The Man Who Carried Cash

T he story of Saul Holiff and Johnny Cash first arrived in my inbox as an email with a subject line marked CONFIDENTIAL. I was a cub reporter at my hometown paper in Nanaimo, British Columbia, and had also recently been promoted to editor of our weekly entertainment section, The Hub. In journalism many a tall tale comes across ones desk, and part of the birth story of any piece begins with separating the wheat from the chaff. But unlikely as it seemed, this story was immediately compelling.

The man writing to me was Jonathan Holiff, whose father, Saul Holiff, had officially worked as Johnny Cashs manager for thirteen years. Before his death in 2005, at a time of his own choosing, as the subsequent obituary in the Globe and Mail had so eloquently put it, he had lived out his last years in Nanaimo.

Since then, Jonathan had written, produced, and directed a documentary film about his fathers life and relationship with both him and Johnny Cash, and was writing to me regarding the gala opening of the film that was about to take place in Nanaimo on his fathers home turf.

It was a story that held immediate intrigue, and in the years since, its grip on my imagination has only intensified.

Following his fathers death, Jonathan returned to Nanaimo from his home in Hollywood, where he worked in the world of celebrity endorsements as managing director of the Hollywood-Madison Group. Overcome with conflicted emotions around his fathers death, these feelings were soon exacerbated by the incessant calls of journalists who were curious about his father, as renewed interest in Cash swirled around the imminent release of the Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon film Walk the Line . It seemed he couldnt escape the spectre of his father. In the midst of this chaos, Jonathans mother, Barbara, offered her son the key to his fathers storage locker in the hope that, by going through his belongings, it would give him some form of closure.

What it marked was the beginning of a multi-year journey of discovery for Jonathan, who, in his own words, was searching for his father in the shadow of a legend. What he found in the storage locker was a vast archive of materials his father had saved during his time as Johnny Cashs manager. As he waded through the archive, a picture began to emerge of a person he never knew who was not only his father but also Saul Holiff, a man personally possessed of a rich and troubled internal life, but who outwardly was a major figure in the history of Canadian and American music.

The result was My Father and the Man in Black , a highly personal documentary that was as much about managers and superstars as it was about fathers and sons. When the film had its hometown opening, I was assigned to write the cover feature story on it. Over time, Jonathan and I began to discuss the possibility of a book that delved even deeper into the mystery of Saul Holiff, the man, and his career as manager of one of the legendary bad boys of American music.

From the beginning, I could see that the material that Jonathan and the Holiff family had granted me access to was impressive. Saul was meticulous, a list-maker, highly organized and fastidious both in appearance and in personal habits. This was reflected in the vast quantity and quality of the records he kept. Of particular significance was a large scrapbook of the type that was built to hold newspaper broadsheets, on the front of which were a series of gold letters: L-I-F -F , as though once intended to spell out Sauls last name. Perhaps the other letters had fallen off. However, on closer inspection it could be seen that the final letter had been amended with a pen to become an E , so instead the letters read LIFE .

Herein was Sauls own collection of newspaper cuttings, letters, and photos he found personally significant, and it provided a sort of key to the other materials within the archive. There were detailed financial records, contracts, audiotaped phone calls with Cash, audio and written diaries, letters, posters, and hundreds of photos both candid and professional. Many of the recordings and diary entries were recorded within hours, weeks, or months of events, which in turn served to inform the book on an as-it-happened level.

Though fascinating and historically significant, it is also worth noting that Saul Holiff never intended for this archive to become public. In fact, up until his death he was busy with liquidating much of it; most of the gold records he had earned previously as Cashs manager had been sold or auctioned off to charity, and each year he would go down into the storage locker with a garbage bag to weed out items into the trash, with a promise to his wife that he would soon whittle it down to almost nothing. It is not known how much was lost in this process, but what survived is still considerable.