Rosanne thinks her mother would have given up on the marriage earlier except for her Catholicism. “Her father was such a devout Catholic that a divorce would have been one of the worst possible things for his daughter, and I know my mother felt the weight of that.”
As her sister Kathy recalls, “Dad would try so hard to stay positive, to make light of things, to always have a great sense of humor, but he would get into these moods where he just seemed to shut down and didn’t want to talk or really do much of anything except spend time by himself in his office.
“The office became a symbol for us when we were little. There was a time when we were always welcome in the office. He might be working on a song or reading one of his magazines about the Old West, but the door was open and he’d stop everything and we’d have a good time. After a while, however, the door was shut. You’d have to knock and sometimes he’d go, ‘WHAT?’ and you’d think ‘Why does he have to talk like that?’ This wasn’t always because of drugs; he was like that up until the day he died, but it was worse—more highs and lows—when he was using.”
Kathy feels that her mother was easier to read.
“My mom was an incredible person,” she says. “They were fire and water. She was very open and very honest. If she didn’t like something, you knew it in a heartbeat. She was the disciplinarian in our house. I think that’s one thing that appealed to him about her—that and her high religious morals. He got a lot of his strength from Mom, especially in the early days. I think he was so lonely and felt so out of his element during the Air Force. He had never been out of Arkansas, and she was his attachment to the States. She gave him something to hold onto during those hours he was stuck in that room, trying to listen to that Morse code.
“He told me the reason he wrote ‘Folsom Prison’ was it captured the loneliness he felt in that room night after night. He told me, ‘I felt terrified sometimes because I knew the door was locked for security reasons and I couldn’t get out. It was like being in prison.’ My mother was his light at the end of the tunnel. That’s what was so hard on him later, when he found out they had different goals—that she wasn’t happy just sitting at home without him.”
It wasn’t just the increasing conflict that made Kathy realize things had changed. After that night in the parking lot at the Hollywood Bowl, she gradually noticed that her dad not only wasn’t coming home but also wasn’t carrying an armful of presents every time he did make it. “I thought, ‘How could he forget our presents?’ because it used to be a big deal when he would have a bag and there would be presents for everybody and we’d sit on the floor and he would always give Mom hers first and then he’d give us our presents. So we got to where we would go, ‘Where’s our presents, Daddy?’ He’d say, ‘I didn’t have time…I had to do this-or-that.’ He had never said that before. He’d even tell us about the times he almost missed his flight because he was in the gift shop looking for something extra for us.”
Rosanne remembers the period as frightening and heartbreaking.
“It just got to where it was like somebody else was coming home, not my daddy,” she says. “The drugs were at work. He’d stay up all night. He and my mom would fight. It was so sad. He would always be having accidents. He turned the tractor over one day and almost killed himself, and we had to call the fire department after he set fire to the hillside. One time he took me on his lap and put his arms around me and said, ‘I’m glad to be alive,’ because the tractor could have rolled over on him. He held me so tightly. I felt so close to him. I wished it could always be like that. But then he’d be gone again.”
The girls finally got to see their dad before they left for school the next morning, but he was gone by the time they returned home. As he had so often, he needed to escape. He drove his camper to the nearby home of his nephew Damon Fielder.
Damon slid in beside Johnny in the camper on the morning of June 27, and the pair started out on the half-hour drive to the Sespe Creek entrance of the Los Padres National Forest watershed. The Los Padres forest is one of the many natural wonders of California and one reason why Cash was drawn to Casitas Springs. Covering nearly 1.8 million acres in all, it stretched from the breathtaking Big Sur coastline south of Monterey to lakes and mountain ranges to the south, and was home to many protected species, including the American condor.
Getting into the passenger seat was Damon’s first regret of the day. Cash was a terrible driver under the best of circumstances—and it was clear from his dazed look that he had already been into the pills. The resulting series of starts and stops made the camper feel like something from a slapstick comedy.
As Damon crashed against the door time and again while the camper careened along the rugged dirt road, his patience was also taking a beating. Watching Cash take a swig of whiskey and down a few more pills on the ride, Damon couldn’t hold his tongue any longer.
“Why do you take those things?”
“I like to control my moods and they help me do that,” Cash replied unapologetically.
“Well, you’re an idiot.”
Cash just scooped up more pills from an old fruit jar on the floor as the camper bounced along a rugged dirt road.
Finally, Damon reached over and turned off the ignition, bringing the camper to a halt. Before Cash could react, Damon pulled out the key, walked around to the driver’s side of the vehicle, and demanded that Cash let him drive. Surprisingly, Cash obliged—and the camper resumed its journey, much more smoothly this time.
Damon was so upset, though, he didn’t even want to sit near Cash as he stopped the camper near a promising fishing spot at the end of one canyon. “I’m going to fish over there. I don’t want anything to do with you,” he told Cash, who replied, “That’s fine. I don’t want to be by you, either.” Damon headed to a secluded stretch of water, cast his line, and closed his eyes, trying to brush away his anger.
