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Drugs and June Carter, Vivian Cash writes in her new book, ruined her union to music icon Johnny Cash — and Carter, others told her, was the more than relentless of the two threats.

Vivian was the one bandage out of the spotlight, left behind to raise her and Johnny's four daughters in Ventura as he and June Carter became the king and queen of country music in almost storybook romance style. Vivian became provender only for, equally she writes, people curious about her past with her famous ex-husband and those of the Nashville mind-set who wanted her "written out of Johnny's history altogether."

At present Vivian'due south writing back, and so to speak, in "I Walked The Line: My Life with Johnny," released this fall. By turns sad and uplifting, the book is a sobering antidote to our celebrity-obsessed civilization and speaks to the oft-ignored fallout from fame.

In it, Vivian confesses that she never stopped loving Johnny and wistfully ruminates on what might have been had drugs and June not entered their lives. The heart and setting for much of this is Johnny and Vivian's stint living in a hillside home above Nye Road in Casitas Springs from 1961 to 1967, a catamenia containing some of the well-nigh colorful and worst of the legendary Human being in Black'south bad-male child behavior — the pills, the booze, the binges, the arrests and an infamous June 1965 wood fire he set higher up Fillmore.

It wasn't long after they moved to Casitas Springs, Vivian writes in the book, "that everything, and I mean everything, started to fall apart." While Johnny toured (sometimes with June) and his fame grew, Vivian stayed domicile.

"She'd say, If I only could accept traveled with him instead of beingness here raising 4 kids, things would accept been dissimilar,'" recalled longtime friend Alice Smith of Ventura. "She said that a lot."

Vivian remarried (Ventura Police Officer Dick Distin, who still lives in town) in 1968 and lived out her days in Ventura, an active, admired and social member of the customs. All four daughters she had with Cash — Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy and Tara — graduated from St. Bonaventure Loftier Schoolhouse in Ventura.

Vivian died in May 2005 at historic period 71, presently afterward finishing the manuscript on her days with Johnny.

In some means, her volume is a retort to the Oscar-winning 2005 film "Walk the Line," with Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny and Reese Witherspoon as June depicted in a dreamy love story.

The film portrayed Johnny every bit the aggressive pursuer and June every bit the reluctant ane, but Vivian paints June as the attorney — most pointedly in the book when she writes nearly an angry backstage confrontation (in an unnamed place) in which June said to her, "Vivian, he will exist mine."

"She wanted people to know June went after Johnny," said Ann Sharpsteen, who co-authored the book with Vivian. "That was where virtually of her pain and anger rested all these years."

Vivian's daughter, Cindy Cash, largely agrees with her mother.

"Once June came forth, she relentlessly — well, she wanted Dad and she was going to go him," said Cindy, who lives in Ventura. "And she did. She made herself very available, to where he pursued her back."

Truths of the triangle

Vivian also writes of the pain of hearing June claim in interviews that she was raising Johnny'due south daughters. She as well claims June Carter was a drug supplier for Johnny, contributed to his addiction and was also an addict. Where the absolute truth in all this lies is probable cached: The 3 prongs of the love triangle who can speak directly to information technology are all expressionless — June Carter and Johnny Greenbacks died in 2003.

Johnny Cash blessed the book and supposedly was going to write the foreword before he passed away.

Simply his fingerprints are all over information technology. In fact, most of this unusual memoir is written by the Man in Black — fully 75 percent of the 320-page book is love letters he wrote to Vivian while he was an Air Strength serviceman stationed in Deutschland from 1951 to 1954. The 2 had met at a roller-skating rink in her hometown of San Antonio and engaged in a whirlwind three-calendar week romance before he shipped out to Europe.

Sharpsteen said she and Vivian sifted through near 10,000 pages of dearest letters the ii wrote each other while they were apart.

Vivian'southward sister Sylvia Flye, who proofread some of the volume, said she had a reason for including and so many of the beloved messages.

