Johnny Cash: The Life (24 page)

Before the audience had a chance to stop laughing, she and the group would go into a song.

By now, Helen was married and pregnant, but Anita and June were the center of considerable male attention in a country music world known for its romantic entanglements as much as for its heartbreak songs. Because she was the prettier one, Anita had the most stars chasing after her, including such A-level names as Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. Her voice, too, caught a lot of ears. At the very time when Johnny Cash was listening to Hank Snow records in Landsberg, Snow was asking Anita to sing with him at a recording session in New York that led to a Top 5 country hit.

Williams had more than singing on his mind when he took Anita with him to New York a year later to sing “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You)” on TV on the
Kate Smith Evening Hour.
In the April 23 segment, the budding sexual electricity between them was obvious. If Anita looked a little anxious, she was. Men were drawn to her—and Williams was no exception. She had already married, at seventeen, a Nashville fiddler named Dale Potter, a move so impulsive she didn’t even tell her parents ahead of time. The marriage was short-lived. On her twentieth birthday in 1953, she married another musician, steel guitarist Don Davis, who had previously dated June. The couple had a daughter, Lorrie, in 1959, then divorced, then remarried and had a son, Jay, before divorcing again in the mid-1960s.

June also found no shortage of admirers. The one who caught her eye was Carl Smith, who had moved from Springfield to become a popular member of the Opry cast and chalk up a series of number-one singles. Because of Smith’s movie star good looks (he reminded many in Nashville of the actor Rory Calhoun), June knew that women would always be throwing themselves at Smith, but there was a lot she liked about him, including the idea of being a country music royal couple. They wed on July 9, 1952, and they indeed became a popular team onstage, where June would sometimes do parodies of Smith’s hits, for instance, turning his “Just Wait Till I Get You Alone” into “You Flopped When You Got Me Alone.”

With the family’s musical career going so well, Eck started spending more and more time at home in Maces Springs. But he left the Carters in good hands. Through his connection with Hank Snow, he had met Colonel Tom Parker, who began booking their shows, eventually teaming them up with his newest find, Elvis Presley.

Years later, Cash tended to be defensive about June’s relationship with Elvis, suspecting they might have been intimate. June did like Elvis immensely, but more in the role of a big sister who was always there to listen to his problems and even iron his pants and shirts. Like Cash, June tended to look at Elvis as something of a kid; she was six years older and more sophisticated. She also saw that line outside his dressing room each night and knew he was not her future. Besides, Elvis, like so many, was more interested in Anita. He pursued her like a giddy schoolboy, even faking a heart attack backstage in Florida to get her attention and sympathy.

For all their charm onstage together, June and Carl Smith soon discovered that their marriage was going to be a rocky one, largely because Smith wanted June to give up her career and be a stay-at-home wife—the same role Vivian was playing in Cash’s life. Gradually, too, June started hearing reports about Smith’s fooling around. She tried to write it off as just country music shenanigans until it became apparent to her that he had fallen in love with someone else—a pretty young country singer named Goldie Hill. When June learned in the early months of 1955 that she was pregnant, she hoped it would cause her husband to recommit himself to their marriage, but it was too late; the new relationship was too far along. The Smiths’ separation was still a secret to country music fans when their daughter, Rebecca Carlene Smith (who later embarked on a singing career as Carlene Carter), was born on September 26. For the sake of their image, the couple even got together for photos with the baby. But there was no turning back. The divorce became final in December 1956. Smith married Goldie Hill the following year, and she gave up her promising career to be the full-time Mrs. Carl Smith on a five-hundred-acre horse farm outside Nashville. The Smiths had three children and remained married until her death in 2005.

Always sensitive about not being as pretty as her sister, June felt humiliated that her husband had left her for another woman. The last thing she wanted was to see her friends and fans; for once, she needed to be out of the spotlight—at least in Nashville. In her autobiography she was brutally candid: “When your heart has been broken, you gather the pieces together, take your little girl and catch a plane to New York.…I thought I was the ugliest girl who ever lived. You feel that way when your marriage has failed.”