His tranquility was broken around four thirty p.m. by a strong smell in the usually pure Los Padres air. It was smoke, and it was coming from the direction of the camper. He rushed back to find Cash on his knees in front of the truck, fanning a fast-spreading blaze. There was a spent package of matches on the ground by his side. Damon figured his uncle had started the fire to keep warm and in his drugged state had let it get out of control.
As flames swept through the nearby brush, he realized they needed to get out fast. He called for Cash to come along, but the belligerent singer said he wasn’t going anywhere. Damon tried to grab his uncle, but Cash resisted, and he was too strong to budge. In a panic, as the fire surrounded them, Damon grabbed a thick tree branch about three feet long and swung at Cash’s head as hard as he could. The blow brought Cash to his knees, but it didn’t knock him out as Damon had hoped. Cash got up and stumbled over to the shallow creek, where he sat down, thinking he’d be safe.
Fearing the worst, Damon raced for help, warning other campers along the trail and eventually hooking up with a fire helicopter crew who flew him to the fire site to rescue Cash. Damon’s heart was racing until the helicopter landed and he saw his uncle was still alive in the creek. This time he had no trouble persuading Cash to vacate the area. The pills and whiskey had begun to wear off, and the water was cold.
Watching Cash get into the helicopter, Damon knew he’d helped save his uncle’s life. He was crushed a few days later, however, to hear that Cash—whose near-death experience did nothing to curb his pill intake—told Carrie that Damon had left him in the forest to die.
Cash was equally disingenuous when asked by forestry officials, investigating the cause of the 508-acre burn, how the fire got started. He blamed it on sparks from a defective exhaust system on his camper. When a judge later questioned Cash about the fire, he was equally defiant: “I didn’t do it, my truck did and it’s dead, so you can’t question it.” Asked during a deposition about the loss of forty-nine of the region’s fifty-three condors in the blaze, he certainly didn’t make any friends when he snapped, “I don’t care about your damn
yellow buzzards.”
Cash was in such bad shape after the fire that Law had to cancel plans for the live recording on July 6 at the prison in Kansas, causing the mild-mannered producer to vow not even to think of doing any more live album projects with Cash.
Touring resumed in mid-July and continued steadily into the fall, breaking only for a couple of recording sessions, until a fateful Texas swing that ended in Dallas the first week in October. Things had improved enough that Grant, who normally handled tour receipts, wasn’t on guard when Cash volunteered to take the receipts with him to California and deposit them in the group’s joint business bank account.
Grant dropped Cash off at the airport and then continued on to Memphis in the mobile home the group used on the road. When he got home that afternoon, he called Vivian to see if everything was okay, and she all but laughed. She hadn’t even heard from her husband. Grant’s heart sank.
II
The origins of amphetamines can be traced back to the late 1880s, but their effects weren’t widely known until a 1935 study showed that the drug gave people incredible energy and enhanced their mood—qualities that led to its being widely distributed to soldiers during World War II to combat fatigue. In 1965 the Federal Drug Administration tightened prescription requirements, making it harder for heavy users to get the virtually unlimited amounts they were accustomed to. This made it increasingly difficult for Cash to satisfy his craving for pills, especially when he was on the road.
After the Dallas show, he flew to El Paso, one of his favorite supply points, where he asked a cab driver to take him to Juárez and get him some pills. The driver assured him that it would be no problem, so Cash waited—feeling like an outlaw, he said—as the driver went into a Juárez bar to buy the drugs. “I slid down a little lower in the backseat each time someone looked my way,” he wrote in Man in Black. “I had never done it this way before.”
Back at his hotel, Cash popped a few pills and killed time before the evening flight to Los Angeles by searching for antique guns in some downtown pawnshops. He was looking at a Colt .44 Army pistol, which had long been one of his favorites, when he was approached by a man he immediately suspected was a plainclothes policeman. Cash assumed he was curious about the gun in his hand.
“I collect antique pistols,” Cash volunteered, holding the weapon out to the man.
“It’s a nice one,” the man replied, in what Cash described as a friendly manner.
After some more small talk, the man asked Cash what time his plane was leaving, and Cash told him nine p.m.
On the way back to the hotel, he started worrying about the flight, worrying that the policeman might intercept him. But why, he asked himself? The gun was an antique, which meant it was legal. And he had hidden all his pills in two socks, one of which he’d put inside his guitar and one in the lining of his suitcase.
By the time Cash got to his seat on the plane, he figured he was home free, that he was just feeling a bit paranoid.
Then he saw two men walking down the aisle toward him. One was the man from the pawnshop.
The man asked Cash if he had a gun, and when he nodded that he did, he was ordered off the plane. In an empty room in the terminal, the men went through both his luggage and his guitar case. They found the pills, but they still didn’t seem satisfied. They went through the suitcase and the guitar again.
Finally, one asked, “Where’s the heroin?”
When he heard that, Cash became angry. He told them he had never taken heroin. The men explained they had assumed he was into heroin because they had seen the cab driver huddling with a known heroin dealer in the Juárez bar.
Cash was relieved, but the officers pointed out that he had still broken the law. He was taken to the El Paso county jail until a bond hearing the next day.
