Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  “What is it like to be married to him?”

  “Is he hard to live with?”

  “Are you jealous of all the attention he gets?”

  She was gracious, even humorous from time to time. But Ruth disliked being followed and quizzed. She was not keen on the elegant teas and black-tie dinners of London society, or of the special tours of English museums and landmarks. The couple was presented formally and privately to royalty, and on March 10 they lunched at St. James’s Palace with the colonel and officers of the Coldstream Guards.

  No matter how interesting, the social engagements were demanding and taxing. Suddenly, because Billy was a famous evangelist, he and Ruth were supposed to know how to dress and which fork to use when in the company of dukes and duchesses, earls and countesses. A week after their visit with the guards at St. James’s Palace, an aristocratic couple invited Ruth to tour the Wallace Collection at Hertford House, Manchester Square. As she studied the objets d’art she made the mistake of asking the prickly curator what Richard Wallace had done “for a living.”

  “What do you mean, what did he do?” he coolly asked her.

  “Well,” Ruth explained uneasily, “I was taken to Kenwood and they claimed it was the home of the Guinness Beer people …”

  “No, Madame,” he interrupted, “Mr. Wallace did not have to work. He was a landed gentleman.”

  There were other adjustments to make. Entertainment was beginning to infiltrate religion, and it would take some getting used to on Ruth’s part. One of the highlights of the Greater London crusade was to be the guest appearance of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Ruth was happy enough to have the legendary cowboy couple come until she learned that they were also bringing Trigger. “I think it wrong to have a horse in a religious service,” she wrote in her diary in early March.

  Ruth was accustomed to simplicity in worship. Horses and rhinestones grated on her sensibilities, and she was repelled by the presence of television cameras in the faces of people responding to altar calls. She understood the need for publicity, much of which was generated by the crusade committee in the form of billboards and banners, but she shrank from it. Accustomed to the quiet, unassuming tactics she had seen in the mission field, it never would be her modus operandi to entertain people to Christ. She would also learn soon enough that because a certain method was jolting to her did not mean it was intrinsically bad.

  She had to apologize silently to Trigger, for example. On March 20, the cloudy Saturday that Roy, Dale, and Trigger performed, forty thousand children filled the dog track next door to Harringay Arena. Trigger danced and pranced and captured the youngsters’ attention. Then Roy and Dale gave moving testimonies. The movie star couple was recognizable everywhere they went, and as Ruth observed what this had done to their personal lives, it made her more unsure. On Sunday, March 21, Roy and Dale invited the Grahams to dine with them at the Savoy Hotel and because of privacy problems had to have the meal sent to their room.

  They ate on a pink damask-covered table as a spring breeze gently swayed curtains in the luxurious suite. Beyond the open window, Cleopatra’s Needle pierced the sky above the Embankment. Roy told them he had just quit smoking, because of his health and because he knew he was constantly watched and emulated. He opined with a smile and crinkled eyes that he did not wish to set a bad example. For their entire week in London, they would have to hide when they weren’t onstage. “Poor Roy and Dale are literally prisoners of fame,” Ruth wrote at the time. “I wouldn’t trade places with them for one billion dollars. I said billion. One little bit of fame is bad enough.”

  Hillary was a middle-aged nurse, a Christian who sang in the Salvation Army Songsters. Her husband was a good man, honest and industrious at his blue-collar job and kindly and faithful at home. They lived amid gardens and dunes in Southport, on the Irish Sea.

  They had heard about the Greater London crusade for months and had tucked away shillings that they might attend. It was to be a welcome vacation of shops in the morning and services at night. They purchased their train tickets, made hotel reservations, and the days passed in quiet, happy excitement. One week before they were to leave, the husband became suddenly and violently ill. Hillary held him as he died.

  With him went her will to go on. All religion and logic were devoured by a grief that daily sucked her mind away. With bags and ticket she boarded the train, lumbering two hundred miles southeast to London, her empty stare fixed to a window. She visited shops. She attended services. In a mechanical ritual she lived out the last scene that she and her husband had written together. Hillary intended, when it was over, to die.

