Johnny Cash: The Life (52 page)

With her demand met, June was at John’s side onstage that night, the start of a six-day run, as if nothing had happened, but there was more drama ahead.

Cash went to Lou Robin’s room and said he was going to fire Helen and Anita. He wasn’t even asking Robin to fire them; he was going to do it himself. But first he picked up a bottle of wine that happened to be in the room. He drank it in one furious gulp. Then he went across the hall and fired his sisters-in-law.

The Carters became hysterical, especially June, who was sprawled across Helen’s bed in a dead faint when Grant entered the room. He tried wiping her head with a cold washcloth, but it didn’t help. Helen wanted to call an ambulance, but Marshall worried that it might lead to bad publicity. Instead, he called John, who had apparently gone to his room after the firing. Seeing June lying there passed out, Cash yelled at her and slapped her on both cheeks, trying to revive her. When that didn’t wake her, Helen started screaming again, “She’s dying, she’s dying.” Cash told Helen that everything would be fine and left the room.

Eventually, June got up and was so hurt by John’s action that she decided to fly home that minute.

“I was in the lobby that night and there’s June with a suitcase, headed out the front door,” Robin says. “It was midnight and I asked where she was going and she said, ‘I’m leaving. John just fired my sisters…I’m going to the airport.’ But I told her there were no flights at this hour and I talked her into [staying at] at the hotel.”

Figuring she didn’t want to go back to John’s room, Robin called Goldie Adcock, the wardrobe lady, and asked her to let June stay with her.

When Marshall went to John’s suite the next morning, however, he was shocked to find them together again. “It was like the worst of the sixties again,” he said. “You never knew what to expect.”

Pushing June through the airport in a wheelchair later that day, Grant knew the crisis hadn’t passed. June looked defeated. “She had nothing,” he later said. “Her family had been fired from the show, she was a physical wreck, and now there was no way to reconcile the problems we had. It was a terrible situation.”

Meanwhile, Jan Howard was sufficiently shaken and depressed that she checked into a Nashville hospital for two weeks. “There were rumors everywhere about me and John, and no matter what I said, people believed them,” she says. “I even heard things like the reason I was in the hospital was that I was having an abortion.”

Johnny Western, who kept in touch with Cash, was approached after the Cleveland episode by someone who identified himself as a writer for the
National Enquirer
and offered him $2,500 to confirm that John and Jan were having “this big, torrid affair.” Concerned about a scandal, Western immediately phoned Lou Robin, who said he’d get the message to Cash.

“As it turned out, the article never ran, and I saw John shortly after that,” Western says. “He came over to me and said, ‘I want to thank you for calling Lou on that deal with Jan Howard, but, you know, you were getting screwed. The
National Enquirer
offered Reba five thousand.’ He had this kind of smile on his face. In his mind, it was over and done.”

When Western heard that June was still by John’s side when the tour resumed four weeks later in Dubuque, Iowa, he assumed the crisis was over. But June was apparently just biding her time.

There were practical career considerations holding John and June together. They both believed their relationship—the hard times and the good—was part of their appeal. Older fans, they thought, came out to concerts or tuned in to the TV specials not just to hear John’s music but to see
them.
There were lots of singing duos over the years who could lay claim to the title of King and Queen of Country Music—including some who had more hit singles, notably George Jones and Tammy Wynette, and Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. But none was as warmly embraced as John and June. To millions, their personal redemption was living affirmation of Cash’s music and themes. It wasn’t just the music that was inspiring; the couple was inspiring together. June, fans believed, was one of John’s blessings, and John was repaying her with his love and devotion.

Beyond the risk of destroying all that, June believed that John still loved her. And there was John Carter. She was clinging to any reason she could find to stay married, but in the end she no longer had the strength. One week after the tour’s final show, on December 19 in Las Vegas, June flew to London—alone. A few days later, she asked an attorney to draw up divorce papers.

“She was really messed up,” says Carlene, who was married at the time to British rock musician Nick Lowe and in the early stages of her own recording career. “She had lost her self-esteem. She spent a few weeks with us, and we all tried to help her feel better about herself again. Kris [Kristofferson] came to see her, and he told her how beautiful she was and that she’d get past all this. I tried to be neutral. I didn’t encourage her to leave [Cash], but I also told her that if she wasn’t happy, she should do something [about it].

