Johnny Cash: The Life (6 page)

Almost immediately after arriving in Landsberg, airmen began receiving “Dear John” letters from their girls back home saying they were sorry, but they had found somebody new. To make matters worse, one of the biggest country hits at the time was Jean Shepard and Ferlin Husky’s “A Dear John Letter.” Even the non–country fans at Landsberg remembered it playing on radios and phonographs throughout the barracks.

According to Mehaffey, the reaction to the letters was so traumatic that the soldiers in his unit developed a ritual to help one another cope with the news. “When someone got a ‘Dear John’ letter, we’d have him stand on top of his footlocker and read the letter to everybody in the barracks. Not everyone did it, but a lot of them did. It somehow took the pressure off.”

For months, John privately feared bad news whenever he picked up his mail. Constantly trying to reassure himself of her love, he wrote to Vivian every day—sometimes two or three times a day—and he complained when she was even a day late writing back. He was frantic during the times when he didn’t hear from her for a week or more. In a letter to Vivian soon after his arrival in Landsberg, John was already scolding her for not writing.

“I still didn’t get a letter from you honey, and I’m getting pretty desperate,” he wrote on October 16. “The mail clerk is scared of me now, I give him such mean looks every time I go to check my mail, which is twice a day….The boys have been telling me that you didn’t love me anymore. That’s why you don’t write, but I don’t believe that. You do love me don’t you my darling? I love you. Yours, Johnny.”

Cash was relieved when Vivian’s letters finally started arriving regularly, but any break in the chain would set him off again. Over the course of his deployment, the letter count between them easily passed the one-thousand mark.

When he soon received an eight-by-ten photo of Vivian, John rushed to the PX and bought a frame for it. He put the picture on the wall above his bunk—a “Hands Off” note attached. The others in the barracks reminded him of all the “Dear John” letters, predicting it wouldn’t be long before he got his heart broken. One airman even dared him to bet $10. John took the bet, promising, “Viv is different.”

Noticing the photo was still on the wall months later, the airman paid up.

Cash was convinced that Vivian was the girl of his dreams, and that made it only natural for him to share one of his dreams with her—the one about being a singer on the radio. In a letter that first fall, he told Vivian that he had just bought a harmonica to keep himself occupied in the barracks, and he spoke about having his own band once he got back to the States. He also wrote about getting together regularly with some guys in the barracks to play guitar and sing. While Perea sometimes joined them, the lineup consisted mostly of Cash, Ted Freeman from West Virginia, Orville (Wayne) Rigdon from Louisiana, and Reid Cummins and Bill Carnahan from Missouri. They called themselves the Landsberg Barbarians.

When John saw how well Rigdon played guitar, he bought himself a German model for $5 and asked Rigdon to teach him how to play. But John still had trouble getting the hang of the chords and gave up trying to master the instrument; he merely strummed along while singing. Over the next three years, he would update Vivian on records he had heard or repeat that he was going to have his own band one day. He was especially proud of the time he bought a set of albums containing several Jimmie Rodgers songs he hadn’t heard before—and the purchase late in his stay of a tape recorder so he could gauge the progress in his singing by making recordings of his voice.

On days off, the airmen frequented one of two clubs in Landsberg. Though the base was integrated, the white airmen tended to go to Der Goggle, while the African Americans favored Der Ziederbrau. On the nights when the squadron filled the places, there weren’t many German patrons. Not many men, anyway. Women were always there.

“Remember, this was so close after World War II that the German populace was still having problems with hunger, real poverty,” Mehaffey explains. “Buying somebody a meal was a big gift. If you wanted a woman, there was no problem. You could pick one up on the street or in a club and she’d take you home with her if you bought her a meal.”

When they had three days free, the Americans, often as many as fifty to one hundred of them, headed by train to Munich or the smaller town of Starnberg, where they would take over a hotel and turn the bar into their own private club. The guys would play music, drink, and look for women. Unlike in the barracks with the Barbarians, John was not the center of attention during these parties. In photos from one of those early nights out he looks fairly anonymous, except for one in which he, obviously a bit tipsy, leans toward the camera while fooling around with a fiddle.

