Book by Johnny's first wife cashes in on his love letters

Johnny Cash

A different and sweeter light will be cast on the life, loves and personal demons of Johnny Cash, the country music legend, when a book written by his first wife hits the shops early next year.

The work will be based on the thousands of love letters exchanged between Cash and his wife of thirteen years, Vivian Liberto Distin, while he was serving in the United States Air Force. It will be called I Walked the Line, a take on his most famous song, also the name of the recent film about him.

The film, which starred Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as his second wife, June Carter Cash, portrayed a music genius beset by doubts and crippled by drug dependency and offered little more than a glimpse of the singer's first marriage.

Cash and Liberto were wed in 1954 and had four daughters. One daughter, Kathy Cash, was sharply critical of the film.

Liberto reportedly approached Cash shortly before he died in 2003 to ask permission to incorporate their letters in a book. Kathy Cash has said her father was immediately enthusiastic.

"He said, 'Vivian, if anyone on this whole earth should write a book it should be you,"' she said.

When Liberto died last year the book was already in gestation with co-writer, Ann Sharpsteen. To be published on Valentine's Day next year, the book draws on the letters sent daily to Liberto by Cash over four years when he was stationed in Landsberg, Germany, as a radio intercept operator in 1950.

"The letters really reveal the real man, unclouded by drugs. It's like reading someone's diary," Sharpsteen said, adding that it also closed wounds for Liberto.

"She had never gotten over Johnny, so it was a journey of healing."

The book may also ease any hurt felt by the four daughters in the wake of the recent film, which earned Witherspoon an Academy Award.

Kathy Cash publicly voiced her dismay . "My mom was basically a nonentity in the entire film except for the mad little psycho who hated his career," she said.

"She loved his career and was proud of him until he started taking drugs and stopped coming home."

James Mangold, the film's director, has denied that he ignored Cash's earlier years with his first family.

"We interviewed Kathy as well as her mother Vivian in the making of the movie," he said recently, "but it's very hard for kids growing up in a family seeing stuff like this dramatised in front of them."

Cash began to drift from his first wife after his career began to take off and increasingly took him touring the country. It was during the tours that he began drinking and taking drugs. And while on the road he also first met June Carter, who was herself divorced.

- INDEPENDENT