by Steve Turner
The fact that only three years into his career Cash was recording singles written by other people illustrated just how unhappy he had become. For his farewell Sun single, he cut "You're the Nearest Thing to Heaven," which he'd written with Hoyt Johnson and Jimmy Atkins, backed by "The Ways of a Woman in Love" by Charlie Rich and Bill Justis.
After getting a letter from Phillips reminding Cash of his contractual obligation to record sixty-five songs, he laid down over twenty tracks (only three of which he'd cowritten) between May 15 and July 17. "He didn't want to record," remembers Jack Clement. "He was annoyed that he had to. It became my job to get him to do it. There was a Hank Williams songbook in the studio and I said, 'Why don't you cut five Hank Williams songs in forty-five minutes? You sing, let the guys play, and I'll add overdubs.' He said okay, and so that's what we did. It took care of a certain number of tracks." The five songs recorded were "You Win Again," "I Could Never Be Ashamed of You," "Cold, Cold Heart," "Hey, Good Lookin," and "I Can't Help It."
Cash's contract with Sun expired on the last day of July, so on August 1, 1958, his secretly negotiated contract with Columbia took effect. Two weeks later he performed at Columbia Records' national sales convention in Estes Park, Colorado, where he received a standing ovation from the gathered reps. It felt like a new beginning. And while Elvis, drafted into the army, would leave for Germany in September, Cash had Hollywood beckoning him with talk of movie offers.
Stew Carnall managed to persuade Cash that his future lay in California. He suggested that his contacts in the film and television industry would be helpful. Bob Neal didn't object because he'd fallen out with Sam Phillips and had lost his connection with the Sun artists. Luther and Marshall, on the other hand, opposed the move because they could see no advantage for them other than when they toured California or Western Canada.
This time marked the end of the really close relationship between the three men. First the social life they had established in Memphis would go and then the attention to rehearsals. When, after a short time, Marshall and Luther moved back to Tennessee, they would only reunite to play on stage or in the studio.
"Johnny wanted to go out and try it but I always thought it was a ridiculous move," says Marshall. "It was supposed to be a move for the better but it wasn't a move for the better. We kept touring all over the country and the driving back and forth nearly killed Luther. It would eventually get to a point where we couldn't do it anymore."
6
Going Down, Down, Down
NEVERTHELESS, THE CASHES MOVED to California in August 1958, driving the eighteen hundred miles with three-year-old Rosanne, two-year-old Kathy, and the newly born Cynthia (Cindy). Initially they rented an apartment on Coldwater Canyon Avenue in North Hollywood, where Cindy's bed had to be made up in a drawer. A few months later they moved into a seventy-five-thousand-dollar ranch house with a swimming pool on Havenhurst Avenue in Encino, bought from TV host Johnny Carson, who had moved to New York to start a new show for NBC. They became near neighbors to John Wayne and Clark Gable. Shortly afterwards, Marshall and Luther moved to the San Fernando Valley.
At the time, most recording stars considered acting the next big career step once they had a few hit singles under their belts. Bob Neal, who'd folded his Stars Incorporated agency in June, had been led to believe that Cash had a good shot at hosting a regular music show on TV. With these and other opportunities in mind, Johnny Cash Enterprises established itself at the Crossroads of the World, a prestigious Spanish-style building on Sunset Boulevard. "Johnny and I both felt we could storm Hollywood," Neal later said.
Recording for Columbia took place at the Owen Bradley Studios in Nashville, and after cutting enough tracks for his first album with Don Law, boldly titled The Fabulous Johnny Cash, he started work on his first collection of gospel songs, Hymns by Johnny Cash. Half of the songs were published hymns, and half were new songs either written or arranged by Cash. The liner notes stated, "Johnny Cash turns his attention from the popular songs that have made him one of the brightest stars of today to the simpler songs of faith and devotion, presenting a program that combines religious feeling with music in splendid fashion."1
One of the first new friends Cash made in California was Johnny Western, a twenty-three-year-old recording artist introduced to him at the office by Gordon Terry. Western (his real name) was a singing cowboy who had performed with the legendary Sons of the Pioneers and had once been Gene Autry's featured singer and guitarist. His recording "The Ballad of Paladin" was currently the theme song of Have Gun—Will Travel, a popular CBS series in which he had also acted.
