Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Months before, Johnny Horton, who had been experiencing premonitions about his death, had asked Cash to watch over Billie Jean and their daughters in case anything happened to him. In turn, Horton agreed he’d take care of Vivian and the girls if anything happened to Cash.

  Ever since, Cash had been plagued by thoughts of what he’d do if Billie Jean were suddenly free. Would he want to be with her? What about his marriage? He had always been taught that divorce was wrong, but there was divorce all around him in country music. Luther and his wife were breaking up, and he could see how much happier the guitarist was with the woman he was now dating. Didn’t people have a right to be happy?

  With the pressure coming in waves, Cash kept reaching into his pocket for more pills. He offered no excuses for them as his habit neared twenty a day, and the strain was starting to show in his gaunt face and in his frequently glazed eyes. The dramatic physical transformation in Cash is obvious even in the contrast between the scenes of Five Minutes to Live that were filmed in June and the ones filmed when shooting resumed in Los Angeles in September.

  Cash was likely high on pills the night of September 29 in Beverly Hills when he picked up a container of propane gas and threw it in the trunk of his car without making sure the lid was secure. As Cash headed home at around 30 mph on a residential street, the container fell over and the gas leaked into the passenger compartment, where it suddenly exploded—perhaps from the spark of Cash’s ever-present cigarette. Remarkably, Cash was able to leap from the rolling car and suffered only minor bruises and burns on his face and arms. The car continued on down the hill until it struck a lamppost. The fire was put out before the can of propane or the gas tank could catch fire. Cash declined medical attention at the scene.

  Five Minutes to Live, meanwhile, was being hastily edited for release before the end of the year. To get advance reaction to the film, producers held a sneak preview that fall in Los Angeles. “They asked people to write their feelings about the film on cards on tables in the lobby,” Lorrie Collins recalls. “Johnny didn’t even want to read them. He knew the film was pretty bad. One card even read ‘The movie should have been called Five Minutes to Die.’ Johnny was devastated.”

  The filmmakers also screened the film again at the Melrose Theatre in Nashville during the annual country music DJ convention the weekend of November 4. Cash was looking forward to the convention because the country DJs had just voted Ride This Train and Now, There Was a Song! third and fifth, respectively, on the list of favorite country albums of the year. But the screening ruined any sense of celebration. Cash, who had come into town with Vivian, had to sit through another public humiliation. All the talk about his being the next Elvis, a movie star, evaporated before the final credits rolled. Not only was his acting horrible, but also he looked sick—or stoned.

  The drying agent in amphetamines, especially when compounded by cigarettes and alcohol, led to bouts of chronic laryngitis, which could reduce Cash’s voice to a near-whisper for a few hours or even weeks at a time. He was feeling the effects of the pills when he went into the studio in Nashville on Wednesday, November 2, to record the theme to Five Minutes to Live, so Law gave up after a few tries and rescheduled the session for the following Saturday. Cash promised to take it easy, but he seemed determined to party around the clock once the disc jockey convention started.

  That was enough for Vivian to finally lash out at him, even though they were in public at the Hermitage Hotel. Hoping for some time together on Friday night, she screamed at Cash when he told her in the lobby he wanted to visit with some of his musician friends. Cash yelled back, then walked away.

  It was well past the midnight hour when Cash returned to their room, and he fell into such a deep sleep that when the phone rang just after five a.m., he merely took the receiver off the hook and dropped it on the floor, Vivian recorded in her memoir. She quickly picked it up and heard the shocking news that Johnny Horton had been killed in a car crash, a head-on collision at 1:35 a.m. on Highway 79 near Cameron, Texas.

  She sat on the bed for several minutes, trying to figure out how to break the news to John. Just then, there was a loud knock on the hotel room door. It was Dewey Phillips, the Memphis disc jockey. When Vivian opened the door, Phillips stepped into the room and shouted at the still sleeping Cash, “Hey, man, did you hear Johnny Horton died?”

