Johnny Cash: The Life (32 page)

“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 concert 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.”

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.

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.

Because he was no longer going home to California, Cash had to find a place to stay in Nashville. He couldn’t move in with June because her divorce wasn’t final, so he and Waylon Jennings, an exciting young singer with a maverick Cash-like attitude, rented a modest one-bedroom apartment in Madison, the town where both June and her parents lived. Waylon, who was born in 1937, was still a teenager in West Texas when he first heard “Cry, Cry, Cry” on the radio; he loved Cash’s voice so much that he later said he had to work hard at not imitating Cash when he started singing in talent contests.

Farcically, they both acted as if each had no knowledge that the other was deeply into pills, even though Waylon, too, was taking them a fistful at a time. They certainly didn’t share their drugs. Waylon kept his in back of the air conditioner; John often hid his behind the television set.

“It was like a sitcom; we were the original ‘Odd Couple,’” Waylon wrote with Lenny Kaye in
Waylon: An Autobiography
. “I was supposed to clean up, and John was the one doing the cooking. If I’d be in one room polishing, he’d be in the other room making a mess…making himself a mess. He’d be stirring biscuits and gravy, dressed in one of his thin black gabardine suits, and the flour rising in clouds of white dust all over him.”

For all the great stories that grew out of their time in the apartment, they were rarely there together, as they were usually on separate tours. Besides, Cash preferred to be with Maybelle and Eck. “He came to my house when he was ready and he left when he was ready,” Maybelle said of Cash. She and Eck didn’t even mind when he’d show up late at night, so high on drugs that he didn’t bother to knock on the door. He’d either kick it in or break a window, climb in, and pass out on the living room sofa. When he awoke the next morning, he’d find Eck fixing the door or window and Maybelle asking, “Would you like some breakfast, John?”

Though Vivian, June, and Marshall seemed to be battling Johnny’s dark side constantly, no one likely had a more stormy relationship with Cash than Saul Holiff. From the time he first saw Cash in Canada, Holiff had delivered on his promise to upgrade Cash’s image—billing him as “America’s Singing Storyteller.” In trade ads, however, Holiff wasn’t above employing wordplay, promoting Cash as “The Song-Singin’, Gun-Slingin’, Cash Register–Ringin’ Entertainer.” Holiff would lash out at Columbia execs whenever sales and airplay fell below expectations and then turn around and scold Cash just as sternly when he would miss recording sessions or cancel concert dates. As he found more and more concert promoters unwilling to take a chance after having been burned in the past, Holiff started booking concerts himself, knowing he would lose money every time Cash didn’t show up. He also decided to focus more on overseas dates, figuring foreign promoters would be eager to get an American star of Cash’s stature and might not be aware of the cancellation issues.

Most people thought that Holiff named his management company—Volatile Attractions—as a wry admission of his and Cash’s explosive temperaments, though in fact the name was a reference to the unpredictability of the stock market, in which Holiff invested heavily. Inevitably, Cash’s drug-driven impatience and Holiff’s gruff personality began to clash soon after they formally started working together.

Holiff’s son Jonathan, who studied his father’s life in detail while making an award-winning documentary film titled
My Father and the Man in Black,
believes that the first time Cash fired Saul was shortly after the Hollywood Bowl concert in 1963, which would have been less than two years after the pair shook hands on the deal. The issue apparently was Holiff’s decision to start managing George Jones, too. Jonathan says, “I found a letter in which Saul said to Johnny, ‘You approved of my idea of handling George Jones out of your office, under your auspices. You know he pays all his own bills….You’re not covering any of his costs. You remain my one and only focus.”

But, the younger Holiff believes, Cash still feared that Saul’s attention would be divided by working with Jones. After two months, however, Cash learned that Holiff was no longer handling Jones, and he asked Holiff to be his manager again.

Johnny Western called Holiff a “very smart guy, a visionary,” and Marshall Grant acknowledged that he “took us to another level,” but no one saw a lot of personal warmth between Saul and John. “Saul told us one time that he was there because Cash got him more money than anyone else he ever worked with,” Harold Reid says. “I don’t think he and John had any other relationship than business.”

Studying both men’s lives, Jonathan was intrigued by the similarities between Cash and his father. They both lost siblings at an early age, both served in the Air Force (Holiff in the Royal Canadian Air Force), both auditioned to be disc jockeys, and both sold door-to-door. “Ultimately, however,” he says, “they were as different as oil and water.