In Cash’s 1975 autobiography,
Man in Black
, he wrote about the dark side of his German experience: “As the long weeks and months went by, Dyess, Arkansas, and that little church, and the things I had learned there, and the life I had lived there became more and more distant. From beer, I graduated to German cognac and having more wild times.…The booze and the profanity began launching me into all kinds of other habits which soon became second nature.”

Mehaffey, who was responsible for keeping tabs on all his unit members, suggests that Cash acted pretty much like the rest of the security team in his early months in Landsberg. “Johnny wasn’t much different from the rest of us,” he says. “Like all of us, he was young, foolish, looking for adventure. Women, drinking, gambling, fighting, and freedom like we had never had before. Johnny was right in there, no worse, no better. Understand, we didn’t think we were wild—and by the standards of the time, we were pretty mild. Our fights were, for the most part, a blow or two and over.”

One thing that did strike Mehaffey about the young airman was how certain he was about his career goals.

“We were all kids,” he says. “None of us knew what we wanted to do—except Johnny. From the beginning, he knew he was going to be a singer. I can still see him sitting on a metal GI cot with the mattress rolled up, strumming that guitar.”

In the endless letters to Vivian, Cash chronicled in detail his coming-of-age experiences—focusing on the conflict between his religious beliefs and his prurient desires. Oddly, he alluded to his transgressions, including the drinking and veiled references to womanizing, in several of these letters—all the time encouraging her to be faithful and to wait for him. The letters are an absorbing mixture of guilt and restraint, devotion and confession, trust and accusation. Mehaffey sensed Cash’s emotional tug-of-war. There were times, he says, when the guys would all be whooping it up in a club and he’d notice John sitting off by himself, glum and staring into space, looking lost and alone.

In a letter to Vivian early in 1952, Cash confessed that he had been with a girl once in Augsburg and another in Munich. “Darling, those girls don’t mean a thing to me,” he reassured her. “You should know that. I just see them one night, and never see them again….Baby, I’d trade 100 of girls like that for one kiss from you.”

To his daughter Kathy, the hints of infidelity were a sign of his insecurity “about her finding somebody better than him. I think his remarks were a test to see how she would react. He wanted to see if she’d stay by his side—and she always did. She never seriously dated anybody while he was gone, and that was important to him.” She adds, “The sense I got from all those letters was that he was also horribly lonely. He was trying to give himself pep talks all the time, telling my mom how great everything was going to be.”

The earliest known mention of marriage came in a letter dated July 18, 1952—apparently in response to something Vivian had written. John began the handwritten note by telling her, “Yes, I wish we could be married soon too honey.” Shortly after, he replaced his usual greeting—”My Darling Viv” or “Hello Sweet Darling”—with “My Wife to Be.”

Cash didn’t hide his feelings from his pals in Landsberg. William Harrell, one of the other interceptor operators, remembered John saying he wanted to marry Vivian so much that he was thinking about converting to Catholicism, even though the religion seemed a bit mysterious and foreign to him. From time to time in letters, especially the early ones, he’d just throw in a question to Vivian. Out of the blue, he’d ask something like, “Honey, what is Catechism?”

Another time he asked, “Darling, if a Protestant marries a Catholic girl, the wedding has to be Catholic and their children have to be brought up Catholics, don’t they? And they can’t name their own kids. Someone else names their kids, don’t they? Maybe that’s not right, but that’s what I’ve heard.”

In February 1953, two days after turning twenty-one, he bought Viv an engagement ring and mailed it to her.

Still, he continued to wrestle with the issue of her Catholicism. In a letter that May, he said he had read something “very disgusting and disappointing” in a book about “mixed” marriage. “It’s urging Catholics not to marry Protestants and Protestants not to marry Catholics,” he wrote her. “If my life were going to be like this book says, I’d be in misery all my life living with you. I don’t believe it even though it’s a Catholic publication and I know you wouldn’t.”

With that, the issue passed for a while, and Cash’s letters were back to simple “love and kisses.”

