Johnny Cash's drug-fueled 1960s despair and comeback
Johnny Cash was falling into a vortex of amphetamines and alcohol consumption when promoter Saul Holiff approached him in the early Sixties to turn his music career from country to mainstream.
It was an odd coupling of the wild country music superstar early in his career, hot off his hit song 'I Walk the Line', and the intellectual, cultured Jewish Canadian manager.
Holiff was there for the worst of times â€" witnessing Cash's free-fall into drugs, overdoses, arrests and repeated cancelled bookings â€" as well as the best of times from roadside taverns to Madison Square Garden and the White House.
But at the zenith of Cash's career in 1973, after 13 years of working with him, Holiff quit.
At the age of 80, Holiff took his own life leaving behind a storage locker of letters and recordings detailing his relationship with Cash as revealed in Julie Chadwick's new book The Man Who Carried Cash.
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Wild years: Saul Holiff started working with Johnny Cash in 1960, the year this photograph was taken of the singe at home in California. It was the start of a ride which encompassed playing roadside taverns for next to nothing - then becoming the star of Madison Square Gardens
Combination: Cash admitted though the pair were an odd duo, Holiff was the only person who could manage him. The two worked from the Johnny Cash Incorporated office in Ventura, where they were photographed in  1961. But Cash, paranoid from the drugs he took, kept claiming Holiff was steling from himÂ
Team: Saul Holiff (right) met Johnny Cash in the wake of his hit 'Walk the Line', as he was spiraling into drug addiction. Cash also met June Carter, and toured with her extensively from the mid 1960s, including in London, Ontario, in 1964. They were to marry in 1968, but ultimately it was June who forced Holiff out
In their long run together, there was never a tranquil period that lasted more than a week.
After divorcing his first wife and marrying country queen June Carter in 1968, Cash had gone from jail to Jesus and adopted June's knee-bending evangelical Christianity.
It made Holiff uncomfortable, and he skipped going to the Billy Graham Crusades where Cash was playing for free. June wanted to know why.
'Do you have something against Jesus?' she asked him.
'Maybe it was that J ohnny played these concerts for free, she added. Maybe he was only interested in money.
'Saul stared at her...
"I consider those remarks to be anti-Semitic, June. And I object to being portrayed that way".'
He had only always been honest. He turned to face Cash, gave him notice and then left.
The rocky relationship was finally over, but it had been one incredible ride.
Until Holiff's son discovered his father's personal archive, the relationship between Cash and his father was understood by few.
They stayed together for over a decade â€" thanks to Holiff's ability to play counselor, accountant, adviser, agent and psychiatrist for the man in black.
'They were tired of each other. Holiff had covered for John for so many years, for all of John's antics, and h e just got tired of it.Â
'And Cash got tired of him trying to be the policeman', Lou Robin, who took over the managerial relationship, told the author.
Cash would later admit that although they were an odd couple, Holiff was the only one who could ever manage him.Â
Hot off promoting early rock 'n' roll singers Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Paul Anka, Little Richard, Holiff focused on Cash when he decided to expand his promotions to include country musicians.
Unlikely combination: Joliff (left) was a Jewish Canadian and an intellectual. Cash and his band had gunfights in hotel corridors. But he was there as they came back in the mid 1960s onwards, with June Carter and Phil Simon, backstage at the London Gardens, Ontario, in 1967
Men in black tie: Cash performed at the White House in 1970 with June Carter, the couple being introduced to President Nixon and First Lady Pat Nixon. It was quite a transformation; in the early 1960s Holiff had been booking taverns for the man in black
Holiff pitched Cash on crossing over from country to mainstream music and that appealed to the young country singer early in his career with the Tennessee Two, bassist Marshall Grant and guitarist Luther Perkins.
It was a boom-chicka-boom sound mixed with Cash's baritone.
They hooked up in business but their first encounter was an argument over money â€"whether advertising expenses were taken off the top prior to the performer's cut. Cash wanted his cut first before expenses were deducted.