June found a natural out from her divorce embarrassment when director Elia Kazan, best known for
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
On the Waterfront,
encouraged her to go to New York to study acting. He had seen her on an Opry show and thought she was a natural.

She was twenty-seven when she arrived in New York with Carlene in late 1956 and enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, known for a demanding series of workshops and boasting a group of students that included over the years such names as Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, and Joanne Woodward. After a few weeks, June realized it was going to be hard to find paying jobs, so she decided to leave Carlene in Nashville with her mother. She shared an apartment in New York with Rosemary Edelman, the daughter of Hollywood TV and film producer Louis F. Edelman, and the two remained lifelong friends.

In New York, June hoped to reinvent herself as a serious actress. She was tired of being the clown. Not wanting to cut her ties to country music completely, however, she returned to Nashville on weekends to appear on the Opry with the family. She made a few appearances on TV variety shows and had small acting jobs in a couple of dramatic shows, but it didn’t add up to much.

On one of her trips back to Nashville, she met a handsome young man named Edwin Lee Nix, who had been a popular football player in the area in both high school and college. Known by everyone as Rip, a nickname he’d picked up as a boy because he loved to sleep so much, Nix worked in his father’s auto shop as a teenager and eventually opened his own body shop. He used his profits to race boats and to support his dreams of becoming an inventor.

Given Nix’s low-key nature and June’s high-energy drive, it seemed an unlikely match, but something about Nix caught June’s eye when he showed up to fix the motor on Ezra’s boat. About three weeks later she invited him to the house for supper. But Nix was so involved in getting his boat ready for a race in Alabama that he forgot until June called to ask why he hadn’t shown up. He apologized and asked her to go to Alabama with him. It felt good for June to be seeing someone who wasn’t part of the tawdry melodrama of country music. Maybe, she told herself, it was time to find a more normal relationship. They continued dating on what seemed to be a relatively casual basis until they learned in the fall of 1957 that June was pregnant. They were wed on November 11. A daughter, Rosanna Lea—or Rosie, as they called her—was born July 13.

Almost immediately, Nix and Carter realized how different their lives were—and neither had much interest in changing. Rip loved his boats (he held a world speed record at one point), while June wanted to be on the stage. Rip moved into the house that June received from the divorce with Smith, and he kept an eye on Carlene and Rosie—with help from Maybelle—while June spent three weeks out of every month on the road. Early on, he accompanied her to some fair dates, but he didn’t like all the traveling. “I drove 2,500 miles in a week and it just wore you out,” he says. As to the larger picture, “things were fine at first between us, but we eventually grew further and further apart because we very seldom got to see each other.”

June had one advantage when looking for live gigs in that many female singers at the time stayed home with their husband or children. Still, it was hard going back on the road—always being the “extra” on the bill, never the headliner—and having to put up with the travel and sexual rites of the lifestyle. June did a pretty good job of being one of the guys, but it was a tough life, and she developed an especially strong relationship with Don Gibson, who was one of the biggest country stars of the late 1950s and early 1960s thanks to such hits as “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Oh Lonesome Me.”

Despite his immense talent, Gibson was a tragic figure who suffered from depression and intense stage fright, both of which fueled a drinking problem. Some who knew June at the time suggest she was simply trying to help him get his life together.  Tom T. Hall’s wife, Dixie, maintains there was a bit of Florence Nightingale in June. But others felt that June was once again hoping to become part of another country music royal couple. She and Gibson, though both married at the time, were still seeing each other when June first shared the stage with Cash in Dallas.

JOHNNY CASH’S LIFE
was moving so fast, and in so many conflicting directions, that each year felt pivotal to him—and the start of 1962 proved no exception. It was the year of June Carter, Carnegie Hall, and the Hollywood Bowl, and those three came together in a dramatic six-week period that affected Cash’s life more than anything else since meeting Sam Phillips. It was a period of extraordinary joy and deep humiliation.

