Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  The foundation for Ruth’s method of childrearing, unsurprisingly, was the Bible. Her upbringing had taught her a love for the Scriptures. She studied for insight, to be corrected, informed, and inspired. From the Bible she drew ideas like this one: “Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil” (Ecclesiastes 8:11). From that verse Ruth determined that punishment, when needed, should be prompt.

  Had she made a habit of threatening “Wait until your father gets home,” the children most likely would have dreaded his return. Billy probably wouldn’t have looked forward to returning home either. Ruth had a catalog of punishments for different offenses:

  First Fight—ten minutes in room

  Second Fight—fifteen minutes in room

  Sassing and Rudeness—switching with a shoe tree or flyswatter

  Procrastinating Going to Bed—earlier to bed the following night

  Often her chastisements were more humorous than severe. Occasionally, when two of the children had a spat, Ruth would sit them together nose to nose until they kissed and made up. Once when Franklin was insufferable while his mother drove the children to a fast-food restaurant in Asheville, she finally stopped the car and locked him in the well-ventilated trunk.

  “Don’t worry,” she assured the startled carhop who appeared just as the trunk yawned open. “He enjoyed it.”

  “I’ll have a cheeseburger without the meat,” Franklin ordered as he dusted off his jeans.

  “The children misbehave,” Ruth wrote. “I reprimand them sharply, more probably peevishly. The very tone of voice irritates them (I know because if it were used on me it would irritate me). They answer back probably in the same tone. I turn on them savagely (I hate to think how often! And how savage a loving mother can be at times). And I snap Don’t you speak to your mother like that. It isn’t respectful. Nothing about my actions, tone of voice, etc. commanded respect. It doesn’t mean I am to tolerate sass or back-talk. But then I must be very careful not to inspire it either.”

  Not long after GiGi left for boarding school she wrote her mother and said she had fallen in love. Ruth kept her concern to herself. It was not her way to lecture or meddle. Later, when Anne was a teenager and bleached her hair and began wearing makeup, Ruth let her alone. Anne began modeling for several of Asheville’s finer clothing stores, and her mother granted her freedom.

  “These weren’t moral issues,” Anne recalled. “Mother totally trusted me and encouraged me and loved me. Therefore I was always the person she thought I was. She used to say, ‘If you trust a person, they’ll live up to that trust.’” Even so, the fighting, the disobedience, and the rebelliousness raged on. GiGi, Anne, Bunny, Franklin, and Ned certainly were not the saints the public “Billy Graham’s kids” ought to be. Then, in the middle of the day-to-day turbulence, Billy would come home and peace would be restored.

  The scene in the early years was always the same. Ruth and the children stood on the wooden depot platform, watching the glassy ribbon of train windows flow by while they waited, hearts racing, in the damp mountain air. Billy, his rumpled suit hanging more loosely than it had when he was last home, would emerge, his face beaming but weary. In his suitcases there were certain to be stuffed animals or dolls and toy cars.

  Life on the mountaintop would change. The children would temporarily lose interest in their neighborhood playmates. They were better behaved. Billy did not tolerate impertinence or disobedience, but he would never be much of a disciplinarian. Spankings from him were rare. GiGi can recall but two, the last one the more memorable. She sassed him, stomped her foot, slammed her bedroom door, and locked it. When she finally let him in, he began spanking her.

  “Some father you are!” GiGi cried. “You go away and leave us alone all the time.”

  Suddenly he stopped, his eyes filling with tears.

  “It just broke my heart,” GiGi recalled. “I’ll never forget that because I realized that this was a sacrifice he was making.”

  In the main, strictness was rather much forgotten when Billy was on the scene. “Daddy would come home from a trip and break all the rules,” GiGi said.

  “Oh, let them stay up a little later,” he’d say to Ruth when it was time to turn the television off and tuck the children in bed. “I hardly get to see them.” He’d give them candy, gum, and soda pop during the week when he knew the rule was that they were to get such treats only on Sundays. The five young faces would look up to their mother after Father had just granted them permission to break her rules, and she would concede, “Whatever your daddy says is fine with me.”

  When he was home he conducted family devotions and told the children stories and played games with them, especially at bedtime. Billy would play spider and creep through the house as the children scattered and screamed in delight. He was affectionate, stopping them in the hallway to hug or kiss them, or perhaps sneak them away for a hike on the mountain. It delighted them when he and Ruth would “smooch,” as the children called it. He was boyishly demonstrative, sometimes whisking Ruth away from the stove to waltz her around the kitchen. Throughout the day he held her hand or sat her in his lap, the two of them laughing and teasing like high school sweethearts.

  “His love and tenderness toward her were something we daughters looked for in our husbands,” Bunny remarked.

  Billy’s presence, however, did not ensure his undivided attention. Usually, he slept through his first two days at home. “It’s like being in a hurricane,” he once explained, “and all of a sudden it stops and there is nothing but quiet.” He would confide in Ruth, telling her details of a life that she had not been on hand to witness. He would voice his joys, plans, and discouragements. Though she had worries of her own, she kept them to herself. She listened, encouraged, and soothed his anxieties and doubts. One evening as she and Billy sat on the porch watching the setting sun ignite thunderclouds piling over Rainbow Mountain, he began fretting aloud.

