Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  “There’s no question it was a turning point,” he says. “You could see it in the ratings. John had gone too far. I think he could have found a gentler way of doing the same thing, but he didn’t see it that way.”

  As the ratings sagged, ABC and Screen Gems moved to reclaim control of the show. With it now apparent that variety shows were losing favor, Leonard Goldberg, vice president of programming for ABC, suggested that the music format be changed to a series of “theme” nights. Apparently Cash wasn’t opposed, because he designed themes that fit with his general desires for the show. The December 23 episode, for instance, was turned into a Cash family Christmas show, complete with his mother at the piano during “Silent Night.”

  In his annual year-end letter, Cash was once again in an upbeat mood. “No year could possibly surpass this one for health, wealth, happiness, success, love, just sheer bliss in my marriage to June.” Then he singled out John Carter: “Thank God for the sweetest blessing on earth….The whole country is raving about John Carter. The most famous baby in history. He’s taking a nap now. Ready to walk. Just a couple of steps.”

  But he expressed more ambivalent feelings about the TV show. Describing the second season, he wrote: “A smash hit. Good shows this season. My best. Fan mail raves.…Proud of my show. Meaningful to people. Love doing it.”

  His tune changed sharply, though, when it came to the show’s still unfolding third season. “Show still a hit. But since this makes 40 network shows, a little excitement is gone. Rating watchers are nervous. Start worrying.”

  He even asked himself whether he would continue to do a weekly TV show after the season ended, and he concluded:

  “Doubtful.

  “I don’t care for the rating game.

  “Must keep my performances honest.

  “Must use meaningful guests.

  “Don’t really care.

  “Will do what my heart and mind leads me to do.”

  V

  Cash was able to follow his heart on the show as the new year, 1971, began. The January 20 and 27 tapings both saluted the history of country music, while the February 3 episode was devoted to the music of the Old West. The inspired show at Vanderbilt University was also his idea. When none of the themes attracted more viewers, ABC came up with its own themes, starting with a February 10 comedy special featuring such cornball country comedians as Archie Campbell, Junior Samples, Stringbean, and Homer and Jethro. “John was embarrassed by it,” Jacobson says, and the two men balked when they were told to proceed with a circus theme.

  “I mentioned the circus idea to John and he was furious,” Jacobson continues. “He asked me, ‘What do they want me to do? Sing ‘I Walk the Line’ while I’m holding a chimp’?”

  Cash instructed Jacobson to tell ABC he wouldn’t do the circus show. When Jacobson warned Cash that he, Jacobson, would probably be fired if Cash didn’t cooperate, Cash told the co-producer, “Tell them if you go, I go.” Relaying Cash’s decision to the show’s producer, Howard Cohen, Jacobson was given an hour to clear out his desk. “I warned them John said he wouldn’t do the show without me,” says Jacobson, “and Cohen said he’d talk to him.”

  Confident that Cash would back him up, Jacobson gave Cash’s phone number to Cohen, and then he waited for a call from Cash or Cohen saying the circus idea was history. “It was Friday night, and when I didn’t hear from anyone by 11:30, I knew it was all over,” Jacobson adds. “Cohen had promised Cash the moon and he gave in.”

  In setting up the showdown, Jacobson made two mistakes. He failed to realize how much Cash hated confrontation—and he failed to realize how important that weekly national pulpit was to Cash. As much as he complained about it, Cash knew the value of the show in spreading his message.

  Two nights later Jacobson went to see Cash. “We sat in the kitchen and had some coffee,” Jacobson says. “It was just small talk. Neither of us mentioned the circus show. Finally, I got up and said, ‘I understand,’ and kissed him on the right cheek. Then I got into my car and drove home, crying all the way.”

  On the night of the circus taping, Jacobson stopped by to watch the end of the show in the mobile production room housed in a truck outside the Ryman. “I hadn’t planned on going, but my curiosity got the best of me,” he says. “When I got there, the show was just ending. John wasn’t singing ‘I Walk the Line,’ but he was holding…a chimp.”

