Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  June was too young to understand the significance of the dedication, but she would later point to the story of Sara and Coy as reaffirming her mother’s lesson of not giving up on the man of your dreams. During their six years apart, Sara had not stopped loving Bays, but she didn’t know if he felt the same way. When she noticed the radio show getting mail from every corner of the nation, she thought that maybe, just maybe, Bays was out west somewhere listening and that he still cared for her. Amazingly, Bays was listening that night with his mother. He soon drove to Del Rio. Eventually he and Sara were married.

  After the final broadcast, Sara headed to California with Bays, while the others returned to Maces Springs. Sara and Maybelle both assumed they were saying good-bye to XERA, but Brinkley’s staff made them an offer that not even Sara could refuse. The station wanted the Carters back for another year, and this time they wanted the whole family—including Helen and June, and A.P. and Sara’s two children. To make the offer even harder to resist, the children would each be paid $15 a week.

  For June, this step into the spotlight was scary. Daddy’s girl had learned in Maces Springs that she could do almost anything—except sing. When she was called on to join her sisters in a musical program, she would turn to comedy or dancing as a diversion. “When you don’t have much of a voice and harmony is all around you, you reach out and pick something you can use,” she wrote in her first autobiography. “In my case, it was just plain guts. Since I couldn’t sing, I talked a lot and tried to cover all the bad notes with laughter.”

  II

  After the Mexican government shut down XERA following an agreement with U.S. officials regarding radio bandwidth standards, the Carters’ radio career seemed to be over, until Harry O’Neill, the Chicago adman who had hired the Carters for Brinkley, bought airtime on WBT, a fifty-thousand-watt station in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in 1942 asked the Carters to follow him there. But Sara, wanting to be with her husband, soon returned to California, marking the end of the original Carter Family.

  From time to time A.P. would talk about getting everyone back together, but it never amounted to anything. Deeply disheartened, this towering musical influence settled for running a general store in Maces Springs—his place in music history largely buried for years until folk and country historians began to appreciate his vast contributions to American musical culture.

  That left Ezra as the keeper of the Carter musical flame in the form of Maybelle and the girls. Ezra wasn’t all that interested in the Carters’ musical heritage; he saw the group primarily as a means for his family to get out of Poor Valley. He lined up a daily show on a station in nearby Richmond and also arranged live shows for the group throughout the area, performing at courthouses, movie theaters, and schools. The newly named Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle gradually built enough of a following that WRVA, a larger station in Richmond, lured them to the Old Dominion Barn Dance, a country music stage show.

  It was an ideal workshop for the Carter sisters. Anita’s strong voice made her a favorite with the crowd, who especially enjoyed her yodeling and the way she’d tease the audience by holding a note so long that they would burst into applause. But it was June who made the greatest strides in Richmond, slowly developing a humorous persona that leaned heavily on the sort of folksy, golly-gee backwoods humor of Minnie Pearl, who delighted Opry audiences with her trademark greeting, “How—dee!” Despite their illustrious musical heritage, the Carter girls’ act was much closer to vaudeville than to folk music purity.

  Teenaged June, who was naturally outgoing, became hostess of a morning show on the station. Her ambition was so obvious that Sunshine Sue, the Barn Dance’s star, worried about the Carters upstaging her. Ultimately, Sue made things uncomfortable for Eck and the group, and they quit the Old Dominion in 1948, ending the stay in Richmond, during which June graduated from high school.

  After all his hard work, Eck uncharacteristically became discouraged enough to take the family back to Maces Springs, asking himself if he shouldn’t give up this music venture. But fate stepped in again. The Carters soon got an offer to appear regularly on WNOX, a small but influential radio station in Knoxville that liked to bill itself as the “stepping stone to the Grand Ole Opry,” the major league of country music. The station was also known for having some top-notch young musicians, including a shy young guitar player named Chester “Chet” Atkins. Eck wasn’t sure he wanted to get involved in show business again, but June pushed him—the only one in the family to do so. Yes, yes, yes, she told her daddy. Let’s go to Knoxville. It was as if she was the one driving the Harley now and everyone else was holding on.

  While his wife and daughters settled in at the station, Eck started working on ways to make the act more marketable. Hearing all the talk about the twenty-four-year-old Atkins, he asked the guitarist to join the Carter quartet, and Chet accepted. His stylish guitar playing and keen musical ideas spruced up the Carter Family material. Soon, Atkins was such an integral part of the group that the name was changed to the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, Chet Atkins and His Famous Guitar.

  June’s charisma and ease in the spotlight weren’t lost on Steve Sholes, the RCA Victor executive who later brought Elvis Presley to the label. After signing Maybelle and the sisters to a contract, he signed June to a separate solo deal and took her to New York in early 1949 to cut a single, “Country Girl,” and to guest on some Homer and Jethro records, including the comedy duo’s novelty version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a Frank Loesser composition that had won an Academy Award for best original song earlier that year. Their parody went to number twenty-two in the pop field. The duo wanted June to go with them on tour and were surprised when she refused. Daddy’s girl may have been ambitious, but she was also loyal.

