Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  Later, when Billy preached to ten thousand at Victoria Park in London’s East End, Ruth wandered through the crowd and noticed a group of irreverent teenagers. When Cliff Barrows suggested a song, they yelled “No!” They wadded their song sheets and pelted people, a stockpile of eggs nearby and ready to hurl. Billy preached on John 3:16 while his wife, dressed in a trench coat and dark glasses, slipped toward the offenders, her strategy planned.

  When she reached them she would say, “I’m much more interested in what you have to say than in what he has to say. Let’s get off where he won’t disturb us and explain what you’ve got on your mind.” Before she could open her mouth she felt a hand on her arm. Three BGEA team members flanked her, thwarting her plan, and the teenagers scattered. This was not unusual, and the preacher’s wife would forever be rather much a security nightmare to whoever’s chore it was to watch her.

  She was irrepressible, spontaneous, even reckless. Ruth, in later years, would confide to a friend that she was never free to be socially and politically uninhibited. She felt she had to constrain herself for the sake of her husband’s ministry. In spiritual matters she was open and irrepressible, and carried her beliefs wherever she went. She shared her faith with whoever seemed receptive, whether it was teenagers, hotel maids, or taxicab drivers.

  One morning in London she hired a taxi to carry her to Foyle’s Bookstore and soon discovered the driver was Jewish. As he whizzed Ruth past cars, careening through side streets and around pedestrians, she invited him to Earls Court.

  “You must be kidding or something,” he turned around and said. “In my faith, we have our own beliefs. And I know what you people would do. You’d try to convert me. And me, I don’t want to get involved.”

  “Are you Orthodox, Conservative, or Reformed?” she asked, clinging to the back of the seat as he darted down another street to avoid a traffic jam at Trafalgar Square.

  “The synagogue I go to is Orthodox,” he replied. “It’s the only one around. I wish it was Reformed. Me, I don’t go to synagogue any more than I have to. I say, why should I go to church and confess my sins to God when I know I’ll go right back the next week and sin all over again?”

  “I wonder why you bother to eat a meal since you will have to turn around and eat another,” she replied.

  “Hey!” he said, laughing, cutting into another lane. “That’s a good answer!”

  He began attacking religious formalism, legalism, and hypocrisy, punctuating each remark with dramatic gestures, looking at her over his shoulder for what seemed alarmingly long moments. He buzzed past her address, braked to a screeching halt, and backed up.

  “Your comments on religion sound very much like Christ’s,” she smiled as she paid him.

  “How’s that?” he asked, startled.

  “Christ said many similar things in the New Testament.”

  “Never read the New Testament,” he said thoughtfully. “But I’ll get one.”

  On Wednesday, June 29, the radio brought the news that the United States had bombed Hanoi, and war protesters retaliated by announcing they would set off firecrackers in the counseling room at Earls Court after that night’s service. As Ruth sat in the stadium and police stood sentry outside the counseling room, an usher slipped her a note. It was from Meg Spalding, a young woman Ruth had recently become acquainted with, and it read: “Dear Mrs. Graham. Please could you come and see me as I need your help. I will wait for you outside the exit where you sit. Thank you very much. Meg. P.S. It is about dope.”

  She was a wan young woman with frizzy red hair, and had noticed Ruth walk in with Billy before the service a week earlier. She had oddly and desperately rushed to introduce herself to the evangelist’s wife. Since then, Meg had forlornly sought out the lovely woman in the stands, her nervous small talk masking her misery and interminable loneliness. One of five children, Meg had been born to a prostitute. Eventually, her home became the streets, her trade the same as her mother’s, and she was a lesbian.

  Ruth immediately left the service and found Meg huddled at the bottom of the steps. Wearing jeans, sandals, and the same brown jacket she had worn every day, she looked blankly at Ruth. Her eyes were dark and dull, her face blanched. Meg dug inside her brown satchel and she pulled out a square of cloth. She spread it open next to her for Ruth to sit on.