  Despite his preoccupation with the TV show, Cash had not forgotten about Glen Sherley, the San Quentin songwriter. Despite Marshall Grant’s misgivings about the man, Cash believed in Sherley, his music, and his story. He saw a lot of himself in this son of Oklahoma farm workers, a man who had been in and out of prisons for years before he ever saw that Greystone Chapel in Folsom.

  To Cash, Sherley, who was four years younger, was living proof of redemption, which is why he spent months lobbying California prison authorities to grant Sherley a parole. He even arranged for Billy Graham to phone Governor Ronald Reagan, urging that Sherley be given a second chance.

  Though he had met the man for only a few minutes, Cash promised the parole authorities that he would personally provide Sherley with a job in Nashville. To demonstrate the point, Cash helped get one of Sherley’s other songs, “Portrait of My Woman,” to Eddy Arnold. Cash was probably as excited as Sherley when Arnold recorded it and the single became a modest hit. Thanks to that single and more Cash maneuvering, Mega Records, a small Nashville label, recorded a live album with Sherley in January 1971 at the California State Prison in Vacaville, where the songwriter had been reassigned. In a letter to Sherley days before the recording date, Cash mentioned that he and Graham were pulling for him: “We believe you are a man of destiny….The name Glen Sherley is to become a legend, a reminder to all men in prison that no matter how long, how…low they go, someone cares for them.…On with the show! Tear them up.” It was signed “Your friend, Johnny Cash.”

  Before the album was released in May, John got the news that Sherley was being paroled on March 8. He arranged for Sherley to fly to Nashville. Cash told reporters at the airport that he and June were going to make Sherley a part of their show and sign him to their publishing company. Sherley then stepped into Cash’s Cadillac and headed to the Cash family home, where he’d spend his first night of freedom in eleven years.

  There was much to celebrate two weeks later as John and June flew to Australia for a tour beginning March 24. Besides the apparent redemption of Glen Sherley, they had just won another Grammy, this one for their duet on “If I Were a Carpenter,” and Cash was more optimistic than ever about getting a fourth season after speaking to an ABC executive just before the flight.

  It felt like a punch to the stomach hours later when Cash learned from a reporter upon landing at the airport that the show had been canceled. Forgetting all that was positive about the series, he would look back on it for years with bitterness: “I resented all the dehumanizing things that television does to you, the way it has of just sterilizing your head….Like all of a sudden I’m a machine and everybody is pushing buttons.”

  Lou Robin felt that Cash was worn out from the TV show. “He was tired of the grind, the compromises, and the weekend touring to help him meet his overhead,” he recalls. Indeed, Cash could have made more money touring than he received for the TV show. That’s why, after working all week on the show, he needed to do concerts on the weekends during the TV years to cover the cost of keeping his entire touring company—some twenty people—on the payroll.

  “The advantage of the TV show was that it made him well known all over the world, which helped him sell more concert tickets and records—for a while,” Robin says. “As concert promoters, Allen and I knew that somebody who was on TV every week would eventually start losing business. When you’d bring a show to town, fans would hear people say, ‘We see him for free every week. Why should we pay to see him?’ That wasn’t the case just with John.

  “In the early 1960s, we did a national tour with the cast of the Bev
erly Hillbillies TV show. At the time, it was the number-one show in every market, and all the people from the program were on tour. But the tour died. We ended up having to cancel several dates. It almost put us out of business.”

  From his desire that the program continue despite all those negatives, it’s clear that what Cash really wanted was his massive platform. He was still getting letters from fans, many of them thanking Cash for his inspiration. This strengthened his sense of mission and purpose. Television had opened the door to a wider world for him. With the show gone, he and June turned to the only bigger picture they knew: the motion picture screen. They had been thinking about making a movie about the life of Christ ever since their first trip to Israel, and they decided this was the time.

