Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

  Frequently, he resorted to disguises, rarely leaving the house without a pair of large sunglasses and a cap pulled low. Perpetually preoccupied, sometimes he didn’t pay as much attention to his camouflages as he ought to have, and some of them were rather curious. He wore a wide-brimmed hat in Mexico and an autograph hound thought he was James Arness. In a European airport he discovered with alarm that he had lost his sunglasses, and quickly bought a pair off a rack. Ruth later noticed, to her horror, the Playboy bunny insignia on the frames. He walked along a crowded beach in Europe, clad in fire-engine-red shorts, a blue windbreaker, yellow socks, Hush Puppies, a denim cap, and sunglasses. “That’s the dumbest looking human being I’ve ever seen,” Ruth thought to herself as she watched him amble in her direction. “Oh, no!” it dawned on her. “He’s mine!”

  Without disguises, he was painfully vulnerable. In the mid-seventies the Grahams were on a boat in Acapulco Bay, Mexico, with future President George Bush and his wife, Barbara. After a picnic of raw oysters on a deserted beach, it was time to swim back to the boat. It would take an hour to follow the shoreline to their hotel.

  “Since the trip back will take so long,” said Billy, in the midst of writing a sermon, “I think I’ll just walk back along the beach.”

  Without wallet or sunglasses, and clad in nothing but a pair of white swim trunks he had borrowed from Bush, he set out, not realizing that the beach he was walking along was the property of a Mexican naval station and off limits to civilians. He rounded a corner and was greeted by two submachine guns backed by unsmiling Mexican soldiers. Billy spoke no Spanish and did his best to explain, and the guards, who spoke no English, tried to understand.

  He was directed to sit on a nearby bench and wait for one of their English-speaking superiors. The officer arrived, heard Billy’s explanation, and released him, with the order that he could not walk along the restricted beach. When Billy stood, he realized he had been sitting on wet green paint. He could trot barefoot along the scorching sidewalk to the first hotel and get back to the nonrestricted beaches by darting through the lobby, where he would be recognized. Or he could stay on the sidewalk the entire distance and burn his feet but remain anonymous, which was what he did.

  As early as 1961, there were signs of what Franklin’s life held. On November 27 the Indianapolis Times printed this: “Columnist Charlie McHarry writes that the handsome lad nightclubbing in New York with Gayle Home, Lena’s daughter, was Billy Graham, Jr., son of the evangelist.” Franklin was nine years old at the time.

  “But the sobering fact,” Ruth observed, “is that it shows none of our children can ever live privately, conquer privately, or sin privately.” She and Billy prayed, she recorded, “that God would mercifully spare [the children] any sowing of wild oats Unless committed to Thee, they will react violently against this enforced publicity and turn against Bill in bitterness as tho he were to blame. … As Christians they will take all this as an opportunity for witnessing. As pagans they would seek to camouflage themselves with worldliness to escape notice.”

  A rakish-looking boy with strong features and a mop of black hair, Franklin had inherited his grandfather Bell’s sturdy build and love of adventure. He was happiest when scaling Suicide Trail on Montreat’s Lookout Mountain or hunting with Calvin Thielman, who taught him much about guns and preached that he mustn’t kill songbirds. One day, after hearing complaints that Franklin was indeed committing this crime, Calvin firmly reprimanded him.

  “Aw, Calvin,” Franklin assured him, “don’t worry! I draw a bead on a bird and I say, Sing. If he sings, I let him go. And if he doesn’t I let him have it.”

  The shooting lessons came to an end one day when Calvin was demonstrating how to handle a high-caliber pistol and accidentally shot himself in the leg.

  Out of sorts in a Sunday suit, Franklin preferred faded jeans and flannel shirts, his hands usually covered with black grease from tinkering with automobile or motorcycle engines. He was energetic and witty, more attracted to vice than virtue. He began his flirtation with cigarettes at age three, supplying himself with the butts dropped by the workmen while they were building the house. One day, after he had gathered a tidy little pile, he heard his father coming.

  “Pretend they’re yours,” Franklin whispered loudly to Wallace Walker, the electrician.

