Chapter 30
AFTER RUTH AGREED TO THE PROFILE, I CALLED THE OBSERVER’s editor, Rich Oppel, and said I had an idea I’d like to discuss with him.
We met at a McDonald’s in Charlotte, sitting at an outdoor table eating Chicken McNuggets.
He’d always been an encouragement to me from the very start, and I considered him a friend.
I told him about Ruth Graham, and that most people had no idea what she was really like.
I’d first met her when I was nine years old and knew her extremely well.
I explained that she was intensely private, an introvert happiest alone on her mountaintop.
But I’d grown up around her. I knew about her stealthy acts of kindness.
A family going through a hard time would come home from church to find a roast in the oven for Sunday dinner.
When a neighbor or employee was sick, Ruth would show up with a pot of her signature vegetable soup that wasn’t made but accumulates, as she’d quip.
She’d visit families at Thanksgiving and Christmas, delivering food and other necessities.
But there was much more to her than good deeds.
I added that she was a speed demon in the car.
When she’d get a ticket, she’d tell the officer not to follow her because she was going to do it again.
During a political rally for Gerald Ford, a protester was holding a sign in front of her, and she snatched it, standing on top of it. The protester charged her with assault.
“I don’t know that anybody would be interested,” Rich Oppel mused after my spiel.
“Yes, they will,” I promised. “If you knew her, you’d get it.”
“Tell you what, the paper will pay you a hundred and fifty dollars to do it freelance,” he decided as we tossed our fast-food wrappers into the trash.
“Her story is worth more than that,” I countered.
I talked him up to five hundred dollars and began interviewing Ruth at her house.
The next few weeks I worked at my former desk in the newsroom.
I was consumed by talking to her friends and family in person and over the phone.
When I completed the profile, I let Ruth read it early to make sure everything was accurate.
The third week of May she and Billy were in Charlotte to attend a wedding over the weekend.
They were staying at the Sheraton, and I had lunch with her on Friday the twenty-second.
I felt important sitting in a hotel restaurant discussing the story I’d written.
I don’t recall her saying much about it, but she was favorably impressed.
“I’ve not forgotten about wanting to do your biography,” I finally said.
“I was afraid of that.”
We discussed it for a while, and she asked for a few days “to pray about it.” I anxiously awaited her decision.
“I’ve felt so led in this direction. If she is led not to do it, I wonder who or what I’ve been listening to? Either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ is frightening,” I wrote in the new journal she’d given to me at lunch.
Two days later she called and said “yes.” I was excited and scared to death.
On Sunday, June 7, her profile ran front page above the fold.
Ruth was featured on placards in every newspaper box in the greater Charlotte area.
I signed with New York literary agent Gerry McCauley, and in early August he used my newspaper story to sell the biography.
Harper & Row’s religious imprint in San Francisco bought the rights for a $40,000 advance that seemed like a fortune to me.
Charlie and I were now in Richmond, settled into a tiny apartment on the edge of the seminary campus.
I was accustomed to writing my newspaper stories on a CRT and couldn’t imagine using a typewriter again.
I bought a Lanier word processor for the outrageous sum of $12,000. In those days, it was new technology, the expense prohibitive.
“This book is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” I noted on August 10, 1981, having no idea what an understatement that would prove to be.
I’d no sooner signed the contract than I had a jogging accident.
I didn’t see the transparent plastic newspaper strap on a sidewalk.
The loop caught my feet, and I was slung facedown.
Had my hands not broken the fall, my head would have slammed into concrete.
I knew right away I’d badly hurt myself.
I couldn’t bend my arms. At the hospital I was told that the impact was the equivalent of being hit by a car.
I began work on the biography with two broken elbows and couldn’t visit Ruth until the casts had been sawn off.
My left arm was damaged so badly it’s an eighth of an inch shorter than my right and would cause problems from then on.
I was wearing a splint when I began making the eight-hour drive to Montreat, smoking up a storm inside my Honda hatchback, listening to the same Supertramp cassette over and over.
