Johnny Cash: The Life (44 page)

Hollywood also reached out in another way. Still hopeful of a career in the movies, Cash signed to co-star with Kirk Douglas in
A Gunfight,
an eccentric western about two aging gunfighters who agree to sell tickets to a public showdown with the winner taking all. The most novel thing about the film, which was shot in New Mexico and Spain during the TV show’s summer recess, is that it was financed by the Jicarilla Apaches of New Mexico.

“They said they wanted to support me [for what] I’d done with
Bitter Tears,
” Cash said. “You see, the Americans gave them some of this dried-up old desert and what they did was strike oil on it. They had a lot of money lying around that they wanted to invest to make more money. They heard there was a movie possibility that I might be interested in.”

Released in 1971, the film fared poorly at the box office, and critics were largely unimpressed. Mel Gussow of the
New York Times
was intrigued by the casting, though. “It is mostly the stars’ presence that gives the movie authenticity—Douglas with his aging chin-dimple more and more resembling a bullet wound; Cash, his face corrugated, his voice rumbling and gravelly. They are a natural match: Douglas’s grin hiding despair, Cash’s frown concealing an inward ease.”

On the recording front, there was so much public demand for Cash material that even the flimsy
World of Johnny Cash
album—a bargain-priced collection of old album tracks, none of them hits—was certified gold (500,000 sales). Cash’s next album,
The Johnny Cash Show,
was drawn from the TV series performances, and on casual listening it seemed lazy by Cash’s best standards. On reflection, the album was another daring step. Rather than showcase the TV show’s most popular moments, it was built around the train segments that Cash felt so strongly about. After all those years, he was getting a second chance to expose that music to his new, larger audience. Thanks to the inclusion of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” the album, too, went gold.

It was the last significant album of the Cash-Johnston partnership. Both men were vague about just what went wrong. Years later, Johnston says he went to London to record an album with Leonard Cohen, and by the time he got back to Nashville, both Dylan and Cash had moved on. “I don’t know what happened,” he continues. “He might have said, ‘I don’t want to work with Bob anymore.’ I never heard anything from him.’”

Columbia’s Clive Davis thinks that Cash grew disenchanted with Johnston’s combative, anti–record company attitude. Johnston was still working with Cash in late 1970 when Davis flew to Nashville because of reports that the label’s biggest star was unhappy with the way the company was treating him.

“Here was our biggest seller, and I was hearing that he was complaining we didn’t promote or advertise his music enough,” Davis says. “The fact was, we spent tremendous amounts of money to promote his music on every type of radio format and in all kinds of publications, including underground papers.

“I asked if he was really unhappy or was I getting bad information? I told him, ‘We’re behind you 100 percent in advertising and promotion.’ He reacted with surprise and dismay, and he began to wonder how these misconceptions might have come about. He finally said the problem might be Johnston. Just before Christmas, Johnny notified me that he wouldn’t be using Johnston again.”

The TV show continued
to be Cash’s top priority, but the weekly schedule was far less demanding than his normal touring itinerary would have been. That allowed him to spend hours with John Carter, go fishing, work in his garden, and contribute to various philanthropic causes. “I have had two good years and I want to help people less fortunate than I,” Cash said when asked by a reporter about his $10,000 gift to a thirty-five-year-old kidney patient in Nashville.

“It was typical of John,” said Marshall Grant. “In that case, he read about the man in the paper, but he could just as easily have been driving along the highway and seen someone in trouble.”

During the TV show run, anything Cash-related was news, especially in Nashville. The papers carried a steady stream of reports of Cash sightings and activities, whether it was two-month-old John Carter returning to Madison Hospital because of a cold or Cash serving as honorary “bell ringer” for the Tennessee Mental Health Association. Nashville readers also learned that a twenty-four-year-old man from nearby Smyrna, Tennessee, was arrested after sending Cash an extortion letter that threatened the safety of Cash and his family. The letter read, “Johnny Cash, if you want to keep making money and keep your family healthy, leave $200,000 in old bills in a plastic bag at I-24 and Old Hickory Boulevard Friday night.”

Another consequence of Cash’s new celebrity status was that tour buses, sometimes five at a time, lined up on the narrow road outside his house. They’d stop long enough for fans to take photos of the gate and even throw notes over the wall. In fact, there were now crowds everywhere he went.

In a notebook he carried around to jot down thoughts for songs he wrote, “Public life is unbelievable.…Being a ‘star’ means so many things and all of them opposite normalcy. If your face is familiar, you are stared at, pointed at, laughed at, whispered at, yelled at and followed. People say lots of things about you that they wouldn’t say if they knew you heard. Everything you do well is taken for granted. Any mistake is a matter for great attention.”