June joined the Cash tour on January 28, 1962, in Des Moines, sharing the bill with Patsy Cline and George Jones. Cash had been playing the 4,100-seat KRNT Theater in Des Moines since 1957, and he filled the place for three shows. It was a sign that however shaky Cash’s record sales, he was still a red-hot live attraction. He had been looking forward to seeing June again ever since the car ride to Oklahoma City, and he went searching for her as soon as he got to the theater for the one thirty p.m. show. To impress her, he had put on his flashiest shirt, which was purple and black. He was somewhat deflated when June took one look at the shirt and pointed out that it was all wrinkled.

When Cash told her he didn’t care, she replied, “Well, I do. You don’t wanna go out there with a shirt like that.”

Unused to being ordered around, Cash responded, “You telling me to take off my shirt?”

“Yes, go on in the dressing room and take it off and give it to me.”

That night Cash stopped by Carter’s room at the hotel, ostensibly to thank her for ironing his shirt, but she had been around country singers too long not to suspect something more was on his mind. For her part, she was certainly attracted to him; she thought he had a tremendous charisma onstage, and she respected him as an artist. She had been following his recordings ever since “Cry, Cry, Cry.” She was expecting him to come in and try to sweep her off her feet, but he wanted to talk about the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, and the conversation continued to their respective childhoods and their parents. Johnny was especially interested when June said her father loved to read about history and religion. Eventually that first night Cash leaned over and tried to kiss Carter, but she resisted. As she later put it, “I kind of chummed him out of the room, very gracefully.”

The next day he headed back to California, but they both knew that for them it was only a matter of time. She called him “John” from the start, switching later to “Cash” only in those moments when she wanted to point out to him that he wasn’t being himself—when he was high on drugs or on ego. “I was enthralled,” he said. “Here was this vivacious, exuberant, funny, happy girl, as talented and spirited and strong-willed as they come, and she was bringing out the best in me. It felt wonderful.”

Before the start of the next tour in Miami, Cash spent February 10, 11, and 12 in Nashville, recording more tracks for the album that was going to salute the old Sun Records sound. It was a carelessly assembled collection of songs, including “Cotton Fields,” the old folk-blues song popularized by Lead Belly, and “In the Jailhouse Now,” a Jimmie Rodgers tune that was revived in the 1950s by Webb Pierce. Cash also took another crack at “Sing It Pretty, Sue” and “Delia’s Gone.” That gave him and Law a lot of material to choose from. As it turned out, none of it was a bona fide hit. Columbia didn’t see enough potential in “Delia’s Gone” even to release it as a single.

The Sound of Johnny Cash
didn’t crack the pop sales charts when it was released later in the year. Not only did the Nashville studio fail to reproduce the stark seduction of the old Sun studio, but also Cash’s vocals were mostly indifferent. He later told me, “I remember where my head was at the time I was singing those songs. I wasn’t too with it on some of them.” About “Cotton Fields,” specifically, he said, “I had no business recording that song in the first place. Kind of showbiz cotton-patch song. Ledbetter [Lead Belly’s real name, Huddie Ledbetter] didn’t mean it that way.”

In the wave of failure, there was one consolation.
Billboard’
s staff was enthusiastic about “The Big Battle,” including the single in their “spotlight” section. “A fine saga song of a soldier on a Civil War battlefield,” they called it. “One of his best recent outings and the tune, of his own cliffing, is right up his alley. It can make it big.”

Cash read the review on the way to Miami for the next tour, and the words allowed him to hold on to his belief in his own artistic heart. Despite the disappointing sales, he was in good spirits. He was going to see June again, and Carnegie Hall was only three months away.

While hoping that June would be more receptive this time, Cash recognized that she was trying to keep a civil distance, and he toned down his advances. He sensed something special about her, and he didn’t want her to think he was just another country star on the make. He was happy that she’d be on the bill at Carnegie Hall, and he delighted in sharing his dreams for the show with her.