  “Franklin,” the man laughed, “your daddy knows I don’t smoke.”

  Several years later, Ruth asked caretaker Floyd Roberts to let Franklin try one of his cigarettes, thinking it would make the boy so sick that he would never again want to smoke. Franklin inhaled the first one down to the filter and proceeded to help Roberts finish the pack. The next day Ruth asked John Rickman to give him a cigar. That plan backfired as well.

  “Why are you doing this?” Franklin asked his mother at bedtime.

  “The things are bad for you,” Ruth said. “I don’t want you to get the habit.”

  Perhaps it was a little late.

  When Franklin was ten, Ruth recorded that he had asked Christ to come into his heart while hiking with Chuck Gieser, the son of a former missionary Ruth’s family had known in China. Instead of ensuring peace, it seemed to give him something else to fight. His mother’s anxieties became acute.

  “I cannot sleep,” she wrote at the time. “For a while I sat here in bed with the lights off, and thought and prayed. I have a headache. It would be so easy to take a sleeping pill but He knows I need sleep and how much. And sometimes there are things more important like seeing the world outside flooded with moonlight and watching the last log in my fireplace flicker and die; watching the shadows of the ceiling beams leaping in the firelight. And knowing He is here. I’ve taken time out to remember all this because of one special thing He said. He had told it to me before, many times in one way or another. It’s about Franklin. Every time I pray especially for him God says: Love him Which seems odd because I love every bone of him. But God means show it. Let him in on the fact. Enjoy him. You think he’s the greatest let him know you think so.”

  Ruth agonized over her older son. She felt frustrated as her other responsibilities wrestled for her attention. Insomnia became common, and by 1965, the year John Pollock was finishing his first authorized biography of Billy, life was becoming as complex and fast as a circuit board. Frequently, Ruth lay awake at night, her mind streaking down her list of chores.

  November 10, 1965, was a typical frenetic day. Ruth drove Anne twenty miles to the dentist, then to the oral surgeon. Ruth carried clothing to the dry cleaner, shopped, and returned home in time to serve tea to radio commentator Paul Harvey and five other guests. At spare moments, Ruth packed her bags for London, read snatches of Pollock’s galley proofs, answered mail, paid bills, and bought traveler’s checks. Still ahead were two talks and a Sunday school lesson to prepare and Sunday dinner to plan. “And running thru my mind,” she wrote, “are there not twenty-four hours in the day?”

  It seemed that the only time she had to herself was the sleepless early morning hours when everyone else on the mountain was unconscious. She studied her Bible and meditated, her thoughts turning to God, Whose presence was silently and invisibly there. “It may be,” she wrote, “that the night seasons are the only times He can get in a word edgewise.”

  From time to time, her experiences were almost mystical. On February 17, 1965, she awoke at 2:30 in the morning, disturbed and dejected. Feeling the impulse to pray, she knelt beside her bed. Inexplicably, tears flowed as she found herself petitioning God for two men, Kenneth Strachan, a Latin American missionary whose wife, Elizabeth, had gone to college with Ruth, and Tom Allen, a pastor in Glasgow, Scotland, whom the Grahams had come to know during crusades in the British Isles. She prayed, unaware of the men’s circumstances, for “a reprieve for both. An extension of their lives and services on earth.” After a few minutes the impulse was gone. She returned to bed. One week later, forty-nine-year-old Strachan was dead from cancer. Allen, also forty-nine, died soon after from a heart attack.
r />   There were periods when the rhythm continued, day and night, night and day, light giving way to darkness, darkness giving way to dawn. “INSOMNIA,” scrawled in black ink and underlined, scarred pages of her journals. In the cool dark her senses became refined, a radar detecting something more. Through parted curtains she watched the moon hanging over Rainbow Mountain, pallid, a ghostly face. The stream whispered to the west of her window, and anxieties, failures, and unfinished tasks would not be silenced.