  Maybe, June suggested, the cancellation of the TV show was a blessing—a sign that it was time for them to take on the larger challenge. Cash spoke to Billy Graham, who encouraged him to proceed with the film. The evangelist told Cash that it could be his greatest gift to God.

  Part

  Four

  Chapter 23

  Israel and The Calling

  I

  THE FLIGHT TO TEL AVIV during the first week in November 1971 to begin filming his story of the life of Jesus gave Cash time to think about his future. He was glad to be doing concerts on a regular basis again; he felt that facing a live audience night after night would help motivate him to write new songs. From mid-March to the end of October, Cash had performed to nearly 400,000 people in sixty-one cities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe.

  “There were times in the 1960s when I was so far out of it that there was no real connection with the audience,” Cash admitted. “But I felt a connection after I got sober and it meant the world to me. There were many nights when the response was so moving that I felt more excited than anyone in the audience. That told me I was on the right road.”

  Cash was also pleased with the new Man in Black album. Though it was not billed as a gospel collection, the material was chiefly religious; Billy Graham even lent his spoken voice to one of the tracks, “The Preacher Said, ‘Jesus Said.’” He was in such good spirits that it didn’t bother him when the album stalled at number fifty-six on the pop charts, the weakest showing of any LP since his superstar run began in 1968. After all, Billy Graham was telling him he was doing the Lord’s work.

  As for his film, Cash had considered various options: getting a major studio to bankroll it, hiring a veteran director, reaching out to a professional screenwriter. In the end, he decided to handle everything more informally. After all the compromises with ABC and Screen Gems, he wanted to finance it himself to avoid any outside interference. This film was going to be his vision.

  As he headed to Tel Aviv, Cash was proceeding pretty much on faith alone. He had no formal script and only a vague outline in his mind. To assist him, Cash turned to two people he trusted: the Reverend Jimmie Snow, who had become as close to being his day-to-day pastor as anyone since Reverend Gressett, and Robert Elfstrom, who had directed the documentary about him.

  Despite Cash’s unease at attending church services because of the disruptions he caused, he enjoyed the friendship and spiritual support of pastors, and he had been looking for someone to fill that role ever since moving to Hendersonville. He had the bond with Billy Graham, but their schedules were hectic, leaving little time for them to get together except at the Crusades or on occasional vacation trips.

  The Reverend Jimmie Snow became his point person.

  As the son of Hank Snow, Jimmie grew up in country music and even spent a few years trying to follow in his father’s footsteps. During that time, he succumbed to the same temptations that Cash experienced. “I had known Jimmie Snow since 1956 and had a lot of respect for him as a man,” Cash remarked, adding, “I had seen him at his worst and he had seen me the same way.”

  Another thing Reverend Snow had going for him was that Cash was a big believer in signs from heaven. When Cash ran into the pastor during his drug relapse on the Far East tour, he saw Snow as one of those signs.

  Still, it took several months before Cash would open up to him.

  After the conversation at his house in 1969, when Cash asked Snow how he could get back in touch with his faith, he invited the minister to stop by the TV studio whenever he liked—and Reverend Snow was a regular at the Ryman, but he didn’t press Cash. After a few months Cash approached him, saying it was time they got together to resume their talk about God.

  This time at the house, the reverend outlined a plan for Cash. “John would say things like, ‘I’m not so bad,’ and I’d say that anything we do in the negative is bad for us,” Snow says. “I told him, ‘The only thing that is going to give you strength is to give yourself totally and completely to God.’” Cash responded by dropping in on a Sunday service at Snow’s Evangel Temple church, whose two hundred worshipers included many from country music, John’s sister Joanne among them. At the minister’s invitation, Cash picked up his guitar and sang a hymn called “My Prayer.” Despite his feelings that day, Cash, with his busy schedule and a nagging hesitancy about fully committing himself, rarely made it back to Evangel Temple.

