Authors: Rosanne Cash
Brenda came to see me in Nashville late that summer. As we sat by the pool at Dad’s house on the lake, I was miserable, hating her for being so beautiful when I was bloated with hormones, hating her for having a return ticket to London. It had not even occurred to me—and it wouldn’t occur to me for another twenty years—that I could have argued with my father and simply gone back. It seemed a bad moment for my old, limp personality to resurface, but in retrospect, I’m grateful he could see the possible trajectories of my life, and intervened to keep me connected to him and the rest of my family.
“We found your journal when we were packing your trunk,” Brenda suddenly declared. “Sandy started to read it aloud, but I told her it was wrong, that we shouldn’t read it and she should stop, because you were so lonely.” She looked at me steadily. “You were
so
lonely,” she said again, almost accusingly.
I hated her for knowing more about me than I knew about myself.
The next time I saw her, several years later, she and Sandy were both living in New York. I spent one wild weekend with them there, and they tried to set me up with a young man who told me confidentially that he was considering the priesthood. We went to a lot of clubs and parties and ended up at the Green Kitchen, in Hell’s Kitchen, at five a.m. on a Monday. I crawled back to my tiny room at the Berkshire Hotel later that morning, deeply depressed, and went back to Nashville the following day. I saw Brenda a few more times, once after she married the actor Corbin Bernsen, when they were driving to Los Angeles, but eventually lost touch with both sisters.
That September I entered Vanderbilt, and with my year’s worth of credits I managed to take mostly sophomore classes, trying to fit myself into a program where I was already two or three years older than my classmates. I was not only older, however, but far more experienced, not to mention eccentric, than the other students. I had no interest in the social aspects of college, which made it impossible for me to feel a part of the community, and I don’t think I spoke more than ten words a day for the entire academic year. I liked my studies, particularly a creative writing class, which was taught by Walter Sullivan, a brilliant writer himself, and while I found a mild sense of camaraderie there, I still made no real friends.
A few months into the school year I moved out of my dad’s house, having found an apartment on Seventeenth Avenue South, at the back of an old building (which, ironically, I would buy six years later when I was married to Rodney Crowell and we needed office space on Music Row). Steve Scruggs, Randy’s younger brother, started coming by my place in the evenings, a few times a week, with his guitar. He usually showed up around nine o’clock, fidgety and distracted, talkative and achingly lonely. He played me songs he was working on, and I played him some of my own. By this time I had become serious about songwriting myself, and wanted desperately to break through to a level of craft that I worshipped in the songs of Guy Clark, Mickey Newbury, Townes Van Zandt, and Rodney Crowell. I had not yet written a good song. Steve was a sweet friend, and if he had romantic motives when he visited me, he never let on, and we became very comfortable passing the guitar back and forth on those quiet nights.
Twenty-five years after moving to London, in October of 2001, I sat at my father’s bedside in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Nashville. He had just narrowly escaped death for the fifth or sixth time over the preceding several years. His precarious health was a constant and exhausting drama of acute and sudden illnesses followed by near-miraculous recoveries, and this latest medical catastrophe had left him jittery and depleted. I sat quietly holding his hand while he ran through his repertoire of tics—jerking, trembling, murmuring. Trying to think of something to engage his attention, I finally said, “I’m writing a book, Dad.”
He harrumphed, emphatically—one of the peculiar ways he liked to communicate.
I described one of the chapters to him: I am sitting on a beach, in Jamaica, staring at the sky and letting the tidal pull of my own future wash over me and draw me forward. I am full of my unlived life, and the joy of anticipation for it is taking me apart, cell by cell, and putting me back together in ways that could accommodate a thousand potentials. I am certain to outgrow myself. I can feel it all coming for me, and I am running to meet it in my deepest heart, in London.
I was deliberately eloquent for him, describing my feelings in detail, the anticipation and the smell of the sea in the darkness, the brightness of the stars, my young, smooth feet in the sand, and the two silent boys at my side, like gargoyles protecting my dream.