It was a pattern Cash would return to - always questioning Holiff on money, a lways suspecting the ledgers were amiss but they never were. He was never a dime off in accounting.
Cash desperately needed someone reliable and Holiff filled his head with dreams of being promoted as a pop act with gigs in Europe and the Orient, big venues in the U.S. like Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl.
Accompanying Cash and his fiddler Gordon Terry on a tour of Ontario, Canada, Holiff witnessed an appalling hotel trashing.
Bassist Marshall Grant carried a circular saw with him for shortening the legs of hotel room tables and chairs and all three men staged gunfights down hotel hallways with their Colt .45 pistols.
They dropped water balloons, eggs and furniture from hotel balconies, tied all the doors on a hotel floor together with rope, painted the doors different colors, axed down the wall between their rooms and even flushed a cherry bomb do wn the plumbing wiping out an entire wall of toilets below.
Marshall sat at the diner counter in front of a piece of meringue pie and then slammed it with his hand to spatter the person next to him.
He blasted Holiff with a cap-and-ball pistol loaded with baloney.
'Saul was completely mortified'.
While Holiff was pitching Cash on thinking of himself as a bigger star with an international presence, Cash was consumed by a secret love for Billie Jean Horton, country music queen and wife of country music and rockabilly singer, Johnny Horton.
Move: Johnny Cash was hopelessly in love with Hank Williams and Johnny Horton's widow Billie Jean Horton and moved on her when Horton died. However, she stopped their romance when she learned about his wife in California  - and their four children
Johnny Cash learned drugs helped him perform by giving him confidence on stage. He was introduced to amphetamines by his fiddler Gordon Terry (second from right) . Also at the lunch counter in San Antonio in 1962 are Holiff (second from left) and Luther Perkins, the guitarist
When Johnny Horton died in a fiery car crash, Cash moved in on Billie Jean and even proposed to her â€" while spiraling downward on pep pills. She cooled the passion on learning about Cash's long-suffering wife, Vivian back in Casitas Springs, in Ventura, California with an armful of four babies.
Cash got hooked on amphetamines â€" Dexamyl, Benzedrine and Dexedrine, back in 1957 â€"thanks to Gordon Terry, his fiddler.
They not only kept the band awake on those long road trips between concerts, but 'Johnny discovered they had another use â€" they electrified his performances and eliminated his shyness onstage', writes author Julie Chadwick.
But at a cost â€" wrecking his voice.
'As much as they pumped him up, they began to twist his personality' â€" keeping him 'awake all night pacing and nervous or brooding and moody'.
'At times it was like there were two people inhabiting his body', Holiff is quoted as saying.
Cash's expanding family, his passion for other women and his prospering career were overwhelming him.
Flying to a gig in Vancouver, as soon as he got to the hotel, he went for his pills and the calm, rational man disappeared.
'By the time he stumbled backstage, Johnny was bouncing drinking glasses off the dressing room walls, leaving a wake of broken glass'.
When Billie Jean arrived in town, he stormed down the hotel h allways looking for her room and threatened to break down the door if she didn't let him it. Locked out and enraged, he turned and smashed all the antique chandeliers the length of the hallway.
Saul, now Cash's protector and defender, was attempting to book him into television and film as a bona fide actor. A lead role in a low-budget crime drama, Five Minutes to Live, had gotten scathing reviews. He couldn't get a television gig.
Criticism was now coming in from radio DJs. There was no hiding the amphetamine-induced change in his once-rich baritone.
He hadn't released a hit album in two years and in early 1961, he wasn't on any charts.
Columbia Records requested he take a fifty percent cut in royalties on his next two records.
Needing a girl singer for a Dallas performance, Holiff came up with the idea of June Carter, w ho performed for years with her family and as part of the Carter Family singing backup to Elvis. Cash was on board with the idea and she joined the tour.
