Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  For all the commentary of “Ira Hayes,” Cash didn’t think of himself as a protest singer. He considered his music squarely in the folk tradition that he so admired. “My thing was never protest music,” he said. “I was into documenting life in our country and in our times and in earlier times. That’s what I was doing in Ride This Train and in Bitter Tears and even the prison songs. I was trying to write about history so that people could understand what was going on. To me protest music was like politics, and that was never my bag.”

  Cash began to think about doing a whole album of comic songs. He didn’t think of them as novelties so much as another way to look at the human condition. He saw in songs like “Dirty Old Egg Sucking Dog” and “One on the Right” a way to laugh at himself at a time when it seemed everyone was taking themselves too seriously. He recorded “One on the Right” on November 29 and asked Clement to come up with some more tunes so that he could construct an album around them. After all, there was nothing else on his agenda now that the prison album had been scrapped.

  Columbia was excited about the pop potential of “One on the Right” and rushed out the single as fast as possible. It was a hit in both country and pop markets.

  Given the somberness of Cash’s life after the El Paso arrest, it seemed a strange time to do a novelty album, but maybe that was the point.

  III

  When Cash returned to El Paso for the arraignment on December 28, he pled no contest to the charges before a U.S. District Court judge. The next day, newspapers throughout the country and Canada carried photos of Cash walking from the courthouse, Vivian at his side. But there was no hiding the damage. Vivian told friends it was the most embarrassing moment of her life. In Nashville, June Carter, too, was distraught. After all her warnings, Cash was still out of control—and it didn’t make her feel any better that he had chosen once again to lean on Vivian, even if it did make sense as an effort to burnish his image.

  Cash was soon to learn that the photo had had even worse consequences than he imagined. Leaders of the National States’ Rights Party, a white supremacist group in Alabama, seized on the photo, which, when reproduced in grainy newsprint, made Vivian look dark-skinned and possessed of facial features some considered African American. Whether outraged by the apparent miscegenation or eager to get back at Cash for his “Ira Hayes” protest stance (Native Americans were also a target of white supremacists), the group reprinted the photo in its newspaper the Thunderbolt and undertook an aggressive campaign against Cash.

  In the publication, the States’ Rights Party alluded to the El Paso arrest and urged its readers to boycott Cash’s recordings, claiming, “Money from the sale of [Cash’s] records goes to scum like Johnny Cash to keep them supplied with drugs and negro women.” The article even referred to Cash’s “mongrelized” children. Reprints were widely circulated.

  Fearing a backlash among fans, especially those in the South, Holiff launched a counteroffensive in the media. “That meant contacting newspapers to get the story out about what was correct to offset articles that were repeating these hate things,” he said.

  While Cash publicly threatened to sue the Thunderbolt for $12 million, Holiff was working behind the scenes. He contacted Vivian’s father, asking for a copy of Vivian’s marriage certificate—which would state her race as Caucasian—and a history of Vivian’s bloodlines. On October 17, Liberto sent him the marriage certificate and a letter in which he detailed Vivian’s Italian, Dutch, and English heritage. The material, including a list of the whites-only schools Vivian attended, was sent to the editor of the Thunderbolt. The accompanying letter read, “We feel sure that the members of your organization are capable of being fair-minded when faced with evidence such as the enclosed. To refuse to correct this situation would suggest that you are not adhering to many of the Christian principles that you advocate.”

  During this period Cash received a few death threats, and a handful of protesters showed up at some dates in the South, but there was no sign that Cash’s record sales or concert attendance figures were suffering. Eventually the issue faded away.

  In her 2007 memoir Vivian wrote that the stress she felt at the time was “almost unbearable. I wanted to die.” She added that she tried to persuade Cash not to speak publicly about the Thunderbolt charges. “To this day,” she said, “I hate when accusations and threats from people like that are dignified with any response at all.”

