Johnny fell in love with June. Vivian never got over Johnny, and she also felt all her life that she got the short shrift in the legend surrounding Cash. There was even a point where June claimed she was doing all the heavy lifting raising the four girls. This was an exaggeration, as the only time the kids were with her was the times they visited their father. Near the end of his life, Vivian asked for and received Johnny’s blessing to tell her story, which she did in her 2007 memoir I Walked The Line: My Life with Johnny. The book sold poorly, and the details of their marriage never became part of the Cash legend.
In My Darling Vivian, director Matt Riddlehoover, along with producers Tara Cash and Dustin Tittle, brings to the screen, the engaging and heartbreaking story of Vivian Liberto’s marriage to Johnny Cash. The film features clips and photos from their life, and Vivian’s daughters speak of their mother and father. The best bits are home movie footage of Vivian in the early days.
“…sets the record straight for a woman whose whole life was glossed over in favor of a more camera-ready tabloid romance.”
Country star Rosanne Cash is particularly eloquent. “My mother’s own story has often been lost or misinterpreted to serve a myth. This elegant film about her, the real Vivian Liberto, not the Hollywood version, is painful but compassionate, wrenching, but true. Even though she was an intensely private woman, I think she longed to have her story told, and her place in the history of my family acknowledged with respect and love. Matt Riddlehoover and Dustin Tittle have succeeded in giving her that place. My sisters and I are deeply moved by and grateful for My Darling Vivian.”
The American tradition of romance insists on monogamy, or the pretense of monogamy, to such a degree that even though the most pious among us may have several partners over the course of a lifetime, they are still considered “monogamous” if they are sequential. It seems fruitless to point out that if you have more than one relationship “for life,” then none of them, in fact, were that at all. The culture of serial monogamy also insists that all relationships except your current one are failures. This fairy tale narrative of love and marriage sets an impossibly high standard that has little to do with how people love, or how they change over time. Vivian certainly believed her first marriage, and therefore herself, to be a failure, but upon seeing the film, one must conclude that neither is true. She was certainly not a failure.
This is a long-overdue must-see that sets the record straight for a woman whose whole life was glossed over in favor of a more camera-ready tabloid romance. There is great value to be found in My Darling Vivian if you’re up to walk this line.
My Darling Vivian was scheduled to screen at SXSW 2020 and the 2020 Filmocracy Fest.
"…If June was the love of his adult life, then his first wife Vivian was the love of his youth."
