Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  On April 16, Good Friday, Billy preached in Hyde Park to more than forty thousand people. Ruth avoided the platform that had been built for the event, and wandered through the crowd, pausing every few dozen steps to listen to the orators spontaneously spawned during such services.

  “Billy Graham wouldn’t be over here if he weren’t making money,” pontificated a young man with a crew cut and thick glasses. “You know he wouldn’t.”

  “It’s all a form of mass hysteria,” asserted his companion, a handsome, smooth-skinned Indian who punctuated each soft-spoken remark with delicate flutters of his poetic hands. “Six months after Mr. Graham’s gone it’s the same thing with Danny Kaye and the rest they’ll get over it.”

  By this time, dozens had gravitated toward the two men like aimless beads of water, forming a curious puddle at their feet. Ruth craned her neck, peeking through ears, shoulders, and collars.

  “Did you all see Mrs. Graham leave the platform?” the Indian asked the crowd.

  Heads nodded in unison. They had indeed seen someone vacate the platform, a former movie star named Colleen Townsend Evans, who had given her Christian testimony and then left for an appointment.

  “Did you notice how everyone was looking at her?” the Indian asked, his voice rising. “People aren’t looking at her husband, they aren’t interested in him. Everyone was trying to get pictures of her. They like to look at her just like they would a Hollywood movie star.”

  Ruth almost choked on laughter.

  Suddenly a woman standing directly in front of her launched into a defense, claiming that Mrs. Billy Graham wasn’t the one who had been sitting on the platform at all. On she chattered, turning and nodding here and there to address the crowd, her eyes finally resting on the amused woman behind her. “Why here’s Mrs. Graham now!” she exclaimed.

  The Indian smiled vacuously as Ruth stepped forward and shook his hand.

  On Monday evening, April 19, she would indeed find herself on the platform, thanks to her husband, who had announced, without collaborating, that she would deliver a brief message that night. He clued her in that morning, and the rest of the day she was miserable with anxiety, her hands trembling. Billy, meanwhile, paced the room, offering what he thought were helpful suggestions in an effort to soothe her.

  “Tell them about your childhood,” he suggested. “Didn’t you ever have any narrow escapes?”

  She thought a minute and then replied that once in Qingjiang she and the Talbot boys found a grenade and, thinking it was a metal pineapple or scale weight, hung it by its ring from a branch in the mulberry tree over the pet cemetery. The gateman recognized their new toy and alerted Dr. Bell, who wrapped the grenade in a paper sack and dropped in into a lake.

  “Listen,” Billy said, obviously unimpressed, “your audience went through the blitz, remember? Why don’t you just practice projecting yourself like Colleen Evans?”

  “Oh, joy!” Ruth exclaimed. “That’s a help. The closest I ever got to a Hollywood contract was a high school play in which I played the part of an old maid missionary.”

  That night, she moved to the podium, turned to her husband, her mouth strategically close to the microphone. “I could kill you,” she said. Her few words were overwhelmed by the huge swell of laughter.

  She was not at her best when shoved onto the stage. “Somehow,” she recorded later that night, “God helped me through without my throwing up on the platform or falling up the steps.”

  The third month of the Greater London crusade unreeled at the same frenetic pace as the previous two. Billy had lost fourteen pounds, and both he and Ruth were exhausted. The press had reversed their original cynical opinion of him. Several reporters had gone forward at altar calls. In part, the media’s change in attitude was due to his refusal to respond to criticism and insults. “I do not intend to get … into endless arguments and discussions with them,” he explained in a letter to Ruth the following year. “I am going to take the position of Nehemiah when he refused to go down and have a conference with his enemies. He said, ‘I’m too busy building the wall.’ We are too busy winning souls to Christ and helping build the church to go down and argue.”

