The truth about Cash

If you have Amazon Prime Video on your television machine, you can go here and see a great movie called "My Darling Vivian." 

It's the story of a woman named Vivian Liberto Cash, who married Johnny Cash, the country singer identified by Robert Klein as "the only man who ever talked flat."  He always cultivated the image of a religious family man, but that's far from the truth, and now you can see the movie that tells his first wife's story.

Vivian was 17 and living with her family in San Antonio, Texas, when she met Cash, at the time a USAF Airman, at a roller rink. This was 1951. The mutual attraction sparked right away, and the two kept steady company for three weeks until the Air Force sent Cash to service in Germany for three years, during which time the two were engaged (Cash mailed her a ring). He returned stateside in 1954 and they were married right off. His career began to take off when they moved to Memphis and he became a Sun Records artist, and at the same time, he and Vivian saw their family grow four times - all daughters (Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara).

Vivian was the type who saved everything - including a thousand letters the two wrote each other during Cash's time in Germany and the roller skates she was wearing the night they met! But Johnny was not that sentimental. Sure, he earned a lot of money and built the family a nice house in Casitas, California, but he left the family there while he cavorted around the world singing and making records and appearing on television shows and commencing an extramarital relationship with June Carter, daughter of two of The Carter Family, one of the country music's founding clans.

This is an interesting album title for a record
that was made while he was still married

The movie will show you in sad detail how the affair tore Johnny's first wife up, and even after they divorced, the humiliation continued, with June Carter Cash constantly talking about how she had seven children, five of them girls. But she counted Vivian and John's four daughters as "hers" even though Vivian was the one raising them.

The movie pulls back the curtain of goodness and humility that Cash put up to hide from his fans the truth about what a callow philanderer he really was. Rosanne Cash, the oldest of his kids, was left to spend every day of her adolescence wondering if that would be the day her mom committed suicide over it all, and there was Johnny, playing around on the road while four kids and a wife lived in sadness.

He became addicted to amphetamines and alcohol, and wove the story of how June helped him kick those habits, instead of him just staying with his wife, and I just don't get the deal with him. Watch the movie - it's better than fiction!