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"The movie, every bit well as articles, had portrayed Johnny and June as this love story of the century,'" said Flye, a former local resident who now lives in Tulare. "She wanted to show they (she and Johnny) had a great love, likewise. She wanted to show people she wasn't the ogre."

Though Vivian never saw the movie, she was aware, friends say, that she was depicted unflatteringly, almost every bit a shrew.

The book's concluding section, in which Vivian is very open up nigh the triangle, has raised eyebrows amongst her friends. Though Vivian confided in some of them, she was a private sort who usually talked about Johnny only when others brought information technology up.

The last part "was very enlightening to me," said Suzanne Dunn of Oxnard. Helen Boyd of Ventura said Vivian told her some things but added, "It wasn't hatred or venom or anything like that. And she didn't speak hostilely well-nigh June Carter."

Longtime friend Cynthia Burell noted that Vivian didn't accept it like shooting fish in a barrel going through all this, and belongings it dorsum and then long also was tough.

"This is something that'south been with her for years," said Burell, a former Ojai city clerk and director of finance who nevertheless lives there. "It's very hurtful to accept someone else say they were raising her four daughters; she raised those daughters. To be sort of overlooked was very hurtful; information technology would take been hurtful to anyone. And in her situation, it was worse considering he was a very public figure."

It did hurt her, said Cindy Cash. On that subject, her mother was frustrated and "feeling invisible." She wanted, Cindy said, "to finally, finally take a voice."

Remembering Vivian

Vivian filed for divorce from Johnny in summer 1966; information technology was granted in belatedly 1967.

But rather than being the shattered ex-married woman, Vivian — at to the lowest degree outwardly — threw herself into life and the community. She was a three-term president of the Garden Club of San Buenaventura and did volunteer work for the county infirmary and a home for unwed mothers in Los Angeles, among other things.

Those who knew her, from shut friends to casual acquaintances, unfailingly speak of her in glowing terms — kind, generous, down to earth, socially engaging, a decorating guru and an ace hostess, e'er ready with her trademark afghans and bootleg treats.

"She actually had the heart of a saint and the wisdom of a queen," said Katrina Plate of Ventura. "I've truly never met a nicer person."

Added Shirley Wilmot of Ojai, "How cute she was, inside and out."

Boyd coordinated volunteers at the Ventura Canton Medical Eye for years and remembers Vivian as "gracious, small and a bit shy. I liked her a lot."

Vivian'south Ventura foothills dwelling house had an indoor pool and was impeccably decorated. She loved entertaining people there.

Said Dunn, who knew her from the Garden Club, "She had an innate sense of fashion in her dress and her abode."

Fran Diamond, the director of Scott's Dress in Ventura when Vivian briefly worked there, called her "an accommodating fun person." Opal Root worked alongside her at St. Bonaventure'south Fiesta fundraisers in the mid-1970s while her son and ii of the Greenbacks daughters were in school there and remembers Vivian did whatever it took to help the attempt.

"She always had a smile on her face," Root said.

Smith, who met Vivian through selling cosmetics, said every room in her house has something she made for her. "If you knew Vivian, you had one of her afghans; that's the kind of person she was," Smith said.

Cindy Cash said her mom was "completely devoted to being a female parent." She said Vivian, though resentful, never badmouthed June or Johnny.

Merely he wasn't far from her mind. Winifred Singleton of Camarillo gave Vivian machine-knitting lessons at her home in the early 1970s and recalled that Vivian once interrupted a session so she could watch a Johnny Greenbacks special on telly. She idea that was odd until Vivian told her she was once married to him.

Information technology was hard for many to read Vivian, including Flye, her sis. She found out virtually the divorce in the media.

Information technology came as a shock to Flye. She had looked on the Vivian-Johnny relationship with envy and thought it was a wonderful marriage and dandy dearest "until pills and June interfered and I don't know which ane came first."