  At least there was good news from El Paso. In March 1966 Cash appeared before U.S. District Judge D. W. Suttle, who gave him a thirty-day suspended sentence and a $1,000 fine rather than the maximum penalty of a year in jail. Before the sentencing, Cash had pleaded for leniency: “I know that I have made a terrible mistake and would like to go back to rebuilding the image I had before this happened.” Suttle was handed a folder containing numerous testimonials, including one from the U.S. Department of Justice praising Cash for entertaining the troops, and one from Reverend Gressett.

  Despite standing by her man in El Paso, Vivian realized by early 1966 that divorce was probably the only answer. The brief hint of reconciliation after El Paso was already a distant memory. “Johnny refused to talk to me anymore,” she wrote. “I’d say, ‘Can we please talk?’ and he’d say, ‘I don’t want to argue,’ and he’d leave….That was our big problem in the end: he didn’t want to be confrontational or questioned.”

  More than ever, Vivian’s “contact” with her husband continued to be Marshall Grant. Luther Perkins and Fluke Holland didn’t want to get involved with what had become a state of full-scale warfare between the couple. Grant was the only one who would even try to fight for her. At the same time, Vivian admitted to herself that she couldn’t compete with June. For one thing, she couldn’t be on the road with Johnny and share his love of music. But she also came to understand that June was simply tougher than she was.

  In her book she pointed to a traumatic meeting with June in the mid-1960s, a “tense five minutes of angry words, posturing and June punctuating her position with five devastating words that rendered me speechless: ‘Vivian, he will be mine.’ With that she turned and walked away.”

  The breaking point came during a routine physical early in the year.

  “I know I looked pathetic,” Vivian wrote. “I was down to weighing 95 pounds, and I was weak and sickly and crying (my permanent state behind closed doors). I knew I needed help but I didn’t know how to ask. I was rapidly deteriorating. My doctor’s face grew serious as he…looked me straight in the eyes: ‘Vivian, you need to do something. If you don’t, somebody else will be raising your girls.’”

  The remarks struck Vivian’s most tender nerve. “This wasn’t meant to be a slap at June,” Sylvia says. “The doctor didn’t know about her. It was just that he could see how nervousness and smoking and drinking coffee had worn [Vivian] down, but when she heard that, everything changed. She wanted to be with her kids even if it meant [ending] her marriage, even if it meant going against our church’s teachings. From that day on, it was just a matter of time.”

  Cash began to sense a change on Vivian’s part and it frightened him. For all his talk about wanting a divorce, he was torn inside. Chief among his concerns was the children.

  “I knew I was going to leave Vivian, but then I’d look at those four little girls,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Man, I’m gonna give up something that’s gonna break my heart, but my heart will be broken more if I don’t marry June.’ When I was in California, my big reason for staying stoned all the time was her. I wanted to be somewhere else in my mind.”

  With Vivian on the way out of his life, Cash reached out to other members of his family, most of whom sided with his wife. He even tried to repair his relationship with his nephew Damon, who’d stopped talking to him after learning about Cash’s accusation of leaving him in the forest to die.

  Damon was puttering around the house in Oak View one day when a limousine pulled up out front. The driver handed him a note from Cash, inviting him to a concer
t John was doing in Southern California. It read, “Please join me.” But the hurt was still too deep. Damon loved Cash the man and admired Cash the artist, but he couldn’t tolerate any more of his uncle’s behavior. Neither Cash’s celebrity nor his blood ties were enough for Damon to forgive all that had happened.

  Without pause, he picked up a pencil, turned the note over, and wrote two words. They were to him a cry of rage on behalf of all those who had been victimized by his uncle’s drug use—including Cash’s parents, his bandmates, and the thousands of concert fans who had been disappointed by all the “no show” nights. But mostly Damon was thinking about his own pain and the abuse Vivian and the children had suffered, abuse he had seen firsthand year after year.

  Damon handed the note to the limo driver and asked him to deliver it to his uncle.

  It read: “FUCK YOU.”

