Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  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?”

  III

  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.

  “Saul was a guy who was raised in the middle of the Depression. His father went bankrupt and Saul had to drop out of school, and it was a great source of embarrassment for him for his entire life. Among Jews, education is considered very, very important, and Saul always felt inferior as a consequence. But he was truly a self-made man.”

  Despite recurring conflicts, the team stayed together—until Holiff reached a breaking point in 1966. In an effort to expand Cash’s concert horizons further, Holiff worked hard to put together an ambitious two-week tour of Europe. The highlight for Holiff was getting Cash onto one of the world’s most prestigious stages, the famous Olympia theater in Paris, which was known for presenting such stylish figures as Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, and Josephine Baker. Cash would be the first country artist ever to perform on the Olympia stage. The show was scheduled for May 11.

  Again, Cash let Holiff down.

  As soon as he arrived in England on May 5, John learned that Dylan was going to be doing a show in Cardiff, also on May 11. So he decided to hook up again with Bob and hired a driver to take him to Wales. Film footage exists of the two of them backstage before the show, where they played “I Still Miss Someone” with Dylan at the piano singing lead, as Cash, clearly stoned, tries to keep up. The scene was captured in Eat the Document, a Dylan tour documentary by D. A. Pennebaker. Though never formally released, the film has been available over the years in bootleg editions, and the footage offers an unsettling glimpse of Cash’s drugged state at the time.

  “Saul worked on that Paris show for a very long time, and everyone was gathered at Heathrow that day to fly over to Paris—the band, Saul, June, my mother,” says Jonathan Holiff. “But Johnny did not show up. He went on what Saul called a ‘wild escapade’ with Bob Dylan.…Saul was so pissed off that he said, ‘That’s it.’ He walked around Hyde Park about eight times, drank a bottle of scotch, and flew home to Ontario.”

  Even after the long flight, Holiff was adamant. He had worked with this madman long enough. In a defiant letter, he told Cash that he didn’t want any commission for the English tour despite everything he had done: “62 letters, countless calls, wires, notes and three months of preparation—manifests, work permits, etc.—so things would go smooth.”

  He also apparently responded to a claim by Cash that Holiff had browbeaten the tour’s English promoter: “Browbeat? The incident you refer to according to Merv [Conn, the promoter] was after your call from Newcastle, when you complained bitterly about your treatment, the poor promotion, etc. and requested cancellation of the last date. I called Merv to advise him accordingly. He was not browbeaten. However, you are more of an authority on the subject than I am.”

  Finally, he wrote, “As agreed five years ago, I resign and give one month’s notice. I intend to be in Buffalo on the last day there [June 25] to collect my commission and to come to what I hope is a peaceful arrangement for the balance of monies owed.”

  Once again Cash sought relief from the turmoil in his music. After the English dates, he and June made their first trip to the Holy Land, and they were enthralled. On the flight back to the States after the vacation, he talked again about doing a gospel album
in Israel.

  When Cash returned to Nashville, Don Law was waiting with good news. The Everybody Loves a Nut album had just entered the country chart at number twenty-two, joining Mean as Hell! which was number fourteen in its tenth week. But Law, in his usual unthreatening way, also pointed out to John that the cupboard was bare. He had scheduled several sessions during the year, but Cash had either canceled them or shown up too wasted to record. The last successful date was January 29, when they wrapped up the Nut album. Otherwise, all they had were tracks recorded at various points during the closing months of 1965, when Cash was continuing to have difficulty writing good new songs of his own.

  Amid the drought, he decided to crank out versions of such varied material as “Wabash Cannonball,” another classic old train song; “You Comb Her Hair,” a love song by his buddies Harlan Howard and Hank Cochran that had already been recorded by George Jones; and even “Guess Things Happen That Way,” his old Sun hit.