Their early days

Vivian (nee Liberto) writes that she met Johnny Greenbacks on July 18, 1951, at a roller-skating rink in San Antonio when he asked her for a skate near closing time. He wasn't expert on skates, she recalls, but made upwardly for it by crooning forth to the Rosemary Clooney tune playing at the time.

A quick romance ensued before the Air Force sent Johnny to Germany. He carved "Johnny Loves Vivian" in a bench forth San Antonio's famed River Walk.

They promised to write each other — and did they ever. Johnny's letters over the three years came in a flurry, sometimes one a day, and are full of love, innocence and the famous Greenbacks humour. The son of Arkansas cotton farmers, Cash wrote once of living in a room with "dumb selfish Yankees," adding, "I'thousand thinking about reviving the Civil War."

Cash wrote of being alone, feeling insecure. His tone was ofttimes tender, writing in one, "Yous are the simply i for me — for always."

The letters are addressed "My Darling Vivian" or "My Baby" — once he called her "My Snookie Pootsie," adding: "Isn't that a killer, sweetheart? I'm not drunk honey. I just dreamed up that proper name."

The letters, with the benefit of perfect twenty-twenty retrospect, can be viewed equally harbingers of Greenbacks's after behavior. Several times, he wrote of being boozer or being with other women, remorsefully promising Vivian he wouldn't do it again, only to repeat it.

Vivian (who relates that she went out with guys back home) doesn't address that head-on simply writes of existence "crazy in dear" then and in the first part of the marriage.

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Johnny came home from the service on July four, 1954. Vivian and family gathered at the Cash home in Dyess, Ark., and collection to the W Memphis aerodrome to run across him. Wordless, "I just fell into his arms, he scooped me upward, and we kissed," she writes.

They married Aug. seven of that year in St. Anne's Catholic Church building in San Antonio.

They moved to Memphis, where Johnny took a chore selling appliances door to door. He soon grew to hate it. His brother Roy introduced him to friends Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins, and they and Johnny shared a love for "hillbilly" music.

One mean solar day — "one hour that would alter everything," Vivian writes — Johnny auditioned for Sam Phillips at Sun Records. "Babe, nosotros're cuttin' a record!" Johnny said when he came dwelling house (Vivian was pregnant with Rosanne, their get-go child).

What followed was "Cry, Cry, Cry," a song Johnny wrote in 15 minutes, Vivian says; days later, Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two were Sun'south newest artists.

Cash went into music history with other Sun artists such as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison, all of whom he toured with; Vivian writes: "Johnny and I peculiarly liked Elvis. He was an accommodating great guy and became a very close friend."

The tours also drew women, and when Vivian asked Johnny if he was ever tempted, he told her not to worry — "I walk the line for y'all."

That would spark a song; Johnny asked Vivian to write down lyrics while driving in the motorcar. Released in bound 1956, "I Walk the Line" became a No. i hit, around the time their second daughter, Kathy, was born.

Greenbacks was huge. A new managing director, Stu Carnall, Vivian says, convinced him to move to California.

"At this point," Vivian writes, "I simply agreed with whatever Johnny wanted to do. I can't say I had much of a mind of my own."

In the summer of 1958, most a month after welcoming third daughter Cindy into the world, the Cashes moved west to Encino, ownership a house endemic past Johnny Carson.

This marked the kickoff of what Vivian terms "a unsafe current" running beneath their heady life. Johnny'due south drinking escalated and he began to accept pills.

"All of the things that Johnny had called filthy and dingy' (his actual words from the love letters) and had insisted would destroy our lives were things he began to embrace," Vivian writes.

Cindy Cash, then a child, remembers hearing her parents fight only one time. But she recalled, "Mom ever seeming worried and staying up belatedly, merely she never let us meet her pain."

Now, looking back, Cindy said, "Pills kind of led Dad into a very destructive period in his life, and Mom unfortunately paid the price."

Vivian thought the move to Casitas Springs in late summer 1961, two weeks after their final child, Tara, was born, would put a cease to Johnny'south beliefs.

