Billy Graham’s bad romance

His marriage wasn’t exactly a love story

They met as students at Wheaton College in 1940. An official biography in 1966 tells the story. Ruth Bell heard a “remarkable preacher” had come to campus.

Walking through the halls one day, she overheard him praying. “I had never heard anyone pray like it before,” she’s quoted saying. “I knew that someone was talking to God.”

Then Billy Graham was talking to her.

Ruth was popular, with “many admirers.”

That was the story. Billy was the opposite, the bashful boy awed in the presence of a pretty girl. In Graham’s 1997 memoir, Just As I Am, he narrates the moments when he first saw her.

“Standing there, looking right at me, was a slender, hazel-eyed movie starlet! I said something polite, but I was flustered and embarrassed. It took me a month to muster the courage to ask her for a date.”

Their love grew, except for one problem. She felt ‘called’ to be a missionary in Tibet. But Billy was clear that he wasn’t. How were they to resolve God appearing to lead them in different directions?

Billy noted that the Christian husband is the “head” of the wife. Not Ruth herself, but her husband, would make the decisions. “The Lord leads me and you follow,” he clarified.

She’d accepted this, adding: “I’ve been following him ever since.”

She was little-known to Evangelicals.

As Billy Graham was becoming the great leader of the religion, endlessly in demand around the world, Ruth was all but a secret.

He’d speak of her influence on him. When set to do a radio show, he wanted to call it The Billy Graham Hour. She suggested Hour of Decision. The title was used for decades.

Graham’s mega-selling 1952 book, Peace With God, credits his wife with having “read and reread the manuscript.” She might’ve helped write it.

“Politics fascinates me,” he said in 1971. Back in 1964, he recalled, he’d considered a run for president—until his wife telephoned.

“If you announce that you’re going to run for president,” she said, “I’ll divorce you, and America will not elect a divorced man.”

Even in photos together, Billy and Ruth seem strangely apart.

It’s like she was the nanny, or a fan who got a photo-op with the star.

A 2020 documentary, Billy Graham: An Extraordinary Journey, has a brief segment on his family, noting he’d be gone for six months at a time. He’d stop off at their home in Montreat, North Carolina to visit, but mostly to rest between dates.

“He needs quietness,” Ruth Bell Graham explains in a 1970 interview, “and then on the road he needs to have a sense that things at home are cared for, so he doesn’t need to worry about them.”

He’d regularly leave her with another child to raise. They had five. Then gone for up to six months at a time. He’d come home to rest.

There were infamous stories.

His toddler daughter was brought to him once, and he didn’t recognize her. Another time, he arrived home as his young son Franklin said: “Who he?”

In his 1997 memoir, Franklin tries to clean up the history as best he can:

“Daddy was often gone on long trips. I missed him, but even as a child I knew he was away doing something very important.”

Franklin recalls that his mother was busy raising them, so she had her work, and art projects too. He writes: “I’m sure this helped pass the time and eased the loneliness she felt.”

We learn only in media reports that all the Graham children were so poorly-behaved they were sent to boarding school. Their first daughter, Bunny, recalled: “Daddy was burdened, Mother was overwhelmed. It was easier to send us away.”

Ruth did sermon preparation for her husband.

She’d research Bible issues for him. “She is a much better theologian than I am and she studies all the time,” Graham once noted.

She’d monitor newspapers for items he could use. She helped hone the Christian messaging that he’d deliver to millions.

She traveled when she was needed for appearances, like state functions where a wife was expected. Other than these moments, Billy Graham was someone who lived somewhere else.

The family photos were photo ops. They barely knew him.

She had quips to deal with the problem.

“I’d rather have a little of Bill,” she’d say, “than a lot of any other man.”

Ruth was asked once if she’d ever considered divorcing him. She replied: “Divorcing never, but killing several times.”

It was, she’d say, a “privilege to share him with the rest of the world.”

I find a rare interview with her in a Honolulu newspaper in 1977, done while Billy was in India. “When the children were growing up, I felt that I should stay home,” she says. “Children need one parent at home.”

It was little noticed, and less discussed.

But the problem remained: Evangelicals pitched the religion as being centrally concerned with marriage and family, when its leader had all but abandoned his own.