  The final two services of the Greater London crusade were on May 22, a rainy Saturday. The first was in White City Stadium and seventy thousand people crowded the stands and playing field, with umbrellas and newspapers held over their heads. The second was at Wembley, where people had camped overnight in the raw weather, hoping to get in. American and British flags tossed in sharp winds high above Empire Stadium. At entrances, bobbies on horse and on foot directed traffic. Inside, a tremendous scoreboard blazed, “Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

  More than one hundred twenty thousand people packed the stadium. Ruth was seated behind the platform in the royal box with eleven members of the House of Commons, the mayor of the City of London and his wife, and the wife of Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher. Cold, damp air seeped through Ruth’s wicker chair and under the edge of the wool rug draped over her knees, chilling her to the marrow. Clouds were ponderous, the air shimmering as though the sky would split any moment and release a downpour. She surveyed the multicolored flecks stretching out before her. That this many people would file into a stadium and stand shoulder to shoulder to hear a man preach overwhelmed her and filled her eyes with tears.

  There was a sudden flurry of movement below as her husband and the Archbishop of Canterbury passed through an entrance, a pack of photographers surrounding them.

  “There ought to be a law stating how close a photographer can get to one’s face,” the mayor said in Ruth’s ear.

  Billy’s sermon was simple, the message of salvation clear. Realizing that the crowd and immensity of the stadium would prevent thousands of people from coming forward, if they wished, he asked those who wanted to make a decision for Christ to wave their handkerchiefs. Billy Graham bowed his head before a fluttering white sea.

  1. John Pollack, Billy Graham (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 116.

  2. Records of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Limited, Folder 1, Box 4, Collection 9, Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton, Illinois.

  3. One night after the service, Ruth ran into famous American photographer Carl Maddens. He was rushing out of the Inquiry Room as she was going in. Moved by what he had seen inside, he blurted, “Let me out of here! This is no place for a photographer.”

  11

  CHAPTER

  Little Piney Cove

  FAMILY ON THE MOUNTAIN

  I surrendered for the obscurity of the mission field. I thought the height and depth of surrender was to lose myself in heathen obscurity for God. I find my surrender was neither high enough nor deep enough.

  All summer I have rebelled at this publicity. I’ve climbed into a shell. I’ve tacked Private, No Admittance over my life, and it won’t work. I belong to God and He placed me here, and He will undertake for me and give me poise, grace, love, wisdom all I need to bring Him honour in the life He has appointed.

  —Ruth Bell Graham, summer of 1954

  After Harringay, Billy Graham’s life belonged to the public, and tourists descended upon the rustic house like pigeons on a monument.

  On Sunday afternoons in the summer of 1954, commercial buses lumbered through Black Mountain from local religious conference centers and approached the town gate, built of native stone with MONTREAT spelled in small white rocks. Visitors had to pass through its twin arches to come and go, and from time to time truck drivers lulled by thrumming diesel engines forgot themselves and crashed through the top of it. During the weeks before repairs, it always looked as if someone had knocked out the town’s teeth.

  Rumbling up Assembly Drive, the buses parked across the road from the Grahams’ house. Bus doors flapped open, disgorging curiosity seekers in a flood of rumpled suits, sunglasses, grins, and cameras. They flocked into the yard, shutters clicking. The evangelist’s fans picked splinters off the rustic gate, sn
atched stones, leaves, twigs, anything that might serve as a souvenir, and they summoned the Graham children to come outside and have their pictures taken.

  Ruth and Billy shielded the family from the public, refusing to place them on display for tourists or Billy’s audiences. Requests to parade the children to the platform to give their Christian testimonies were denied. Although Billy wasn’t home enough to shield them from his admirers and critics, Ruth was fiercely protective. Journalists were forbidden to interview the children and take their photographs, but she could not keep an eye on four rambunctious youngsters every minute. The summer of 1954 she began noticing that three-year-old Bunny, by nature more gregarious than her two sisters, had more change than her small allowance could explain. Questions were asked, and GiGi tattled: “Well, Mother, just watch the next time a bus stops.” The following Sunday, Ruth watched Bunny slip from the house to the front gate.

  “Are you Billy Graham’s little girl?” one of the tourists asked.