  “God has never failed you yet, has He?” Ruth asked.

  “No,” Billy said. “But He’s come pretty close to it sometimes.”

  Business did not stop when he was home. There were always telephone calls and letters to answer. Television crews and journalists would arrive for their “thirty-minute” sessions, which characteristically stretched into half-day marathons with Ruth hovering nearby, smiling, appearing calm, as she listened. Behind her cool, gracious façade, she was stressed and uneasy. Her hands trembled as she served coffee. She was poised to attack, ever ready to protect those she loved from what she viewed as the irresponsibility of the press.

  In the late fifties and early sixties, anyone could and often did show up on the Graham mountain. One Sunday morning Ruth took the children to church while Billy stayed home and rested. He decided to surprise the family with a picnic lunch and met them on the driveway with seven peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and an unopened can of pork and beans. They were eating as an old car full of admirers chugged up the mountain, past the PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. It overheated in front of the swimming pool.

  Billy was quick to offer help. Magnanimously, to his uninvited guests he said, “Come on up and share our picnic lunch. There’s plenty of food for everyone.”

  “Sharing always makes a picnic more fun,” Ruth uneasily assured the children.

  There were unwelcome visitors who bore special messages from God, or, worse, who thought they were God. When Ruth was pregnant with Ned, her housekeeper Beatrice Long entered the living room one day, characteristically calm and never in a hurry.

  “Mrs. Graham, there’s a man at the door who says he’s Jesus Christ and Mr. Graham is expecting him.”

  Ruth went to the door and found a heavy, perspiring man who immediately repeated his claim.

  “You are not Jesus Christ,” she told him firmly, “and my husband is not expecting you.”

  An argument ensued and the man announced he was coming in.

  “You are no
t. And besides,” she unwisely added, “you must remember, after the Resurrection, Jesus didn’t knock on doors, he walked through them.”

  The man paused to lift eyes heavenward for instruction. Ruth grabbed the opportunity and quickly shut the door and latched it. He drove his green Chrysler New Yorker to Assembly Inn on Lake Susan and told the desk clerk his story. “My only mistake,” he concluded, “was I knocked on the door instead of walking through it.”

  “Don’t you realize,” the clerk responded, “Jesus made no mistakes?”

  The man announced that the end of the world was upon them. He tossed his wallet and wristwatch into the lake and rolled his car in after them. There were other encounters, and Ruth handled them firmly whether Billy was out of town or in his study.

  “Before they put that gate up,” recalled Beatrice Long, “cars would come up there every day and pretend they were lost. Some of them would wander around the yard hoping someone would come out and speak. Sometimes she’d go out. Sometimes she wouldn’t. She was never rude. She was nice and kind to them but they never did see him. He wouldn’t know what was going on.”

  In the sixties, a man toting a large Bible appeared at the Billy Graham office in Montreat. The man bore a message from God, he claimed. He wasn’t leaving until he delivered it. After he had camped in front of the office for three days, a secretary telephoned Billy, informed him of the situation, and asked him what should be done. In no time, Billy was down the mountain, shirtless, sitting on a tree stump in the sun. For hours he patiently listened to the man’s rather deranged prophecies. Billy shook his hand and thanked him. It was a scene that would have been common had Ruth not intervened.

  Then Billy would go away again, hastily piling packed baggage into the car trunk and heading to the train station or the airport. Often one of his aides would pick him up. As his fame grew, it became futile for the family to say good-bye to him in public, where he was inundated with those who wanted his autograph or a handshake. Once Anne accompanied him to the airport and was immediately swept to the background by well-wishers flooding her father. Rapidly shaking one hand after another, he finally turned to his daughter, shyly standing behind him. Pumping her hand, he blurted, “Nice to meet you!” before bolting toward his gate.

  When it was time to say good-bye neither Ruth nor Billy displayed emotion. There was the tight hug and kiss. But in private, their individual reactions were quite different.

  Many a time, Billy said, “I’ve driven down that driveway with tears coming down my cheeks, not wanting to leave.”

  No matter what part of the world he was in, whenever possible he would telephone Ruth every night. His feelings were best expressed in a letter he wrote her from Los Angeles on August 11, 1963, two days before their twentieth wedding anniversary:

  How can I find words to express my appreciation for all you have meant to me. Your love and patience with me in my ups and downs … have meant more to me than you will ever know. Your counsel, advice, encouragement and prayer have been my mainstay and at times I have almost clung to you in my weakness, in hours of obsession, problems and difficulties. Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favor of the Lord. One reason that in spite of my own lack of spirituality, discipline and consecration I have found favor of the Lord is because of you. I found a good wife and as a result have found favor with God. … It seems that in the recent months my capacity to love you has been increased. I did not think that age would bring greater and deeper love but it has and is. I love the wife of my youth more every day! When we are apart, I miss you so much more than I used to. A week seems like a month. Yes, I am thankful to God for you. What a wonderful helpmeet He provided; certainly our marriage was planned in heaven. I am thankful for the five precious children you bore me each one a bundle of joy. And what a wonderful mother you have been to them! No child ever had a greater mother than our children. You may compare yourself to Susanna Wesley and think you are a failure but she did not rear her family in a modern secular society. For our generation you are near perfection.

