Tall, handsome, clean-cut, athletic, Billy Graham had clear blue eyes and seemed even younger in person than in his photograph. He stood erect, shoulders squared. It was early October, and the place was packed. In fact, Graham’s stay had been extended from three weeks to eight—not bad for his first major outing.
Halfway through his sermon, I got mad. When I heard that everyone was a sinner, I got defensive. I knew I was, but I didn’t need him to remind me. I walked out.
By the way, the sermon had nothing to do with science.
Cynthia worked on me all the next day, trying to convince me to go back. I finally gave in—for her—and said, “Okay, I’ll go back, but under the condition that when he says ‘Every head bowed and every eye closed,’ we get out.” She agreed.
The next time, there was again no mention of science—only sin. And it seemed directed right at me. My confusion and guilt were overwhelming. And yet I couldn’t stop listening. Every time I raised an objection in my mind, Graham seemed to sense it and answered me.
When I heard the agreed-upon trigger words I grabbed Cynthia’s hand and stood to leave. I squeezed along the row between knees and chair backs on my way to the center aisle. But at the same time I couldn’t stop thinking about my promises—and I hesitated. I knew what I should do, but I didn’t want to do it. I was afraid. And for that, I felt ashamed of myself. But when I reached the aisle I could no longer resist. I just let my instinct take over and instead of leaving I went forward.
Turning toward the stage was the crucial moment, the fork in the road. At the stage I fell to my knees, emotionally overcome. I asked for forgiveness and invited Christ into my life.
Although I now believe that my life had unfolded according to God’s plan, at the time I was as good as thinking: If you’re there and you can help me, I am ready to accept your help because I am out of options. I’ve tried everything else I can think of. Nothing has worked.
I had nothing left to lose.
That admission itself was the beginning of my recovery. I’d always known that I’d come home from the war with a problem, but I had never been willing to ask for help—from anyone.
But now I had, and my whole body and spirit felt different. Wonderful. Calm. Free. I wanted to keep feeling that way. My life of training and commitment to a goal kicked in. I wanted to survive and somehow I knew that to maintain this sudden inner peace I would have to give up the habits I’d developed that weren’t working. I was willing to give it my all.
I’VE OFTEN BEEN asked what that moment of transformation feels like. Epiphany, revelation, call it what you want: It’s different for everyone. But for me … I felt weightless. Suddenly calm. I was no longer fighting myself. And my burdens lifted.
When I was racing, I had no idea in advance if I’d run great or poorly, if I’d win or lose. And this even though I won often. Each time I’d get a major attack of butterflies as I walked out onto the track. I was actually more anxious when running against Glenn Cunningham and other great runners than I was approaching my first enemy target during the war. The only way to deal with the anxiety was to accept that it would always be there—and to remember that as soon as the starting gun went off I was 100 percent committed, and on automatic pilot. My training took hold and only one question remained to be answered: How am I going to survive this race and win?
That’s what I experienced on my knees. Butterflies. And the questions: What am I doing? Can I do it? Can I survive this new challenge? The moments before I turned toward the stage on which Billy Graham stood felt like the seconds before a race. Whatever was going to happen, I wanted to get it over with. I wanted to stop waiting in the starting blocks. In a race the starter says, “On your mark, get set …” and if he holds that “get set” just a tiny bit too long, your already tense muscles tense more, but you can’t move. It really makes you uptight.
I just wanted the starter to shoot the gun so that my training could take over.
The revelation was that I had to be the starter.
IN A DAZE, yet relieved, I was led to a prayer room behind the curtain. I spoke quietly to a counselor. He said that I needed to “stick with the Lord” and not try to stand alone any longer—a tough requirement since most of my life I had depended only on myself. He also made it clear that I was just at the beginning, and that the act of changing my life had been just one moment. I would face many challenges in the moments and days to come—a situation that is hardly exclusive to faith-based transformations. Think of the doctor saying “Quit smoking or you’ll die.” Transitions are unbalancing. Cautionary. Disorienting. I was told that I’d be tempted by my old ways and have doubts. “You’re like a child. It’s not unusual for negative influences to appear just after a conversion, saying, ‘What you did was a lot of baloney.’ Your friends might question you and think you’ve gone off the deep end. But the more you get into it, the stronger your roots will grow.”