  She nodded innocently, her red pocketbook yawning at her wrist as she waited for the expected nickel or quarter in exchange for each picture taken. Her mother put a quick halt to Bunny’s entrepreneurial endeavors. Training nine-year-old GiGi was a different matter. “She was a timid, enchanting child with a proclivity for mischief. She tried harder to be good than anyone but couldn’t,” recalled Ruth, who very well may have been the genetic source of her oldest child’s spirit. GiGi’s sins included scampering through the backyard and tying a rope across Assembly Drive, then dispatching six-year-old Anne to try to collect a dollar toll from passing cars. Crouched behind a large rotten stump, GiGi hurled mud balls and crabapples at tourists. One afternoon when someone stopped her on the roadside and asked, “Could you please tell me where Billy Graham lives?” she sweetly replied, “Who’s he?”

  Ruth decided it was time to move when she discovered someone peeping over her bedroom windowsill while she was drying her hair one morning. She was jittery, exhausted, and unable to sleep. Her own responsibilities had dramatically increased from the growing demands on her husband’s life. He was too busy to manage the family budget, and the job had become hers. He no longer saw his paychecks, and Ruth was all too frequently summoned to the bank to take care of their overdrawn account. William Hickey, the president of Northwestern Bank, would telephone her himself:

  “Ruth, this is William Hickey …”

  “I’ll be right down,” she would interrupt.

  Handling the finances was further complicated by the reality that she not only had to make ends meet, but needed to remember that the world was watching every penny she spent. She could never indulge herself in jewelry or expensive clothing, even if the items were gifts, and refusing extravagant presents was sometimes quite troublesome. For example, when she requested that a group she had addressed send her thousand-dollar honorarium to an orphanage in Mexico, they complied and sent her a Neiman Marcus gift certificate for the amount. Ruth bought a gold bracelet and gave it to a relief organization with the stipulation that they sell it for twice its value and use the money for mission work in Third World countries.

  One Christmas, good friend and country music star June Carter Cash sent Ruth a hooded, full-length autumn haze mink coat (she had noticed Ruth shivering on crusade platforms). Ruth explained that she couldn’t exactly appear in public, much less on Billy’s platforms, wearing the fur.

  “Look,” June said, “wear it to the barn. Wear it to the car. Wear it out walking with Billy in the snow on the mountain. But stay warm!”

  Ruth wore the coat on the mountain or in the car, once appearing at a friend’s house on a bitterly cold day wearing the coat and a pair of asbestos gloves. Finally, with June’s permission, Ruth auctioned the coat as she had the bracelet, only to have a friend buy it for twice its value and give it back to her for her birthday. Somewhere in a closet, this mink no doubt remains, most recently sighted in the winter of 1995 when friends arriving by helicopter spotted Ruth, the air traffic controller, bundled in fur in the field below. She was waving her arms to make sure her visitors didn’t hit any wires.

  Though no one offered Billy a fur coat, he had plenty of other rewards to resist and always would. In the late fifties he rejected NBC’s offer of a million dollars a year to host a two-hour Sunday morning talk show. He said no to Paramount Pictures Corporation executives who wanted to make him a movie star. He declined ABC’s offer of a starting salary of $150,000 if he would serve as a consultant, and he donated personal gifts, such as prime real estate in Florida and California, to the BGEA and Wheaton College. A year’s lease of a private jet and pilot were refused, and he donated about half of his estimated five-hundred-thousand-dollar family inheritance to various Christian organizations.

  Ruth wondered how she would overcome the tensions imposed by fame. She anguished over the importance of providing the children with a normal environment. Typically, she kept her anxieties to herself, talking about them in her prayers and journals. She fought the resentment that boiled to the surface when tourists invaded their property and their privacy, and she also knew that any unkindness on her part would not be forgiven.

  “It’s an odd kind of cross to bear,” she wrote at the time. “Yet those who have not been through it would consider it some kind of glory.”

  In early 1954, the Grahams had been offered a good deal on a hundred-and-fifty-acre cove, located two miles from their house between two ridges, or hogbacks, on one of the Seven Sisters. The land was occupied by two mountain families who grew corn on one slope and culled timber on the other. They decided to sell out, and the cove was offered to the Grahams for a mere forty-three hundred dollars.

