Pat had a private makeup suite that he shared with the 700 Club’s other star, old Ben Kinchlow, the friendly sidekick. They liked frozen air. You could see your breath in Pat and Ben’s makeup suite. Pat was sitting in a big old-fashioned barber chair with his makeup and hair girls fussing around him, doing last-minute touch-ups.
Pat still had the paper makeup ruffle tucked around his neck. It made him look like a stripped-down Dutch seventeenth-century pastor in a Rembrandt, only under Pat’s neck ruffle he had on a cashmere tan jacket rather than black robes. And any sober Dutch Reformed pastor would have had Pat burned at the stake as soon as he heard him speaking in tongues, let alone the stream of gibberish he was about to unleash on us.
Pat’s makeup was more or less done. He was ready to share from his heart and dedicate that day’s show to the Lord. Ben was ready, too. His job, on and off the air, was to do his part for Jesus by hanging around and laughing at Pat’s jokes and saying “Yes, Lord” every time Pat said something wise and heartwarming, or even looked like he might.
The first wise and heartwarming thing Pat said to us—with plenty of his trademark goofy giggles and laughs, and his voice going up an octave for emphasis—was “Today the Lord showed me a special sign concerning the spirit of the age!”
“Yes, Jesus!” shouted Ben.
The rest of us nodded and thanked Jesus, too.
Then Pat said, “I went out to my garage this morning, and a snake was curled up right next to the passenger-side door of my car. So I got a shovel and killed it. Then I go outside to throw its body into the woods, and there’s another snake sitting on the path! [Long goofy chuckle.] Well, folks, you need to know that I’ve lived in that house ten years and never seen a snake before! I knew the Lord was trying to tell me something!”
Pat chuckled and Ben laughed and we all chuckled, too, and said yes, Jesus. And I tried not to catch Dad’s eye.
Then Pat said, “Would you believe it, but everywhere I turned there were more and more snakes! My arms got tired smiting them! Finally God spoke to my heart and said ‘Pat, no matter how many serpents you smite, I’ll send more; so trust in me, Pat, not in your own strength!’ Then I fell down and wept before the Lord, and when I looked up all the snakes were gone, even the bodies of the dozens I had killed! I can’t tell if I was in my body or caught up in the Spirit.”
Ben: “Lord, You are so great, we just worship you.”
“Oh, Jesus, we just thank you for Pat!” whispered a makeup girl.
Pat cut her ass-kissing short. “You want to know what [long goofy chuckle] the serpents signify?” he asked.
We all said yes, yes we did. Ben moaned and shivered, as if what Pat might say next was probably more than regular folks could bear. Meanwhile, the makeup girl dabbed at Pat’s face with a foam wedge, smoothing out the makeup where she’d missed a spot. This was all business as usual to her. Pat could have claimed that Jesus was sitting on his knee eating an ice cream cone, and she would have just kept dabbing away.
“I’ll tell you what, ladies and gentlemen,” said Pat, swiveling the makeup chair to survey us all: “The snakes are the sins contaminating the Body of Christ! The Secular World’s not our only problem, ladies and gentlemen; it’s our own sin that’s grieving the Lord’s heart and delaying His return!”
Ben: “That’s right!”
Now Dad was shifting his weight uncertainly back and forth from one foot to the other.
“The other day,” said Pat, “I was invited to speak to the Orlando chapter of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Association. At the end of my talk on how God will bless us if we plant a seed of faith and give richly to His work, by supporting the 700 Club’s special fund, I said ‘Now bow your heads, open your hearts, and close your eyes so no one but God and me can see you. Now each one of you men’—they were all successful, married Christian men in their midforties to fifties—‘raise your hands if you still masturbate.’ And do you know, over half raised their hands!”
“O Lord, just forgive us!” Ben wailed.
On the Club that day there was an interesting moment. The floor director was doing what floor directors do everywhere, silently counting down on her fat fingers so Pat could wrap things up for the break. Pat was having a Word of Knowledge. That’s when God tells Pat things directly, as if he’s on the phone calling in information about, say, some woman in Milwaukee with a tumor in her left ovary.