  As Cash slowly opened his eyes, Phillips shouted again, “He got killed by a drunk driver, man! He’s dead!”

  Cash sat straight up in bed, then put his head in his hands and let out a mournful cry: “Noooooooooo! Nooooo!”

  Cash tried to call Billie Jean, but he couldn’t get through. Then he phoned Grant and said he wanted to buy a ticket on the next plane to Shreveport. But Grant reminded him that he had to record “Five Minutes to Live” that afternoon; he was already late in getting it to the film company. He also mentioned that Cash was supposed to perform at the Columbia Record convention luncheon and make his first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry in more than a year. Finally, Cash relented. He would do all that before going to Shreveport.

  Vivian would later say that for Cash, Horton’s death brought back “all the horror” of his brother Jack’s death—and that he again wondered if he wasn’t partially responsible. A week before the crash, Horton had called Cash’s home in Los Angeles. Cash wasn’t home, but Vivian gave the message to her husband. But he was “busy with this and that” and never returned the call.

  In fact, Horton had tried to get hold of Cash several times in the days before his death, and Cash avoided the calls. That led to speculation among some in the Cash camp that Horton had discovered his friend and Billie Jean were having an affair—and that Cash didn’t know what to say. But the more likely story was that Cash was going through a bad drug period and he didn’t want Horton to find out.

  After Horton’s death, Cash anguished for months over whether he might have been able to help his friend if he had spoken to him on the phone. Others later told Cash that Horton, who had often talked to Cash about his premonitions, feared so strongly in the final week of his life that he was going to die in a car crash that he tried to cancel his appearance at the Skyline Club in Austin. But his manager, Tillman Franks, told him it was too late, that he would get a bad name among bookers if he started canceling at the last minute.

  One reason for Horton’s premonition about the Skyline, eerily enough, was that the club was also the last place Billie Jean’s ex, Hank Williams, had played before dying of a heart attack in the backseat of his Cadillac. Hearing about that, Cash blamed himself even more strongly. He would have told his friend to go ahead and cancel the Skyline date.

  As promised, Cash showed up at the Columbia Records luncheon, then the 4 p.m. recording session, and finally at the Opry, where he sang “Going to Memphis.” Along the way, a Nashville Tennessean reporter asked him about Horton. “He was my best friend,” Cash responded. “I worked with Johnny more than anybody else. I’ve tried to copy his personal habits, his clean living. Johnny was in constant communication with God. No matter what happened he was always smiling.”

  Before catching a plane to Shreveport, Cash asked his DJ buddy Charlie Williams to get Vivian to the airport Sunday in time for her early morning flight to Los Angeles. But Williams spent the night partying and slept through his wake-up call, causing Vivian to take a later plane. Weeks later, Cash told Western that the flight Vivian had missed crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, killing everyone on board. He seemed genuinely shaken, Western remembered. Curious, Western tried to find out the details of the crash, but he discovered that the only crash in the Gulf of Mexico occurred a few days later—a plane from Miami. It was another of Johnny’s stories, he realized, but as usual, there was a point to it. Cash felt as if his whole world was coming down around him.

  III

  As soon as Billie Jean saw Cash’s cab pull up to the curb outside her house, she raced across the lawn with her three children. Together, the five stood in a long embrace—tryin
g desperately to comfort one another. Billie Jean had been married to Horton for seven years, and Cash knew how much she loved him. At the same time, Billie Jean knew how much her husband meant to Cash.

  While Billie Jean stayed in seclusion, Cash greeted the parade of neighbors and friends who stopped by the house to express their sympathies. He also arranged for the final rites to be held the following Tuesday at the Bossier City Rose-Neath Funeral Home chapel. He sat with Billie Jean and the children at the services and, at her request, read a passage from the Bible. David Kamich, a Columbia Records executive, thought Cash’s reading and subsequent eulogy were deeply moving. But others found Cash embarrassing—rambling and disheveled. More than one asked themselves if he was drunk.

