He shared  a skybox with Sen. John McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis. He had a hospitality suite all to himself. These are just a few of the perks that Robert Wood Johnson IV, heir of the Johnson & Johnson fortune and a major donor to the GOP enjoyed this week in Minneapolis/St. Paul, according to this report by  Michael Luo of the New York Times.

Here’s what it took to earn such perks:

Mr. Johnson has long been a player in Republican politics — he was a Bush Ranger in 2000 and 2004, raising more than $200,000 in each election. He has personally given more than $1 million to Republican candidates and committees over the years.

But this year, he emerged as perhaps the party’s most coveted donor. In May, after turning his office into a war room for more than a month and making sometimes 50 calls a day, he orchestrated a fund-raiser in New York City that brought in $7 million in a single evening for Mr. McCain, by far the largest amount collected up to that point by a campaign that had been struggling to raise money.

More recently, Mr. Johnson rode to the rescue of the Minneapolis-St. Paul convention host committee, helping it close a more than $10 million budget shortfall in a matter of weeks by writing a sizable check himself, getting his mother, who hails from Minneapolis, to do so as well, but also soliciting numerous large contributions from his circle of wealthy friends.