Chapter 30 #2
I could only imagine the stories the Graham family had heard, and obviously, I didn’t measure up. I was having nightmares about being at Ruth’s house while her children were there. I was invisible, I wrote in my journal. Worse than that, I was humiliated “because I shouldn’t be there at all.”
After Ruth returned home from the Mayo Clinic, she continued to cooperate despite the opposition. She’d made a promise. She would do her best to honor it, but she wasn’t herself.
While she recovered from her hip replacement, I’d run the tape recorder for hours, a microphone clipped to her bathrobe.
I’d sit in my room transcribing from her journals and other private papers.
I’d been told I was much too young and inexperienced to be Ruth’s biographer.
I decided I needed to seem older and more sophisticated to the luminaries I hoped to interview.
I ordered engraved Crane stationery that didn’t look like the sort of thing a na?ve young person would use.
The governor of Virginia in 1981 was Chuck Robb, his wife, Lynda, the daughter of Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson.
The Johnsons were friends of the Grahams, and I sent a letter to Lady Bird just as I would to June Carter Cash, Dan Rather, Barbara Bush, the radio commentator Paul Harvey, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, to mention a few.
My interview with Lady Bird Johnson would take place in the governor’s mansion in downtown Richmond.
I started out by not being able to find a parking place, frantically ditching my Honda in a federal marshal’s reserved spot, hoping I wouldn’t get a ticket.
(I did.) I arrived at the mansion breathless and lugging a big briefcase packed with notepads and two tape recorders.
I was seated downstairs while caterers fussed over a luncheon the Robbs were having that day.
When Lady Bird glided down the curved staircase, she looked at the women caterers.
She looked at everybody. Then finally at me.
I stood up, introducing myself, to her surprise, catching the doubt and questions in her eyes. And maybe a glint of annoyance.
“Oh, you’re quite young, aren’t you?” she said in a resigned way as I followed her upstairs.
The next year I traveled to Washington, D.C., Texas, New York City, Tennessee, Boston for interviews and research. Ruth’s children continued to distrust my intentions. No doubt there was resentment about their mother giving me unfettered access to the most private details about their family.
It should have come as no surprise that they would take exception, convinced I was the wrong person for the job. My claim to fame at the Observer was my series on prostitution. I was in my early twenties and had never published a book. Worse than the girl next door, I was an unqualified interloper.
I reacted as personally as they did, squabbling with the youngest daughter, Bunny, as if siblings.
In a way we were. Many decades later, Franklin would tell me, “You’re as much as part of this family as the rest of us are.
” That was a big thing to say. I don’t doubt I wouldn’t have been nearly so charitable had a neighbor come along and decided to write about my family.
Without a doubt, I would have sicced lawyers on that person and tried to put a stop to it.
I didn’t handle the situation well at the time, not knowing what to do with my volatile emotions.
Poor Charlie had to listen to my rants. So did my friend Annie Hall, wife of the Union Theological Seminary president.
She was a licensed therapist, and we walked every day, often drinking wine after hours as she patiently listened and advised.
She said what was happening between Ruth and me was a necessary transition.
It wouldn’t be until many years later that I’d realized it was predictable.
Prior to this we’d had a parent-child relationship.
I’d put her on a pedestal, expecting far more from her than was realistic.
We had to break out of that for us to become adult colleagues and friends, and the process was brutal.
Ruth had the legal right to approve the final manuscript in exchange for permitting me to interview her endlessly and draw from her private papers.
We started disagreeing about the details I wanted to include, much of it comical.
Another person I interviewed was her former beau Harold Lindsell, an evangelical Christian author.
“Ruth wrote in her journal about your piercing blue eyes,” was the first thing I said when I got him on the phone.
“My eyes aren’t blue,” he said after a pause. “They’re brown. They’ve always been brown.”
When Ruth described him in her journal while in college, she’d already met Billy and fallen in love with him. She was thinking about his piercing blue eyes and not Harold Lindsell’s. I mentioned this to her, and her retort was, “I’m pretty sure Harold had blue eyes too.”
“He says he didn’t,” I countered. “And still doesn’t.”
If she remembered something that contradicted what she’d written decades earlier, she’d say, “I don’t care what I wrote back then.”
It was a frustrating process, and both of us were enjoying it less and less. By 1983, I was on the fourth revised draft, and the publication had been delayed. The Graham family’s concerns about me weren’t the biggest problem. Harper & Row had its own agenda, I’d find out soon enough.
It seemed they cared only about pandering to the Grahams and decided to hold up my advance money, causing serious financial strains.
Charlie was a full-time seminary student, and our only income was what I earned.
I had to pawn the family silver that Mom had asked me to buy from her.
If I didn’t, she would sell it to one of my cousins.
I was devastated that Harper & Row didn’t seem loyal to me.
That’s putting it mildly. I realized they didn’t care about me at all.
They were keen on getting the rights to Billy Graham’s eventual memoir and a novel by his friend, the legendary Johnny Cash.
My publisher wanted to hire Bunny as an editor of acquisitions and did.
“So, who am I? Nobody. I have no name, no money, no clout,” I wrote in my journal.
By June 1983, Ruth couldn’t handle the biography or me anymore.
She was maxed out and distraught, her impulse to duck and dodge.
Suddenly, the phone numbers were changed at the Graham house.
I couldn’t reach her. If I called her staff, they wouldn’t put Ruth on the phone, no doubt per her instructions.