  But something nudged her during the service on her last night at Harringay. When the evangelist invited people to come forward, she rose heavily to her feet. Slowly, she followed hundreds of unfamiliar backs, watching the drab wool shapes bob and wind in front of her, vaguely, through the isolation of depression. She was led under the bleachers to the left of the platform and down a cold, narrow corridor. Midway to a tent called the Inquiry Room, where new converts were to be counseled, she could go no farther.

  This was where Ruth found her, pressed against the wall, a woman with a slack, empty face. Twice Ruth asked if she could help and was greeted with silence.

  “I should so love to help,” Ruth gently coaxed again.

  Hillary looked at her, then away. Finally, in a monotone, she told her story. When she had finished, she bitterly demanded, “Why are so many horrible creatures allowed to pollute the earth years without end when a virtual saint is snatched away without warning, without explanation?”

  “What could I say?” Ruth wrote in her journal that night. “I with a husband, so happy and content. My words came like dust.”

  She prayed with the woman and copied her address. She would write to her, she thought, for in person she had failed. Ruth feared that she had failed ever since she had arrived in London almost a month earlier. Each night she joined the six hundred counselors and the dozen interpreters in the Inquiry Room, waiting to be used, secretly hoping she would be ignored. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help. It was simply that she felt she couldn’t.

  Such a strange assortment of men and women converged upon that place each night. Dancers, actors, countesses, miners, people who had made profound wrecks of their lives came and were desperate to talk. An undertaker moved by Billy’s sermon on Lazarus appeared. An escaped prisoner wandered back to turn himself in to God and the police. A Russian nobleman who spoke no English wandered back, and when he was asked by an interpreter how he could have understood the message well enough to respond to it, he replied, “When I entered this place I was overwhelmed by the presence of God. How can I find Him?” A towheaded little boy came after running to Billy and asking him breathlessly, “Mr. Graham, could you tell me where they are finding God?”3

  Some, however, treated the Inquiry Room like the personnel window of a department store. It was the place to register complaints. On March 23, a smartly dressed woman approached Ruth, not realizing that this woman wearing the white silk ribbon with “Advisor” printed on it was Billy Graham’s wife.

  “Can I be of help?” Ruth asked.

  “Well, not really,” the woman replied tartly. “But you could answer one question for me. Why do Billy Graham and his team stay in such an expensive hotel?” She was a beauty consultant in a fashion shop and all of her clerks had been talking about it. “A room costs ten pounds a night,” she added smugly.

  Ruth patiently explained that the rooms actually cost two pounds ten, and she hoped the woman would walk away without asking how she knew. But the woman asked, and the blood rushed to her face when Ruth reluctantly told her.

  As Ruth’s first month in England drew to a close, two miseries nagged at the back of her mind. “I don’t know where one single contact I have made over here has resulted in one single conversion to Christ,” she wrote. “Not one; and I get so lonesome for the children I can hardly stand it.” Her depression was acute at ni
ght. She didn’t dare look at photographs of the children or conjure up their faces in her mind. She would turn out the lights and quickly pray, “Please take care of each one,” before she climbed into bed and pulled covers up to her ears.

  On March 27, she instructed a team member to purchase her a return ticket. The first month had passed and she was going home at last. When she told Billy her plans, he canceled them.

  It wasn’t completely in jest when he warned team members, “If you get her the ticket, you’re fired.”

  He needed her. She was his most trusted confidante. He was emotionally dependent on her. A year after Harringay when he was in Glasgow alone, he wrote her:

  I don’t have to tell you that you are in my mind every moment and that I love you with all my heart, and miss you so much that it hurts…. Naturally I think of you a thousand times a day and each little experience I wish I could share with you. Last night I told Lome Sandy and Charlie Riggs to gather all the stories for me daily. I said, Last year every evening Ruth would bring me a number of stories of conversions of people who had come to Christ. I don’t have her this year to report to me every night; therefore I am depending on you fellows. You see what an important place you had on the team. Your letters have been a balm in Gilead. They have given me inspiration, quieted my nerves. They bring me so close to you. Be assured that my love grows for you every day and I miss you more than I ever thought I could miss any person.