He grew still and stared straight ahead through the glass doors to the nurse’s station while I talked. When I finished, he turned to me with surprise.
“You got me. With that chapter.” He thought for a moment. “I didn’t know you felt all those things then.”
Neither of us spoke for a moment or two; then softly I said, “Well, I did.”
Dad’s eyes glazed a bit, and he said quietly, “Just to think of you makes my heart swell with pride.”
Randy Scruggs married in April of 1976. He and Sandy are still married and have one daughter, Lindsey. He is a successful record producer, musician, and songwriter and owns his own production company and studio in Nashville. We renewed our friendship in our late twenties and have worked together many times. When I recorded my dad’s old song “Tennessee Flat-Top Box” in 1987, it became a number one hit, with Randy playing the signature guitar line.
I saw our dear friend John Rollins for the last time on New Year’s Eve 2000, at Cinnamon Hill, when I was there to see in the new millennium with my husband, John, and our baby, Jake. As John Rollins walked out of the house into the balmy evening, wearing his pink golf shirt and white trousers and wishing everyone a happy new year, I said good-bye to him and thought to myself very clearly,
This is the last time I will ever see him
. He died of a heart attack while taking his afternoon nap that spring, in his offices in Wilmington, Delaware.
Ted Rollins became estranged from his father for many years, and reconciled with him a few years before John died. Ted is still very close to our family and was particularly close to my father. He always made Dad laugh. When Dad was confined to a wheelchair in the last year of his life, Ted came over with silver paint pens and drew rocket ships and explosions all over the chair. He has become like a brother to me.
Brenda Cooper became a successful and respected Emmy Award-winning fashion stylist for television and film. We reconnected when she divorced and moved back to New York. The first time I appeared on David Letterman’s show, she accompanied me to allay my nervousness. Before the taping, we were in my dressing room with the door open when Letterman himself walked by. Brenda leaped from her chair and accosted him, shrieking, “You had better be nice to her!” Letterman was so taken with her animation, upper-crust accent, and striking looks that toward the end of my televised segment he called her out onstage. She took a seat next to me, and when he asked her if he had passed muster, she giggled and told him that he had indeed.
Sandy moved to New York, where I lost track of her. I think of her still.
Steve Scruggs committed suicide on September 13, 1992.
While writing this account, I received an e-mail from David, the son of the head of the British fan club for my dad who had so kindly appeared at the airport when I had first arrived in England and whose invitations to dinner I had never accepted. David had found me on the Internet and wrote to me, thinking that I would want to know that his father had just died.
Maurice Oberstein went on to have an illustrious career and was always respected as a gentleman in an ungentlemanly business. After his tenure as managing director at Columbia Records UK, he moved on to become CEO of Polygram International. He is credited with being one of the chief architects of the modern British recording industry. He died of leukemia in London on August 12, 2001, at the age of seventy-two.
In January 2007, I was in Sydney, Australia, playing at the State Theatre. When I arrived in my dressing room, I found a note from Derek Witt: “Remember me? We worked together.” I had not heard from him since 1977, so I called him when I was in London the following month. He had long since left the music business, and we had a nice long chat. He later sent me his photograph with an accompanying note that said, “I’m very happy with my lot in life.” Later that year, in November, the night before I was scheduled for brain surgery, I got a message on my cell phone that Derek had died.
Malcolm Eade is currently the vice president of international A&R for Epic Records UK. He is happily married with three children and is a grandfather. In our first phone call after twenty-six years, which left me in tears, he said to me, “I remember everything about you.”
Anthea Joseph died on Christmas Eve 1997 at the age of fifty-seven. She had been living alone with her two cats in the countryside outside London. She had ended her professional life in the music business as personal assistant to Obie at Polygram.