  “I’m doped,” Meg said.

  “What happened?” Ruth asked, sitting near her.

  “It’s me girlfriend Pat. She died in hospital today. Drugs.”

  “You can’t go on escaping from problems and hurts by taking dope,” Ruth told her gently. “You’ll have to choose between escaping to Christ or escaping to dope. Jesus loves you, Meg.”

  She hung her head, staring at her hands. “I wish I had a mother like you.”

  “Listen,” Ruth told her, “you have Jesus. He’s always with you. He loves you. He understands. He’s more powerful than dope. I’ll be gone next week. Earls Court will be over. You’ll have disappointments but He’s there with you.”

  “I have more dope,” she confessed.

  “Give it to me,” Ruth said.

  “You want it?”

  “No, I don’t, but I don’t want you to have it.”

  She again rummaged inside her satchel and handed Ruth a small knot of something wrapped inside a handkerchief. In the distance Billy’s words echoed off the stadium walls as though there were two voices preaching instead of one. The service seemed unreal and far away as his wife sat in the damp air watching a young prostitute drift deeper into a stupor.

  It was the beginning of a sad, seemingly futile friendship. Ruth attended to Meg, and would exchange letters with her for many years, though her troubled friend was the sort of person very few in Ruth’s position would have cultivated. She wished for her an end of aloneness and abandonment. It was what Ruth wanted for all her other children. Two years later, she met Tony Mendez. He was a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, where he was known as “the Kid.” Compactly built and bearded, he was usually armed with a pool cue and a switchblade. Mendez liked platform shoes and multicolored Indian cottons, and was uninhibited and mercurial.

  His parents had divorced shortly after immigrating to the United States, and his mother had raised him and two sisters in a shabby tenement on Prospect Avenue, a drug-infested strip between the Harlem and East Rivers. Early on, Mendez mastered the art of survival, picking up a dollar any way he could, and rarely buying anything if he could steal it. He hustled in smoky, boozy pool halls, earning sometimes a hundred dollars a day, and feeding his hunger for cocaine and heroin.

  On a whim, he enrolled in a few courses at nearby Fordham University shortly after graduating from high school. There he fell under the watchful eye of his guidance counselor, a man who had grown up in the ghetto and escaped. In early 1968 he urged Mendez to leave New York and told him about a tiny two-year school in western North Carolina called Montreat-Anderson College. Maybe Mendez should give it a try.

  “Those people are out in the sticks,” Mendez retorted, laughing ruefully as southern stereotypes came to mind. “Man, they’re backward!”

  To please his counselor, Mendez filled out the application, though he had no intention of ever going south. But when he received word that he had been accepted, the thought of heading there for some reason warmed his heart, he recalled. That fall he stuffed his few garish belongings into a suitcase and flew to Asheville.

  It was a shock from the moment the prop plane began circling for landing. The runway seemed no bigger than a racetrack, a solitary wind sock swaying languidly from a pole. Inside a terminal so small that baggage was simply set on the floor, he looked about in sinking disbelief. The lobby was a small square of shag carpet scattered with plastic chairs, and a mounted television set blinked in a corner. The gift shop sold no duty-free cameras, liquors, and perfumes, but saltwater taffy, jars of dark sourwood honey, and Cherokee Indian souvenirs.

  But it was the mountains that left him speechless. Fall had peaked, and hi
lls were dashed with gold, orange, yellow, and red. The few pitiful trees Mendez had seen along Prospect Avenue had already lost their leaves. He had never before seen the magic of autumn.

  “Did someone paint the leaves?” he asked the college employee who picked him up at the airport.

  “No, Tony,” the man replied. “They change that way.”

  As a student, Mendez was a loner, working as a janitor in the post office and in the student center, where he hustled at pool and spent his profits on drugs. Gambling in Asheville as well as in Montreat, he earned a reputation, and soon outsiders were driving through the rustic stone gate to challenge him. The college’s Presbyterian administration began to wonder at the wisdom of importing this inner-city student.