It didn't.

Bad Johnny, good Johnny

Johnny Cash is a fable in part due to his careless, outlaw persona and brushes with the law, and Ventura County had its share of Cash shenanigans.

Johnny was a regular company to Lake Casitas, ostensibly to fish. In the book, Vivian said he wrote "Band of Fire," one of his most famous songs, during a fishing trip in that location. He also partied there, occasionally passing out in his boat.

"He used to come up out here, drink likewise much and go over the border," said Randy Male monarch, the Lake Casitas marina manager.

Phone calls would be made, and somebody always came out to have him away, King said.

Cindy recalled "Mom putting us all in the motorcar and usa having to go wait for Dad somewhere and option him up." She can't remember all the wheres.

Helen Boyd's husband, Jeffrey, then a sheriff'due south deputy, recalled that he went to the Casitas Springs home to talk to Johnny about his penchant for playing Christmas music loudly, a habit Vivian mentions in the book.

"I'm the one who told him to shut it down," Boyd, now 79 and retired, said with a chuckle, adding that Johnny was overnice and polite about it. "Information technology was a boisterous audio. It thundered all through there, down the creek bed."

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It was loud, said Cindy Cash, who vividly remembers her dad putting upwardly loudspeakers in the thou.

"He was devastated" when told to turn information technology off, she said, laughing at the retention. "He thought he was doing something dainty for the community."

Boyd also was an investigating officer on the 508-acre forest burn Johnny accidentally set in late June 1965, near where Alder Creek spills into Sespe Creek in a higher place Fillmore. The then-named Adobe burn down took a week to put out, required air tanker drops and resulted in the Man in Black existence prosecuted.

Carl Rivenburgh, and so an banana burn command officer on the U.Southward. Woods Service'due south Ojai district, wrote Cash a commendation and interviewed him at the scene.

When he got in that location — "style back in the backcountry" — Cash's pickup, a truck camper the vocalist affectionately called "Jesse," was pulled off to one side of the road and Cash was seated nearby. Greenbacks told Rivenburgh that he had gone there to fish and that the burn down started from his truck. Rivenburgh said he crawled underneath and discovered the exhaust pipe had separated from where information technology went into the muffler. That problem led to heat igniting nearby grass when Cash tried to beginning the camper.

Rivenburgh said Greenbacks, who told him he tried to beat out down the fire in early stages with his leather jacket, "was just about iii-fourths shot and couldn't walk existent straight."

"In my conversation with him, I considered him inebriated, probably drunk by liquor," said Rivenburgh, now 85, retired and living in Klamath, Calif. "Later — I wasn't educated on dope in those days — I idea he was probably shooting up on something."

In a 1997 autobiography, Greenbacks recalled the fire in his inimitable manner. He said he went into a later courtroom proceeding "full of amphetamines and airs," refusing to respond questions direct.

He denied starting the burn down, writing that he said, "No, my truck did and it'south dead, then you can't question information technology."

In that book, Cash besides indicated that the fire scared off or even killed 44 California condors (the fire was shut to a sanctuary). Asked virtually that in a deposition, Greenbacks wrote that he replied, "I don't give a damn nearly your yellow buzzards."

The U.Southward. Fish and Wild animals Service, stewards of the condor recovery effort, said any condors were probable only driven off; if they had died, in that location'd exist a record. Dennis Ensign, a firewoman who worked the blaze 42 years ago, recalled no dead birds there.

Cash also claimed to be the first private denizen the federal government successfully sued and collected from for starting a wood burn down (to recover costs of fighting it). But the Forest Service doubts it.

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Accounts from the day said Cash was fined well-nigh $125,000 — an amount Cash mentions in the autobiography — but The Star later reported it was reduced to most $82,000 and that Greenbacks'southward insurance companies were ordered to pay the tab.