  Some of Horton’s friends also thought it was inappropriate for Cash to be staying at the house rather than checking in to a hotel. Eyebrows were raised at a reception at the house following the service when Cash and Billie Jean sat outside on a swing instead of joining the mourners in the living room. Later Billie Jean says she’d felt too fragile to mingle with the guests, and that all Cash was doing was trying to support her. “I don’t know what I would have done if Johnny hadn’t been with me,” she says. “He was distraught, but he took care of me and my babies.”

  Through it all, they both knew there was another dynamic at work. While no words were spoken, Billie Jean had known for months that Cash was falling in love with her, and she could easily have fallen into his arms if she hadn’t been married. “From the time I met Johnny Cash,” she adds, “I wanted him, but I was married to a man that I loved and I had three kids and Johnny had three.”

  Now that Horton was gone, Johnny and Billie Jean finally confessed that they loved each other, but just what did that mean? They were both too distressed even to begin to think clearly. Gradually, over days, they began to talk about the future. Slowly, too, they became lovers. Cash told her how he had promised to watch out for her in case of Horton’s death. He also suggested that he go with her to New York to look over Horton’s royalty account at Columbia. There should be enough money in it for Billie Jean to live comfortably, because Horton had had three Top 10 pop hits in the last eighteen months, but Cash wanted to make sure; record companies could be notoriously slow in crediting royalties to an account. If she needed money until the royalties arrived, Cash said he’d transfer funds from his royalty account to provide for her.

  The Louisiana Hayride wanted to hold a fund-raising memorial concert in Horton’s honor in early December, but it was delayed until the seventeenth because Cash was scheduled to begin a brief tour of Germany on December 2. He wanted to take Billie Jean with him, but she needed to stay with her children. The break was good for both of them. They had to think about just where this relationship was heading.

  On the German tour, Cash was pretty much out of it. The trigger this time was clearly the combination of Horton’s death and his longing for Billie Jean. Cash tried to look at the relationship from every angle—his own, Billie Jean’s, Johnny Horton’s, Vivian’s, the children’s. He knew he was playing with fire again. Just as the Jerry Lee Lewis scandal should have warned him away from any relationship with Lorrie Collins, Eddie Fisher’s leaving his wife, Debbie Reynolds, in favor of his best friend’s widow, Elizabeth Taylor, led to a backlash among fans that pretty much derailed Fisher’s singing career. Cash’s fans, too, could be repelled if he decided to leave Vivian for Billie Jean. But he was too consumed by the prospect of a future with Billie Jean to worry about what such a decision would mean to his fans.

  At one of the last stops on the tour, Cash noticed Luther Perkins sitting in the hotel lobby writing what Cash thought was a letter.

  “Writing to Margie?” Cash asked.

  Luther had met Margie Higgins at a taping of the Jimmy Dean TV show in Washington, D.C., in 1957, when he was still married to Bertie. It was the start of a relationship that meant so much to Perkins that he would drive hundreds of miles between tours to see her. After months of separation, Luther was now looking forward to marrying Margie.

  “I’m writing her a song,” Perkins replied with a big smile. It caught Cash off guard because he had never known Perkins to write a song.

  “Let me take a look at it,” Cash said. Perkins handed him the sheet of paper, and Cash was touched by the sweetness of the words. He told Perkins it was a beautiful song.

  Cash thought about Luther and Margie a lot in the following days, searching their story for an answer to his own feelings about Billie Jean. On the flight back to the United States, Cash told himself he was going to ask Billie Jean to marry him.

  Besides Cash, the lineup for the Horton memorial show at the Municipal Auditorium in Shreveport included Marty Robbins, Sheb Wooley, Johnny Western, and Gordon Terry. Afterward, Billie Jean wrote a letter to Cash, thanking him for putting on the show.

  Billie Jean felt she had a soul mate in Cash, but she also saw some warning signs, especially the amphetamines.

  “There was a little bit of drugs before, I think, but when Johnny Horton died, that put him over the top,” she says. “I lived with Hank Williams, the king of the dope, and I was afraid Johnny was going to destroy himself if he didn’t get off those pills.”