  Part

  Three

  Chapter 17

  The Deathwatch

  I

  IF THE SHAME OF EL PASO wasn’t enough to turn Cash’s life around, Marshall Grant wondered if anything was. Within days of the arraignment, Cash was back on pills. After the closeness of the early days, Grant felt their relationship growing increasingly distant; instead of a partner, he felt more like an employee with a job description that stretched from playing bass to taking care of hotel and flight arrangements to, above all, helping keep Cash alive.

  Overdoses and near overdoses had become so common that everyone in the touring party cited various times and places: Johnny Western mentioned Waterloo, June Carter named Des Moines, Grant alluded to a string of towns. In addition, there were the near-fatal drug-induced accidents, including the time in the summer of 1965 when Cash borrowed June’s Cadillac in Nashville and crashed it into a telephone pole, breaking his nose and knocking out four upper front teeth. To break the tension, Luther Perkins came up with a piece of advice people in Cash’s camp would repeat for years: “Let him sleep for twenty-four hours. If he wakes up, he’s alive, if he doesn’t, he’s dead.”

  The experience that everyone in the Cash camp recalled most vividly happened at the Four Seasons Motor Hotel in Toronto on the morning after a March 19, 1966, show at the city’s prestigious new O’Keefe Centre—just five months after the El Paso arrest. The concert hall had opened in 1960 with the pre-Broadway premiere of Camelot, starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews. Playing there was another step in Holiff’s campaign to upgrade Cash’s image.

  There were signs of trouble even before the show, Holiff said, when Cash showed up “very, very, very strung out—terribly so. Johnny had smashed a bottle [and] he came out onstage in bare feet.” Watching a wobbly Cash try to step around the pieces of glass, the theater manager decided to cancel the afternoon show even though the audience was already in place. The evening concert went on as scheduled, but Cash’s performance was shaky at best.

  Things would get worse.

  Because the group had to leave at seven the next morning to make it to Rochester in time for an afternoon show, Grant went to bed as soon as he got back to the hotel, he detailed in his memoir. But he was awakened around two a.m. by June, who said John had left the hotel with Ronnie Hawkins, an American rock ’n’ roller who owned a club in Toronto. Knowing Cash’s tendency to stay out all night, she was worried that he wouldn’t be back in time for the trip.

  Grant went to Hawkins’s club on Yonge Street, but it was closed. Hearing noise from a second-floor window, he hollered until he got someone’s attention. He was told that Cash had gone to a nearby Chinese restaurant. When that proved a dead end, Grant returned to the club and yelled again until another head popped out the second-floor window. To make sure he got to Cash this time, he said he needed to talk to him because of some problems at home in California.

  The gambit worked, and Cash soon appeared in the window. Grant told him that he needed to come with him and call Vivian because there was a problem with the girls. It was now three a.m., and Cash said he’d be along shortly. An hour later, finally back at the hotel, Grant explained to Cash that he had lied, that the real reason he wanted him back at the hotel was the seven a.m. departure. Cash was unhappy, but he assured Grant he’d be ready.

  At six thirty, Grant knocked on Cash’s door to make sure he was up. When Cash didn’t answer, Grant used his key to enter the room, where he found clothes and dishes spread all over the bed and the floor, but no sign of John.

  Hoping that Cash had already gone to the motor home for the drive to Rochester, Grant rushed to the parking lot, where he found the singer slumped over in the vehicle’s dinette area. Grant grabbed a hand mirror from the counter and stuck it under Cash’s nose, hoping for a sign that he was breathing. There was none. Grant feared Cash’s luck had finally run out, only to be relieved a few seconds later when a slight wisp appeared on the mirror.

  There wasn’t time to go back to the hotel for help, so he tried to blow air into the singer’s lungs. After what seemed like several minutes, Cash uttered a faint grunt. June soon arrived with other members of the tour party, and they helped move Cash to a bed in the rear of the motor home. Grant’s first thought was to cancel the show in Rochester, but he had seen Cash recover rapidly from past incidents like this, so he decided to press on.

  Not wanting customs agents to see Cash in such bad shape, Marshall and June hid him under a pile of blankets at the border crossing. It worked; the troupe made it to Rochester on time. As the motor home pulled up to the venue, Cash was finally sitting up. Marshall and June gave him several cups of coffee and helped him change clothes.