In 2009, my youngest daughter, Carrie, went to London for a short visit. She called me from Hampstead to ask me the exact address where I had lived, and then an hour later she e-mailed me a photo of herself, twenty years old, as I had been, standing in front of No. 3 Carlingford Road. A chill went through me; it was like looking at a photo of a time traveler who arrived where her mother had begun, with all the beauty, circumspection, and grace that I had longed for, and strained to glimpse.
Today, I can’t sit on a beach and look at the moon without realizing that my life is more than half over, and that the same moon that reproaches me now with my unlived dreams once drew me across the ocean with mysterious promises. My life was changed utterly by my six months in London. I often think that perhaps I didn’t stay long enough, but I’ve forgiven Dad for making me come home. It makes my heart swell just to think of it.
T
he word “contrition” comes from the Latin word for “bruise” or “grind,” a derivation that makes perfect sense to me as a former Catholic. Something in the drone and the rhythm of the Act of Contrition—“
Through my fault, through my most grievous fault . . . ,
” which I said to a man behind a screen in a dark confessional booth for so many years—was uniquely compelling. It took me many years to realize it wasn’t my fault, or even my grievous fault, however much I was drawn in by the swing of the words and the safe intimacy of confession. What all those anxiously droned Acts of Contrition chiefly accomplished was to break me down, bruising my sense of self permanently. Or so I thought. In any case, they had the immediate effect of making me withdraw from the truth about myself for a very long time. The truth about me, as it turned out, was unacceptable not only to Catholicism but to adults in general. The truth about me was not meant to fit into the system of convent school, religion, contrition, or punition. None of that mattered. I was a writer. It would save me.
One day in 1990, after I had finished my album
Interiors
and was beginning to write the songs for
The Wheel,
I went to my file cabinet and aimlessly pulled out a folder of papers my mother had recently sent me of my artwork, homework, and spelling lists from the seventh grade. Leafing through them I came upon an English project I had done on metaphors and similes. Reading the piece, I vividly remembered the excitement I had felt on being given this particular assignment, for it was the very first time in my entire career as a student that I had been excited about anything the nuns had ever asked me to do. I read through my discussion of metaphors and similes, and I could feel the thrill of my twelve-year-old self coming off the page, a nascent writer in love with language as if language were a potential lover. I came to a single page that said, in big letters I had printed very, very carefully, “A lonely road is a bodyguard.” It was a metaphor I had invented, and I was pleased with myself for having chosen this powerful image over the more straightforward simile, “A lonely road is
like
a bodyguard.” I lifted that sentence from my seventh-grade project and put it directly into a song I was writing, “Sleeping in Paris”:
I’ll send the angels to watch over you tonight
And you send them right back to me.
A lonely road is a bodyguard
If you really want it to be.
That song ended up on
The Wheel,
and whenever I hear it now, or think of it, or sing it, I nod to my little girl self, and she, in the wisdom of her great distance and perspective, looks on with pleasure and the patience of one who has waited a long time to be noticed. This one line, in this one song, is how I know who I am, and how I know I survived.
When I became a student at Vanderbilt in 1976, I declared a double major in English and drama, but I quickly discovered I could not break into the clique of drama students who got cast in plays because I was quiet, extremely shy, and a bit overweight. I also lacked any of the vibrancy or ambition that would have caught the attention of the teacher, whom I found somewhat distant and pontificating anyway. Two other professors, however, did make a great impact on me: Dr. Reba Wilcoxon, a tough and insightful English teacher who gave me the assignment to write a Menippean satire, which was one of the most memorable and exciting writing experiments of my life, and the great Walter Sullivan, eminent professor, authority on Southern literature (particularly the fugitive and agrarian movements), and a wonderfully lyrical author and teacher. When I arrived at Vanderbilt, he had been teaching there for twenty-seven years and went on to teach for twenty-three more, retiring in 2000. In his youth he had been part of a young writers group that included Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Robert Penn Warren. He was deeply inspiring in his gentle incisiveness, taking my terrible, saccharine, and sophomoric stories seriously, and encouraging me again and again to write “what I know.”