However uncomfortable the endless parade of fans sometimes made him feel, Cash appreciated the support and invariably went out of his way to be gracious. Rather than stay in the house, he would often go outside to shake hands with or sign autographs for the tour bus fans. Even on mornings when he’d be outside hoeing or tending to his grapevines, he would stop and chat with fans who drove by. Dr. Nat Winston believed that Cash’s allegiance to fans went deeper than trying to thank them for their support. Like many in show business, the psychiatrist says, Cash had an enormous need for affirmation and adoration.

“One time we spent much of the day on a boat, fishing and relaxing, and John kept talking about how he needed to get away from everything, and he specifically mentioned the tour buses,” Winston adds. “Well, when we got back to the house around six o’clock, there must have been ten or twelve buses lined up outside the gate, and he almost broke his leg trying to get out the car so he could race over to the fans. Whatever he said, he needed the adoration.”

It wasn’t only hard-core fans who wanted something from Cash. “Twenty state governors called me in the last year trying to get favors from me,” he told Christopher S. Wren, in the first Cash biography. “People have called me from Washington asking me to use my name for something. They’ve put all this power in my hands. I keep searching for the wisdom, hoping I’ll say the right thing and do the right thing.”

For guidance, Cash continued to turn regularly to Billy Graham, whose constant message was that God had given Cash this power and that he should use it to tell people what God had done for him and what God could do for them. The words were reinforced by the feeling Cash got when he sang “What Is Truth” to sixty thousand people at his first Graham Crusade in Knoxville on May 24, 1970. The adrenaline rush, he said, was even greater than at either of the prison shows.

After that Crusade appearance the evangelist told him, “God has given you your own pulpit. You can reach more people in one TV show than in fifty Crusades.”

Cash’s escalating popularity made him feel invincible, and it was no surprise when ABC picked up the TV show for a third season. Yet there was trouble ahead. Almost immediately after the show returned to the air on September 23, viewership started to decline, though no one involved in the show could agree why.

In retrospect it is easy to see that the falloff could well have been due to circumstances beyond his reach. The public was tiring of the variety show format. Within nine months, nearly a dozen network variety shows would be canceled. In the final months of 1970, the arguments in executive offices from New York to Hollywood to Nashville over the reason for the drop in ratings ranged from the perennial matter of the wrong mix of guests to Cash’s increasing emphasis on gospel music. Jacobson, who was in a key position to observe the ups and downs of the show’s dynamics, eventually pointed to the religious factor. But his subtle warnings were overruled by other forces in Cash’s life. The star received thousands of letters from fans and ministers around the country, all urging him to go beyond singing gospel songs to making a public declaration of faith.

Closer to home, June, too, was pushing for him to do the same thing. She even persuaded him to attend services from time to time at the neighborhood Baptist church. In a newspaper interview at the time, she said the country needed greater spiritual direction, telling the reporter, “If we don’t have some kind of spiritual comeback, I think we’re going to be in really bad trouble. Our morals are deteriorating to the point where people will just disintegrate.”

The TV staff’s grumbling about the gospel component made Cash even more aggressive on the issue. “John didn’t like being told what to do,” says Don Reid. “Nine times out of ten, when someone told John not to do something, he’d end up doing it. Plus, this was something deep in his heart.”

The crisis came when Cash showed Jacobson a statement he planned to read on the show that would air November 18.

It read: “All my life I have believed that there are two powerful forces: the force of good and the force of evil, the force of right and the force of wrong, or, if you will, the force of God and the force of the devil. Well now, the force of God is naturally the Number One most powerful force, although the Number Two most powerful force, the devil, takes over every once in a while. And he can make it pretty rough on you when he tries to take over. I know.

“In my time, I fought him, I fought back, I clawed, I kicked him. When I didn’t have the strength, I gnawed him. Well, here lately I think we’ve made the devil pretty mad because on our show we’ve been mentioning God’s name. We’ve been talking about Jesus, Moses, Elijah the prophet, even Paul and Silas and John the Baptist. Well, this probably made the devil pretty mad alright, and he may be coming after me again, but I’ll be ready for him. In the meantime, while he’s coming, I’d like to get in more licks for Number One.”

Jacobson found the statement unnecessarily strident and advised Cash not to use it, but Cash wouldn’t listen. After the taping, Jacobson again suggested they cut the statement before the actual broadcast, but Cash was insistent. He told his closest ally on the show, “If you cut that out, I’ll never talk to you again.”

Years later, Jacobson stood by his position.

“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.”

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.”