by Steve Turner
Johnny was unaware of the KKK campaign until Porter Wagoner called him about a flyer he saw while playing in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. Cash hired a top lawyer for the case, John Jay Hooker, and filed a twenty-five-million-dollar lawsuit against the Klan. Cash released an official statement:
What I resent is the attempt at defamation of character and the attempt to make my children ashamed that they were born. If there's a mongrel in the crowd, it's me, because I'm Irish and one-quarter Cherokee Indian [sic]. I've had no interest in politics. My business is making music, and I've sung "John Henry" as well as "Remember the Alamo." If I win this, I'm going to give the money to the defense budget.
"It became very serious for all of us in the Cash camp," says Saul Holiff. "Not only serious, but threatening. Columbia's top brass finally came to help us and we threatened a major lawsuit when it became obvious that the Klan had made an egregious error in Vivian's background. So we had them cold. When they saw the mistake that they had made they backed away, apologized, and stopped everything. Eventually, after making another serious mistake, they were sued and went bankrupt."
In October 1965, three weeks after the El Paso arrest, Cash's friend Peter La Farge, only thirty-four years old, was found dead in his New York apartment. Though he officially died of a stroke, the drug paraphernalia found in the room suggested an overdose—either deliberate or accidental.
Initially, this succession of events sobered Johnny right up. He stopped taking pills, began to gain some weight, and started recording a lighthearted album that used several songs written by his old friend Jack Clement. Everybody Loves a Nut appeared to be a deliberate diversion from all the morbidity around him. In the first session after his court appearance, Cash recorded "The Frozen Logger," "The Bug That Tried to Crawl around the World," "Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart," "Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog" and "Take Me Home." "I'd always written novelty songs and he just decided he wanted to cut a novelty album," says Clement. "I was all for it because I happened to have a bunch of material in that direction."
Cash didn't stay clean for long. Soon after starting a new tour he was back on the pills. In May 1966, he arrived in London to tour England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. From there he planned to go on to play in Europe. Bob Dylan's tour coincided with Cash's—they had many of the same cities scheduled, though on different dates. Since their last meeting in the summer of 1964, Dylan had grown his hair into an Afro, hired a band (the Hawks) to play behind him, and forsaken his political protests for surreal explorations of different states of consciousness. While this broadened his fan base and put him on equal footing with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, it alienated some of his early supporters who believed he'd betrayed the folk movement. They viewed Dylan's electrified music and mod shirts and boots as a capitulation to modern pop. At a concert in Manchester a member of the audience famously shouted out "Judas!" when the set changed from acoustic to electric.
Although Dylan had a naturally fertile imagination, some of the perceptions and allusions in the new songs obviously came from drug experiences. Dylan took pills to keep up the pace, smoked pot to relax, and possibly dropped LSD to explore. He never directly answered when asked exactly what he took, but he did say, "I wouldn't advise anybody to use drugs—certainly not the hard drugs. Drugs are medicine. But opium and hash and pot—now, those things aren't drugs. They just bend your mind a little. I think everybody's mind should be bent once in awhile."1
The two men met up at Dylan's hotel in Mayfair, a meeting captured by director D. A. Pennebaker and used in Eat The Document, his unreleased film of the 1966 tour. The sequence shows Dylan playing "I Still Miss Someone" on an upright piano while Cash, dressed in a dark jacket and an open-necked shirt, stands beside him harmonizing. At the end, a smiling Cash tells Dylan, "You know, the tune's completely different." He then sings it to him as it should have been. On May 11, one of Cash's days off, he traveled to Cardiff to see Dylan.
Holiff managed to book Cash a show at the Olympia Theatre in Paris immediately following the British tour. The prestigious engagement had taken a lot of negotiating, but when the manager arrived at Heathrow Airport to fly on to Paris, Cash didn't turn up. He'd apparently partied so hard with Dylan that he just couldn't make it. "That's when I resigned," says Holiff. "I spent the next week just walking around Hyde Park contemplating my future before buying myself a first-class ticket back home." The break between Holiff and Cash lasted for six weeks.
When Cash returned to the States, he made a brief appearance at Casitas Springs but left almost immediately on June 2, 1966, to tour. He didn't even come back at the end of the tour. Instead, he stayed with Gene Ferguson in Brentwood, but no one else knew where he was. "Vivian would call me to see if John was there," says Ferguson. "Then June would call me to see if John was there. I hate to admit it, but I lied to both of them. He put me in a real precarious position."
This desertion was the final straw for Vivian. She hired an attorney, Lawrence Storch, and on June 30 filed for divorce on the grounds that, "Since the marriage of the parties, defendant has treated plaintiff with extreme cruelty and has wrongfully inflicted upon her grievous mental suffering and anguish." She was particularly concerned about her share of the estate because she was, "without sufficient funds or means with which to support herself and said minor children." She claimed she had reason to believe that, unless restrained by a court order, Cash would try to "sell, dispose of, or encumber said community property . . . for the purpose of defeating plaintiff's rights and claims."