  The thought of staying in London another two months was awful. Ruth was certain she was more needed at home. “If I’ve got to stay,” she wrote March 30, “I wish I could be used. I’ve told the Lord I want nothing to be in His way of making use of me if He can.” On April 1, Billy wavered and told her that she could leave. Overjoyed, she telephoned her children and told them that she would be home in a week. She packed her bags and immersed herself in various activities, trying to push away a lingering uneasiness that irritated her like a pebble in a shoe.

  The next few days were raw, the sky solid with clouds. On April 4, she left her hotel alone and walked to Hyde Park, where she found a small crowd assembled at the Speakers’ Corner, listening to Donald Soper (now Lord Soper), a Socialist Methodist preacher and well-known orator. He was notorious for his skill at making fools of those who dared to challenge him.

  “This person says he believes the Bible from cover to cover!” he roared, pointing an accusing finger at a young man. “He looks like the type that would believe the Bible from cover to cover!”

  Ruth worked her way through the laughing mob, moving closer to Soper just in time to hear him fire at her husband. She wasn’t surprised. Billy Graham’s face watched traffic from billboards and rode by on the sides of city buses. He was a target in political and religious circles and the butt of jokes in nightclubs.

  “I have no patience with those who preach sudden conversion,” Soper shouted. “To think an entire life can be changed in a half hour’s time is a diversion of Christian truth!”

  Ruth found his diatribe more depressing than annoying. “One had the feeling he was siding with the laughing unbelievers in his ridicule of simple-hearted Christians,” she wrote. “It was time to close and just then I felt some drops of rain. A great black cloud had piled up overhead and it was as if Heaven wept to see a man of God (supposedly) stand and sow doubts in the hearts already full of bewilderment.”

  Dressed in a black-and-white-checked wool coat, bareheaded and without an umbrella, she hurried toward a nearby hotel for shelter. As she walked briskly along the rain-spattered pavement, she realized that a young man had fallen into step with her. As she turned a corner, he turned with her. Then he mumbled something.

  “Pardon?” Ruth asked.

  “A pity the rain had to break it up,” he said. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to my hotel,” she replied in a clipped tone, quickening her pace.

  He tenaciously followed her as she crossed a wide, busy street, darting perilously in front of cars.

  “An American, huh?” he asked cheerfully, ignoring her obvious discouragement.

  “That’s right.”

  “Would you have time for a cup of coffee?”

  “No thank you,” she said. “I’d better get back to my hotel.”

  “What about tomorrow night? Are you busy?”

  “Yes. I’ll be going to Harringay,” she said, and suddenly filled with mischief, she asked, “Couldn’t you come?”

  “I suppose I could,” the man said with uncertainty. “And how about Tuesday night?”

  “I’ll be going to Harringay again.”

  “Again?” he asked, incredulous. “You won’t be going to Harringay every night next week, will you?”

  “Every night.”

  After a long, uncertain silence, he asked, “You wouldn’t be connected with Billy Graham, would you?”

  “His wife,” she said as the man fled.

  The response was typical when men tried to pick her up. They would do their best to strike up a conversation with this handsome woman wearing a wedding ring. The instant her identity became known, the gentlemen ran.

  Though Billy had given Ruth permission to return to their home in North Carolina, she knew he did not want her to go. For the next few days she packed and unpacked, unable to decide what to do, and on April 5 she received a letter from a retired missionary:

  Dear Mrs. Graham,

  Have just heard of your problem to stay with your husband or go to the four children and am praying.