Grant learned of the arrest the next day and hired a former El Paso County judge, Woodrow Wilson Bean, to represent Cash. Hoping to minimize publicity, Bean—whom Cash proudly pointed out was believed to be a distant relative of Judge Roy Bean, a legendary figure in Old West lore—asked that newsmen be barred from the hearing, but the request was rejected by U.S. Commissioner Colbert Coldwell.
Cash, dressed in a business suit, was on edge during the hearing. He cursed at one of the reporters and threatened to kick a photographer’s camera. In the end, Cash posted a $1,500 bond and was released pending an arraignment on December 28. He was given permission to leave town but not the continental United States.
As he headed home to Casitas Springs, Cash felt as if a mask had been ripped off, leaving him looking like a hypocrite for singing all those gospel songs and telling people they could overcome their problems. He’d been in minor scrapes with the law before, but until now, knowledge of his drug use had been limited to country music insiders. Now his fans knew the truth. Not only did newspapers around the country report on the arrest, but also hundreds carried a photo of him being escorted out of the courthouse in handcuffs by a U.S. marshal, his face grim, looking all the more sinister behind dark glasses.
This time, at least, Vivian’s wait wasn’t in vain. Cash went straight home to Casitas Springs, and he was contrite. Humiliated and fearing the effect of the arrest on his career, he reached out to both Vivian and his parents, talking more openly than before about his addiction and vowing to turn himself around. While at home, he learned that Peter LaFarge had been found dead from a probable overdose in his apartment in New York. LaFarge’s death made him feel that it was even more urgent to clean up. After years of disappointment, Vivian wanted to believe. She wanted to take his pledge to straighten up as a sign that he also was going to give up June Carter and rededicate himself to his family. But it was too late. She couldn’t erase his insecurity and pain.
Vivian angrily showed him the newspaper photo of him in handcuffs and his daughters told him that kids were saying bad things about him in school. For the first time in his life, he said, “I felt real shame.”
Grant was encouraged when Cash showed up “straight as an arrow and ten pounds heavier” two weeks later for his first post-arrest concert in Charlotte, North Carolina. Grant told himself that the arrest might have been the best thing that could have happened to Cash, thinking, “This might shake him up enough to where he’ll get off those things.”
In Nashville, June Carter wondered about her place in Cash’s life; he had gone home to Vivian, not to her, in a time of trouble. She had already told Rip Nix that she wanted a divorce, hoping that would encourage Cash finally to leave Vivian. Cash tried to reassure June. He said it would have looked bad in the judge’s eyes if he hadn’t gone home to his family, and he told her he still wanted to be with her.
Meanwhile, Holiff was working tirelessly to persuade promoters around the country not to give up on Cash. Most did continue to book him, but there was one highly publicized exception. Officials at Texas A&M University canceled plans for a Cash show scheduled for November 24 on campus, citing the El Paso arrest. “The administration didn’t feel it was wise to present an entertainer with a cloud hanging over him,” said the dean of students. “We try to provide a clean, Christian atmosphere for our students.”
But some students came to Cash’s rescue. Not only did more than two thousand of them sign petitions protesting the cancellation, but also a student committee worked out a deal with Holiff for Cash to perform on the scheduled date at a nearby off-campus club.
Through all the headlines, Cash continued to be a strong presence on the radio and sales charts. The Orange Blossom Special album spent thirteen weeks on Billboard’s pop charts, and four of his singles made the Top 15 on the country charts: “Orange Blossom Special,” “Mr. Garfield” from the True West album, “The Sons of Katie Elder,” and “Happy to Be with You,” a ballad that Cash co-wrote with June and Merle Kilgore.
The only disappointment commercially had nothing to do with adverse publicity. As label execs feared, a double album was too expensive for most Cash fans. True West didn’t make the national sales char
ts. Still, Cash and Law believed in the music and they made a bold decision: they reshaped the material into a single album, which they titled Mean as Hell! and scheduled for release early in the new year. (It would do well, but not spectacularly, on the country charts.)
The variation in quality between the Orange Blossom Special and True West albums and the “Katie Elder” and “Happy to Be with You” singles reveals the difference between the personal music that Cash felt most comfortable playing and the records he made solely with the charts in mind. The albums had been heartfelt projects for Cash, and he’d focused his care and attention on them. The singles were another story.
“Happy to Be with You” was a particularly disappointing attempt to recapture the commercial bounce of “Ring of Fire.” Though this new song was a statement of contentment, it employed the trumpets and lyric structure of the earlier hit. Even though “Elder” and “Happy” sold well, Cash rarely sang them in concert.
Experiencing another dry spell in his songwriting, Cash was at a strange point in his career; for perhaps the first time since Ride This Train, he didn’t have another concept album in mind. The solution came in the fall of 1965 from a familiar source. Jack Clement told Cash he had a new song that would be perfect for him—a playful slap at all the protest music that seemed to be growing increasingly strident and humorless. It was called “The One on the Right Is on the Left” and Cash loved it.
The sociopolitical climate in America in 1965 was at an extreme of bitterness, with young people becoming increasingly aggressive in their opposition to government policies and practices both at home—only two years earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech—and overseas, where the United States had finally joined the ground war in South Vietnam. Many adults dismissed the protesters as traitors and cowards.