To prevent him from selling the property or concealing his earnings, a court order was issued, and because she had no idea where Cash was living, she had it published in the Nashville Banner four times during August 1966. It ordered John R. Cash to "appear and show cause before the above titled court (the Superior Court of the State of California), in the courtroom of said court, at the courthouse, in the City of Ventura, County of Ventura, State of California, on the 22nd day of August, 1966, at the hour of 9.00 a.m. of said day, or as soon as counsel can be heard, who this court should not make the said orders. . . ." The orders included custody and control of the children, support and maintenance during the action, attorney's fees, and restraint on disposing his property during the action.
Cash failed to appear in court on August 22. On August 29, his attorney, Bruce Thompson, responded to the complaint for divorce. He assured the court that Cash was neither guilty of extreme cruelty nor of causing grievous mental suffering and anguish. He further denied that Cash intended to conceal his wealth or dispose of property and that Vivian was without sufficient funds. In October Cash agreed that she should have custody of the children, pending a trial, and promised not to sell any property. Vivian agreed to withdraw her claim for maintenance during the same period.
"I was eleven years old at the time," says Rosanne. "There was none of this, 'Hey. Let's sit down and talk about this.' I think my mother was freaked out and she was of an age where you just didn't talk about these things, particularly with the children. So we were left full of anxiety and wondering what was wrong. I remember seeing it in a newspaper. It said that my mother was suing my father on the grounds of mental cruelty. I was at my grandmother's house, and she saw me reading this and said to me, 'Your daddy is not cruel,' I was so grateful to her for saying that." When Kathy asked her mother what it would mean if there was a divorce, Vivian told her that she shouldn't worry too much, because the only difference would be that Daddy's clothes would no longer be hanging in the closet.
Cash moved out of Ferguson's home and rented a one-bedroom, first-floor apartment at the Fontaine Royale Apartments off Gallatin Road in Madison, Tennessee. Close to Mother Maybelle and Pop Carter's home on Cude Lane, his new place was also near June's home on Gibson Drive, although he made a point of not being seen there. In August, he ran into Waylon Jennings looking for a new place, and the two soon became roommates.
It was a cramped and disorderly bachelor pad. Two king-sized beds fill
ed the bedroom, dirty plates littered the kitchen, and each man hid his drugs in different secret places, thinking that the other wasn't aware of his habit. The only thing that made the arrangement bearable was that, for the most part, their tour schedules kept them from sleeping in the apartment at the same time. And, once a week, June and Maybelle would come by to tidy and clean.
It made no sense for someone of his fame and wealth to live in such modest circumstances permanently. With his divorce all but signed, Cash wanted to a buy a home where he could relax and write, where he could entertain and showcase his expanding collection of books and records. He contacted Braxton Dixon, a local builder, and asked to see available lots. At the time, Dixon was building a unique house overlooking Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, about twenty miles north of Nashville. He decided to show Cash the property, almost as an afterthought, because he knew Cash wanted something similar that was close to water. Dixon didn't think of it as a spec house but as one he might live in himself.
The house was built from stone and wood Dixon had collected from old barns and houses—some of them more than two hundred years old. The rafters were made of skinned tree trunks, and three of the outside walls were of glass. It was unusual and impressive, and Cash fell in love with it on the spot. He loved the lake and the roughness of the stones and wood. It filled him with a sense of peace and space. He imagined it as a place where he could straighten himself out and get re-acquainted with the trees, flowers, grass, and earth that had inspired him as a boy. Dixon tried to tell him it wasn't for sale. "Everything's for sale," Cash answered, and he negotiated a deal.
Moving in even before it was completed, he became close friends with Dixon, who quickly learned about Cash's drug problem. He genuinely wanted the new house to signify a new start and desperately wanted to kick his habit, because June refused to marry him until he went straight. "He called us one day and said he wanted us to come over and see his new house," says Don Reid of the Statler Brothers. "So we did. There wasn't a stick of furniture in it and I don't think there was even any electricity. He had asked us to bring a guitar. So the four of us went out and he was there with June and he said, I want you to christen my house.' I remember it was dusk and there were no lights. We stood in the living room and we sang 'How Great Thou Art.' He wanted that to be the first song ever sung in his house."
On August 30, 1967, Cash capitulated to Vivian. He withdrew his denials, dropped the counterallegations, and agreed to divorce proceedings without any further defense. He finally realized that the negative publicity from a public court battle would cost him far more than any financial judgment. Specific "written findings of fact" and "evidence" resulted in the court's opinion that "a divorce ought to be granted to plaintiff from defendant on the grounds of the defendant's extreme cruelty." Vivian was awarded custody of the children as well as the guarantee of four hundred dollars per month (plus medical care and insurance) per child. Finally, Cash would pay her sixty-five-hundred-dollar attorney's fee.
Vivian also received a substantial financial settlement that involved one of Cash's lucrative publishing companies and his share in Purple Wagon Square, a shopping center in Ojai, California, that he'd bought with Sheb Wooley, the writer and performer of the 1958 hit song "The Purple People Eater."