  She began climbing out of bed at two, three, and four o’clock in the morning to write letters, pay bills, or finish work that worried her. She prayed and read her Bible, and began to dread the turning off of her light at the hour for bed. One night, she felt a tugging as she read Psalm 91:5. The words were lifted from the page: “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.” She emerged from her worries, strengthened.

  In 1969, Franklin hit the white water of his rebellion. “In looking back,” Ruth wrote, “I think I would say this is the summer Franklin began to walk his own road.” He turned seventeen that July. He seemed unwilling, his parents saw, to take a stand for Christ. Despite their concern, their talks with him were amiable.

  “I remember when long hair became a big issue I wanted my hair to touch my ears,” Franklin recalled. “When I smoked I knew they disagreed for health reasons. But they never preached at me. They wished I’d do it at home and not behind their backs. They didn’t want me to make alcohol, tobacco, or long hair an issue.”

  Franklin would not smoke in front of his family, but he couldn’t fool his mother. He sneaked by smoking out his upstairs window, not realizing that an updraft from the valley simply carried the evidence around to her bedroom. Academically, he continued his nosedive, and his parents sent him to the Stony Brook School, an all-male private school in New York. There he kept a brotherly eye on Bunny, nearby in the Stony Brook Girls School. Both of them were miserably homesick, and in an effort to cheer themselves up, he visited her on a regular basis, bringing her candy he bought with money he earned from selling popcorn on campus. When his parents realized how much he loved his home and the mountains, they did not insist that he return to Stony Brook his senior year.

  Instead, he enrolled in Charles D. Owen, the local public high school, where he struggled with his studies and the gang of students who thought it great sport to goad the shaggy, denim-clad fellow widely known as Billy Graham’s son. One classmate, determined to harass him into violence, sat behind him in class and jiggled the desk every time Franklin attempted to write. After repeated warnings, Franklin finally jumped to his feet and took a big swing, knocking the young man over the teacher’s desk. Moments later Franklin was in the principal’s office. He was expeditiously sent home. “He walked in, grinning like a possum totally unrepentant,” Ruth recalled.

  He wasn’t exactly a calming influence in the house. Franklin tormented Ned unmercifully, and fired his shotgun out his bedroom window, and set stereo speakers in front of the intercom to rock the house with Janis Joplin. In summer, he stayed out late. Again his mother did not confront him. “I’d come in at one or two o’clock,” Franklin recalled. “And her light would still be on. But she never would get on me for being up late.” It was often at these times, when she was calmly waiting for him, that they would have their most meaningful talks. But sometimes her presence annoyed him.

  “You only wait up so you can smell my breath,” he accused her one night.

  “If that’s how you feel,” she replied, “I’ll hit the sack. I’m tired.”

  At least in Franklin’s mind, it was sometimes his mother, not God, who was doing the “chasing.” One Sunday afternoon at lunch the family was discussing spirits and wondering if it were possible that some Christians returned to earth after death, no longer restrained by bodily limitations. “Too many people who have lost loved ones,” Ruth remarked, “have said that at times they have had such a sense of their loved one’s presence as if they were breathing down their necks.”

  “I sure hope you don’t die,” Franklin pointedly remarked to her.

  In the main, Ruth allowed him to do as he pleased, making it clear that she expected much from him regardless of how little he expected from himself. Her attitude about sin in general was that people who break the law or one of God’s commandments should confess and accept the punishment. Then they should accept forgiveness. If her son chose to be irresponsible, he had to live with consequences, such as feeling cranky and exhausted when his mother awakened him at 7:30 each morning by banging a broom against the copper stove hood below his second-story bedroom. When that failed, she dumped his ashtray on his head.

  He began locking his door. Ruth did not believe she had met her match. She climbed onto the roof one morning and crept across shingles. A tin cup of water was clamped in her teeth and she planned to dash it in his face when she reached the open window. Franklin heard her coming and feigned sleep until she was just outside his room. He slammed down the sash and grinned at her through the glass.

  16

  CHAPTER

  Other Children

  THE MOTHER

  Ruth picks some peculiar ones.

