JUNE CARTER CASH WAS DRUG ADDICT WHEN SHE DIED!
COUNTRY legend June Carter Cash is being celebrated in a new documentary, but sources say the TV fairy tale ignores the singer’s own desperate battle with drugs after spending most of her 35-year marriage trying to get hubby Johnny Cash clean!
Simply titled June, the Paramount+ program features flattering interviews with Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Reese Witherspoon, who won an Oscar portraying the five-time Grammy winner in 2005’s Walk the Line.
But John Carter Cash — the only child of the Losin’ You singer and Johnny — reveals his tormented mother spent her last ten years trapped in a dark hole of addiction!
The music producer, 53, notes June — who passed away in 2003 at 73 — steadfastly coaxed her hubby, Johnny, into rehab to break his reliance on uppers and downers. But the mother of three also endured the agony of watching her son and daughters — John’s half-sisters Carlene Carter and Rosie Nix Adams — grapple with their own substance abuse!
In John’s memoir House of Cash, he writes, “Then came the time, I
believe, when she had simply had enough, when the struggle with the addicts in her life overcame her strength and resolve. I think the cumulative mental, physical and emotional pain combined in such a way that the drug use eventually seemed OK to her.”
John admits being heartbroken as he watched his quickwitted mother fade before his eyes as her addiction grew and she resisted his efforts to get her into rehab.
“She simply stopped speaking in full sentences,” he recalls. “Her mind was not the same.”
A family friend shares, “June’s life was so full of accomplishment and adventure. But her life ultimately was like most everyone else’s — a lot of pain, personal struggles and heartbreak filled it, too.”
Officially, June was killed by heart disease, but the country queen died a hopeless addict.
“A man doesn’t know what he knows until he knows what he doesn’t know.” — Laurence J. Peter