  On a Sunday morning during the fall of his first semester, Mendez crawled out of bed, headachy and dizzy after drinking the night away. He pulled on a white Nehru jacket and slacks, tied a red sash around his waist and a scarf around his head. He ambled along the cracked cement walkway, passing beneath gnarled apple and pine trees on the rim of Lake Susan, Montreat’s stream-fed swimming hole. Docks were warped and painted the same dark green that seemed to coat every resort porch and rocking chair in western North Carolina. On a diving platform in the center of the lake was the graffiti “PLEASE DON’T WALK ON THE WATER.”

  On the lake’s western bank, over the dam, the student center was a modest building filled with brightly colored plastic chairs and round, Formica-covered tables. The oily smell of a million hamburgers clung to the stale air. Mendez considered this his turf, and found it was being violated by a gang of students who were seated around the pool tables—his pool tables. A handsome woman with a large black Bible was the ringleader. It seemed her name was Ruth.

  She glanced with friendly curiosity at the glassy-eyed, wildly dressed Hispanic stumbling through the line of chairs in front of her, and she thought, “That’s got to be the most pitiful individual I ever saw.” Bleary and confused, he dropped into an empty chair and watched her through bloodshot eyes.

  “I’ll never forget,” he recalled, “she must have had Billy Graham’s Bible because it was so big.” She abandoned her Sunday school lesson and directed her comments toward him. Afterward, she introduced herself and invited him to come again.

  “Well, I’ve got to go continue my game,” he said, hurrying away.

  As the days unrolled, Mendez’s reputation worsened, an unsurprising phenomenon in a town the size of Montreat, where news spreads like an echo in a telephone booth. Calvin Thielman was determined to reach the college’s hippies and invited Mendez and several others to his house on December 9. Billy Graham’s Indian associate Akbar Abdul-Haqq talked with them and answered questions. Afterward, Mendez stayed for more than an hour and said he wanted to change his life. The next day, Ruth, or “Roof” as Mendez called her, sent him a copy of the J. B. Phillips translation of the New Testament. Reading the simple prose in the student cafeteria, he understood the words for the first time and became so excited that several students reported him drunk.

  Two days later, he and his best friend broke into a heated argument in the dormitory.

  “I could cut your face! I could cut your face!” the friend menaced, waving a scalpel, a recent gift from Mendez, who had stolen it from the biology lab.

  Méndez, the street fighter, slipped a bone-handled knife from his belt and plunged it into the man’s stomach. When the police arrived moments later, they found the two men clinging to each other.

  “Buddy, I didn’t mean to do it,” Mendez cried.

  “It’s okay, buddy. It’s okay,” said his bleeding friend.

  Though the friend dropped all charges, the college wouldn’t be so generous. Montreat-Anderson’s Disciplinary Committee advocated kicking Mendez out of school. They summoned him and interrogated him about the fight, about his past, their opinion of him darkening by degrees. Ruth was a member of the college’s board of trustees at the time and was instrumental in saving Mendez from being shipped back to the ghetto.

  “Do anything,” she told the committee, “but don’t send him back to the Bronx. He’ll slide down the drain.”

  Reluctantly, the committee agreed to place him on probation and let him stay.

  After hearing his wife talk about Mendez, Billy invited him to the house and they spent an afternoon talking in the living room. As he left, Billy wrapped an arm around him and said, “Tony, I want you to know that your friends are my friends, and my home is always open to you.”

  Méndez took him at his word, and the next day he loaded a bus and a van with drug addicts and the worst on the street, as he called them, and led the way to Little Piney Cove. The caravan halted at the lower locked gate, an obstacle Mendez had not anticipated. He reassured his disappointed companions, climbed on top of the bus, and began yelling as loudly as he could until they were granted entrance. The Grahams watched from the porch as the crew arrived, not knowing how they would fit all of them inside the house.