Cash invited him to play on some guitar transcriptions at McGregor Studios in Hollywood for discs that were distributed to the armed forces and after that, to open for him on a tour of California. Then came some shows in the Midwest that featured Gordon Terry. From these beginnings grew what would become the Johnny Cash Show. The only changing feature was the female vocalists. For the first year Rose Maddox had a spot and the next year Patsy Cline. "Then we took Barbara Mandrell on her first tour when she was only thirteen years old," remembers Western. "That was a tour in 1962 and Patsy took care of her."
Even though Cash now headlined a showcase he had put together himself, the rigors of touring differed little from his days as a support act. Now he had a trailer packed with suitcases and instruments to tow behind the car. Western always tuned two identical Martin guitars for him because Cash's escalating drug habit meant that he would often accidentally drop his instruments. Some guests didn't trust Cash's driving ability and so a second car was brought along. "He was the world's worst driver," says Western. "Patsy Cline wouldn't ride if he was driving. She would only ride with Gordon Terry or me, and she was the best road buddy in the world."
Touring was one part ecstasy to three parts monotony. The excitement of being away from home and on the move soon paled—particularly when visiting towns for the second or third time. In order to quell the inevitable boredom, the Cash entourage developed the art of hotel destruction, something that fell somewhere between outright vandalism and an elaborate practical joke.
Each member developed a specific role. Marshall Grant's areas of expertise included cutting up furniture and setting off explosions. As Johnny Western explains: "He would carry a small Black & Decker circle saw. What he would then do is cut the legs off the furniture in his hotel room and then put them back in place so that everything looked perfectly all right. When the maid walked in the whole room would fall apart as soon as she touched something with her duster."
Marshall usually arranged the explosions in open spaces late at night, purely for amusement. He started with firecrackers and small amounts of gunpowder but eventually only found satisfaction with sticks of dynamite that he would pack around with yards of string. One of his most exciting discoveries was a signal cannon that he would sometimes fire down hotel corridors. He even managed to adapt it for shooting gravel at neon signs on the highway.
Gordon Terry specialized in painting and decorating. He would carefully paint everything in the room—not only the furniture, but also the walls and ceiling. Sometimes even the mirrors and television would get a quick coat. The result was even more surreal because it was so professionally executed. "We didn't mess up the room," says Marshall Grant. "We did a good job on it. It was a bizarre thing to do and if you did it today you'd probably get sent to jail. We always used to pay for the damage. We'd say that we'd had a party and someone had got a bit overexcited. The manager would ask for fifty dollars or one hundred dollars and that's what would happen. Looking back it seems quite ridiculous and it's not something that I'm too proud of."
Cash and Western often did something appropriately cowboyish, like setting up shootouts with replica Colt .45s in hotel lobbies or arranging for someone in the party to be publicly "kidnapped" and bundled into a waiting car in front of gawking pedestrians. More out of frustration than as a stunt, Cash once stuck a Bowie knife into a Mona Lisa reproduction in a hotel ro
om that didn't measure up to his standards. One of their most elaborate jokes took place during a stay at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Cash and Stew Carnall procured bales of hay and buckets of manure from a riding stable in Central Park and smuggled them into their room via a service elevator. They then proceeded to carefully spread the straw across every available inch of floor space before checking out. "It had a beautiful rug in this room," remembers Western, "but by the time they'd finished it looked as though Trigger had been living there for a week."
Some of the stunts had a touch of comic genius. In Scottsbluff, Nebraska, they removed all the furniture from a hotel room and placed it outside the elevator with two of the troupe tucked up in single beds. They then called for room service. When the waiter came up with the food he immediately went back down to fetch the manager. By the time the manager arrived on the scene, the hall was completely clear. The routine was then repeated with another call to the waiter.