I loved his class, and he made me feel not only important but that I might actually have a future in writing. It was a promise that had been waiting for fulfillment—waiting since I was nine years old and won a poetry contest at school, waiting since I’d had the imaginative daring to conceive of a road as a bodyguard. But despite Professor Sullivan’s mentoring, Vanderbilt just didn’t work. I wasn’t a college girl. I was odd, removed, quiet, intensely lonely, and prone to living inside my own thoughts, often to my detriment and deep emotional disturbance. I didn’t care about the school at all, and lacking any of the natural enthusiasm of young women my age, I had no desire to socialize with my classmates. I wanted to be a writer, but becoming a good writer seemed an insurmountable and confusing task.
After finishing the academic year, I decided to move back to Los Angeles, where I enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. I was impatient with myself as a writer. I couldn’t see that I was getting better, so I thought I would try acting. I got an apartment on Fuller Avenue in Hollywood, close to the Institute, which was on Hollywood Boulevard at Highland Avenue. My father continued to subsidize me, paying my rent—$345 a month, an exorbitant amount in 1977—tuition, and living expenses.
I took to Method acting classes like a duck to water. I spent all day and evening, every day, at the Institute, I read Stanislavski as if it were the Bible, I watched the single existing film of Eleanora Duse, who was revered by Method actors, as if it held the key to all mysteries, and for six months I lived and breathed “The Work” with absolute and fierce focus. I was a Method elitist, and everything outside of the Institute appeared meaningless and colorless to me. I audited the classes that Strasberg—whom we were all encouraged to casually address as Lee—taught, but he scared me (and everyone else in the program) to death. He was brutal in his feedback, which he often used manipulatively. He might effusively praise an actor after a scene one week and completely ignore her the next, or spend an hour humiliating someone and then only casually remark “Nice work” to the other actor in the same scene. No one could predict his moods or understand his motives.
My own acting teacher, Dominic DeFazio, was an intense Italian who was also ruthless in his assessments of his students, but while he was tough he was also encouraging. I quickly developed an enormous crush on him, which I could barely conceal, leaving me flustered and frozen around him. But I wanted to learn, and the exercises he taught us for accessing buried emotion and for connecting the feelings to external content were enormously helpful to me in my personal life, and became even more useful later on, when I became a performer.
One scene I did for Dominic required me to cry on cue, and after weeks of rehearsal I was still consumed with anxiety about my ability to accomplish it. On the day of the scene I stood in the wings before going onstage in the classroom, absolutely petrified and certain that I would be unable even to walk out onto the stage. But I did go on, and when I got to the point in the scene where I was supposed to cry, I was delighted to find that my training had worked, and I produced the requisite tears. I then discovered, however, that I couldn’t stop, and I cried through the rest of the twenty-minute scene. At the end of it I took my chair in the center of the stage next to the other actor to wait for Dominic’s feedback. He paused and then said dryly, “Rosanne, your fee for films just went up to a million dollars.” I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself; after growing up as the girl who never cried, I was now the girl who couldn’t stop crying, albeit once removed from reality.
Within a few weeks I had made a number of friends at the Institute, something that didn’t happen in an entire year at Vanderbilt. Nadejda Klein, who was married to my dad’s agent, Marty Klein, at Agency for the Performing Arts, was a dark, sophisticated beauty with two children and a fantastic Eastern European accent. I copied her in almost everything—the way she dressed, her affectations, and her extralong More cigarettes, even though cigarettes held no appeal for me at all. I spent a lot of time with Nadejda, eating exotic lunches and, of course, fervently discussing The Work and our mutual obsession with the Duse film.