Soon, I found Cynthia waiting in the audience and she threw her arms around me. I looked at her and knew in my heart, as if it had always been so, that I was through drinking, through smoking, through with everything. My lifelong desire for revenge had evaporated. I didn’t know what the future held—would I be rich, poor, whatever?—but that didn’t matter. “I’m through with my past life,” I told Cynthia. “I’m through.”
I believed I had found what would work for me.
WHEN WE GOT home I immediately poured all my liquor down the drain, though not a three-hundred-year-old bottle of cognac that my father-in-law, an importer, had given us. I simply returned it. I threw my cigarettes in the garbage.
When I awoke the next morning I was stunned to realize that I hadn’t dreamed about the Bird. And to this day I haven’t. In fact, I forgave him because the ability to forgive is a major result of my transformation. Imagine your doctor cutting out the hating part of your personality. I still remember the facts, of course, but since then the violent emotions are gone. I had clung to the idea that hating the Bird was the same as getting even, but I knew then that whoever I hated didn’t know my feelings, and could not be hurt. I only hurt myself.
THE DAYS TO come brought the predicted challenges. For example, parties. Remember, I’d come home from the war and Hollywood had opened itself to me. Every night we’d go out. There were free dinners and drinks. I took full advantage. But now I wouldn’t drink, even though my buddies, who didn’t understand the nature of how I’d changed, urged me to join in.
I’d say, “No way,” and was so enthusiastic about my new life that I’d eagerly try to explain it in a jumble of words.
I remember being at the home of a man who’d invented backache pills. I was sitting on the floor talking to a group of actresses who had flocked around me because they’d all listened to Billy Graham, and they knew that he’d made big headlines in the Hearst papers because of three men who had come forward: me, Jim Vaus (the gangster Mickey Cohen’s wiretapper), and Stuart Hamblen (one of radio’s first singing cowboys). But the host’s sons kept picking on me: “C’mon, hey, Louis, you won’t last two weeks.” I finally went to the kitchen and told the host, “Well, I did what I could do.” I thanked him for the party and went home.
The next day the host called me to apologize. He said, “When you left, several of the guys said, ‘Man, I wish I could do what Zamperini did.’ ”
His call gave me new strength and vigor. I’d learned something important. I decided to preach less and instead just live my life as an example of my faith so that anyone could tell the difference between the past and present.
These moments were tests. I had friends who actually watched me for a year to see if I was just acting. My buddies said, “He can’t stick it out, not with everything he’s done.”
After a year, when they saw that I was still on my new path and seemed much happier, they started to believe me that change was possible. Harry Read was one. He finally came forward himself, and told me, “I just wasn’t sure, Louis. Knowing you the way I do, I just couldn
’t believe it. But I’ve watched you, and believe you’re sincere.”
THE BIBLE WARNS that a smooth sea never made a good sailor. I’m sure all faiths express their own version of this tenet. Nothing happens overnight. The picture painted by the well-meaning and overenthusiastic is that after a conversion God gives the new believer a steady diet of happiness and nothing can go wrong. That’s not true. On the contrary, like every other sincere person who is striving to believe in a new way of life—however they get there—in spite of having so long lived another way, with a mind conditioned to cynicism, I had to go through a period of despondency, doubt, and painful self-examination. Deep meanings aren’t immediately revealed because, frankly, like trying to teach calculus to a second-grader, you’re not able to handle it. I remember once hearing a man brag, “Ever since I became a Christian, my life’s been a bowl of cherries.” I turned to him and said, “You know what you need? You need Christ.” In other words, a dose of humility and reality.
All major changes take daily work. It’s not happy magic all the time.