Anyway, that day God gave Pat a “Word” for some lady with deafness in one ear. Pat squinted at the floor director through closed eyelids—he was deep in his healing, we-just-this-Lord-we-just-that, prayer. She was counting down the seconds on her fingers to the out. And Pat wrapped up the Word of Knowledge right on cue! Since a Word of Knowledge is as direct a message from God as you can get this side of the Last Judgment, it interested me to learn that God made sure his Word fit the time slot.
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Some people literally worshipped my parents. They still do. A lady rushed up to me at one of our seminars and asked if she could shake Dad’s hand. I told her that he had already left, which he had, and she grabbed me and blurted “I just want to say I touched a Schaeffer!”
After Dad died, a stranger sent me an elaborate hand-carved, laboriously painted, three-foot-tall bas-relief “icon” of my father portrayed as a saint in heaven standing holding hands with Jesus. It must have taken the person months of work to make this curious kitsch monstrosity (somewhat in the style of the nineteenth-century “icons” of George Washington being received by the angels).
Even Christianity Today magazine—which, during Dad’s lifetime, treated him with suspicion—got into the act some fifteen years after Dad died, with a cover story titled “Our Very Own St. Francis” and a picture of my father dressed like Francis of Assisi. (They talked about his continuing influence and how he shaped the thinking of a whole generation of evangelical pastors.) And I have long since lost count of the number of women who launched into unstoppable gushing sessions when talking about Mom. On the other hand, I have also met quite a few bitter young men and women who tell me that their evangelical mothers “raised me according to your mother’s books!”
My adventures in Schaeffer-worship bothered me even when I was profiting from them. A little goes a long way. And the groupie factor also drove my sisters nuts.
Priscilla has made it a mission to disabuse the students who still come to L’Abri of the Schaeffer mythology. She makes no secret of her nervous breakdowns, her dependence on Prozac, her depression and anxiety attacks, her alcohol-related struggles. She will tell anyone who asks that being a Schaeffer child—and the pressure from Mom to be part of the ministry and, above all, from strangers to live up to their “Schaeffer expectations”—didn’t help. When I called her to ask if she would allow me to write about her problems, and she gave me the okay, she also said “Mom drove me crazy, but in fairness I would have suffered from stress and depression anywhere. I would push too hard in L’Abri, then crash. If I had been doing something else just as intense, it would have happened, too.”
Susan burned out early in L’Abri, too, retired when she was in her fifties, and moved into an assisted-living home with Ranald. (They were both in reasonable health.) Susan told me that when she visits the English L’Abri (the one she founded in Hampshire) that she never goes to any of the meetings and doesn’t want to see anyone there except for some members of her immediate family who happen to live nearby.
Debby, who provides most of the day-to-day care for my aging and fragile mother, says that she struggles with a feeling of rage when she’s with Mom—which she realizes is “completely illogical,” given that Mother is old and helpless. But she also works hard to include Mom nevertheless. Debby says that she doesn’t remember ever having “one real conversation” with my mother during a whole lifetime. “Mom always had her own agenda. She was interested in how we fit into that, not in us.”
As for me, if I see someone reading a Bible on an airplane, I’ll hurry past in case they look
up and somehow recognize me as the “Franky” Schaeffer who they used to watch on the 700 Club. I’ll cross a street when walking past an evangelical “bookstore” for the same reason. And my insecurities—and squirrelly Schaeffer baggage—can be measured by my name changes. I directed Whatever Happened to the Human Race? as “Franky Schaeffer,” one of my Hollywood features as “Francis,” wrote my evangelical books under “Franky,” and switched to “Frank” after I left the fold.
To one extent or another, my parents’ children have had serious problems that relate to Mom and Dad and their work. And even though everyone can say the same, perhaps there is a little added pressure on the children of venerated saints, saints that in private were far from saintly.
