Legend of Johnny Cash

Published on Saturday 22 September 2007 00:08

OF ALL THE MUSIC-RELATED MEMoirs due out this autumn, Vivian Cash's is likely to be the most surprising. With abundant evidence to make her case, the first wife of Johnny Cash explains how her role in his life was expunged by the mythology that sprung up around him. Her book, which has been put together with the help of Ann Sharpsteen, vehemently corrects the impression created by "people of the Nashville mindset, who prefer that I be written out of Johnny's history altogether".

Most of this unusual book was actually written by Johnny Cash. After a brief introduction it becomes a string of the near-daily letters he wrote to his sweetheart, Vivian Liberto of San Antonio, during the three years he spent in the air force. They met at a skating rink in July 1951, when Vivian was a petite, exotically beautiful 17-year-old schoolgirl. Soon afterward Johnny, then a 19-year-old serviceman, was on his way to Germany. He did not see Vivian again until the summer of 1954.

Vivian Cash died in 2005, after spending much of her life avoiding revisionist versions of Johnny Cash's life story. With any luck she never saw Walk the Line, the 2005 hit movie that presented her as a nagging, ever-pregnant obstacle to his storybook romance with June Carter, who became his musical partner and second wife. The film's Vivian could not be less like the one described by Johnny in the feverish, obsessive love letters that are presented here.

This book does not include Vivian's side of the correspondence. Nor does it need to: Johnny's impassioned dialogue is conducted as much with himself as it is with her. Desperate to idealise his little angel as sweet, clean, pure and holy, he is equally desperate to hang on to her despite the strain of long separation. The letters become both fascinating and agonising as Johnny single-handedly creates and then hopelessly overburdens the wild romantic fantasy that sustains him through those lonely years.

At first he swoons over the memory of ruining Vivian's lipstick and bobby pins. He promises her "oceans and oceans of love and devotion". And even at this early, innocent stage he tells her everything, no holds barred.

"Honey, I'm the only guy I know that tells his girl about the girls he runs around with over here," he writes. "I've told you everything, and I'm glad we understand each other." At the same time he expresses a loathing of his buddies' flagrant sinfulness and promises never to be heedless of what he does. "Baby," he insists, "I'd trade 100 of girls like that for one kiss from you."

Pouring out a correspondence so torrential that he says it scares the mail clerk, Johnny Cash also returns constantly to his greatest fears: drinking and disloyalty. His first lapse into drunkenness is treated as a terrible accident. "I promised my mother I'd never drink," he confesses. "Believe me, I'm ashamed." But his promises to avoid alcohol are broken over and over. With this comes a terror that his girlfriend, back home and unsupervised, will mirror his behaviour. "My wife and the mother of my children will be the kind of woman that will say, anytime and anyplace, and to anybody, 'No thank you, I don't drink,'" he tells her sternly.

When she begins frequenting a particular night spot, he writes: "I believed you Viv honey when you said the Kit Kat was a nice place." He adds: "King Herod's palace was a nice place too."

The Johnny Cash who writes to "My Snookie Pootsie" and says he plans to sleep with the big blue teddy bear he won for her "when the other boys aren't looking" is often not that cuddly. More often he is a tormented soul, wild with sexual longing and a desire to control every last aspect of the couple's future life.

He complains convincingly that he loves her so much it hurts. He repeatedly promises to be forever devoted to her, no matter what. ("Your little body might be all out of shape from carrying so many of my kids, but that will just make me love you more.")

In these ways he creates a fantasy world as tantalising as it is unattainable. The correspondence stops abruptly when he returns home to marry Vivian and, at least by her account, begins tearing their dream world apart.

Quicker than you can say "show business success story", Johnny's priorities change. Vivian becomes the mother of four daughters, and he becomes the man skyrocketing to the top. The little Southern family is transported to California, home base for much of the behaviour Johnny once feared. Vivian in part blames his violent transformation on substance abuse and much of it on Carter, who supposedly once declared: "Vivian, he will be mine." And then he was. "Let me tell you, it was horrible to be on the receiving end of her determination," Vivian Cash writes.

I Walked the Line is a wildly romantic book, but also a sad and wrenching one, a testament to the destructive power of hopes pushed past breaking point. Although Vivian Cash's narrative sounds almost wilfully naive, that serves to make her book more revealing. The absence of hindsight and analysis, combined with the poignant pathology on display, make this an unusually intriguing memoir, which gives the reader ample room to see what was both invisible and inevitable in these young lovers' vision of a happy married life.

Vivian has what she says is a big secret: that she never stopped loving Johnny, not even after each of them remarried. In his final months, then an ailing widower, he spent enough time with Vivian to authorise publication of his letters.

Johnny Cash's admirers remember him well in that last, painful part of his life. Now they can also picture him as a just-grown man with a very different idea of what it meant to be in pain.

• Vivian Liberto, born in San Antonio in 1934 and educated at a Catholic school for girls in the city, was 17 when she met Johnny Cash, just three weeks before he was posted to Germany, in 1951. They married a month after he came home, in August 1954, and went on to have four daughters during their 13-year marriage.

• Cash's declaration of love and loyalty in I Walk the Line, recorded in 1956, earned him his first number one hit. With stardom pushing him increasingly on the road and into temptation's way, it also arguably started the couple down the long road to their 1966 divorce. According to daughter Kathy Cash, Vivian was proud and supportive of her husband "until he started taking drugs - and stopped coming home".

• Johnny met June Carter in 1956 when they were both part of the Opry company, but it wasn't until 1965 in Las Vegas that their relationship hotted up. He proposed on stage in 1968 and they were married a week later.

• Johnny and June died within months of each other in 2003. Vivian died two years later.