  —Pete Post, Chief of Police, Montreat

  There were her “other children,” waifs who drifted, lost in life, like dandelion seeds. She had an eye for them, snatching them in midflight for a moment, more a mother than a missionary, and a tender friend, not a judge. The years, really, had not changed the heartbroken little girl who buried Tar Baby beside the compound wall and dug him up three weeks later to see how he was doing.

  Her empathy was her weakness, for often she involved herself with people who were beyond help. No matter how often they fell, her optimism was unflagging. No matter how often they took advantage of her kindness, she did not see it.

  On Wednesday, May 18, 1966, the Grahams boarded the Queen Mary in New York and set sail for the month-long crusade at Earls Court, London. The afternoon was cool, the clouds ponderous over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge as the ship passed under it toward the open sea. The night before the ship docked Ruth tossed anxiously in their cabin, sleep eluding her until 4:30 A.M. when she dreamed they were in the Earls Court stadium and only thirty people had appeared for the first service.

  As they prepared to dock in Southampton on Tuesday, May 24, seventy-five reporters boarded. Unlike the mob twelve years before, this crew was courteous and friendly. From Southampton the Grahams traveled by train to Waterloo Station in London, where they were greeted by a large, cheering crowd. Many had first heard Billy at Harringay. The people sang spirited hymns as a convertible whisked the famous couple away.

  “It’s hard just to smile and wave when there’s a lump in your throat,” Ruth wrote at the time. “It would be all right if only they wouldn’t sing. Then memories of Harringay come crowding back and that overwhelming sense of the presence of God. And you know you should be down there among them, lost in the crowd, singing with them … not riding in a convertible.”

  On May 28, a warm, cloudless Saturday, the Grahams arrived in Oxford at midafternoon, commotion rippling from them as they were besieged by newsmen, well-wishers, and the curious. Oxonians glanced up quizzically as the party moved along narrow, winding streets, where flower vendors peddled paper-wrapped roses, and pale, bespectacled dons pedaled bicycles. They passed dark, towering churches with headstones leaning and stained from centuries of rain and wind. Europeans, Africans with crisp English accents, ragged beggars, and tourists teemed beneath spires.

  The next day Billy was to speak at Saint Aldate’s, an evangelical Anglican church. A long line of Oxford students wrapped around the imposing stone building, some still in their evening clothes from revels the night before. Others were passing out humanist tracts. As he went through the crowd to the church door he was escorted by hecklers. “I’m glad to have you here,” Billy affably let them know as he passed into the cool silence of the sanctuary. Afterward he and Ruth drove to Cambridge, stopping midway for a picnic lunch,
for once alone. “The press,” Ruth wrote, “missed two good shots of Bill. One of him going into the Ladies restroom by mistake and the other, his hat brim turned down all around, raincoat on … [as he leaned] on the fence like an old farmer.”

  He spoke at Great Saint Mary’s that night, and again, hundreds of students were queued outside, many there to make sport of this American evangelist who dared to violate their refined minds with his simple message.

  “I bless you in the name of Billy Graham,” a young man wearing his shirt backward chanted as he sprinkled water on his friends. In the hall next to the church residents played their radios full volume until the police intervened. A row of students sitting behind Ruth whispered insults about her husband throughout the service. The vicar forgot to turn on the pulpit light and Billy could not see to read one word of his notes.

  Abroad, Ruth was no different from the Sunday school teacher at home. It was the young cynics, the confused, often troublesome people who drew her.

  On Sunday, June 12, her husband was to speak at a church in Brixton. She sat in the family pew of the elegant woman beside her, a patrician and an acknowledged force in the congregation. Two young men, bearded, wearing blue jeans, their arms tattooed, moved down the aisle and stood with uncertainty just yards from Ruth. She glanced at them empathetically and later wrote in her journal, “I wished so that someone would welcome them warmly and offer them seats.” The woman next to her stared at the men with obvious suspicion and disapproval.

  “That kind sometimes disturbs meetings,” she whispered to Ruth.

  Heads turned as Billy appeared at an entrance. He walked down the aisle, stopping long enough to shake hands with the two young men and welcome them. The moment he moved on, the woman instructed an usher to show the men out.