But the fact that I became my father’s sidekick was the self-perpetuation of a nightmare. Like most children, I wanted to be independent of my parents and then found myself exacerbating my dependence. Not only was I drawn into my parents’ ministry, I was the prime mover and shaker when it came to making sure that Dad got truly famous within the evangelical subculture. If it is tough having a famous father, more fool the son who made him so!
Dad wasn’t ever completely comfortable with his new (and very late-in-life) role as a big-time evangelical superstar. He felt out of place when hailed as the “father of the religious right.” Was this really what he wanted to be remembered as? And I felt as if I was having a series of out-of-body experiences when I spoke in front of groups like the Southern Baptists at their huge annual convention. The success of what I was doing made me feel like I was sinking into a swamp.
I would pace around behind the stage before an event, literally praying for escape and cursing myself for having quit painting. I was with people who looked at me squiffy-eyed if I slipped up and said “damn,” or “shit,” the sorts of people to whom I had to make sure I never mentioned that I loved this or that “godless” movie.
I became lax. I told one homeschool mother (the wife of a pastor whose church I was speaking at) that I had loved All That Jazz.
“That’s R-rated, isn’t it?” she asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“I guess so,” I mumbled.
“Well, please don’t ever say that in front of my children!” she said. “You are responsible for not becoming a stumbling block, and I’m having enough trouble with them already!”
When I later met her “children,” I was expecting little kids. They were two pale boys, ages fifteen and seventeen. Having met their mother, I understood why they looked hunted and seemed to be twitching.
Our new breed of Schaeffer followers were the sorts of people who said they adored everything about Dad’s book How Should We Then Live? “except that naked picture”—Michelangelo’s David. (I had prevailed in the photograph selections for the book, having lost in the fight over David’s nudity in the movie version of our project.)
These were the sorts of people I had to make sure were nowhere around if I ordered a bottle of wine, or talked about my gay friends, or lit up a cigar. And whatever they thought Mom and Dad were about, the actual Swiss L’Abri of the 1960s and early ’70s would have struck them as shockingly free, a place they never would have let their children visit.
I knew “The Speech” so well, I could think about other things while I delivered it; for instance, about how I wished God had never made any men or women with a “ministry in music.” I wished he’d strike them all down so I’d never have to spend another minute listening to another fat lady (even the men were “fat ladies” to me) sing another Jesus-is-my-boyfriend song to synthesized violin playback.
I must have done The Speech over a hundred times in the year or two after Whatever Happened to the Human Race? came out, including the time I gave it from Dr. Kennedy’s pulpit at his famous Corral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida, to over two thousand people who gave me a near-hysterical five-minute standing ovation. (I was also on his TV show several times.)
Shorthand version: Abortion is murder; secular humanism is destroying us; turn back to our Christian foundation; vote Republican.
I learned that the worst audiences, like talking to a roomful of pickled fish wearing down parkas, were in Minnesota. I learned that the best audiences were in California, where people want to have fun twenty-four hours a day, so they laugh at all your jokes and buy a cartload of books and tapes. I learned to leave out fancy French words south of Washington, DC (not counting Miami and New Orleans). And I learned that if you talk “too fast,” all those huntin’, fishin’, shootin’, lifetime-NRAMEMBER types, the ones that worry about the United Nations, have their eyes too close together, and have wives caked with about forty pounds of makeup per square inch, start to look at you funny. And if they can’t understand what you’re saying, pretty soon you feel this suspicious wave of squinty-eyed, do-you-think-you’re-better-than-us fucked-upness rolling toward you over the banquet tables and the flower arrangements somebody stuck tinsel and balloons in, and up around the head table and past the lime Jell-O topped with some kind of nameless sweet shit and sprinkled with nuts.
How I hated the trips to and from all those airports! The pastor picking me up always seemed anxious to “share.” It was usually about his church and his problems with his congregation or his own “rebellious” teenagers that invariably were “far from the Lord.”