They continued their friendship as the tour moved to Houston and then Shreveport, where they performed on a revamped edition of the Louisiana Hayride (the original format had ended in 1960). There’s no evidence of his seeing Billie Jean, who, it turned out, was no fan of June Carter, whom she had met during her days as Mrs. Hank Williams. “He was desperate for someone in his life, and June was on the road and June was a hustler,” Billie Jean says. “That’s her reputation. She was a longtime hustler.”

It’s easy to dismiss her comments as jealousy, but Billie Jean wasn’t alone in seeing June as trying to “nab” Johnny Cash. In fact, June’s entry into Cash’s life caused so much suspicion—among Vivian, John’s parents, band members, and gossipers in Nashville—that she was in many ways an early country equivalent of Yoko Ono in John Lennon’s world. The gist of the grumbling that went on for years was that she was out to break up Cash’s marriage and use him as a springboard for her own career. As the years went by, she, again like Yoko, would be considered a villain by many of Cash’s old friends when she blocked their access to him, fearing they would contribute to his drug use. It wasn’t an easy role, but June was determined to play it.

If her goal was strictly career advancement, she might have looked elsewhere. Cash’s commercial prospects were shaky by the end of 1961. He hadn’t had a knockout country hit since “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” two years earlier, and the mounting drug use made his future appear increasingly uncertain. Billie Jean had already rejected a place in Cash’s life because of those drugs. June, however, was immediately attracted to this troubled artist—and true to her Carter genes, she was ready to fight for this man.

The rumors started flying as soon as she arrived on the scene. In her memoir, Vivian, after mentioning her husband’s drug use in the early 1960s, writes: “And worse yet, some of Johnny’s band members began dropping not-so-subtle hints to me that June was after Johnny on the road, and that I should really do something about it.

“When I confronted Johnny with the reports, he insisted June had done none of those things I had been told. He said I was letting my imagination get the better of me, and not to listen to gossip. I chose to believe Johnny, but I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feelings I had about her.”

Cash and Carter were together constantly on the road. Several members of the troupe, including Marshall Grant, were very fond of Vivian, and it’s easy to see how they could assume there was more going on than there actually was at that point. But after Shreveport Cash returned home to California, where he continued to work on the plans for the Carnegie Hall date. He was back in Nashville on March 19 and 20 for a recording session whose only interesting feature is that Anita Carter contributed vocals on two tunes, one of Cash’s favorite gospel numbers, “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord),” and “Johnny Reb,” a song written by Merle Kilgore, whom he knew from the Louisiana Hayride. Neither track was released; Cash’s voice sounded fried. But he did mention to Marshall after the session that Anita was “one beautiful woman.” Marshall asked himself if Vivian was now going to have to worry about two Carter sisters.

After some Midwestern shows that month, Cash returned to Los Angeles and recorded in late April a version of “Bonanza!” the title song from one of the nation’s hottest TV shows. Al Caiola had a hit instrumental version in the spring of 1961, but no one had done a vocal version. After the exposure of “Johnny Yuma,” it seemed a logical commercial move—but first Cash and Johnny Western wrote new lyrics. In addition, that month Cash and
Bonanza
star Lorne Greene planned to do a duet on “The Shifting Whispering Sands,” an Old West ballad that had been a Top 10 hit in 1956 for western-pop singer Rusty Draper. But Cash was sick and didn’t make the session. He later overdubbed his vocal on the tape that Greene and the musicians made that day; but that recording, too, was never released.

With recording out of the way, he headed to Spartanburg, South Carolina, on May 3 for a short series of shows leading up to the date at Carnegie Hall on May 10. Two days later in Columbia, South Carolina, Cash was feeling nervous about the New York showcase and took a walk with June, hoping to relax. When they got back to the hotel, they went to her room, where she told him to lie on the bed so she could rub his back and try to ease a sudden series of spasms. Cash recalled years later the tension in the room.

