When Man in Black Was Just Johnny

Books of The Times

By JANET MASLIN
The New York Times
Published: August 30, 2007

Of all the music-related memoirs due this fall, Vivian Cash’s is liable to be the most surprising. With abundant evidence to make her case, Ms. Cash, 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, put together with the help of Ann Sharpsteen, vehemently corrects the impression created by “people of the Nashville mind-set, who prefer that I be written out of Johnny’s history altogether.”



I WALKED THE LINE
My Life With Johnny

By Vivian Cash with Ann Sharpsteen

Illustrated. 326 pages. Scribner. $27.

Most of this unusual book was actually written by Mr. 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 Ms. Cash was a petite, exotically beautiful 17-year-old schoolgirl. Soon afterward Mr. Cash, then a 19-year-old serviceman, was on his way to Germany. He did not see Ms. Cash again until the summer of 1954.

Ms. Cash died in 2005, after spending much of her life avoiding revisionist versions of Mr. 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 Mr. Cash in the feverish, obsessive love letters presented here.

This book does not include Ms. Cash’s side of the correspondence. Nor does it need to: Mr. Cash’s impassioned dialogue is conducted as much with himself as it is with her. Desperate to idealize his little angel as sweet, clean, pure and holy, he is equally desperate to hang onto her despite the strain of long separation. The letters become both fascinating and agonizing as Mr. Cash 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 Ms. Cash’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, Mr. 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 behavior. “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.”



Johnny and Vivian Cash soon after their marriage in 1954.

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 they 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 tantalizing as it is unattainable. The correspondence stops abruptly when he returns home to marry Ms. Cash and, at least by her account, begins tearing their dream world apart.

Quicker than you can say “show business success story,” Mr. Cash’s priorities change. Ms. Cash 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 behavior Mr. Cash once feared. Ms. Cash blames some of his violent transformation on substance abuse and much of it on Ms. 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,” Ms. 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 the breaking point. Although Ms. Cash’s narrative sounds almost willfully naïve, that serves to make her book more revealing. The absence of her hindsight and analysis, combined with the poignant pathology on display, make this an unusually intriguing memoir. There is ample room for the reader to see what was both invisible and inevitable in these young lovers’ vision of a happy married life.

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

Mr. 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.