  In the late spring of 1969 Billy held a crusade in Madison Square Garden, and Mendez, home for the summer, decided to attend. The night of the first service he and a group of rough-looking men showed up in gang colors, shaggy hair, tattoos, obscene patches, and frayed blue jeans. The stadium was full, said the security guard as he looked them up and down, and Mendez assumed he was being discriminated against.

  “Listen,” Mendez said, his voice rising, “Billy Graham and Ruth, they’re just like my parents. I’ve eaten at their home, I’ve slept there …”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the guard said sarcastically. “Listen, he’s my brother.” Then he got hard and ordered, “Listen buddy, keep walking.”

  “Come on!” Mendez motioned to his friends. They pushed past the guard and bolted through the entrance. What Mendez didn’t know was that the Black Panthers had threatened Billy’s life that day and security was unusually tight. By the time he and his buddies had made it to the fourth tier they were surrounded by plainclothesmen, and in moments they found themselves back on the street.

  “Yeah, yeah, you know him, sure,” his friends taunted him.

  Two nights later Mendez brought his sisters to the service, and when the invitation was given, Ruth saw the three of them go forward. She headed toward the counseling room to welcome them.

  “Hey Ruth,” Mendez said nervously, “I’ve got to see you, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  They met the next night outside the loge entrance.

  “What’s the trouble, Tony?” she asked, studying his troubled face.

  “Well, Ruth,” he said, “I’ve done something bad. Really bad.”

  “Not again,” Ruth said. “What this time?”

  “Well, Ruth,” he said, “I have a buddy. He needed some money and, Ruth, he had never robbed a filling station before and needed some help. So I thought it was my Christian responsibility to teach him how to rob a gas station.”

  “How much did you get?”

  “A hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You have to pay back your share.”

  He blanched.

  “Was your buddy a Christian?” she asked. “No,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, “then you have to pay back his share as well.”

  He stared at her in pained disbelief.

  “Tony, do you have anything else in your possession that you’ve stolen?”

  “Everything I got,” he said.

  “It’s a good thing it’s summer,” she told him, “because you’re going to have to give everything back.”

  When he returned to Montreat that fall Ruth asked him, “Did you pay back the service station owner?”

  “I couldn’t,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders innocently. “I went to the filling station and it was closed down.”

  “Well, I guess so if he had many customers like you,” she said.

  17

  CHAPTER

  Power and Influence

  WITH THE PRESIDENT />
  I don’t think Ruth cares a hoot about whether or not she meets a celebrity.

  —Julie Nixon Eisenhower

  On a clear, balmy March evening in 1950, Strom Thurmond and his wife, Jean, invited the Grahams to the governor’s mansion at Columbia, South Carolina. It was one of the first occasions when a prominent politician showed interest in this evangelist who had become so well known during the pivotal Los Angeles crusade the year before. Ironically, after an evening of mingling with a number of the state’s prominent citizens, the names Ruth recorded in her diary were those of the domestic staff.

  This was typical. The Grahams’ association with the famous and influential has been a source of curiosity and controversy. In 1950, President Harry Truman invited Billy to the White House for the first time. Five years later, the Grahams were invited to Clarence House to be presented to the Queen Mother. Later that spring they were invited to Windsor Castle to have lunch with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. This would go on for the rest of their lives, for never has an evangelist been of such interest to contemporary world leaders.

  Ruth occasionally accompanied her husband on his visits to places of importance. In general, she was observant and unassertive. She rarely discussed the details of such events with friends or even family. In the mid-nineties, when there was increasing pressure for Billy and Ruth to reveal details about their famous associations, they would not. Confidential conversations, whether with presidents or neighbors, were privileged.

  In later years, Ruth would often bemoan the growing loss of loyalty and grace in a world where every confession, indiscretion, and peccadillo was a disgrace for all to see. She would never have a taste for Court TV or psychobabble talk shows, and she would never get used to worrying about reporters and the curious who began rummaging in the old galvanized garbage cans at the bottom of the Graham road.