Johnny Cash: The Life (31 page)

When he heard that, Cash became angry. He told them he had never taken heroin. The men explained they had assumed he was into heroin because they had seen the cab driver huddling with a known heroin dealer in the Juárez bar.

Cash was relieved, but the officers pointed out that he had still broken the law. He was taken to the El Paso county jail until a bond hearing the next day.

Grant learned of the arrest the next day and hired a former El Paso County judge, Woodrow Wilson Bean, to represent Cash. Hoping to minimize publicity, Bean—whom Cash proudly pointed out was believed to be a distant relative of Judge Roy Bean, a legendary figure in Old West lore—asked that newsmen be barred from the hearing, but the request was rejected by U.S. Commissioner Colbert Coldwell.

Cash, dressed in a business suit, was on edge during the hearing. He cursed at one of the reporters and threatened to kick a photographer’s camera. In the end, Cash posted a $1,500 bond and was released pending an arraignment on December 28. He was given permission to leave town but not the continental United States.

As he headed home to Casitas Springs, Cash felt as if a mask had been ripped off, leaving him looking like a hypocrite for singing all those gospel songs and telling people they could overcome their problems. He’d been in minor scrapes with the law before, but until now, knowledge of his drug use had been limited to country music insiders. Now his fans knew the truth. Not only did newspapers around the country report on the arrest, but also hundreds carried a photo of him being escorted out of the courthouse in handcuffs by a U.S. marshal, his face grim, looking all the more sinister behind dark glasses.

This time, at least, Vivian’s wait wasn’t in vain. Cash went straight home to Casitas Springs, and he was contrite. Humiliated and fearing the effect of the arrest on his career, he reached out to both Vivian and his parents, talking more openly than before about his addiction and vowing to turn himself around. While at home, he learned that Peter LaFarge had been found dead from a probable overdose in his apartment in New York. LaFarge’s death made him feel that it was even more urgent to clean up. After years of disappointment, Vivian wanted to believe. She wanted to take his pledge to straighten up as a sign that he also was going to give up June Carter and rededicate himself to his family. But it was too late. She couldn’t erase his insecurity and pain.

Vivian angrily showed him the newspaper photo of him in handcuffs and his daughters told him that kids were saying bad things about him in school. For the first time in his life, he said, “I felt real shame.”

Grant was encouraged when Cash showed up “straight as an arrow and ten pounds heavier” two weeks later for his first post-arrest concert in Charlotte, North Carolina. Grant told himself that the arrest might have been the best thing that could have happened to Cash, thinking, “This might shake him up enough to where he’ll get off those things.”

In Nashville, June Carter wondered about her place in Cash’s life; he had gone home to Vivian, not to her, in a time of trouble. She had already told Rip Nix that she wanted a divorce, hoping that would encourage Cash finally to leave Vivian. Cash tried to reassure June. He said it would have looked bad in the judge’s eyes if he hadn’t gone home to his family, and he told her he still wanted to be with her.

Meanwhile, Holiff was working tirelessly to persuade promoters around the country not to give up on Cash. Most did continue to book him, but there was one highly publicized exception. Officials at Texas A&M University canceled plans for a Cash show scheduled for November 24 on campus, citing the El Paso arrest. “The administration didn’t feel it was wise to present an entertainer with a cloud hanging over him,” said the dean of students. “We try to provide a clean, Christian atmosphere for our students.”

But some students came to Cash’s rescue. Not only did more than two thousand of them sign petitions protesting the cancellation, but also a student committee worked out a deal with Holiff for Cash to perform on the scheduled date at a nearby off-campus club.

Through all the headlines, Cash continued to be a strong presence on the radio and sales charts. The
Orange Blossom Special
album spent thirteen weeks on
Billboard’
s pop charts, and four of his singles made the Top 15 on the country charts: “Orange Blossom Special,” “Mr. Garfield” from the
True West
album, “The Sons of Katie Elder,” and “Happy to Be with You,” a ballad that Cash co-wrote with June and Merle Kilgore.

The only disappointment commercially had nothing to do with adverse publicity. As label execs feared, a double album was too expensive for most Cash fans.
True West
didn’t make the national sales charts. Still, Cash and Law believed in the music and they made a bold decision: they reshaped the material into a single album, which they titled
Mean as Hell!
and scheduled for release early in the new year. (It would do well, but not spectacularly, on the country charts.)

The variation in quality between the
Orange Blossom Special
and
True West
albums and the “Katie Elder” and “Happy to Be with You” singles reveals the difference between the personal music that Cash felt most comfortable playing and the records he made solely with the charts in mind. The albums had been heartfelt projects for Cash, and he’d focused his care and attention on them. The singles were another story.

“Happy to Be with You” was a particularly disappointing attempt to recapture the commercial bounce of “Ring of Fire.” Though this new song was a statement of contentment, it employed the trumpets and lyric structure of the earlier hit. Even though “Elder” and “Happy” sold well, Cash rarely sang them in concert.

Experiencing another dry spell in his songwriting, Cash was at a strange point in his career; for perhaps the first time since
Ride This Train,
he didn’t have another concept album in mind. The solution came in the fall of 1965 from a familiar source. Jack Clement told Cash he had a new song that would be perfect for him—a playful slap at all the protest music that seemed to be growing increasingly strident and humorless. It was called “The One on the Right Is on the Left” and Cash loved it.

The sociopolitical climate in America in 1965 was at an extreme of bitterness, with young people becoming increasingly aggressive in their opposition to government policies and practices both at home—only two years earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech—and overseas, where the United States had finally joined the ground war in South Vietnam. Many adults dismissed the protesters as traitors and cowards.

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.

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.