To think of Billy Graham is to think of him onstage, alone, pointing that finger.

Since 1976 Ruth had been friends with a local teenager.

Patsy Daniel was a tennis player wearing her brother’s clothes, with an anorexia problem and nursing inner wounds. Her father had abandoned her, and her mother was mentally ill.

She’d met Billy Graham’s in-laws, then his wife—always noting her beauty.

“A woman of regal beauty, she was thin but shapely, her features flawless, as though chiseled with love,” Patsy later recalls.

Ruth took to encouraging Patsy as a writer—reading her poetry, and suggesting she journal as a form of therapy. Patsy felt deeply moved, affirmed in her dream of being a writer.

She’d see Billy too, on his occasional stops at home. “He just seemed tired,” she recalled.

In 1981, age 25, Patsy was married and working as a reporter for the newspaper in Charlotte—and looking to get into books. She thought to write one about Ruth. A biography of Billy Graham’s wife?

“I don’t think it would be very interesting,” Ruth said.

Ruth thought it would be “a sweet book about our friendship.”

She broached the idea with Billy. He asked his handlers, and they were even less sure. Ruth was told that if she wanted a biography done, they’d set her up with an ‘experienced’ writer.

Ruth said no, repeatedly. Months passed. Then Ruth telephoned Patsy and said she agreed to the biography. A 1992 profile notes: “Some people around her thought Patricia was using her friendship to gain access that might hurt Graham.”

But Ruth pushed them aside. “What Patsy needs is practice,” she announced, “and I’m going to let her practice on me.”

Patsy dug into the project with the fervor of a detective.

She lived for days at a time in the Graham home, questioning Ruth far into the night. Ruth told her things that had never been told.

Finishing the manuscript, Patsy gave it to Ruth to read.

How strange that reading must have been? The book narrates:

“I was struck by her beauty, her gentleness and spontaneous laughter. My next encounters with her came when I was in the local red brick grammar store and would see her car idling out by the endless line of orange buses wrapped around the school. She was there to pick up her younger son Ned. I would conspicuously walk back and forth in front of her car, searching with mock gravity for bus #91, until she spotted me and asked me if I wanted a ride.”

It seemed to be random meetings—but Patsy had been pursuing her.

Ruth suggested changes to the draft.

There were details about herself that were not anything she’d planned to reveal. Her motorcycle riding. The problem of her husband being away.

But Ruth seemed deeply, personally upset.

She despaired at having agreed to the project. “Why did I ever let you do this?” she challenged Patsy.

Ruth went silent, as the Graham family took over negotiations.

Throughout, Patsy insisted the book was a tribute to Ruth. “That’s about the most visible way I can think of of giving your life to someone else,” she said. “To allow you to write about them.”

A rewritten manuscript was handed back to Patsy. She got a lawyer, and there followed rounds of tense meetings, and more rewrites. The book, A Time For Remembering, was published in 1983.

By that time, Patsy’s husband had decided to become a pastor. They divorced, though she still used his surname, Cornwell.

Ruth had stopped talking to her.

The biography sold well, but was little discussed, and fell out of print. What a strange book it remains—totally unique in Evangelical literature. A deeply felt portrait of a woman’s life.

There’s Ruth the dreamy girl who grows up artistic, often fantasizing about martyrdom, and Heaven.

There’s the young woman who meets Billy Graham—except this was a different story than the one told in the ‘official’ books.

Back at Wheaton in 1940, the courtship is different.

This time, Ruth saw herself as not getting married ever. She wanted to be a missionary in Tibet, she kept saying. That meant being single.

There’s no scene of Ruth overhearing Billy “talking to God.” Ruth said she could “never quite recall the first time she met Billy,” but did recall a day he’d been playing chess.

He seemed determined to be someone important. He seemed firm in his decisions—except in choosing a wife. He’d been seen with many girls. A female friend, Cornwell narrates, came to Ruth “presenting a list of girls that Billy had dated, and dropped.” It was a warning.

Ruth was fine about dating other men. Billy was furious: “Either you date just me or you can date everybody but me!” he exclaimed.

She’d told him she planned to be an “old maid missionary.”

This, she felt, was “the highest calling there is.”