Billy asked if Harper & Row “could fire me & hire a professional.” He said I was “an amateur, the job’s too big for her,” my editor Roy Carlisle repeated to me, and I wrote it down.
I don’t know if what he said was true. It had become patently clear whose side he was on, and it wasn’t mine.
I had no respect for Roy, calling him a “weasel” to Charlie, who couldn’t stand him either.
Various people who worked for the Grahams or were related reviewed my manuscript, making changes. Some changes were merited and for the better. But others weren’t accurate or the way I expressed myself, and that was fine with Harper & Row. I suspect Roy encouraged it.
“It doesn’t matter,” my publisher, Clayton Carlson, told me over the phone when I complained. “We could publish a comic book and as long as Ruth Graham is on the cover, it will sell.”
“What I’m writing isn’t a damn comic book!” I retorted. “And that’s not what Ruth wants!”
I demanded that he remove my name from the book. My writing was scarcely recognizable after a myriad of edits, most made by Ruth when she objected to my hard-nosed journalistic candor.
“She resents my violating her privacy and having the gall to analyze her,” I noted in my journal. “Though she knew this was coming, she wasn’t prepared for it.”
Looking back, it’s clear to me that once the biography was real, she panicked.
But the biggest problem was Harper & Row’s disregard of me as a writer.
After an editorial meeting in the Grahams’ home, Roy Carlisle and Charlie went at it in private on the driveway.
The editor warned him of the publisher’s “deep pockets.”
“Well, we have deep pockets too!” Charlie returned the threat.
“I probably shouldn’t have said that.” He would chuckle about it many years later.
We had anything but deep pockets, and that was obvious to all involved.
It became apparent I was simply a means to an end for Harper & Row.
But that wasn’t true legally. The biography was supposed to be written by a sole author, and it wasn’t anymore.
The publisher was violating my contract, and Charlie engaged the help of Joseph Carter, the managing partner of Hunton & Williams, Richmond’s most prominent law firm.
Carter took on my case pro bono, threatening to sue Harper & Row if the manuscript wasn’t returned to the original form.
Things changed overnight. Clayton Carlson tried to throw the Grahams under the bus by telling me that “what really made [the Billy Graham organization] mad was that right under their nose, Ruth gave away a very valuable property.”
I don’t believe that was the reason the family had objections about me.
In fact, the Graham organization would end up giving away the book at crusades.
As the project neared completion, Ruth was so stressed she came down with sciatica, disappearing off the radar.
I heard she’d left for Europe but don’t know where she went. For all practical purposes, she quit.
Bunny was tasked with going through the manuscript page by page as we worked on reaching a consensus about the approvals.
We spent the rest of the summer in marathon phone sessions.
She explained that Billy, his organization, and her siblings were “critical of mother” about her letting me write the book.
The ordeal had put a terrible strain on Ruth.
Bunny tried to make me see the situation from their point of view.
None of them knew me. I was just a neighbor Ruth had become close to over the years, someone she’d “adopted.” Billy Graham was the most famous evangelist in the world.
The idea that his wife would entrust her life story to me was incomprehensible.
Bunny and I spent months getting the manuscript back in shape.
We didn’t always agree but found common ground, were even cordial, gaining a new understanding of each other.
I will always appreciate what she did, and the countless hours spent.
Had it not been for her, the book wouldn’t have been approved.
It wouldn’t have been published. Truth is, I was far too caught up in my own needs and worries to realize how Ruth’s family must have felt.
The restored manuscript was accepted by the end of August, and while awaiting the publication, I was thinking about what to do next.
I made queries to magazines and newspapers in hopes somebody would hire me for an article or two.
But there was no interest. I wanted to write books and was still intrigued by crime. What if I combined the two?
Maybe I should try my hand at murder mysteries.
I suggested this and nobody cared. My agent, Gerry McCauley, didn’t want to represent me anymore.
He’d gotten so fed up with my tirades that he started hanging up on me when I’d call.
Ruth and I had limited contact, and she seemed a shadow of her old self.
The ordeal had taken it out of everyone, her most of all.
“But by God—we wrote the book anyway,” I jotted in my journal on September 14, 1983.
Her biography would be released at the end of the year with a first printing of sixty-five thousand copies.
In December, I wrote Ruth a six-page letter expressing my hurt feelings about her bailing on me.
She called, upset by what I’d said. She told me at least a dozen times that it was all “a big fat misunderstanding” and for me not to give it another thought.
“I can tell that Ruth feels so bad about all that happened,” I journaled at the time.
On January 28, 1984, The Washington Post’s book review was horrible.
I found out after church when a parishioner mentioned seeing it.
I could tell by the look on the person’s face that I wasn’t going to be happy.
I raced to the nearest newsstand and picked up the Sunday paper.
I sat for the longest time in the car, stunned and humiliated.
“But I should have known,” I wrote that same day.
Any book about the Grahams wasn’t going to be reviewed positively by the mainstream media unless it was critical, even a hatchet job. The biography was neither, nor was that ever my intention. Because my account of Ruth was warm and positive, I was accused of writing “a hagiography.”
“My confidence is gone at the moment. I know I shouldn’t let one bitchy review do that to me,” I noted on January 31.
I wouldn’t visit Ruth again until the following April after I was done with book promotions.
We sat together in Montreat’s Gaither Chapel and afterward visited on her mountaintop just like the old days, our friendship restored but more mature.
She said she loved me with a “special love,” I wrote at the time, “like one of her own children but different.”