Willpower alone wasn't enough to get Cash drug free—not even with the additional support of Braxton Dixon, who got rid of pills he found hidden around the house, and June, who tried to dissuade his Nashville suppliers from driving up to Hendersonville. Maybelle enlisted local psychiatrist Dr. Nat Winston, former state commissioner of mental health for Tennessee and a banjo-pickin' personal friend of Earl Scruggs. Winston tried to admit Cash to several private psychiatric hospitals, but at the last minute, Cash would always back out, and legally no one but he could make that decision. However, his relationship with Winston was a life-changing one, and later he even credited Winston with saving his life.
Looking back from the 1990s, Cash pinpointed a visit with a friend in Chattanooga as the ultimate crisis point in his life. Thirty miles west of the city lay Nickajack Cave—an underground warren that was home to one hundred thousand gray bats—where he'd previously searched for Indian arrowheads and inscriptions left by Confederate soldiers. This time, he planned not to hunt for treasures but to end his life. He believed that if he crawled in far enough, he'd be unable to find his way out. When he starved to death it would look like a tragic accident.
In 1995 he told the writer Nick Tosches:
It just felt like I was at the end of the line. I was down there by myself and I got to feelin' that I'd taken so many pills that I'd done it, that I was gonna blow up or something. I hadn't eaten in days, I hadn't slept in days, and my mind wasn't workin' too good anyway. I couldn't stand myself anymore. I wanted to get away from me. And if that meant dyin,' then okay, I'm ready. I just had to get away from myself. I couldn't stand it anymore, and I didn't think there was any other way. I took a flashlight with me, and I said, I'm goin' to walk and crawl and climb into this cave until the light goes out, and then I'm gonna lie down. So I crawled in there with that flashlight until it burned out and I lay down to die. I was a mile in that cave. At least a mile. But I felt this great comfortin' presence sayin', "No, you're not dyin'.I got things for you to do." So I got up, found my way out. Cliffs, ledges, drop-offs. I don't know how I got out, 'cept God got me out.2.
In his 1997 autobiography he added another detail. He recalled that when he crawled back into the daylight, June was there with his mother, and together they drove him back to Nashville. He omitted saying how they knew where to find him, why they thought he might need their attention, or even what happened to the vehicle he originally drove to the cave. During the ride back home, he told his mother that God had pulled him back from death, and he was now ready to recommit his life to God and come off drugs.
This graphic and pivotal event wasn't referred to in the Christopher Wren biography or in his first autobiography, The Man in Black. In both of these books he dates his epiphany as his November 2, 1967, arrest in Lafayette, Georgia, when he was picked up with a pocketful of pills. If, as he has written, the Nickajack Cave experience was in October, his determination to come clean couldn't have lasted long.
Former sheriff Ralph Jones remembers the night in Lafayette well. "He was looking for a house and knocked on the wrong door on Mission Bridge Road," he says. "The woman who lived there was on her own and was a bit worried, so she called my office and one of my deputies, Bob Jeffries, picked him up and brought him in. He was searched and that's when we found out that he was Johnny Cash and that he had pills on him."
He was jailed overnight and Richard McGibony, a musician friend who lived nearby, was called in to make bond for him. According to McGibony, Cash had come to Lafayette to visit Albert Fullam, an old man who had once worked on the railroad with the singer Jimmie Rodgers. He parked his Jeep outside Fullam's property but later lost his way back, so he ended up looking like a vagrant checking out front yards and knocking on doors.
He could have charged Cash with disorderly conduct, but Sheriff Jones decided to show mercy. "I told him that I would like to know, for my own personal satisfaction, why he would want to throw everything away," he says. "I asked him why he would waste his career, his family, and all the money he had earned for the sake of getting stoned on these pills. I just felt led to say that to him and later he said that he didn't know whether God had sent him to me or whether God had sent me to him."
After bailing him out, McGibony drove Cash back to Nashville. Two days later, on November 5, 1967, June persuaded him to attend a service at First Baptist Church, Hendersonville. She felt that the only way to save Cash was to reawaken his faith. He constantly switched his trust from drugs to his own inner strength, but instead needed reminding to trust in God's strength working through him. He needed to be empowered.
Both incidents brought home to Cash his inability to control his behavior and yet revealed the forgiving nature of God.
They were moments of grace. He was reminded of the words of the apostle Paul: "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39).
Rev. Courtney Wilson, pastor at First Baptist since 1955, preached that morning on the gospel story of the woman at the well. While resting at Jacob's well in Sychar, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman there to draw water. Jesus engages her in a conversation, during which he offers her instead what he refers to as "living water." The woman is naturally confused about where to find this water of his. Jesus tells her, "Everyone who drinks this water [the water in the well] will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst."
"What Jesus was saying was that faith in him was for eternity," says Wilson. "I spoke about this in my sermon, and Johnny later said that it made him determined that he was going to try that living water, that faith in Christ, instead of going the way that he'd been going. He made his rededication that Sunday. There was something special to him about the experience. From that time on his relationship with God, with Jesus Christ, was very real. He kept it current in his life."
For his water flows eternal from the well that never dries—