Non all Cash's false pas were on such a grand calibration. Randy Boswell, then sixteen and driving effectually 1 nighttime in the late 1960s, recalled that he was on a back road betwixt Foster Park and Oak View when he passed a blackness Cadillac on the side of the road. Up a means farther, he passed Johnny Greenbacks walking forth, probable heading to become gas. Boswell picked him up, took him to a station and drove him back to the Cadillac "and off he went."

"Information technology was pretty obvious why he ran out of gas," said Boswell, now an electric engineer living in Oregon. "He was pretty high. This was in his wild-child days."

Boswell said he recognized Cash because the singer had sponsored his Little League team but a few years earlier.

All of Cash's troubles, which even he seemed at times to revel in, overshadow his good deeds. Boswell was among those who recalled that Cash, sometimes with Buck Owens, did benefit shows in the area for the Boys Club and other causes.

In her volume, Vivian writes that Johnny financially supported her and their daughters through the years, and came back for their graduations.

Flye, Vivian's sister, said she personally saw his bad behavior only one time, on a visit dorsum to their parents' home in San Antonio when Johnny was on pills and spent an entire nighttime up and pacing.

He was, Flye said, a "very loving father."

At that place were a lot of good times, Cindy Cash said. On Christmas forenoon, Johnny e'er led his daughters into the living room in Casitas Springs to open presents; the girls had to walk in past lodge of age.

Once, Cindy said, "Dad had taken off his shoes, put them in the fireplace ashes, and made footprints leading out the door, simply so we'd believe there was a Santa Claus."

Farewells

Despite all his flaws, that'southward the Johnny that Vivian prefers to retrieve in the book. The night side, the troubles with the law, the bad-male child stories his cronies liked to tell, she writes, wasn't her Johnny. "That was drugs."

June Carter doesn't fare as well in her eyes. From the first time she met her (in 1958), Vivian writes, her intuition said worry: "This adult female was a danger to my family." She never knew exactly when the adulterous began.

Initially, Vivian denied it; she was the ane "Johnny walked the line for." But then came signs: Johnny began spending less time at home, family members and bandmates started dropping hints, and Vivian found receipts for thousands of dollars of gifts for June.

Losing her hubby to another adult female, she writes, was a "degrading, horrible experience." The thought Johnny could love someone else was hard to accept.

In the end, Vivian regrets not revisiting the honey messages with Johnny and not fighting harder to save the union.

"I should have been relentless at saving it, as relentless as June was at destroying information technology," she writes (though she ultimately forgives her).

But Vivian nearly regrets the anger she carried around all those years.

He had left without a good day. Johnny, she writes, eventually apologized to his daughters only never to her — "I'd take given anything to hear Johnny say (he was deplorable)."

June Carter died in May 2003. That summertime, Vivian went to visit Johnny in his Tennessee home and told her she was writing a book about their life. He reportedly replied, "What took you so long?" Local friends said Vivian relayed that to them upon her render.

Alice Smith noted the symbolism in the book'south title, which she said was suggested to Vivian by her friends.

"They would tell her, Y'all were the i who walked the line all these years, raising four daughters,'" Smith said.

Johnny died Sept. 12, 2003, of complications from diabetes. Vivian starts the volume with his expiry, writing " to me he is and will always be my wonderful, caring, protective husband."

At book's cease, Vivian writes that she hopes her daughters know more than always "how much I loved their daddy."

Vivian also relays repeated dreams in which Johnny is continuing by a nighttime car and motioning her to come over, telling her he wants to talk. But the dreams end before Vivian gets to hear what he wants to say.

Possibly it was that apology. Maybe Vivian, after her death on May 24, 2005, of complications from lung cancer surgery, is in a improve place to hear it.

Writes Vivian: "I promise anytime nosotros get to finally speak."

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Source: https://www.vcstar.com/story/entertainment/2016/10/26/johnny-cashs-first-wife-tells-of-romance-heartbreak-june-carter-vivian-cash-/92772320/

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