The first day of my cold-reading class, I took a seat on a bench outside the room where the session was shortly to begin. Next to me was a tall, beautiful girl about my age I had never seen before. We were both anxious, as the teacher was known to be tough, and cold reading allowed not only no preparation but myriad opportunities for humiliation. Suddenly, in the tense silence between us on the bench, the girl burst into tears. I reached out and took her hand, and we became friends from that moment on. She introduced herself as Kelly McGillis.
Another of my fellow students got a job in the television series
Columbo
, and it so happened that the episode for which he was hired, “Swan Song,” starred my dad as a traveling evangelist who kills his wife, played by Ida Lupino. After filming his scene, my friend told me that he had played a mechanic who was meant to be nervous and awestruck upon meeting my dad’s character. When I asked him what motivation he used to create the nervous excitement—the classic acting school question—he sheepishly replied, “I just used meeting Johnny Cash.”
It was, all things considered, a strange time in my life. A serial killer, the Hillside Strangler, was then on the loose in Los Angeles. My mother, seventy miles north in Ventura, was beside herself with continuous worry over me, with good cause. I sometimes left the Institute at eleven p.m. and walked obliviously into the dark, empty parking lot alone. Men followed me home from the supermarket. My apartment was broken into twice; the second time, all my jewelry was stolen, which devastated me. I told my father, who sent me a new piece of jewelry every week for several weeks. A pair of pearl earrings would be accompanied by a note saying, “My love is more precious than pearl earrings.” He got as far as “My love is more precious than Cartier watches” before he finally stopped. I still wear the Cartier Tank watch he gave me in that marathon of generosity.
I had affairs with a couple of fellow actors, neither of whom I felt particularly drawn to, but I thought it was something I was supposed to do. I was so desperately trying to find my real life, but I was frustrated and out of focus. I loved the class work at the Institute, but I had not gone out on a single audition, which most of the other students in the school were doing regularly. I started asking myself hard questions about being an actor: Was I just in love with the insulation the Institute afforded and the privileged, almost cultlike experience of being under the auspices of Lee Strasberg? Was my skin really thick enough for me to go out on auditions and get rejected over and over again? I knew in my heart that being part of a group of people who were singularly committed to an artistic ideal mesmerized me, but I recognized that I could not make a life as an actor. I could not bring myself to go on auditions, and the idea of drawing so much attention to my physical appearance, a significant part of getting a job, was absolutely horrifying. I was already obsessed with the worry that I had the wrong kind of nose to be a great actress. After comparing my small ski-slope nose with that of every actress I could think of, I found that not a single one shared my exact shape, which I interpreted as a fundamental indication of my lack of acting ability.
By December of 1977, I was floundering. The spell of The Work was wearing off, and I was a little panicked about my next move. I decided to get as far away from Los Angeles as I could, and I arranged to visit my dad’s friend Renate Damm in Germany for several weeks over the holiday break.
I arrived in cold Munich in early December and moved into the tiny spare bedroom of Renate’s apartment in the Siegfriedstrasse, near the English Gardens. I only knew Renate from touring in Europe with Dad and June, as she was the international liaison for their record label and always traveled with them. Dad had made the call to Renate to ask if she would host me for a short while, and she was incredibly gracious and welcoming. A decade older than me, she treated me like a beloved little sister. Her birthday was December 12, which was just a day or two after I appeared, and that night we went to a huge party for her at Ariola Records, the label where she worked. There I met many of her colleagues, and Renate told them all that I was an excellent songwriter. At this point I had written a dozen or so songs, most of them perfectly awful. One of the heads of the A&R department said to me, very seriously, that if I was to make a demo of them and send them to him, he would consider signing me to Ariola, to make a record to be released only in Europe. I was noncommittal, but I became secretly excited by the idea and later discussed it with Renate at length. After my truncated stay in London, I had been longing to move back to Europe, and quietly making a record in Germany and not having anyone in the States notice it would enable me to avoid any comparisons to my dad. I went back to Los Angeles and, with some trepidation, terminated my enrollment at the Lee Strasberg Institute. That was the end of my formal education.