The Man Who Carried Cash. Julie Chadwick
answered Johnny. He took a breath. “Stew, it’s over.”
In tears, Stew desperately tried to sway him, and handed the phone to his wife, Lorrie Collins, who was eight months pregnant with their first child. It was a cheap move. For years, Johnny had been besotted with Collins, a rock and roll singer with whom he had toured in his early years and performed, along with her brother Larry, on the Los Angeles television show Town Hall Party. Though he was still married to Vivian, Johnny’s infatuation with the teenage Collins had become so intense that, consumed with guilt, he confessed his feelings to fellow musician and long-time touring companion Johnny Western while the two were on a drive in the Mojave Desert. Alarmed, Western implored Cash to consider all that he stood to lose: a burgeoning music career that had just taken flight, and his wife and growing family.
“For God’s sake, Johnny. I know you like Western movies. Well, just like in the Western movies, you gotta ride out into the sunset by yourself on this one,” said Western. “It’ll end your career and your family at the same time, and you’ll be finished.”11
Stew Carnall began to chase Collins himself, and by the time she was seventeen, she had impulsively eloped with thirty-five-year-old Carnall — a scandal they narrowly avoided by adding a couple of years onto her age in media reports and subtracting several from his. Rumours circulated that she had married Carnall to avoid torching Cash’s career, but nonetheless, disaster was averted. This time, however, even Lorrie Collins wasn’t about to sway Cash.
“Get off the damn phone, Lorrie. Stew’s fired, and he’s going to stay fired, and there’s nothing you can do to save his job. It’s over,” Johnny said, and hung up the phone.12
Western, who stood beside Cash as the whole scene unfolded, was secretly pleased. A long-time performer with the king of the cowboys, all-American singer and movie star Gene Autry, Western was most famous for “The Battle of Paladin,” a theme song for the popular television series Have Gun — Will Travel. Fair-haired, husky, and gorgeous, he was also a real-deal cowboy — a guitar-playing, sharpshooting, Old West aficionado who was possessed of a near-photographic ability to recall events. One of his earliest memories was of sitting on an uncle’s horse at eighteen months of age, a feat that flabbergasted his mother when he told her. Unable to drink due to an allergy, Western was often one of the sharpest and most sober-minded of the group, and had kept a keen eye on Saul’s meticulous professionalism for months. At that point Saul was merely handling Cash’s bookings, though his attention to detail was a skill Cash sorely needed.
The extended tour had allowed Saul time to speak more deeply with Johnny about his career and where he felt it was headed. Saul tried to impress on Cash that he truly thought a man of his presence and talent was destined for much larger venues, and his label should be throwing more effort into promoting him as a pop act, not just as a country star. It was a niche category, he said, and country hits were often noticed only when they crossed over into the pop charts. With Cash-composed songs racking up millions in sales in his first four years, and more than a million with “Walk the Line” alone, Cash was destined for bigger things. In Saul’s eyes, that was more than enough reason to start pressuring Columbia Records to deliver.13
It was food for thought. Until that point Johnny had felt pretty happy with his lot, blessed even. Who else had this kind of opportunity — to do what they loved to do and get paid for it? But Saul Holiff’s ideas pushed things to a whole new level. “Think about it, John. Instead of just ballrooms and dance halls around the United States and Canada, you could be aiming at Europe, the Orient,” Saul told him. “And big venues in the U.S. like Carnegie Hall or the Hollywood Bowl. Why not? And that could be just the beginning.”14
The Canadian tour also permitted them time to hit it off on a personal level, as Saul saw it. At one point while the two men talked at length in his car, Cash confessed he was worried about Vivian, who was pregnant with their fourth child. When Saul produced his car phone so that Johnny might call home and ease his mind, the generosity and luxury of it impressed him to no end. This seemed to be a man who made things happen.15
The men may as well have been from different ends of the earth, but the two found they had striking similarities, too. Left desperate by the ravages of the Depression, Johnny’s family had relocated to Dyess, Arkansas, when he was three years old to farm cotton as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Beyond the childhood poverty that gave them both a determined edge, both men also grew up in families that had suffered the early and violent loss of a child — Cash’s older brother Jack had died at the age of fourteen when a table saw slashed through his abdomen, a defining incident that haunted Johnny for the rest of his life. Both men had also struggled with overbearing fathers who had belittled and singled them out for harsh reprisals, and to whom they always felt they were a disappointment. A stint in the military shaped both men’s youth, and each had sold goods door-to-door and found early solace and escape in the arts.
Their differences were remarkable, too, and once the tour finished the two continued to correspond regularly via telegrams and letters throughout the summer of 1961, displaying an increasing affection and amusement regarding these contrasts. They began to collaborate on plans for the future, much of which centred around an extensive upcoming tour of eastern Canada, including a sponsored hunting and fishing trip in Newfoundland, and even talked over the particulars of financing Saul to travel to the Far East on a reconnaissance mission so that they might plan a tour — a particularly ambitious prospect Saul had dreamed up. In early June, he jotted off a telegram about his progress on both projects.
STILL HOPEFULLY AWAITING YOUR CALL. IN MEANTIME I CONTACTED HARMON AIR FORCE BASE IN NEWFOUNDLAND TO INVESTIGATE A CUSHIONED GUARANTEE TO HANG OTHER DATES AROUND. […] AWAITING YOUR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS AS TO APPROXIMATE EAST COAST DATES AND NEWFIE PROPOSAL. HAVE ACCUMULATED MUCH INFORMATION ALREADY ON THE FEASIBILITY OF YOUR FAR EAST APPEARANCES. WHATEVER HAPPENS, I REGARD YOU AS ONE OF THE NICEST PEOPLE I KNOW. SAUL HOLIFF.16
As he composed another longer and more detailed letter, which was sent around the same time, Saul took time to express his gratitude for the opportunity Cash had given him; privately, he felt insecure about his capabilities. This was all new territory to him, and he felt a deep-seated need to impress Johnny. “Rest assured that I will put every effort and energy at my disposal into making this tour [of eastern Canada] a success. I feel the arrangements are fair, and I consider it a privilege to work on behalf of you, and appreciate the confidence you have shown in me. You can be sure that whatever the nature of the deals made in each city, they will be made with your best interests in mind,” Saul wrote on July 4. Enclosed within the letter was a bundle of photos of Johnny, that had been snapped at a recent concert in Guelph, and a long list of cities for the eastern tour, complete with the population of each location and when Johnny last played them, if ever. Near the end of his letter, Saul paused. There was something else that had come up that he wanted to address — the mens’ behaviour on the Ontario tour, during which Cash and Gordon Terry, an Alabama fiddler and frequent supporting act, had made prank phone calls.
The way it worked was that the boys would gather around in the hotel room after their show, go through the phone book, and call a random number, no matter what time of the night it was. Disguising his voice, Gordon Terry would then pretend to be a delivery service driver.
“We got a truckload of baby chicks from Bandera, Texas, here,” Gordon would say.
“It’s the middle of the night; I’m not comin’ down there for no baby chicks!” the person on the other end would shout back.
“You’d better come down here, or we’re gonna put these chicks in a taxi cab and send them to your house,” Gordon would reply, at which point the entire room would fall about laughing.
Recalling these events, Saul added a postscript to the letter: “I haven’t yet fully recovered from Gordon Terry’s Negro imitations with the special sound effects courtesy of Johnny Cash, and I don’t think the people who received those calls will ever recover.” His distaste didn’t extend much further than an addendum, but the event may have reminded Saul of his own struggles with anti-Semitism.17
Though he chose to address the issue in a lighthearted manner, Saul privately thought the behaviour of the men while