“I kept saying, ‘Mama, why are you so scared to leave him if you are so unhappy?’ and she said, ‘I’m afraid that I won’t have John Carter.’ I tried to tell her the court would never take her son away from her, but I finally began to realize that she was just flashing her wings a little bit, like, ‘I’m going to show him. I can live a life without him.’ She was trying to shock him.”

After three weeks, June moved to the upscale Dorchester Hotel, and Cash flew to London in hopes of wooing her back. “I could see he was devastated too, and he wanted her back, but it wasn’t going to be easy,” Carlene says. “It was really a tough time for both of them. The pills were the big problem. John wasn’t perfect. He would go off the handle and say things he didn’t mean to say, including some very hurtful things. But he wasn’t mean-spirited. He had a good heart. He couldn’t have done something as cruel as fire the Carter Family if he wasn’t on pills.”

Cash was contrite enough during the London meeting that June relented; neither was willing to test life without the other. John and June were holding hands and singing “Jackson” again when their tour kicked off February 1 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

To Grant, it still felt like walking through a minefield. Beyond the fragile relationship between John and June, and Cash’s reliance on his pills, Cash was rarely speaking to him anymore. As the tour moved through Fort Myers, Jacksonville, and Fort Lauderdale, Grant wondered who would last longer in Cash’s circle, June or him.

Through all the domestic turmoil, Cash looked forward to the release of the gospel album, now a two-record set titled
A Believer Sings the Truth.
His writing continued to be uneven; the imagery of Jesus as “The Greatest Cowboy of Them All” was especially strained. But the passion of the Sister Rosetta Tharpe numbers and the immediacy and verve of other tracks were reminiscent of Cash’s Sun days.

The wild card was Cachet Records. The label started off aggressively, taking out a full-page ad in the trades which quoted Cash as saying, “This is the album I’ve wanted to do all my professional life.” What Cash soon learned was that Cachet wasn’t able to follow through financially. The album sold around thirty thousand copies and then hit a wall, Robin believes, because of lack of distribution. In lieu of back royalties, the label gave Cash the remaining twenty thousand copies from its warehouse. Cash tried to distribute the album himself, but there wasn’t much market for it, so boxes full of the LP sat in a back room at the House of Cash for years. To help Cash recover some of his production costs, Robin eventually talked Columbia into releasing a single-album version of
A Believer,
but sales were again minimal.

Cash and Grant were still barely speaking in the early months of 1980. The end came suddenly in a pair of incidents, both of which might simply have been dismissed in calmer times as a case of frayed road nerves. But pills and the strife with June had left Cash feeling edgy and defensive.

The first involved Cash’s desire to perform the Rodney Crowell song “Bull Rider” from the
Silver
album. Cash was scheduled to play a rodeo, and he thought the song would be a natural. But when Cash asked Marshall to get the guys together so they could rehearse it, Grant brushed him off.

“I kept asking him to rehearse the song and he’d just say he didn’t have time,” Cash recalled later. “I would probably have looked past it if he just refused once, but I kept after him and he just wouldn’t listen to me. I was going through a lot at the time, and this was one of many things that made me think that Marshall didn’t care about me any longer. I didn’t think I could work with him anymore.”

The second incident occurred on Cash’s bus during a California tour in February. Cash was as bad at reading maps as at driving a car, but he was looking over a map this day, trying to help the bus driver find an unfamiliar city. Grant, who knew virtually every back road in America because of his years on the road, saw John fumbling with the map and he said something to the effect of “Give me that. You don’t know how to read a map!” Cash felt humiliated.

When the tour ended, he decided to fire Marshall.

From his apartment in New York, he phoned his secretary, Irene Gibbs, and dictated a letter to Marshall. He told her to sign it and send it.

