Johnny Cash: The Life (5 page)

Rather than J.R. or even John, he told her to call him “Johnny,” the first time anyone could recall his using that name. It was as if he wanted something new and more personal, a sign perhaps of just how fast and hard he’d fallen for this young beauty. Johnny stared into her hazel eyes and at her light bronze skin, trying to figure out what to say. Finally he blurted out, “Would you like to skate with me?”

When she replied yes, Johnny felt his heart racing. Crazily enough, the shy boy from Dyess started singing to her, but not one of his country favorites. Probably fearing she might have no interest in country music, he chose a pop song, “I Still Feel the Same about You,” which was a current hit by Georgia Gibbs. It was perhaps an odd selection, because the song wasn’t a tale of romantic bliss but an apology for having broken a girl’s heart.

Vivian was flattered. It was the first time anyone had sung to her. As they continued to skate, Johnny told her that he was from Arkansas and was going to be sailing to West Germany soon. She in turn said she was seventeen and a senior at an all-girls Catholic high school. Johnny was so dazzled by her that the Catholic part didn’t even faze him, despite all the whispering he’d heard in Dyess about the mysterious religion.

As they circled the rink, Johnny pretended he was a novice skater, which encouraged Vivian to hold onto him frequently because she thought he was about to fall. When the house lights flickered, indicating closing time, John felt himself panic. He didn’t want to let this girl go. “Can I take you home?” he blurted out, and his spirits soared when she answered, “Sure.”

Because he didn’t have a car, John had to accompany Vivian home on the bus. On the way, he learned that her family had deep roots in San Antonio. There was a popular market named Liberto’s, and one of her uncles had started the first Spanish-speaking radio station in town. Her father, Tom, owned an insurance agency and her mother was a homemaker. She had a younger sister and an older brother. When they arrived at her front door, he asked if he could see her again. After she said she’d like that, he leaned over and tried to kiss her. Stepping back, she said, “I don’t kiss boys on the first date.”

It may not have been the reaction John hoped for at the time, but it was, in fact, the perfect answer.

Cash was attracted by Vivian’s beauty, but he also quickly decided that Vivian was a “good” girl and that she’d make a faithful, loving wife and a caring mother. And, he would soon learn, she was even a fan of country music. If he had known that, he joked years later, he would have sung her an Eddy Arnold song. Within a week, he was thinking he would someday marry her.

In her room that night, Vivian retraced every moment of the evening. She told herself she had found her Prince Charming. She spent much of the night tossing and turning, wondering if he’d really call. Her answer came early the next morning. John called not just that day but every other day until he left Brooks in early August. The pair also went out every time he could get away. They went to movies. They went to the malt shop. They went window-shopping. They held hands and strolled along the city’s picturesque River Walk in the moonlight. It wasn’t long before Johnny got that first kiss while they sat on the roof of a car at a drive-in. Soon after, he carved
J.C. Loves V.L.
on one of the wooden benches along the River Walk. They daydreamed about the future. They were collecting a remarkable number of memories for just three weeks together.

Even though Vivian’s father was concerned about his “baby” dating an Air Force man, Vivian’s younger sister, Sylvia, remembers that her parents couldn’t help but like this polite, respectful young man who said “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” without fail. Still, Sylvia recalls, her father was relieved when he learned Johnny was finally leaving for his new assignment in Germany. There was no way, he figured, that the relationship would last.

But Johnny convinced himself that it would. He told Vivian—or “Viv,” as he began calling her—that he loved her, would always love her, and wanted to spend his life with her. He told her he would write a letter every day—and he made her promise to do the same. It was heady stuff for a nineteen-year-old boy, but it was even more of a fairy tale for a seventeen-year-old girl. He seemed so mature in his uniform. She also thought he was smart, caring, a man of faith, and, of course, very, very sexy.