Other stunts were inexcusably destructive and foreshadowed the hotel vandalism by bands like the Who and Led Zeppelin by at least ten years. Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two must have been the first traveling band to fill a bathtub with Jell-O, create a connecting doorway with a fire ax, explode cherry bombs in a toilet, smear fish paste on radiators, and toss light fixtures out of windows just to hear the sound they made on impact. As their reputation as pranksters and vandals increased, they found themselves banned from certain hotels, and country artists in general became viewed with suspicion by hoteliers.
Although Cash had guest appearances in four TV Westerns—Tales of Wells Fargo, Shotgun Slade, Wagon Train, and The Rebel (for which he sang the theme)—his only big-screen appearance was as a drugged-up killer in the film noir Five Minutes to Live (later marketed as Door-to-Door Maniac). "Part of the reason he came to California was to be an actor," says Johnny Western. "He knew that he couldn't do that while living in Memphis. But then he was touring so much that he often wasn't around when offers came up. When studios call you, they want you today. They're not going to hang around and wait until you come back to town."
Cash was now away from home 80 percent of the time, traveling three hundred thousand miles a year. It would be easy to say that his marriage to Vivian fell apart simply because he was absent too often, that he wanted a wife who traveled, and she wanted a husband who stayed at home. The truth is that they were never really suited to each other, having completely different backgrounds, beliefs, life experiences, interests, and expectations. They'd each married some sort of projection of their youthful desires, fueled by three years of passionate letter writing.
No one would have guessed the Cashes were having marital troubles from the publicity of the time. Cash was always portrayed as the contented family man who liked nothing more than being at home with his "charming wife and three little daughters." Vivian perpetuated the image of domestic tranquility through her letters in Cash's fan magazine in which she'd talk about him planting rose bushes and host ing barbecues for friends while she looked after the children and played in the local bowling league.
Vivian didn't like the music business, and not just because it had taken her husband away from her. She didn't feel comfortable around music-business people. Rare photographs of her taken backstage show a painfully shy woman obviously feeling out of place. Because music was so important to Cash, he interpreted Vivian's discomfort as a rejection of who he was.
Out on the road, Cash was meeting sassy women who loved music and the music business as much as he did. They were often forthright, wickedly funny, and sexually alluring—quite unlike the simple country girls he had dated in Dyess. Most importantly, they made him feel good about himself.
In 1957 Cash toured with the Collins Kids, a brother-and-sister duo originally from Oklahoma that was part frenetic rock-'n'-roll and part novelty act. Larry was the crazy and annoying kid brother. Lorrie was the older and more restrained sister. They both played guitars and had built up a reputation by appearing regularly on Town Hall Party, a Grand Ole Opry-style show televised weekly from the Compton district of Los Angeles. Within months of arriving in California, Cash and the Tennessee Two played on the show with Merle Travis, Bob Luman, Jeannie Sterling, Johnny Bond, and Joe Maphis. That day, the Collins Kids performed Elvis's "I Got Stung," the Big Bopper's "Chantilly Lace" and a blues medley.
Although Cash had vowed to "walk the line," his resolve was faltering, particularly when the now sixteen-year-old Lorrie Collins caught his eye. Over the next several months as the Collins Kids played dates with them they spent a lot of time together and he became infatuated with her despite the fact that she was dating teen idol Ricky Nelson. She became aware of his feelings for her but, despite rumors to the contrary, insists that nothing transpired. "It was a long time ago and I have no idea why he felt that way about me," she says. "It must have been the fact that I was young and the association with music, that sort of thing. It was just something that happened but nothing ever took place between us."
For the increasingly burdened Cash, the sexual chemistry was powerful and confusing. "It was one of those things that just swept him off his feet," says Johnny Western. "She'd just blossomed into womanhood and he was attracted. Sometimes he and I would get into my Jaguar and drive fifty or sixty miles into the desert and he'd tell me things that he hadn't told anybody else. His marriage was falling apart, his daughters were small, and he felt trapped. He didn't know what to do about his feelings for Lorrie because she was so young. He'd say, 'What am I going to do?'