At Ruth’s house, I’d hook her up to a tape recorder, and spent long hours reading decades of her journals.
They weren’t to leave the house, and I’d stay in an upstairs bedroom going through each one, making notes.
I’d blow cigarette smoke out the window, deluding myself into thinking Ruth didn’t notice.
Each time I’d roll up to her house, she’d meet me outside, giving me a big hug. I must have reeked of cigarettes, but she never mentioned it or complained about my bootlegging white wine in a distilled water jug. At bedtime I’d have a glass or two in front of her. She never judged.
“I honestly don’t know what will unfold or even what I’ll write!” I noted in my journal. “I only know in my soul that there has always been a very special reason for Ruth and I knowing each other. It has been eerie and powerful… What an incredible honor.”
One night I dreamed I was in her living room when someone walked in and gave her a paperback book. It was filled with depictions of her that were “tacky and unexpected,” I recorded in my journal on August 11.
“She began, slowly, to sob—so upset and dismayed by the intrusion. And I put my arms around her trying to comfort her as she repeated ‘I didn’t want anybody to write this. Really, I didn’t…’”
It’s not coincidental I would dream something like that.
Without question Ruth didn’t want the biography written.
Despite her reluctance, she made herself available, instructing the Billy Graham office in Montreat to make photocopies of her correspondence.
The only documents she said I couldn’t see were the love letters between Billy and her. She wouldn’t share those with anyone.
When home in Richmond, I’d spend hours sitting in a lawn chair outside the seminary’s Rice Apartments reading historian John Fairbank’s books about China.
The deeper I got into my research, the more I sensed that Ruth was having grave reservations.
I saw her attitude shift. I could tell she was unhappy and anxious, her mood shadowed in a way I’d not seen before.
One night when I was staying at her house, I woke up to an apparition on the foot of my bed.
It looked like a ghost of Ruth, filmy and transparent, her face anguished as she raked her fingers through her hair.
I was startled and taken aback. Perhaps it was nothing more than a bad dream.
But it seemed a projection of what was going on in Ruth’s psyche.
On August 23, 1981, at the age of sixty-one, she was admitted to the Mayo Clinic for a hip replacement.
Four days later, the phone rang inside Charlie’s and my seminary apartment.
A woman with a New York accent introduced herself as Harriet Pilpel, Billy Graham’s attorney, who I’d heard of before.
She often was a guest on conservative commentator William F. Buckley’s Firing Line TV show.
Harriet informed me that Billy Graham was against my doing Ruth’s biography, as were their children.
“You shouldn’t do the book.” Harriet Pilpel stated it like an order. “You’re not the one.”
On behalf of the Graham family, she ordered me to “cease and desist,” and I told her no.
I didn’t answer to her. Ruth would have to tell me herself.
But she was recovering from surgery, and it wasn’t possible for me to reach her.
I figured the timing wasn’t an accident that I’d hear from the Grahams’ attorney while it was impossible for me to tell Ruth what was going on.
I worried she’d changed her mind and vanished to avoid having to tell me herself.
In hindsight, I think Ruth would have dropped the project right then.
But it wasn’t so simple now. I’d signed a contract.
It would have been impossible for me to return the advance money to the publisher.
Ruth’s intention of helping my career would have resulted in her ruining it had she bailed on me.
“I didn’t sleep well. This situation is so terrible,” I wrote the next day. “I am exhausted & sick. Ruth is inaccessible and Billy is in Calgary.”
It was true that the Graham children were opposed to my writing about their mother, and who could blame them?
The older son, Franklin, kindly explained it to me in a letter.
The timing wasn’t right. He hated to tell me that, “not wanting to hurt my feelings.” I didn’t know him then but had seen him around town while growing up.
He was the local James Dean, a strikingly handsome bad boy racing around on a motorcycle or in a sports car.
Whenever I’d catch a glimpse of him, it was exciting.
I’d wave and say hi, thrilled when he waved back.
No doubt, Ruth’s children associated me with the family that appeared on their mountain in 1966.
Mom had been hospitalized at Appalachian Hall and so had I.