Remembering Ruth Graham

by Judy Bachrach

JUNE 21, 2007 TAGS: RELIGION, TRADITION, INSPIRATION ADD A COMMENT

When I met Ruth Bell Graham, it was at the cavernous, oversized log cabin she and her husband, the famous evangelist Billy Graham, had built back in the Fifties in the mountains of Montreat, N.C. It was a pretty place, ringed with fireplaces and stuffed with books, cushions and memories: mostly of Billy's accomplishments and Billy's photographs, the latter taken alongside such notables as Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Their smiling faces and adoring presidential tributes to Billy could be seen on practically every wood-paneled wall.

Ruth was 77 at the time of our interview 10 years ago, a tall, rangy woman with fine, penetrating eyes set in the delicately boned face of a runway model. Her hair was snow white; she was wearing dark tapered trousers nipped at the waist and a thick bulky sweater. She was seated " perched really " on a comfortable old armchair, her calm gaze traveling from me to Patricia Cornwell, the best-selling crime novelist.

It was Cornwell who had brought me to Montreat, anxiously and with a good deal of trepidation. "Ruth's life hasn't been easy, married to Billy," said Cornwell. "But she's not really what you'd expect in an evangelist's wife, she's not at all judgmental. Both of them are like that. They believe in sin, but they don't judge."

This was clearly good news as far as the author was concerned, since it was about Cornwell and her trouble-filled life that I was then writing for Vanity Fair. Ruth was supposed to be, in effect, the author's character witness, a soothing, grounded counterpart to a quirky character who had suffered abandonment as a child, and then as an adult bulimia and a lesbian love affair that had recently become public. It was clear Ruth didn't relish her role.

"It was Ruth who brought me and my brother in when our mother couldn't take care of us any more," said Cornwell. "I guess I was maybe 9 or 10 years old."

Ruth nodded. She had been over this story, it was clear, many times before, and it wearied her. Also, she hadn't really raised young Patricia, or Patsy, as she was then known. After feeding her, Ruth had given the child temporarily to a missionary family. "I did give her a leather-bound journal, though, and encouraged her to write," she added.

And? I wondered.

"And it all worked out for Patsy in the end," Ruth replied briskly. "You give people the tools they need, then you have to let them work it out for themselves. That's what I did for my own children." She showed me a series of pictures: three daughters, all very pretty with the same determined jawlines; and two sons, who had spent their more youthful years chasing girls and drinking. Much of the time, Ruth had raised them all single-handedly.

"When things got to be too much for her, Ruth used to spend hours away from the family, climbing trees," Cornwell said.

"Still do," said Ruth. "Although in 1974 I fell out of a tree while helping one of my grandchildren fix a swing." That fall, as she did not tell me, apparently resulted in chronic back pain for years.

"Let me get this straight " you climb trees?" I interrupted.

"Yes," said Ruth.

"And you're 77," I said.

"You need silence sometimes," she said.

Originally, she had not really wanted to get married, Ruth added. When Billy Graham first proposed, she was a Wheaton college girl in Illinois, intent on becoming a missionary in Tibet. She turned young Billy down flat.

"But Billy was pretty persistent, so I changed my mind," she reflected. She seemed stoical about this change of heart, but it was evident there had been difficulties in the relationship that she was not proposing to discuss that day.

The couple married in 1943. It was Cornwell, in her biography of Ruth (Ruth: A Portrait), published just a year after my encounter with her, who was privy to her friend's most private thoughts. One of which was that Ruth had sincere regrets about having acceded to the pleadings of her handsome suitor.

"After the joy and satisfaction of knowing that I am his by rights and his forever, I will slip into the background," Ruth wrote long ago in her journal. "In short, be a lost life. Lost in Bill's."