  The Carters stepped up the radio station ladder when KWTO in Springfield, Missouri, came calling. They were making good money again, and June took quickly to the high life. “They spent money like there was no tomorrow,” Atkins related. “Cars, clothes, anything they wanted.” In Springfield, the Carters were sharing the stage regularly with big-name country attractions, including a promising new singer named Carl Smith, who everyone thought was the handsomest man in all of country music.

  The Carters were on such a roll that the Grand Ole Opry approached Eck about having them join the Opry cast. The Carters made their debut early in 1950 on the Opry stage at the famed Ryman Auditorium. They were an immediate hit. “The roof came offa that building,” as June declared later. It was easy to see why. When they stepped up to the microphone at center stage, the Carters brought with them the history of their years on the radio, the great Carter Family songs, plus youthful vitality, humor, and even a touch of sexuality. At the Opry, June continued to blossom as a comedienne, even stepping away from the group at the start of their weekly appearance to joke around with whichever country star happened to be emceeing that section of the program. Typical of her frequently flirtatious humor was this exchange, which she would repeat in various forms in city after city on tour:

  Emcee: How you doing tonight, June?

  June: Well, I just got back from entertaining the troops at [the name of a nearby military base] and I had to jump into this wolf hole.

  Emcee: You mean “foxhole,” June.

  June [looking innocent and confused]: Well, a fox may have dug it, but it was sure full of wolves when I jumped in.

  Before the audience had a chance to stop laughing, she and the group would go into a song.

  By now, Helen was married and pregnant, but Anita and June were the center of considerable male attention in a country music world known for its romantic entanglements as much as for its heartbreak songs. Because she was the prettier one, Anita had the most stars chasing after her, including such A-level names as Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. Her voice, too, caught a lot of ears. At the very time when Johnny Cash was listening to Hank Snow records in Landsberg, Snow was asking Anita to sing with him at a recording session in New York th
at led to a Top 5 country hit.

  Williams had more than singing on his mind when he took Anita with him to New York a year later to sing “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You)” on TV on the Kate Smith Evening Hour. In the April 23 segment, the budding sexual electricity between them was obvious. If Anita looked a little anxious, she was. Men were drawn to her—and Williams was no exception. She had already married, at seventeen, a Nashville fiddler named Dale Potter, a move so impulsive she didn’t even tell her parents ahead of time. The marriage was short-lived. On her twentieth birthday in 1953, she married another musician, steel guitarist Don Davis, who had previously dated June. The couple had a daughter, Lorrie, in 1959, then divorced, then remarried and had a son, Jay, before divorcing again in the mid-1960s.

  June also found no shortage of admirers. The one who caught her eye was Carl Smith, who had moved from Springfield to become a popular member of the Opry cast and chalk up a series of number-one singles. Because of Smith’s movie star good looks (he reminded many in Nashville of the actor Rory Calhoun), June knew that women would always be throwing themselves at Smith, but there was a lot she liked about him, including the idea of being a country music royal couple. They wed on July 9, 1952, and they indeed became a popular team onstage, where June would sometimes do parodies of Smith’s hits, for instance, turning his “Just Wait Till I Get You Alone” into “You Flopped When You Got Me Alone.”

  With the family’s musical career going so well, Eck started spending more and more time at home in Maces Springs. But he left the Carters in good hands. Through his connection with Hank Snow, he had met Colonel Tom Parker, who began booking their shows, eventually teaming them up with his newest find, Elvis Presley.

  Years later, Cash tended to be defensive about June’s relationship with Elvis, suspecting they might have been intimate. June did like Elvis immensely, but more in the role of a big sister who was always there to listen to his problems and even iron his pants and shirts. Like Cash, June tended to look at Elvis as something of a kid; she was six years older and more sophisticated. She also saw that line outside his dressing room each night and knew he was not her future. Besides, Elvis, like so many, was more interested in Anita. He pursued her like a giddy schoolboy, even faking a heart attack backstage in Florida to get her attention and sympathy.

  For all their charm onstage together, June and Carl Smith soon discovered that their marriage was going to be a rocky one, largely because Smith wanted June to give up her career and be a stay-at-home wife—the same role Vivian was playing in Cash’s life. Gradually, too, June started hearing reports about Smith’s fooling around. She tried to write it off as just country music shenanigans until it became apparent to her that he had fallen in love with someone else—a pretty young country singer named Goldie Hill. When June learned in the early months of 1955 that she was pregnant, she hoped it would cause her husband to recommit himself to their marriage, but it was too late; the new relationship was too far along. The Smiths’ separation was still a secret to country music fans when their daughter, Rebecca Carlene Smith (who later embarked on a singing career as Carlene Carter), was born on September 26. For the sake of their image, the couple even got together for photos with the baby. But there was no turning back. The divorce became final in December 1956. Smith married Goldie Hill the following year, and she gave up her promising career to be the full-time Mrs. Carl Smith on a five-hundred-acre horse farm outside Nashville. The Smiths had three children and remained married until her death in 2005.