Needing a girl singer for a Dallas performance, Holiff came up with the idea of June Carter, who performed for years with her family and as part of the Carter Family singing backup to Elvis. Cash was on board with the idea and she joined the tour in 1962. Â They became a couple and married in 1968
Drug-induced paranoia made Cash question if Holiff was stealing funds - but he was also the only thing keeping Cash's business relationships intact. They appeared together, along with June Carter, at a Screen Gems/Columbia Records press conference in Los Angeles in 1969 to announce the Cash television show
In 1966, W.E. 'Lucky Moeller' and Saul Holiff signed a lucrative but ultimately ill-fated agreement to promote Johnny Cash in Oklahoma City. The problem was that unreliable, strung out on drugs, and paranoid, Cash did not want to perform
Holiff had the sickening realization that he had entered a madhouse.
He got Cash booked into Carnegie Hall in 1962 but the star was in trouble.
Besides popping amphetamines 'like popcorn' prior to the show, he had consumed large quantities of diet pills so that he could fit into a 1930s railroad outfit of one of the founding fathers of country music, Jimmy Rogers.
By the time Cash stepped on stage, he was a scarecrow wearing ill-fitting and worn-out clothes.
When he opened his mouth to sing, he had no voice. The amphetamines had dried up his vocal c hords.
Cash later attributed the drugs to being the devil in disguise.
Holiff got Cash booked into the Hollywood Bowl and was trying to get on tour with Elvis in Japan.
What Holiff didn't know was that Elvis couldn't leave the country because hjis manager, 'Colonel' Tom Parker was actually a Dutchman who had entered the country illegally in 1929 from Holland and lived in fear he'd be deported. He served in the U.S. Army but went AWOL in 1932. He wasn't crossing any border.
On the road, Cash's attraction to June Carter blossomed into a full affair and he declared he was in love with the Bible-thumper.
His drug problems were beyond rampant.
'I had become habituated to amphetamines and barbiturates and alcohol â€" all three at the same time. That combination is deadly poisonous. I got up to a habit of as many as a hundred pills a day and a case of beer,' Cash is quoted.
In an amphetamine-induced paranoia, he accused Holiff of pilfering funds and wanted to replace him with his brother, Tommy.
Out of his brain on drugs, he entered Tommy's office in Nashville trashing it at night, burning the carpet with cigarettes, spilling coffee, ripping off the wall fabric and emptying filing cabinet papers all over the floor.
At bookings, Cash was a no-show. 'Everyone knew Johnny was bad news'.
Suddenly I found myself in this chaotic, unpredictable, terrible atmosphere. The cancellations were awful and I had to make good on them. I had to fend off lawsuits
High and amped up, he borrowed his sister 's camper truck and headed to California's Los Padres National Forest in Ventura County with his nephew, Damon.
Pill-popping and whiskey-drinking on the way, he went off to fish in seclusion.
When the smell of smoke reached Damon, he rushed back to find Cash slapping at a fire next to the camper trying to extinguish it.
A book of used-up matches was lying nearby. Damon believed Cash had set the fire to keep warm.
The flames quickly spread and consumed 508 acres of forest that took 450 firefighters a week to fully extinguish.
In a fury, Damon hit Cash over the head with a tree branch and ran to locate the fire helicopter crew.
Forty-nine endangered American condors housed in nearby wildlife sanctuary perished.
'I don't give a damn about your yellow buzzards ', Cash said.
He settled a negligence suit brought by the federal government for $82,000, $43,000 less than what was filed.
'There was never a tranquil period that lasted more than a week', Holiff is quoted.
'Suddenly I found myself in this chaotic, unpredictable, terrible atmosphere. The cancellations were awful and I had to make good on them. I had to fend off lawsuits'.
By July 1965, Cash only wanted to work four days that month.
Johnny and June showed up together for a date at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto but acting strangely.
Arrested seven times in seven years, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and I knew it. I was usually on a hundred pills a day but I got no plea sure from them, no peace. I couldn't stand my life, but I couldn't find my way out of itÂ
No longer hiding their relationship, 'Cash rolled about on the ground in front of the stage licking his lips at June's heels while she performed'.