Johnny wanted to make love to her, but she refused. In reality, he probably didn’t try that hard, because he didn’t want to jeopardize his new dream by giving her the wrong impression of his intentions. One day, he told himself over and over, Vivian Liberto would be Mrs. Johnny Cash and he’d be a singer on the radio. This vision gave him immense comfort as he returned to Dyess in the final days of August. He had promised Viv he would call her before the ship left Brooklyn for West Germany, but he couldn’t wait.

On the morning of September 4 he called from Dyess, and she was thrilled to hear his voice. In a letter he wrote her later that same day, he asked her to send him a large photo so he could put it over his bed in Germany and look at it every morning and night. He enclosed a photo he’d had taken at the base. He ended by urging, “Write, honey.” Seven days later, he wrote her the first of several letters from Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, where he and other members of what would eventually be named the 6912th Security Squadron were being assembled before they left for Germany. He signed it “Love, Johnny.”

While they were waiting to be shipped out, Bob Moodie, whom John had met at Brooks, invited him to spend the weekend at his folks’ place in Rhode Island. On the way, they stopped off in New York City, and John took an immediate liking to the place. He especially loved all the bookshops and movie theaters, but the most notable thing was seeing his first Broadway play. A stranger, noticing the two young men in uniform, gave them free tickets to the musical comedy
Two on the Aisle.
John loved the experience and became a lifelong fan of Broadway theater.

Cash’s group left the Brooklyn Navy Yard on September 20, 1951, for Germany aboard the USNS
General W. G. Haan,
a seventeen-thousand-ton ship capable of carrying just under four thousand troops. Writing to Vivian once they were under way, he signed his note “Oceans and oceans of love and devotion, Johnny.”

On the first day at sea, Cash was walking back to his double-deck berth when he noticed the guy on the bunk beneath his was reading the Bible. When he looked closer, he saw it was Ben Perea, whom he recognized from Keesler Air Force Base.

“Do you read the Bible often?” Cash asked.

When Perea nodded yes, John replied, “Me too.”

The next day Perea caught John’s attention again, this time sitting on his bunk singing “Beautiful Brown Eyes,” an old country song revived earlier in the year in a recording by Jimmy Wakely. John stopped and sat alongside Perea. It was the start of a friendship that lasted throughout their Air Force days and beyond. Ben was a shy, deeply religious young man who would avoid the excesses of German nightlife, and John admired him. John was also drawn to Perea because his father was a railroad man. Plus, Ben was Catholic, and John had a new desire to learn all he could about the religion.

The pair spent hours and hours on the ship and in the barracks in Landsberg singing songs. Ben didn’t think John was much of a singer in their early days together, but it was fun having someone to sing with. During the trip, they pretty much sang popular country hits, which meant a lot of Hank Williams and Eddy Arnold. Ben remembers they probably sang Jimmie Davis’s “You Are My Sunshine” most of all because it was such a simple but moving song.

When he wasn’t singing, John was lying on his bunk writing letters to Vivian. In one, he mentioned that Vic Damone, who was a well-known pop singer at the time, was aboard the ship and had organized a choir that met every night.

“How do you like that?” he wrote. “Pretty big time, huh? Me singing with Vic Damone.” John may actually have worked up enough nerve to sit in with the choir on a couple of numbers, but he didn’t have any contact with Damone. His only singing partner on the ship was Perea. But again, he wasn’t inclined to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

It was the first week in October when the giant transport ship arrived at the port city of Bremerhaven on the North Sea coast of West Germany. Cash and the other new members of the security team boarded a train for the long ride south to Landsberg, near Munich. The air base was a former outpost for the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, and it was notorious in Germany because Adolf Hitler wrote
Mein Kampf
while imprisoned there in 1924. The surrounding area was a breathtaking mix of rivers, lakes, park grounds, and mountains. It was ideal for fishing, sailing, and skiing—all of which Cash pursued over the next three years.

Before he could explore those attractions, though, John spent time checking out the amenities on the base itself and was delighted to find a movie theater. During that first week, on October 13, he and Ben Perea saw a gritty low-budget Warner Bros. film titled
Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison.
John liked the movie and mentioned it in a letter that night to Vivian. In later interviews, Cash always said he wrote “Folsom Prison Blues” after seeing it. In truth, he would write it
long
after seeing the film.