As soon as he saw the registered letter, which arrived during the first week in March, Grant knew his twenty-five years with Cash had come to an end. He wasn’t surprised, knowing how irrational Cash had become again. He wasn’t even surprised that Cash didn’t tell him the news in person, because he knew how John hated personal confrontation. That didn’t ease the hurt.

In his 2006 memoir, Grant said he thought about including a copy of the letter in the book but decided against it. “Let’s just say that I know it was the drugs talking, and John said things in that letter that he later regretted.”

Two days after the letter arrived, Carl Perkins stopped by Grant’s house to offer support and to pass on some troubling news. Earlier in the day Perkins had also dropped by to see W. S. Holland, who told him he heard Marshall had been fired because he’d been caught stealing a million dollars through kickbacks and other schemes while handling travel arrangements and band purchases.

The news made Grant physically ill, and he called friends in the Cash organization. Yes, they confirmed, that’s what Cash was telling people—though Cash denied it years later. “I fired Marshall because our relationship had just broken down,” he said.

As days went by, Grant felt increasingly bitter—not so much about Cash’s charges of theft, because he didn’t think anyone believed them, but about the way Cash had “stolen me and Luther blind” over the years to support his drug habit. He was referring to Cash’s abandoning the agreement the three had made at Sun Records to share revenue equally. Grant decided to sue his old friend.

Cash didn’t waste any time in getting back on the road after firing Grant. Within days he was onstage with Joe Allen, one of Nashville’s most respected bass players, standing in Grant’s place. It was now an eight-piece band. After years with a compact unit, Cash had slowly been expanding the group ever since he’d had the TV show. The changes began with a series of piano players, including Butler, who joined Grant, Wootton, and Holland. Then a third guitarist, Jerry Hensley, came aboard in 1974. Two horn players, Bob Lewin and Jack Hale Jr., became regulars in 1978. All of these changes made Cash and Robin decide it was time for a new name. They came up with the Great Eighties Eight.

Between tours, Cash was in and out of the studio early in 1980 working on a new album,
Rockabilly Blues,
but he lacked vocal authority, and his four new songs were again subpar.

But there was more working against
Rockabilly Blues
than its unevenness. Everyone’s attention in Nashville in the summer of 1980 was on the phenomenal country and pop reaction to an album that had been released in May: the soundtrack to the film
Urban Cowboy.
The movie, which starred John Travolta and Debra Winger, did for country music what
Saturday Night Fever
did for disco—it took the music into the pop mainstream. Suddenly, people who had never shown any interest in country music were buying cowboy boots and heading for the local honky-tonk to ride the mechanical bulls.

It was the biggest thing to hit Nashville since Willie, Waylon, and the outlaw movement, and record companies went all-out to try to produce more records that could jump on the pop-flavored
Urban Cowboy
bandwagon. Given all the excitement, who was going to pay attention to what was, for all practical purposes, just another Johnny Cash album?

During a tour break soon after firing Grant, John and June headed for the peaceful surroundings of Cinnamon Hill. John Carter described Jamaica as a way for his parents to “regain their center” and “renew their focus.” June loved the estate and its grounds every bit much as John. She’d sometimes dance in the yard, singing or whistling to the hundreds of birds gathered there; she claimed to have a name for every one of them.

The atmosphere on this trip, however, was grim. Their future together was still on the line. Even if she had lived too long with Cash’s addiction for her truly to believe that things would get better, she had to hear him pledge his love and his devotion. She wanted contrition.

For much of the week, John Carter was witness to their shouting matches. Things got so heated one evening that Cash asked his son to leave the room. John Carter tried to listen through the thick stucco walls, but he couldn’t make out the words. He felt as if his world was coming to an end when his father suddenly opened the door and invited the trembling boy to rejoin them.

“Son,” he recalls his dad saying. “We have something tell you.”

Braced for the worst, John Carter heard his mother shout, “We’re going to get married again!”

The three hugged one another long and hard.

On the next afternoon, John Carter—wearing a brand-new suit for the occasion—watched his parents stand in front of a pastor from Mount Zion Church near Montego Bay to renew their wedding vows. The youngster’s world was “one again.” His parents’ struggles, he believed, were over. Looking back on that day years later, John Carter would shrug at how innocent he was.