“It got real quiet, neither one of us said anything. Finally I said, ‘I wish I weren’t feeling the way I am.’ She asked what I meant and I said, ‘About you.’ And she said she was ‘feeling the same way, ’cause there’s only trouble if we keep feeling this way.’”

With that Cash stood up and said, “We won’t, then. We’ll just work together.” Cash insisted they were only trying to be sensible. “We both had that attitude,” he said. “We weren’t gonna start anything.”

Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl were part of Holiff’s master plan to reposition Cash, in the eyes of disc jockeys and talent bookers, from a country music singer to a folksinger with strong mainstream appeal. If he could do that, Holiff figured he’d have a much better chance of getting his client booked on primetime TV shows and into the more lucrative pop market.

The industry had been talking about a coming folk boom ever since the Weavers and Harry Belafonte became so popular in the early and mid-1950s respectively, but it was the success of the Kingston Trio late in the decade that made execs look to folk as the next rock ’n’ roll—or, more precisely, the musical choice of those teenagers who had embraced rock in the 1950s and were hungry for more substantial fare as they reached college age.

The Trio was still hugely popular in 1962, but the artist who contributed even more to the growing enthusiasm for folk was a young woman whose angelic voice and purist approach struck a deep emotional chord in young people. Joan Baez was only nineteen in 1960 when she released her debut album on the folk-centered Vanguard label and started building enough of a national following for that album to stay on the charts for more than two years, earning her the cover of
Time
magazine. At the same time, dozens of young folk artists were playing the clubs and coffeehouses of New York’s Greenwich Village, just a subway ride away from the headquarters of the big record companies.

Cash’s label had already signed one of the most promising of those artists, Bob Dylan. Producer John Hammond was excited enough about Dylan to send Cash an advance copy of his self-titled first album in the fall of 1961. Cash was greatly impressed and sent Hammond a note of thanks. When Dylan’s album failed to sell well, the young songwriter became known around the label as “Hammond’s Folly.” The producer was forever thankful to Cash for expressing his support to Columbia bigwigs.

Columbia executives all the way up to Lieberson understood the commercial advantages of promoting Cash as a folk artist, but they didn’t see it as an easy sell. Cash was thirty, which could make it hard for him to become accepted as one of the voices of this new generation. Holiff countered by pointing out that many of Cash’s original fans were rock ’n’ rollers, and they had already responded to the singer’s folk side, as demonstrated by such hits as “Five Feet High and Rising.” Besides, he noted, Cash was five years younger than Belafonte, whose folk sensibilities had contributed greatly to making him one of the industry’s biggest sellers since 1956. Two of Belafonte’s live albums had even been recorded at Carnegie Hall.

To add to Cash’s folk credentials, Holiff put together a package for New York that also included June Carter and the Carter Family—making this the first time Cash would share the stage with June’s mother and sisters.

In booking Carnegie Hall, Holiff wanted to show that Cash could sell tickets in New York, the nation’s biggest record sales market—one not known for country music shows—and he wanted Columbia to tap into the Carnegie Hall live album tradition. Despite some concerns about Cash’s unpredictable behavior, Columbia executives gave Don Law the okay to record the event. Holiff, in turn, stressed to Cash the importance of the moment: no disappearing act.

In the days leading up to the performance, Cash thought about the show’s format with the same energy and drive with which he approached his concept albums. He wanted to take advantage of this prestigious spotlight to show who he was musically, including his roots—and anytime he talked about roots, he turned to Jimmie Rodgers. He even called the cast members together the day of the show to rehearse. To the shock of everyone present, however, Cash was so wasted from drugs, worry, and lack of sleep that his voice was reduced to a mere whisper.

“Johnny had been getting steadily worse, but things really hit bottom at Carnegie Hall,” says Johnny Western. “He could sometimes pull himself together for important moments, but I think the Dutch courage left him that day. He knew this was a major event for him. The show was sold out in advance. The record company was recording it. I think the pressure just got to him and he turned even more to the pills.