CYNTHIA WAS STRONGER than I was, faith-wise. Her support was a big help in my early days when I made my conversion public, and was up against doubters and naysayers. She would always say, “Have faith. God, in his own time, will work things out.”
And, I have to tell the truth for me, they always did seem to work out.
Know When You’ve Done All You Can Do
_______
I once spoke at a church and a couple who attended regularly got up and walked out after twenty minutes. After the service was over the pastor called them and asked, “Why did you walk out?”
“We come to church to hear about Jesus,” they said. “We heard about the war. We didn’t hear about Jesus.”
“You should have waited until the end of the talk,” he said.
Another time, I spoke at an Optimist International meeting—an association of almost three thousand clubs around the world dedicated to “Bringing Out the Best in Kids”—and this time mentioned Christianity to start with. A man stood up and said, “I didn’t come here to be preached to,” and he walked out.
Oh, well.
I tell my story just as it happened: I’m a rascal, I’m in trouble, I’m an athlete, I’m in the war, I’m in trouble, I’m a POW, I come home. I fall apart. And then as I near the climax I know people are asking themselves, “I wonder what’s coming next?” I tell them about what happened, but I don’t preach.
I USED TO struggle with my own eagerness.
Back in the prop airplane days of 1957, I was in Chicago, waiting for a plane. My flight was overbooked and the airline wanted volunteers to give up their seats. They called my name. At the desk I said, “Look, I’ve got a meeting tonight in Oakland and I cannot miss that flight.”
I returned to my seat. The guy next to me said, “Oh, so you’re Louis Zamperini?”
“I am,” I said.
Then he heard his name on the PA. I knew it; he was a famous tennis player. “I can’t let them bounce me,” he said, as he stood. “I’ve got to be in Hawaii tomorrow at noon.”
We sat around waiting to board and my mind got to working. Oh boy, this famous tennis player, I’d love to win him for the Lord.
Wrong idea. Self-serving. I just wanted to get the glory and the credit because he was well-known.
We ended up next to each other on the plane and I started talking. He clammed up. I felt terrible. I grabbed a magazine and pretended to read it while I prayed silently to myself: Boy, I really messed this up. I’m sorry, I was just overbearing. I’m not going to say another word to him, not another word; he’ll have to do the talking.
For thirty minutes I just sat there. Finally, he turned to me and said, “Louis, there’s one thing that’s always bothered me about the Bible.” I forget the question, but I answered it and went back to my magazine. A few minutes later he asked me another question. I answered it and went back to reading.
The plane finally landed in Oakland, California. We walked into the terminal and exchanged pleasantries. He still had to wait about an hour for his flight to Hawaii. I headed for the exit. Before I got there he ran up to me: “Louis,” he said, “if I become a Christian, does that mean I have to become a missionary or a preacher?”
“No,” I said. “God needs laymen just as much.”
THIS ALSO HAPPENED to me with the actress Susan Hayward. I was speaking at an Easter Sunrise Service at the Van Nuys Baptist Church, when we called for anyone who wanted to come forward to come forward. The actress Susan Hayward did.
Susan had been married to the actor Jess Barker, a friend of mine. They had fraternal twin boys. But that ten-year marriage was turbulent and ended in 1954. During that decade she’d been nominated for three best actress Oscars, and would get two other nominations—and win in 1959 for I Want to Live.
Apparently Susan wasn’t happy. In April 1956 she tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills. I was driving up to the local mountains when I heard the news on the radio. She was in the old Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, on Fountain Avenue. I felt an urge to turn around and come home. I asked my wife, “Do you think I should try to see her?” and she said yes.
I drove back to Hollywood and parked near the Fountain Avenue Baptist Church. I knew the minister. I asked him to pray with me about my instinct to try to see Hayward. I didn’t want to make a mistake. We concluded that I should.
The hospital lobby was jammed with reporters and cameras. She was listed under the name Mary Brennan, and no one was allowed to see Susan, not even the head of her studio, or her agent.
