“I’ve always loved writing but I never thought that I would actually be able to write a book,” she said. “I kind of harboured that dream but I went into business and marketing.”

She landed a marketing internship with the fashion giant Elizabeth Arden as part of her schooling, and in 2008, at the age of 18 she set off for New York City. She didn’t realize it at the time, but her journey was strikingly similar to that of Florence Nightingale Graham, the birth name of the company’s founder. During her time in the big city, Johnson became captivated with the story of how a woman from just outside Toronto rose to become one of the most successful businesswomen of the era.

“My fascination with her started with the small coincidences and when I started interning … I didn’t have the idea for the book yet, but I just kept documenting in a little red moleskine notebook, just these little things about her,” she explained. “She was the wealthiest woman in the world for three decades, from the 1930s to the 1960s, and no one knows about her. Men of her era, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Henry Ford, they have monuments and universities and museums named after them, and this Canadian, self-made woman, just kind of faded from public consciousness.

“I didn’t know anything about her, the name kind of rang a bell, my grandmothers loved her, and I started researching the woman more than the actual beauty industry itself,” she continued. “The fascination was about the woman behind the brand.”

Among her many accolades, Arden was the first woman to grace the cover of Time Magazine and was inducted into the US Business Hall of Fame. Johnson pointed out that she was also heavily involved in the women’s suffrage movement.

“She would go around to these suffrage parades where women were wearing white, trying to get the right to vote,” she said. “At the time, makeup was a sign of sin, it was only worn by ladies of the night, prostitutes, so she would hand out tubes of her red lipstick and they would all wear them in their suffrage parades in their marches along 5th Avenue, and Washington DC. They would all wear red lipstick as kind of an F-U to the patriarchy, as a sign of rebellion that women would wear red lipstick during the day and it wasn’t for the male gaze.”

There wasn’t a whole lot written on the pioneering fashionista, which sparked Johnson on her journey to inform the world about her incredible life.

“There was only one dual biography about her, an out of print book called War Paint, and it was a dual biography about her and another woman, Helena Rubinstein, and it was more about them pitting themselves against each other, it wasn’t really about her legacy,” she said.

Johnson recorded her ideas and certain scenes that she wanted to portray in a notebook, but it wasn’t until 2013 that she started writing in earnest. She said that in 2014, while she was pursuing a Master’s degree in Journalism at Harvard University she wrote the bulk of the second draft.

“I finished it then and then it took a few years after to get an agent, get a book proposal together and the book has been rewritten many times … it looks very different than the initial draft that I had,” she said.

The summer after graduating, she completed the final stretch of writing by squirreling herself away at her family’s cottage in Norway Bay.

The novel focuses on Arden’s life but also includes first-person sections where Johnson uses her stint in the fashion industry to add a fresh perspective.

“I didn’t want people to feel like our stories were weighted equally, so … basically I just looked to her for inspiration, I don’t fancy myself a modern day Liz,” she said. “It starts with Liz, and my portion of the story is at the tail end … only there to highlight how much or how little has changed in the beauty industry or for women a century later. I’m more there to put her up on a pedestal, and give it a new perspective.”

She said that the red door was a branding tool that Arden used at her establishments, marking them as a safe haven for women, but the title of the book has a deeper meaning.

“It’s a subtle metaphor for getting behind the makeup we put on our faces, behind the Instagram filters or highlight reels and the kinds of personas we present to the world, who are we really behind that facade and that’s the universal theme of the book,” she said. “There’s the surface level story of the beauty industry and our coming of ages, but there’s really more to take away and a deeper meaning at the end that I hope everyone can relate to.”

Johnson said that while there have been some logistical challenges regarding printed copies of her book due to the pandemic, she was glad to finally share it with the world and has already started on her second book, a murder/mystery thriller set in the prohibition era.

“I want to be a career author, I’m eager to jump on to a new project and see that through to fruition,” she said.

Behind the Red Door is available for purchase online, either in hard-cover or e-book, through Amazon, Indigo and Barnes and Noble. Johnson said that she would be sure to bring some physical copies with her the next time she visits the Pontiac.

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