  Shortly after the turn of the century, a six foot six mountain man named Solomon Morris built the narrow dirt road that wound from the hogbacks’ base to a level area several hundred yards below the summit, where the mountain families later built their pole cabins. Morris hacked a clearing in the brush halfway to the top.

  He followed with a mule-pulled plow and drag pan, and cut and smoothed a road wide enough for a wagon. Morris planted more than a hundred apple, pear, cherry, and black walnut trees and carried dozens of white pine seedlings from nearby Mt. Mitchell. These and a thousand white pines the Grahams received for a Forestry Incentive Program reseeded many times over until their full, pungent branches eventually cloaked the mountain.

  Before the Grahams agreed to buy the property they drove there to inspect it and were greeted by suspicious eyes peeking through cabin windows on a slope thick with rhododendrons, mountain laurel, and wildflowers. The red-clay-chinked stone foundation of Solomon Morris’s original house reclined in the moist, fragrant shade of the white pines he had planted almost half a century earlier.

  Billy surveyed the property with skepticism, while Ruth felt her blood race at the potential.

  “I leave it up to you to decide,” he said just before he left for the West Coast.

  She borrowed money from the bank and bought the cove while he was gone. When he returned he was incredulous.

  “You what?” he asked.

  After he recovered from his initial shock, they began making plans, deciding they would build behind the tall bank of white pines Morris had planted. Billy wanted to cut the evergreens to afford them a view of the valley. Ruth believed that no tree should be cut unless it was absolutely necessary. They compromised by deciding to build farther up the ridge. The mountain people evacuated the property, leaving a tarpaper shack, two pole cabins, three lean-tos, a hog pen, a potato cellar, and foundations of other cabins that had burned to the ground over the years. Bulldozers began gouging a shelf in the hogback.

  Ruth’s first project was a surprise for Billy. She would remodel one of the pole cabins so the family could escape the tourists on weekends while the house was being built. Workmen tore out partitions, opening the cabin into one spacious, L-shaped room. They built a fireplace from fieldstone found on the property, replaced the asbestos roof, and scoured the rooms from beams t
o floorboards. Ruth furnished the cabin with a double bed and covered the loft with mattresses for the children. The kitchen was a fireplace and an outdoor grill. Spring water was piped into a wooden tub at the back door, and the bathroom was an outhouse some hundred paces beyond the secondhand wraparound porch Ruth had bought from a carpenter.

  Shortly after she finished her secret project, Billy returned home. She drove him up the mountain at dusk, not telling him where she was taking him or why. Hugging the rutted, unpaved road around sharp bends, the jeep finally crunched to a halt in front of the remodeled cabin. Oil lamps glowed in windows and a wisp of gray wood smoke drifted up from the chimney. They sat at the hearth drinking cocoa she had heated over the open flames, their romantic mood dissolving into laughter when he drained his cup and discovered the chewing gum she thought she had tossed into the fire moments earlier. As construction continued, the cabin was a welcome refuge where Ruth’s family, parents, and friends convened for picnics of fried chicken, biscuits, potato salad, and apple pie before the open fire.

  In the weeks that followed, Ruth designed her new home. It would be U-shaped and two stories, facing a small semicircle of lawn and a vista of Black Mountain, the Swannanoa Valley, and row after row of hazy ranges. This would be Billy’s retreat from the frenetic world, it was her hope. But as years passed, her accomplishment would prove, most significantly, to be a striking manifestation of her own sensibilities and spirit. She built and furnished the Graham home with materials from her past and cemented them with her imagination. It would be her artistic masterpiece, and she would spend a lifetime loving it as he continued to travel.

  She studied books on architecture and discovered that she felt most strongly drawn to the chapters about log cabins. Like the red jeep she drove up and down the mountain and the face of the man she loved, ruggedness attracted her. She preferred the natural beauty of old wood and stone. Cracks, nail scars, and weather-beaten materials “had character,” she explained, “as if they’d existed for a long time and seen a lot of living.”