I got the receptionist’s attention. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m here to see Susan Hayward,” I said, very softly.
“Well, so is everybody else.”
“I know,” I said, “Please call her room, and tell her it’s Louis Zamperini. If she won’t see me, I’ll leave immediately.”
The receptionist hesitated and was about to say no.
“But if you don’t call her, I’m going to stay here all night,” I added.
“Well, I’ll call,” she said, “but it won’t do any good.”
I appreciated that. She called. I got to go right up.
I slipped by the press and made for Susan’s room. I knocked and walked in, expecting to see a depressed wreck. Instead, she looked great, lying in bed with the blanket pulled up to her chin.
“Well, hello, Louis,” she said, cheerfully, then sat up.
We made a little small talk and then I got right to the point. “Why did you do this?” I asked. She didn’t have a clear answer. The press later decided that she’d just been trying to get attention. But I took her seriously and said, “God has spared your life for a purpose.” I wanted to let her know that the purpose was her salvation.
Susan’s response caught me off guard: “Oh, well, I know that,” she said. “God spared my life so I can make millions of people happy with my acting.”
I didn’t know what to say. We discussed what particular Bible verses meant, but every time I got close to discussing her walk down the church aisle, she deflected my question.
I wanted to press, but I’d done all I could.
“Don’t feel too bad about my salvation,” she said. “At least you taught me something—that I can ask God for whatever I need.”
THE BIBLE SAYS to go into the world and preach the gospel, and some take this more seriously than others. But—and this has always been important to me—it doesn’t say anything about forcing it down someone’s throat. I can’t say, “Hey, you’ve got to accept Him.” And I don’t.
Today, we have too many die-hard fundamentalists the world over. You can see the hate in their eyes when someone doesn’t agree with everything they say. A dangerous few go to terrible lengths to spread their beliefs, including violence. I’ve met plenty of people who rejected Christ, yet it’s always some guy trying to spread the word of one radical ideology or another who gets mad and madder because he be
lieves he has to score a conversion, like it’s a game he has to win.
If you go to the door and get rejected you’re supposed to kick the dust off your shoes and move on, not try to kick down the door. You’ve done your job.
All you can do is plant the seed—whether it’s about faith, some life lessons, or setting an example—and water it by answering any questions you’re asked.
The rest isn’t up to you.
The Gangster and the Gospel
_______
Jim Vaus was gangster Mickey Cohen’s wiretapper. Like me, he became a Christian in November 1949, after listening to Billy Graham. There’s a picture of me, Vaus, Stuart Hamblen (the singing cowboy), and Graham floating around out there.
Cohen was a juvenile delinquent, boxer, and gambler. He helped Bugsy Siegel set up the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and worked with him until Bugsy was murdered in 1947 when the mob became unhappy with his property management skills. Or so the story goes.
With Siegel gone, Cohen became the number-one mobster in Los Angeles, and as such was locked in a constant battle with Police Chief William Parker.
I knew Mickey Cohen. In those days, if you were a first-class athlete or a movie star, you’d meet guys like him all the time. But this relationship was more interesting than most.
THERE’S A PICTURE in Devil at My Heels of me meeting my wife-to-be at the Burbank airport just before we got married. Cynthia was the most beautiful girl in the world to me—and Mickey Cohen loved to meet athletes and pretty girls. I guess Cynthia and I satisfied all his requirements because Cohen told Jim Vaus, “I want to meet Zamperini.” Recently converted, Vaus was happy to do it, hoping I might interest Cohen in a new way of life.
Cohen invited Cynthia and me to lunch. We met at the Brown Derby, the restaurant shaped like a hat, which by then had been physically moved from its original location up the street to 3377 Wilshire Boulevard. You walked around the rim to get in.
We had a nice conversation about our lives, USC football, my war story, and a little bit of Christianity. He wanted to know everything. He’d also say, “Pardon me,” and get up about every ten minutes to use the bathroom. I thought maybe he had intestinal problems, but it was his hands. He was germ phobic.
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