I said, 'Johnny. You love cowboy movies?' He said, 'Yes. I do.' So I said, 'Well, you've got to step in the saddle and ride into the sunset on this one. This isn't going to work. You know it's not. It's going to cost you an arm and a leg and people are going to blame this young girl for being a home wrecker.' He said he still didn't know what to do."
The problem went away when Stew Carnall began dating Lorrie and married her in 1959, when he was thirty and she seventeen. A rumor circulated that the marriage had been staged to prevent the exposure of Cash's liaison, but Western denies it. "Stew was desperately in love with her. They stayed married for quite a while and had two children."
Cash always returned home restless. He couldn't settle into the ordinary routines of suburban home life and craved the excitement and stimulation of the road. "He'd be home and tired for a couple of days and he'd play by his pool with the kids, but by the third day he'd be ready to move off," says Western. "He got itchy feet. Work was his main hobby and he absolutely adored being up onstage. If he wasn't playing for a few days he'd be on the phone finding out about the next tour."
Consequently, Cash stopped returning to Encino even when his tours ended. Instead, he often headed down to Shreveport to stay at Johnny Horton's home at 1610 Audubon Drive. He would hang out there for days, hunting, fishing, and playing music with Horton and Billie Jean. Sometimes the two men would disappear to another part of the house to discuss the ideas of the psychic Edgar Cayce, who claimed to be able to access special knowledge after putting himself into a self-induced sleep state and to answer questions impenetrable by reason and logic.
Billie Jean made a huge impression on Cash. Besides being the gorgeous former wife of Hank Williams, she was a forthright and amusing conversationalist, an excellent shot with a rifle, and an accomplished angler. She loved the company of men and delighted in the knowledge that when she arrived at a country music convention or sat close to the stage for a concert, she would turn heads. "If she was in the room, you'd know she was in the room," says Horton's former guitarist Reggie Young. "She had huge hair and she dressed provocatively. She was the total opposite of the sort of person you thought Johnny Horton would be with."
Horton, with good reason, was jealous of the attention his wife got. Tillman Franks, Horton's bass player as well as his manager, felt that the way she dressed when she attended concerts detracted from her husband. She was conscious, as was Horton, that Cash was paying her more attention than was usual from a family f
riend.
Unsurprisingly, as someone who spent a fair amount of time trying to contact the other world, Horton was given to premonitions. The most persistent vision convinced him that he would die an early death. Specifically, he thought his death would somehow relate to alcohol. As a teetotaler, he concluded that most likely he'd die at the hands of a drunkard, perhaps after one of his concerts, and he became wary of playing in clubs and bars. Convinced of the inevitability of his premature death, he talked Cash into making a pact with him: if one of them died, the one remaining would look after the widow and children of the other, until they regained their stability.
The annual D. J. convention of 1960 took place at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville, and Cash attended with Vivian. One of the rare times they traveled together without the children, she wanted to enjoy some private time together, but he wanted to hang out with the musicians and songwriters in their rooms. Later that Friday night, November 4, they had what he later described as "one of our worst fights." Vivian went to bed while Cash scoured the corridors looking for action.
Early the next morning he received the news that Johnny Horton was dead. The night before, he'd done two shows at the Skyline Club, north of Austin, and while driving back to Shreveport in his 1959 Fleetwood Cadillac with Tillman Franks and guitarist Tommy Tomlinson, his car was struck head-on by a Ford Ranchero outside Milano, Texas. Tomlinson and Franks survived, but Horton was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital in Cameron, thirteen miles away. The Ranchero driver, a young student, survived. He had, in fact, been drinking.
Cash couldn't leave for Shreveport right away because he had a session booked at Owen Bradley Studios to cut the title track of his movie Five Minutes to Live, but later that day he flew down to console Billie Jean. Horton's death seemed to unhinge Cash—those close to him thought that he began acting "weird"—and may have exacerbated his addiction to the amphetamines.