Women, religion, and alcohol weren’t the only issues that Cash grappled with at Landsberg. According to a story that circulated among some of his Landsberg cohorts, John and a couple of friends had drunk too much during a weekend in Augsburg, just northwest of Munich, when Cash saw a black airman walking with a white woman. He yelled at the soldier, saying he shouldn’t be going with a white woman. The argument got so heated that a military policeman had to restrain the men, the story went. It shocked his mates, because there were lots of African Americans on the base and John had gotten along well with them, especially C. V. White, an outgoing guy with a love for flashy clothes. It was White’s wardrobe, in fact, that gave John the germ of an idea that his friend Carl Perkins would turn into “Blue Suede Shoes.”

Also, writing to Vivian in early May of 1953, Cash apparently referred to the same drunken incident which he described as an argument at a train station, not mentioning any interracial component. “I called him every name anyone has ever given a Negro,” he wrote. “The further he walked away, the louder I yelled, calling him ‘Coon,’ ‘Nigger,’ ‘Jig-a-boo,’ and a few others.” He continued, “This morning I was so sick I wanted to die. I drank a lot of coffee and threw it back up.” Cash later maintained that the episode in Germany was an irrational drunken outburst. He acknowledged that he had grown up around much racial prejudice, admitting to a friend in the late 1990s that a relative had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and had committed acts of violence against blacks. But that was long before his family moved to Dyess, he said. Like millions of other whites of his generation in the South, he felt that he eventually distanced himself from the earlier bigotry of the region, and for him that process began in Germany. Despite the Landsberg incidents, Cash told James Keach, who would eventually co-produce the film
Walk the Line
with Cathy Konrad, “I never, ever disliked blacks.”

Cash’s high school classmate A. J. Henson supports that view. “I would say that there was racism in Dyess,” Henson confirms. “Since there were no blacks there, we didn’t have many incidents. But the talk was no one wanted much to do with blacks. A group of us were in Wilson and we were walking on the sidewalk when we met a black man. I stepped to the side so he could get past. One of the boys got on me for that and said that whites didn’t get out of the way like that. I think most of us have changed since then. I have three adopted black grandchildren.”

Cash’s daughter Rosanne believes the time in Landsberg helped her father become a more tolerant person. “I think Dad took the prejudices of his upbringing with him to Germany,” she says. “He had never seen the wider world; didn’t know anything else. His mind quickly began to open. The little travel journals he kept were just so rich and wonderful—he wrote about mountains and monuments, how much things cost, how old they were, histories of places, train rides and boat trips, and of seeing the queen travel through the streets of London. He was clearly enamored with the world, and reveled in a new sense of sophistication and worldliness. Along with that new sense of worldliness came a much greater tolerance and understanding of the evils of racism. Once that was dissolved in him, it never appeared again. He was, in adulthood, the most tolerant person I knew.”

To underscore the point, Rosanne relates a moment when she was nineteen and lying on her bed reading a book on astrology when her dad walked in and asked what she was reading. “I showed him and he nodded. I said, ‘You don’t believe in this, do you?’ He said, ‘No, but I think you should find out everything you can about it.’ Once his mind started to open, there was no stopping it. It was huge. He ‘contained multitudes.’”

During the summer of 1953, Cash was well past running with the crowd in German bars. He asked Vivian to come to Germany and live with him in an apartment in Munich. Because she was still under twenty-one, the Air Force required written permission from her parents before she could join him. So he wrote to Vivian’s father on July 17 asking for his daughter’s hand, but Tom Liberto turned him down. “Dear John,” Liberto wrote on August 8. “I know I have taken more time than I needed in order to properly answer your letter which I have thoroughly read and understood. Mrs. Liberto and I did not try to find the answer that would be best for you and Vivian by our own judgment, but rather we spent a few days in prayer asking Divine Guidance.”

In the letter, Vivian’s father went even further in discouraging an immediate marriage. Pointing out how little time the couple had known each other before Cash went off to Germany, Liberto recommended they “extend this courtship at least a reasonable time after your arrival in the States” to make sure they were right for each other.