  Ruth’s emotions were revealed in her poetry:

  We live a time

  secure;

  sure

  It cannot last

  for long

  then

  the goodbyes come

  again again

  like a small death,

  the closing of a door.

  One learns to live

  with pain.

  One looks ahead,

  not back,

  … never back,

  only before.

  And joy will come again

  warm and secure,

  if only for the now,

  laughing,

  we endure.2

  On rare occasions her feelings escaped in front of close friends, such as actress Joan Winmill Brown, who was visiting her while Billy was out of the country on a long campaign. One morning, Ruth received a letter from a missionary acquaintance whom she had not seen in years. Joan later recalled what it said: “Oh, I guess you don’t remember me, Ruth, now that you are married to such a famous evangelist. It must be a very glamorous life. Here I am stuck in the mission field with my husband.”

  “Well, at least she’s with him,” Ruth said, her eyes bright with tears as she quickly left the room.

  “Maybe she cried in her room,” GiGi speculated, “but we did not know it at all. When Daddy would leave she would get busy doing something. We’d have projects like hunting for antiques and we’d right then begin looking forward to his coming home.”

  After he was gone and his physical presence was a memory, Billy was the figure they saw on television, in magazines and the paper. He was the authority figure who was no longer there to enforce rules or break them. Once while Billy was gone, his secretary entered the kitchen and discovered Franklin playing with matches.

  “Franklin,” she said sternly, “you know your daddy told you not to play with matches!”

  “No he didn’t,” Franklin countered. “He told me not to let him catch me playing with matches. And I’m not going to let him catch me.”3

  Billy was the husband who was gone an average of six months of each year. Ruth never really got used to it. Even at the end of the century, after they had been married more than fifty years, she would find somewhere to go or something to do right after a car drove him away. Anne, who stayed home during high school and saw her mother the most, remembered that no matter how late it was at night, she could see her mother’s bedroom light shining in the trees at the rim of the yard.

  “She’d be studying her Bible. And if I entered her room at these times and found her on her knees, there was no use saying anything to her then because she wouldn’t hear me,” said Anne. “That’s how Mother coped with Daddy’s being gone so much.”

  1. Ruth Bell Graham, It’s My Turn (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming Revell, 1982), 67.

  2. Ruth Bell Graham, Sitting by My Laughing Fire (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1977), 153.

  3. Chris Jarrett Kyle, letter to Ruth Bell Graham, 1982, Ruth Bell Graham Papers, Montreat, North Carolina.

  14

  CHAPTER

  The Beginning of a Mission

  RUTH’S DESK

  I am grateful not even one little sparrow falls to the ground but what He knows and understands. This is our opportunity to explain to the world.

  —Ruth Bell Graham, 1966

  On a ridge between the Red and Sulphur Rivers, a hundred miles northeast of Dallas and just south of Oklahoma, stood a two-room log cabin on a small patch of weather-beaten dirt. It was Lamar County, near Paris, Texas, August 15, 1930, and the heat slammed down like a hammer as Mae Thielman gave birth to her second set of twins. She named the youngest of her seven children Calvin Coolidge and Malvin Joe.

  For the next thirty-two years Calvin Thielman and Ruth Graham would move in their separate orbits and finally connect in an obscure thumbprint in the Blue Ridge called Montreat. They would become partners in their personal war
against the poverty, pain, and loneliness they had witnessed in their childhoods and seemed from then on to discover in every pocket of the world.

  The cabin rested on a small cotton farm run by Calvin’s father, Charlie, an alcoholic who became abusive during his binges. He died when Calvin was fourteen months old, leaving his mother to chop cotton and later work in a factory, eking out a bare survival for herself and her children. She was a devout Presbyterian and wanted more than all else to instill a love of God and learning in her children. By the time Calvin graduated from West Texas University, he was a respected student and athlete. He was headed for a career in law until he felt the unmistakable call to the ministry.

  In 1952, he and his wife, a petite blonde named Dorothy Barnette, moved to Columbia Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. There Calvin became friends with Billy Graham’s brother-in-law Leighton Ford and Ruth’s brother Clayton. Through them he became well acquainted with the Grahams and the Bells. In 1961, he was hired to fill the double post of Montreat-Anderson College chaplain and minister of the Presbyterian church, which sat on the top of a hill at the center of the school’s raw fieldstone buildings. The grounds, which in the summer bustled with conferees and vacationers escaping the heat, had changed little since that waning afternoon almost twenty years earlier when Ruth Bell and Billy Graham had been married there. Ruth had attended the church regularly since. Shortly after he was hired, Calvin gave her charge of the college Sunday school class, consisting almost exclusively of Montreat-Anderson students.