  The jewel among the field was a song that had “hit” written all over it. “For Lovin’ Me,” a dynamic bit of male bravado, was composed by Gordon Lightfoot, a young Canadian who shared a publisher with Dylan. If Cash had been in good enough shape to fill the song with the right sensual tension, Law would have rushed it out as soon as possible as a single. Unfortunately, the arrangement on the recording was listless and Cash wasn’t convincing in the role of a love ’em and leave ’em kinda guy.

  Besides, Law told Cash, Waylon had already recorded the song, and DJs were jumping all over it. Jennings’s version captured the song’s strong sexual undercurrents and went a long way toward making Nashville realize it had a budding superstar on its hands.

  In talking to Cash, Law was hoping to hear he had some new songs or ideas, but there was no sign that his dry spell was over. Cash did mention a live prison album again, but the memory of the second botched live recording remained too strong for Law even to consider it. Cash was so unfocused that Law found it hard to know if Cash was even listening to him during the conversation. Cash would sometimes stay at Law’s apartment in Nashville, which enabled Law to observe his behavior even more closely than in the studio. “He was a very complex and a very tortured person,” he said. “He’d come in and go through every drawer. I don’t know what he was looking for.”

  With Cash offering no alternative and Columbia needing a follow-up album for Nut, Law suggested the only option he could think of. He put the best of the tracks on hand into an album aimed at fans who’d liked “Happy to Be with You.” In no shape to go into the studio, Cash gave the okay to release the album, titled Happiness Is You. It was his weakest yet.

  IV

  There would be no showdown in Buffalo after all. After a brief cooling-off period, it was as if Holiff had never quit. Without a word of explanation, he and Cash just picked up where they’d left off. Holiff knew that Cash was still his best chance to make a million dollars—and Cash told himself he’d probably never find anyone else who would take such abuse yet show such determination and ambition. Some Cash observers have suggested that Holiff was another father figure, though Cash, in later years, didn’t refer to Holiff with the same deep affection he showed for George Bates, Sam Phillips, or Eck Carter.

  Back in the fold, Holiff turned his attention to Don Law. For all of Law’s distinguished history at Columbia, Holiff felt that Cash needed a stronger voice in the company, someone who would fight for promotional dollars in a way the laid-back Law didn’t. Though he never told Cash, Holiff also felt that a stronger producer would challenge him more when he didn’t come up with songs or album concepts that had commercial appeal.

  The producer Holiff began focusing on was Bob Johnston, a young, free-spirited Texan who had been championed at Columbia by the greatly respected John Hammond and who was working in the pop division with such high-profile acts as Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan. Cash was impressed, but he wanted to be loyal to Law. He told Holiff to give him some time to think about it.

  Around the time of the Buffalo date, John and June guested on Rainbow Quest, an informal TV talk show devoted to traditional American music. Hosted by Pete Seeger, it was broadcast by WNJU in Newark, New Jersey, a UHF station, which meant limited viewership. To underscore the old-time concept, Seeger and his guests sat around a kitchen table (complete with coffeepot) and talked about the history of the songs they sang. Other guests in the series included the Stanley Brothers, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Doc Watson, and Mississippi John Hurt.

  The Rainbow Quest episode, which can be seen on DVD, offers a telling portrait of Cash’s depth as an artist and his destructiveness. In a future time of more careful image control, Cash wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near a TV camera in his condition.

  From the opening moments of the show, Cash exhibited the squirming, twitching mannerisms of an addict. As the camera panned to him after June sang “Worried Man Blues” early in the show, Cash took off his shoes and did the rest of the program in his stockinged feet. It’s no wonder Seeger seemed more at ease talking to June. Then again, Seeger respected Cash. He looked on admiringly as Cash sang some tunes from his childhood—“I Am a Pilgrim” and “There’s a Mother Always Waiting”—and, especially, when he sang Peter LaFarge’s “As Long As the Grass Shall Grow.”