  Their time in New York made her feel like a princess. Cash took her to Broadway shows, bought her a trunkful of clothes and other gifts. His affection made her forget momentarily her concerns about his drug use.

  When Cash asked her to marry him, she wanted to say yes, but she was still confused. She thought about her children, and it worried her that Cash was willing to walk away from his own. She also felt she needed some time; it was so soon after Johnny Horton’s death. Cash told her he understood and to take all the time she needed.

  It wasn’t an easy period for either of them.

  When Cash sang “I Walk the Line” each night onstage, he was reminded of his deep conflict. He didn’t want to hurt Vivian or, especially, the girls, but he thought about Billie Jean constantly. The band members knew something was going on, but they didn’t ask.

  “Because of all the pills, we never knew from one day to the next how he would react,” says Western. “After what I told him he should do about Lorrie Collins, maybe he didn’t want to confide in me again about something that serious. If he had asked, I would have told him the same thing: ‘John, you have to ride away.’”

  Early in the new year, Cash got some surprising news. During his trip home over the holidays, Vivian had gotten pregnant again. How thrilling that had always sounded in the past. This time, though, it left him even more confused. It seemed that the only escape was in pills.

  Anxious, he began to press Billie Jean for an answer, perhaps pushing too hard. In time, Billie Jean might have accepted the proposal, but she wasn’t ready. Unable to stall any longer, she told him no.

  Billie Jean tried to break the news gently. She explained it was too soon after Johnny Horton’s death, and she also mentioned, almost in passing, that she didn’t want to be tied down because she wanted to pursue a career in music herself. Cash told her he’d love for her to have a career; they could even tour together.

  What she didn’t reveal were the real reasons: the drugs and his willingness to leave his family.

  Cash wanted to be understanding. He told her to take more time. He called her almost daily for weeks, but he finally gave up and became bitter. He was fixated on the notion that the only reason she turned him down was that she wanted to be a singer, and he channeled that hurt into a song. To his mind, she was now the villain. Without any reference to Billie Jean, “Sing It Pretty, Sue” would appear on an album in 1962.

  So you gave up all between us for a glamorous career

  And with all your talent you should be the big star of the year

  Then you’ll be public property so I release my claim to you

  Go on and give ’em all you’ve got, sing it pretty, Sue.

  Cash was also depressed in the early months of 1961 by the Five Minutes to Live disast
er. Carnall continued to look high and low for more roles, but he knew the word-of-mouth on the first film was going to make that difficult. Predictably, reviews were brutal, especially about the acting.

  Even before Five Minutes to Live hit the theaters (usually as the bottom half of a drive-in double bill), Carnall started doing damage control. In May he told Los Angeles Times film critic and columnist Philip K. Scheuer that Cash’s film dream had just come true: he’d acquired the movie rights to the story of Jimmie Rodgers’s life from Rodgers’s widow. This was a film he really cared about.

  Given all the turmoil, Cash felt a desperate need for a new start. For one thing, he wanted to get out of Los Angeles—but not back to Tennessee. He liked the independence of living in California rather than in the tight Nashville music community. He thought immediately of the quiet, rural open spaces of the Ojai area. He was still hoping his brother Roy and his wife would move there. Meanwhile, Cash told a local building contractor, Curly Lewis, that he was interested in finding a parcel of land for himself.

  Lewis found the perfect property for a new house in Casitas Springs, less than five miles from the trailer park. The eleven-acre site was on the side of a hill (Cash often described it as a mountain) with no neighbors above and valleys on either side. With land for crops and horses, this was about as rural and isolated as you could get and still be only an hour outside Los Angeles.

  Casitas Springs was founded in the 1940s as a bedroom community to serve the nearby oil field workers. By 1961, the collection of modest homes, the handful of mom and pop shops, and a couple of bars might have struck the average visitor as pretty trailer park–like itself, and that downscale setting must have been part of its appeal to Cash.