  Always sensitive about not being as pretty as her sister, June felt humiliated that her husband had left her for another woman. The last thing she wanted was to see her friends and fans; for once, she needed to be out of the spotlight—at least in Nashville. In her autobiography she was brutally candid: “When your heart has been broken, you gather the pieces together, take your little girl and catch a plane to New York.…I thought I was the ugliest girl who ever lived. You feel that way when your marriage has failed.”

  III

  June found a natural out from her divorce embarrassment when director Elia Kazan, best known for A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, encouraged her to go to New York to study acting. He had seen her on an Opry show and thought she was a natural.

  She was twenty-seven when she arrived in New York with Carlene in late 1956 and enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, known for a demanding series of workshops and boasting a group of students that included over the years such names as Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, and Joanne Woodward. After a few weeks, June realized it was going to be hard to find paying jobs, so she decided to leave Carlene in Nashville with her mother. She shared an apartment in New York with Rosemary Edelman, the daughter of Hollywood TV and film producer Louis F. Edelman, and the two remained lifelong friends.

  In New York, June hoped to reinvent herself as a serious actress. She was tired of being the clown. Not wanting to cut her ties to country music completely, however, she returned to Nashville on weekends to appear on the Opry with the family. She made a few appearances on TV variety shows and had small acting jobs in a couple of dramatic shows, but it didn’t add up to much.

  On one of her trips back to Nashville, she met a handsome young man named Edwin Lee Nix, who had been a popular football player in the area in both high school and college. Known by everyone as Rip, a nickname he’d picked up as a boy because he loved to sleep so much, Nix worked in his father’s auto shop as a teenager and eventually opened his own body shop. He used his profits to race boats and to support his dreams of becoming an inventor.

  Given Nix’s low-key nature and June’s high-energy drive, it seemed an unlikely match, but something about Nix caught June’s eye when he showed up to fix the motor on Ezra’s boat. About three weeks later she invited him to the house for supper. But Nix was so involved in getting his boat ready for a race in Alabama that he forgot until June called to ask why he hadn’t shown up. He apologized and asked her to go to Alabama with him. It felt good for June to be seeing someone who wasn’t part of the tawdry melodrama of country music. Maybe, she told herself, it was time to find a more normal relationship. They continued dating on what seemed to be a relatively casual basis until they learned in the fall of 1957 that June was pregnant. They were wed on November 11. A daughter, Rosanna Lea—or Rosie, as they called her—was born July 13.

  Almost immediately, Nix and Carter realized how different their lives were—and neither had much interest in changing. Rip loved his boats (he held a world speed record at one point), while June wanted to be on the stage. Rip moved into the house that June received from the divorce with Smith, and he kept an eye on Carlene and Rosie—with help from Maybelle—while June spent three weeks out of every month on the road. Early on, he accompanied her to some fair dates, but he didn’t like all the traveling. “I drove 2,500 miles in a week and it just wore you out,” he says. As to the larger picture, “things were fine at first between us, but we eventually grew further and further apart because we very seldom got to see each other.”

  June had one advantage when looking for live gigs in that many female singers at the time stayed home with their husband or children. Still, it was hard going back on the road—always being the “extra” on the bill, never the headliner—and having to put up with the travel and sexual rites of the lifestyle. June did a pretty good job of being one of the guys, but it was a tough life, and she developed an especially strong relationship with Don Gibson, who was one of the biggest country stars of the late 1950s and early 1960s thanks to such hits as “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Oh Lonesome Me.”

  Despite his immense talent, Gibson was a tragic figure who suffered from depression and intense stage fright, both of which fueled a drinking problem. Some who knew June at the time suggest she was simply trying to help him get his life together. Tom T. Hall’s wife, Dixie, maintains there was a bit of Florence Nightingale in June. But others felt that June was once again hoping to b
ecome part of another country music royal couple. She and Gibson, though both married at the time, were still seeing each other when June first shared the stage with Cash in Dallas.

  Chapter 13

  The Drugs and Carnegie Hall

  I

  JOHNNY CASH’S LIFE was moving so fast, and in so many conflicting directions, that each year felt pivotal to him—and the start of 1962 proved no exception. It was the year of June Carter, Carnegie Hall, and the Hollywood Bowl, and those three came together in a dramatic six-week period that affected Cash’s life more than anything else since meeting Sam Phillips. It was a period of extraordinary joy and deep humiliation.

  June joined the Cash tour on January 28, 1962, in Des Moines, sharing the bill with Patsy Cline and George Jones. Cash had been playing the 4,100-seat KRNT Theater in Des Moines since 1957, and he filled the place for three shows. It was a sign that however shaky Cash’s record sales, he was still a red-hot live attraction. He had been looking forward to seeing June again ever since the car ride to Oklahoma City, and he went searching for her as soon as he got to the theater for the one thirty p.m. show. To impress her, he had put on his flashiest shirt, which was purple and black. He was somewhat deflated when June took one look at the shirt and pointed out that it was all wrinkled.

  When Cash told her he didn’t care, she replied, “Well, I do. You don’t wanna go out there with a shirt like that.”

  Unused to being ordered around, Cash responded, “You telling me to take off my shirt?”