During the long high-pressure hours in the radio intercept room, he started feeling like a prisoner himself. He did begin to toy with a song about Folsom Prison, but nothing came of it at the time. As much as he loved music, John didn’t know much about songwriting yet.

Ben remembers that John often jotted down musical ideas in a spiral notebook, but they were usually spin-offs of existing songs—either parodies or blatant copies. Over the next few months, John forgot about Folsom Prison. He didn’t return to the idea until he happened to hear a song in the barracks two years later—a song that gave him the blueprint for his first signature hit.

In his early letters to Vivian, John noted that the locals treated Americans like gods. “I don’t know why, but they do,” he declared. “They would even get out in the street to let one of us pass. They must think we are over here to protect them. I can just see me protecting them. All I want is a nice fox hole.” The playful reference to a foxhole was as close as he could come under the strict Security Service rules to explaining the tense, anxious atmosphere around the base.

Massive numbers of Russian troops were stationed in the Soviet zone of Austria less than a hundred miles away, directly across the Danube River from Linz, Austria, where more U.S. Air Force units were based. “The Russians were talking big and making lots of military noises all along the line dividing them and U.S. forces,” says Bob Mehaffey, the supervisor of Cash’s forty-man unit. “This was just after the Berlin Airlift, and the Russian military was still very upset about that. We knew that the Russian armor along the border was far greater in numbers than ours, and the Russians could be deep into West Germany before our military could sufficiently react. They could overrun us in twenty minutes—and there was constant tension. Air Force people were rarely assigned weapons, but everybody in our unit, including John, was assigned a carbine.”

This tension added greatly to the strain of already grueling monitoring sessions for members of the 6912th squadron. Typically, Cash and others worked in eight-hour shifts, but they were sometimes increased to twelve hours or more during emergency conditions or when the team was short-staffed. Every effort was made to keep the shifts to eight hours, Mehaffey says, because “we lost a bunch of operators who couldn’t handle the pressure and went bonkers. Some returned to the unit pretty soon, but some never did.”

An operator might get so fatigued that his body couldn’t tolerate it and he’d lose control emotionally. Mehaffey recalls one especially tense twelve-hour session in 1951 when one of his most stable operators suddenly got up from his chair and walked full speed right into the wall and just kept pounding his head against it and crying. Mehaffey rushed over and asked what was wrong, and the operator said helplessly, “I can’t find the door.” Mehaffey took the man to the medical offices, where doctors medicated him and sent him to bed for twenty-four hours. In this case, the operator did return to work.

Years later, Cash told an interviewer about a meltdown of his own at Landsberg. “One night, after I had been in Germany for about a year, I just got fed up,” he said. “We were working the second floor and, before I knew it, I picked up my typewriter and threw it plumb through the window. I started crying. They sent me to the dispensary and gave me a couple of aspirins. I got the rest of the night off.”

Mehaffey doesn’t recall any such incident. Most likely Cash was severely worn down, and he made up the story to convey his feeling of confinement. Cash did feel alienated in his new environment to such a degree that he sometimes felt he was himself at war—against the system, authority, the regimentation, and, increasingly, the temptations. Thousands of miles from home, he was in a typical military culture in which everyone around him, it seemed, was beginning to sample what for him was forbidden fruit—women and booze.

Once again John stood out among the operators. While most others monitored transmissions from other Iron Curtain countries, including East Germany, Hungary, and Romania, John was one of those given the most challenging assignment. He had to monitor the transmissions of the Russians themselves, who sent Morse code signals with such speed that most U.S. operators simply couldn’t keep up with them.

Chuck Riley, an airman who later earned a degree in economics at the University of Toledo, was impressed by Cash’s mind. “John was no hillbilly stereotype. He had a tremendous level of intelligence. We had lots of interesting and drawn-out conversations on world affairs and historical things. He had a remarkable vocabulary and a quick wit. As great as his musical talent, I always thought his intelligence might have been an even greater gift.”