  June’s daughter Rosie was also a member of the congregation, and she sometimes talked her mother into going with her to the services, which mixed sermons with lots of singing by the church choir and members of the congregation. One Sunday in mid-April 1971, June heard an aspiring twenty-two-year-old songwriter named Larry Gatlin sing a gospel-tinged song called “Help Me,” and she was deeply moved by the words and by the pure beauty of Gatlin’s voice. She rushed home and said, “John, you’ve got to come hear this boy.”

  It was May 21 when John and June sat in a pew and listened to Gatlin’s song, a sinner’s prayer that reminded Cash of his own lost times in the 1960s.

  As the service continued, Cash reflected on the pain he could have spared himself and others if he had asked for God’s help earlier. When the pastor asked if anyone in the church wanted to step forward to make a spiritual commitment to Christ, Cash flashed back a quarter century to the day when he had made a similar public declaration in the Baptist church in Dyess. He realized it was time to do it again, aided now by a greater understanding of what that commitment meant.

  Cash stepped from his pew and knelt at the altar. “I’m reaffirming my faith,” he said. “I’ll make the stand, and in case I’ve had any reservations up to now, I pledge that I’m going to try harder to live my life as God wants, and I’d like to ask for your prayers and the prayers of these people.”

  By then, June and members of his family had come up to the altar to stand next to him. John and June hugged, both of them in tears.

  To Reverend Snow, Cash was a man wanting to pay back for all his blessings.

  “He had all these dreams of things he wanted to do for God,” he says. “We talked a lot about what he could do and he said, ‘I would really like to make a movie about the life of Jesus. Would you be interested in helping me with that?”

  On the drive home, Cash spoke to June, too, about the movie. He had already been working on some script ideas with Larry Murray, a writer from the TV show. Cash’s vision of the film was an extension of the Ride This Train approach. He’d tell the story of Jesus through music and link the songs with his own narration. To illustrate the songs, the film would show Jesus’s feet in various historical locations in Israel, from Jericho to the Jordan River.

  One of the songs he now planned to use was Gatlin’s “Help Me.”

  II

  Robert Elfstrom was working on his boat at his lakefront vacation home in Maine when he got a phone call from Cash shortly after Labor Day 1971. The two had got along well during the nearly two years it took Elfstrom to film and then edit the documentary for National Educational Television (soon to become PBS). Cash was calling to invite Elfstrom to direct the gospel film.

  “When I asked John what the film would be about, he said, ‘Jesus,’ and I remember saying ‘Jesus
who?’ because the call caught me by surprise and I thought he might be talking about some rock performer with that name.

  “John replied, ‘Jesus Christ!’”

  When Elfstrom, an agnostic, said he didn’t know much about Jesus, Cash paid no attention. He simply asked Elfstrom to meet him a few days later in Oslo, where Cash was giving a concert. There was no way he was going to refuse. Like millions of fans, Elfstrom had fallen under Cash’s spell.

  In Oslo on September 12, Cash outlined his concept, and Elfstrom agreed to go to Israel with Murray in late October to start scouting locales. “We only had the vaguest idea of how we were going to tell the story, but I could feel his passion,” Elfstrom says, “and I wanted to do what I could to help him even though I felt like I was probably the least qualified person on earth to direct a film like this. John didn’t even know what he was going to do with the film, much less have a distributor. He just said, ‘Let’s make it the way I want to make it and you want to make it and then we’ll see who wants it.’”

  In the three years Elfstrom stood side by side with Cash during the making of first the documentary, then Cash’s film, he came to admire him greatly.

  “When I started working with John on the documentary, I was a clean slate,” the director recalls. “I didn’t know much about him and frankly didn’t care. This was a job for me. But I started getting intrigued right away. There was magnetism about him that was apparent the first time I saw him in concert somewhere down South. He was electrifying, and the audience was captivated. Over time, I came to realize that onstage was where everything came together in his life, all that he had gone through back in Dyess and in the years in between. There was something in him that wanted to make his fans’ lives seem significant and that they were worth something.”