Cash continued to accuse Holiff of financial discrepancies, signing chits in Vegas when he wasn't there. It wasn't true. It was drug-induced paranoia.
After a tour of the South wrapped in October 1965, Cash took all the tour receipts and said he was going to deposit them in the bank.
He was now sourcing pills on the black market via a network of drugstore connections and was told he could find an endless supply of pills in Mexico. So he hailed a cab and crossed the border.
He made the buy, tied the pills in two socks and put them inside his guitar case.
< p class="mol-para-with-font">The next morning, he was taken off a plane at the El Paso Airport, arrested and charged with smuggling drugs across the border.He had 669 Dexedrine tablets and 475 tranquilizer pills.
Cash posted a $1,500 bond, got out and cursed a reporter and threatened to kick a photographer's camera.
Back on stage, he was at times incoherent and erratic, facing the wrong way when he performed.
He was a broken man, hollow-eyed, wrung out and skeletal by September of 1966.
'Arrested seven times in seven years, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and I knew it. I was usually on a hundred pills a day but I got no pleasure from them, no peace. I couldn't stand my life, but I couldn't find my way out of it'.
Fame: At Folsom Prison brought Johnny Cash back into the spotlight. By 1972 he was huge, appearing on Rowan & Martin's Laugh In and posing backstage with Dan Rowan (second left), Dick Martin (second right), and Marty Klein, with Holiff in the center.
Going solo: Johnny Cash and Saul Holiff's business relationship ended when Cash turned to fundamentalist Christianity. Holiff is quoted as saying: 'He robbed me of my soul, and now I think he's trying to save it for me.'
No-Show Cash couldn't get booked which meant Holiff couldn't make his commission or be compensated for days and months of bookings. Then Cash cut his commission down by five percent while publicly and falsely accusing him of double-dealing.
'I didn't want to die, but I'd given up. I'd accepted the fact that I was killing myself and I was going to try to enjoy it,' Cash later said.
When June told him she was leaving him, it drove him to the brink of madness.
But he hadn't hit rock bottom yet.
Stocked up with pills, he got in his new Cadillac and headed south to Geor gia from Nashville where he woke up in jail. When he was let out the next morning, the sheriff reminded him that only God could help him now.
Back in Nashville the following day, Holiff and June recommended Cash see a psychiatrist.
Holiff also recommended he get a new producer.
Now divorced, Cash married June and suddenly had a hit with the album At Folsom Prison.
The album sales soared but music industry insiders recognized a familiarity to the song. It sounded just like Crescent City Blues by pop composer Gordon Jenkins.
Gordon filed a lawsuit and Holiff had to settle for $75,000, predicated on the matter not being disclosed publicly.
After ten years of drug addiction, Cash was now on a stratospheric ascent making $100,000 a night after earning $1,250 a night.
Two years earlier, Cash was only able to get gigs at hockey arenas and gyms because no one would touch him.
He had become a musical Midas selling more records than any other recording artist in the world including the Beatles in 1969.
Holiff had developed his own issues in response to Cash's.
He occasionally drank, took tranquilizers. He began managing his children like they were clients and became authoritative.
Holiff pitched Cash as the next John Wayne but he didn't like sitting around making movies.
Cash wanted to do a show in the Holy Land. He wanted to walk all over Israel just like Jesus.Â
He wanted to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. Holiff had no desire to follow Cash.
Julie Chadwick's new book The Man Who Carried Cash hit bookstores June 20Â
He recognized hostility on Cash's part.
He wanted to spend more time with his family.
'I've worked so god-damned hard for 10 years, and taken such incredible abuse, and such humiliation so often', Holiff wrote in notes to himself.
'He robbed me of my soul, and now I think he's trying to save it for me â€" through his fundamentalist Christianity jazz.
'It's inevitable that a rupture is on the horizon.'
He made a list of the pros and cons. The cons won - and he left Cash forever.
The Man Who Carried Cash: Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash and the Making of an American Icon  is available on Amazon.comÂ
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