  The broadcast was another example of Cash’s ability to tailor his performance to his audience—in this case folk bard Seeger. It wasn’t a stretch. Cash loved this music. But he also knew what would work in that setting. It’s a point Don Reid picked up on early in the Statler Brothers’ tenure with Cash. “We saw him perform differently for different crowds,” he says. “There was the big city John, the rural John, the college John, the convict John, the White House John. I was struck by how much he was attuned to the audience and their feelings and [would] try to find something in his own experience that enabled them to come together.”

  Out in Casitas Springs, Vivian continued to agonize over her future. Since the doctor’s warning, she had been trying to imagine life without Johnny Cash. What would be the effect of a divorce on her and her kids? She even asked Ray and Carrie Cash what she should do, and her mother-in-law advised her to file for divorce, saying, “That’ll shake him up, and he’ll come back home.” The remark showed how little even his mother knew about Cash’s thinking and condition at the time.

  All Vivian knew was that she couldn’t take it anymore.

  On a Friday afternoon in June, Vivian signed the divorce papers in her attorney’s office in Ventura. She charged extreme mental cruelty and asked for alimony and custody of the girls. Cash was served with the divorce notice on August 14 in Denver, and the papers were formally filed at the courthouse on August 17. The news hit the headlines the next day.

  “When my mom said ‘divorce,’ I didn’t know what it meant,” says Kathy, who was ten in 1966. “She held me in her arms and said, ‘It means his clothes won’t be hanging in the closet.’ I said, ‘Okay, can I go play?’ I loved my dad, but it wasn’t like it was going to be any different. We never saw him anymore anyway.”

  Cash tried to downplay the issue. He told Marshall that Vivian was bluffing. But he was frantic. Though he stated in his first autobiography that he didn’t contest the divorce, he sent Holiff a telegram instructing him, “Fight this.” Holiff hired an attorney, and both sides dug in.

  Some close to Cash at the time said he didn’t want a divorce. That’s not the same as saying he wanted to go back to Vivian. At best, he wanted the status quo, which meant he would still have his family—and he wouldn’t have to give Vivian half of everything he owned. The correspondence with Holiff centered mostly on minimizing the latter. Even in later years, his daughters Rosanne and Kathy say he never even hinted that he had wanted to go back to their mother.

  The battle over settlement terms would go on for months.

  Meanwhile, June’s marriage to Nix was history. Nix didn’t contest it. “I didn’t want to drag the kids in front of all those people and make a big case out of it,” he says. “I’m
not upset about it. It’s just something that happens.”

  Years later, he expressed no hard feelings toward either June or Johnny. “Anyone could see we weren’t meant for each other,” he notes of June. “She’d be home for about five days, then gone for twenty. Even in that five days, she’d be nervous and restless, and I’d say, ‘June, you’re ready to go back on the road, ain’t you?’ and she’d say, ‘I guess so.’ It was the same with her mother. That was their life. They grew up that way. You can’t expect them to be any other way.”

  The hardest thing about Cash’s fractured relationship with Vivian was how little time he had with his girls. One of the strongest tenets from his Dyess youth was the importance of family, and he had seen so many other country entertainers throw their families away; he was haunted by the idea of doing the same thing. After he gave up Casitas Springs for Nashville in 1965, he repeatedly begged Vivian to let the children visit him—but there was no way she could trust him when he didn’t even have a proper home. For most of his life, either in letters or in conversation, Cash would express guilt over his relationship with his children. He spent much of his life trying to repair the void that was created during that time, but the damage was immense.

  As soon as Vivian filed for divorce, Cash renewed his requests to see the girls, but she still demanded that he have a suitable place for them to stay. Cash started looking in Nashville for a house to buy.

  V

  Cash kept to himself a lot, both on tour and in Nashville, in the weeks after the divorce filing. Grant, Holiff, and Law hoped he was using the time to write new songs; they knew of his tendency to turn to music in moments of great stress. If so, Cash didn’t have much to show for it when he met with Law in the fall. Hoping to speed things along, Law tried to get Cash into the studio, but it took until November 1 before they finally made it.