“I’ll pray for you,” I’d mutter, or “The Lord’s going to use these times of testing to bring you to a wonderful new place in your walk with him.”
What I really wanted to say is that shit happens and that just because I was a Schaeffer didn’t make me an expert on his life.
Then there was Miss Piggy at the fund-raiser I did for a chastity-anti-sex-education ministry in Fargo, North Dakota: “We Can Wait.”
“We Can Wait” hired a husband-and-wife “youth minister” team to open my act. They showed up in homemade costumes dressed as Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. They sang “Jesus Loves Me,” in Kermit and Miss Piggy’s voices. They had obviously spent a lot of time on their song-and-dance routine.
After the song, the wife, still dressed in her Miss Piggy outfit, took off her foam rubber trotters and pulled out hand puppets and did a little routine where Miss Piggy (the hand-puppet version) met Cookie Monster hand puppet. The two Miss Piggys—puppet and costumed youth-pastor-wife—shared the gospel with Cookie Monster and told him that “love waits” and to wait until he was married before “making any li’l Muppets, cuz love isn’t a contact sport, sweetie!”
The full-size-Kermit-youth-minister (standing off to one side) was an accomplished ventriloquist and was doing Cookie Monster’s voice. Then Kermit accepted Jesus Christ as his very own personal Savior and put on a “chastity ring,” after which Kermit said how it was so wonderful that Cookie Monster was now “written up in the Muppet Book of Life.”
My children remember my life on the road a bit differently. They had more fun than I did. Jessica writes:Listening to my Dad speak was always a pleasure. This may sound exaggerated but it is the literal truth. He was just so good at it. I would wait for the audience’s laughter, for the small changes he would make each night, probably to keep it fresh, to keep himself from getting bored. I was never forced to listen anyway, if we wanted to run around we only had to go backstage. My young parents were good at remembering the needs of childhood.
Every moment I spent with our “cobelligerents”—as Dad was now calling the mob of groupies, Muppets, and other evangelical leaders we were in bed with—was sinking me deeper into a mixture of self-loathing and despair. Genie bore the brunt, as did Jessica and Francis. (Soon after John was born, I made my jailbreak, so he had a better time.) I always came back off the road wound-up and angry. I started to despise the people thronging my meetings, and to despise myself for despising them.
I was also planning an escape. My plan was to jump from making evangelical documentaries to directing Hollywood features. From time to time, I would sneak off to Hollywood and have meetings with anyone who would talk to me.
&n
bsp; The tension in my life between who I saw myself as, and who I was as others saw me—and what I was really doing, no matter how I tried to fool myself—was becoming unbearable. I was working in America, talking about America, living in America but was really a half-assed semi-European just beginning to learn about the real America.
Why anyone listened to me remains a mystery. Maybe it was testimony to the respect my father was held in, maybe something to do with the fact that I was a good speaker, and also perhaps to do with the desperation of the evangelical community, which will latch on to anyone remotely intelligent and follow them, at least for a while.
There were three kinds of evangelical leaders. The dumb or idealistic ones who really believed. The out-and-out charlatans. And the smart ones who still believed—sort of—but knew that the evangelical world was shit, but who couldn’t figure out any way to earn as good a living anywhere else. I was turning into one of those, having started out in the idealistic category.
I remember a day that my predicament become clearer. I was in the Southern California studios of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). I had just been on their annual telethon. Then I did Dobson’s program Focus on the Family (yet again) via a phone interview between setups for the TBN telethon. I’d suffered through several hours of on-air fundraising along with some sleazy gospel trio and the flagrantly flaky (and apparently embalmed) hosts. We’d been hanging around their set for what seemed like a lifetime. (It looked like something Donald Trump’s decorator might have rejected as too tastelessly garish.) The thrust of the TBN show (and also Dobson’s “phoner”) was that we needed to save America from decadence, corruption, and evil. The examples of all this “evil” included sweeping generalizations about public schools, the media, movies, the arts in general, and the gays. I came home to raving.
Crazy for God Page 27