  Cash appeared deathly ill as he headed to the microphone to begin the show with “Folsom Prison Blues.” Why, Grant wondered, didn’t Cash’s fans recognize how sick he was—not just this time but over the last few years? All the crowd saw, however, was their hero. When the final song ended an hour later, flashbulbs popped throughout the room as fans yelled for more. Cash had been near death only hours before, but he had just given what Grant called one of the best performances of his career.

  While Cash headed for the dressing room, Grant asked himself how a man blessed with such talent could also be so screwed up. How could someone inspire millions yet inflict such pain on himself and those closest to him? But there wasn’t time to dwell on those questions. The only thing he cared about as he walked back to the motor home was finding Cash alive the next time he knocked on his hotel room door.

  II

  To replace Johnny Western, Gordon Terry, and Tex Ritter, who had dropped off the tour or started doing fewer dates for various reasons, Cash and Holiff put together a new lineup to go along with June and the Tennessee Three. They had already added the Statler Brothers, a personable and talented male vocal group they spotted at a show in Virginia in 1964, who would remain a popular part of the package for years. The team of brothers Don and Harold Reid, Lew DeWitt, and Phil Balsley had a gospel background that appealed to Cash, plus they had a strong feel for secular material, too, and even a flair for comedy.

  Cash also offered a hand to Carl Perkins. The rockabilly star had fallen into relative obscurity, sabotaged chiefly by his alcoholism. As Sam Phillips had predicted, Don Law didn’t know how to bring out Perkins’s unique blend of country and rock, and Carl was dropped from the label in 1963. He then was signed by Decca Records, but he did no better there.

  Cash had been keeping tabs on Perkins, and he took advantage of a Southern tour swing in January 1966 to stop by Carl’s house in Jackson, Tennessee, to invite his friend to join him on the next show, in Chattanooga—just for old times’ sake, he said. But Cash was hoping to make Carl a regular part of his show if things went well, and they did. Perkins’s rockabilly zest added some flash, and Cash enjoyed spending time with him offstage.

  Of all the performers he would describe as his brothers over the years, no one was quite as close to Cash as Carl. It wasn’t just that they shared poor rural roots; they also understood each other’s substance abuse problems. Except for June, no one spent more
time on the road with Cash than Perkins. At times they seemed almost to cling to each other for dear life. Perkins would later tell of going into the back of the motor home where they could be alone, and they’d “get so drunk—me on my whiskey and he on his pills—that we couldn’t see each other and we’d start crying. We’d sit there and talk about our dead brothers and get to feeling sorry for ourselves.”

  The only one who could step into their private sanctuary was June.

  “June was taking it and praying and crying and hoping that someday we’d stand up and be men,” Perkins told Christopher S. Wren in the early 1970s. “She preached at both of us…our heads hanging down so bad we couldn’t eat. ‘John,’ I said. ‘One of these days we’re going to have to get off it.’ And he said, ‘I know it.’”

  With Carl and the Statlers in place, Cash turned to the Carter Family. June had been pushing the idea for some time because she wanted to see her family working again after a long period of inactivity. But Cash didn’t add Mother Maybelle, Helen, and Anita just to please his girlfriend. He loved sharing the stage with the Carters. On those few occasions when he had brought them on the road, he’d felt proud to be part of that great Carter Family legacy. He had grown so close to Maybelle and Eck that he often spent time at their house when he was in Nashville.

  Cash especially looked forward to talking about spiritual matters with Eck. They read the Bible together, and Cash would experience moments of peace. Unfortunately, the feeling wouldn’t last. He’d get back on the road and start popping the pills. What he found most comforting about Eck was that no matter how many times he fell, Eck never lectured him. Eck just tried to tell him that he had a choice in life. He didn’t have to keep turning to drugs; he could turn to God. It’d take until mid-September for the Carters to get all their affairs in order and officially join the tour, but when they did, the final piece in his touring family was in place.