  In case God says Stay, I feel constrained to send you a quotation from a friend’s letter to me many years ago when we had to let the last of our five leave us and we had to stay in China. She wrote, You have the right to ask the Mighty One to do more for them than He could if you were with them. Open thy mouth wide.

  He has been faithful to the promises and kept and used all five. I am writing this at the request of our youngest, who says she can testify to the fact that the Lord didn’t let them down!

  If the Lord says, Go, He will care for your husband better than you can, and as your choice is His, He surely will make that will clear.

  That night the answer came to Ruth as she sat in the arena, the din of voices rising and falling at the dog track next door, a distant roar of idiocy in a weary, wounded world. Less than a decade ago England had lost one-fourth of its wealth and sixty thousand civilians in the blitz. London had suffered a coal shortage and was still in a brownout. Bombed-out buildings yawned from the cityscape like open sores. Only the wealthy wore bright clothing, most Englishmen drab and tattered like sparrows. The House of Commons demanded Winston Churchill’s resignation and debated whether Britain should manufacture the hydrogen bomb. Voices rose and fell in rhythm with the orbits of dogs.

  It wasn’t an epiphany exactly, but as Ruth sat high in the gallery, thoughts and feelings sifted through and finally focused. It spoke for itself, she wrote. “The average man does not realize his peril. He fiddles gaily on while Rome burns about his ears. It’s the gravity of the whole situation that gives me pause. If Bill feels he needs me if I can in any way be of help over here perhaps I should stay.”

  She canceled her reservation. Her problem wasn’t her effectiveness. It was looking for visible results. Her husband could see the fruits of his ministry immediately in the crowds that gathered below his podium. For Ruth, there would rarely be instant satisfaction. It wasn’t the nature of her mission. Yet there were those priceless, wondrous moments when she got her reward. Twelve years later, again in London, a creamy envelope was delivered to her hotel room. It was postmarked Southport, and a modest script flowed in lines straight and centered as though someone had taken great pains to be neat:

  Dear Mrs. Graham!

  I’m so happy to know you are in England. You won’t remember me but in your big London Campaign I came down to hear Dr. Graham. My husband had died suddenly the week before and I came to London to end everything. But in the meeting as I listened to the message God spoke to me. You wer
e so kind and understanding it helped me so much to know, even in your busy life, you could think and pray for me!

  My life is busy am still singing in the Salvation Army Songsters and trying to love and serve my Lord.

  Hillary

  On April 11, the Grahams drove eighty miles south for a weekend near Beachy Head in East Sussex. It was a rare moment of pause in their frenetic lives. The next morning, while the clock ticked steadily beyond church time, they ate breakfast and strolled along the white chalk cliffs. The thick turf ended suddenly and the sheer rock cascaded six hundred feet into the English Channel, its placid waters heaving lethargically, twinkling like a multifaceted crystal. Behind them rolled the Sussex Downs where William the Conqueror had invaded England some nine centuries before.

  “We lay on our stomachs and peered over the edge, giddy from the dizzying height, and watched the sea gulls wheeling and preening themselves in the sun and nesting in the jagged rocks below. The water lapped gently on the rocky beach,” Ruth wrote. The peaceful rhythms of the English Channel and the soft buffeting of the sun beckoned them to linger, but they had to leave for an evening church service to hear an Irish evangelist. The peaceful mood quickly dissolved when Billy reminded her of the Irish Christians’ disapproval of makeup. Reluctantly, she removed what little she had on. That night she ventilated her feelings in her journal, defining a philosophy that she would later pass on to her own children.

  I’ll just pray God will open Bill’s eyes and heart to realize what a stumbling block a Christian’s appearance can be to the unconverted, and not be too concerned with offending the saints. How difficult it is for a girl to see anything attractive in Christianity when Christians look so unattractive. It has become a matter of deep conviction with me. We Christians, through frowning upon relatively harmless playthings like makeup, bleached hair, nail polish, etc., make the Christian life a bugbear to young converts instead of a joy. I think it is especially easy for [people] to mistake their prejudices for their convictions.