Billy shot back: “Woman was created to be a wife and mother.”

“There are exceptions,” Ruth replied, “and I believe I’m one of them.”

Billy rebuked her, telling her to “search the Scriptures and pray until you find out just what is God’s place for woman in this life.” Should she wish to embrace Christian teaching, he said, and be “willing to accept God’s place, you can let me know.”

This was theological combat.

Ruth’s choice to accept Billy as a husband was tied to his assessment of her status, before God, as a woman. He kept telling her to forget her “crazy ideas,” and let him be the one in communication with the deity.

The narrative becomes tinged with terror.

Cornwell writes that Ruth “had a terrible sense of foreboding about being Mrs. Billy Graham. She was terrified of losing her identity.”

Ruth wrote in her journal that she’d struggled fiercely, wishing “it would be over with — all this struggling and thinking and reasoning — this feverish tossing to and fro in my mind.”

Finally, she called Billy to her, and said: “I thought it only fair, Bill, to tell you that — ” She pauses. “That I loved you.”

They became engaged. But home in North Carolina over the summer break, Ruth became ill, ‘listless’ and ‘fatigued’. Instead of returning to Wheaton, she was sent to a sanitorium in New Mexico.

She wrote Billy, saying she wasn’t in love with him.

When she returned to Wheaton, he asked if she wanted to return his ring. Cornwell narrates:

“She hesitated, depressed by the finality of the gesture and unsettled by the image of him vanishing from her life. No, she answered, her words edged in frustration. The problem, she explained, was that she still believed she was meant to be a missionary.” “Listen,” he said, “do you or do you not think the Lord brought us together?” “Yes,” she had to confess. “Then,” he said firmly, “I’ll do the leading and you’ll do the following.”

Ruth accepted, it seems, with the surmise that she’d be spending her life largely alone. She wrote in her diary:

“He will be increasingly burdened for lost souls and increasingly active in the Lord’s work. After the joy and satisfaction of knowing that I am his by rights — and his forever, I will slip into the background…. In short, be a lost life. Lost in Bill’s.”

Over their honeymoon she again became ill.

As they pulled into their new apartment she had a fever. He took her to the hospital and left her, having to do a gig at a church.

She cooked for him and he didn’t like her food. If delayed in cleaning up after him, he let her know. They often argued. After one of their fights, she’d recall, he’d set her straight. “I have never taken your advice before,” he said, “and I don’t intend to begin now.”

He took to traveling often. After his visits home, she was often ill. Cornwell writes that “after he had walked out the door, she would crawl into bed with a severe headache or an upset stomach.”

Then Ruth would get back to work—scripting his sermons, taking care of his children, all the things she’d do for God.

If called on to make public appearances, she would. Then she got back to the solitary work of being Billy Graham’s wife.

When Ruth stopped talking to her, Patsy focused on her writing.

She was working on detective novels—first with a character of a male detective. Then she began working on a female detective. She connected ‘Kay Scarpetta’ with Ruth Bell Graham.

As Patricia Cornwell later recalls:

“I had Ruth by my side, even when she wasn’t there. Then my work with her was done. I decided I had to find some other remarkable person who would put up with me for more than one crime. That’s the genesis of Scarpetta, the heroine of my series. It is Ruth’s fault. She is responsible for people around the world knowing a lot more about blood spatter patterns, autopsies, and DNA.”

Around 1991, Ruth and Patsy resumed being friends.

The reunion seems to have happened as Patsy was being outed as lesbian in the tabloids. As she recalls in a 2007 profile, her mother had been horrified, telling her, “You’ve disgraced our family.”

Patsy realized she should tell Ruth. She recalls: “I flew to see her, saying there would be things in the news. She just said, ‘So, honey, what else have you been doing?’”

In 1997, by then world-famous mystery novelist Patricia Cornwell, Patsy re-published her biography as Ruth, A Portrait. At the time, she was developing a tabloid reputation for pursuing women—no matter how married. She often mentioned Ruth. A 1997 profile of Cornwell in Vanity Fair includes a scene of them together.

Ruth was asked if she knew Patsy was lesbian.

Ruth says she didn’t. She’s quoted:

“And the fact that I’ve known her all these years and not once have I had the slightest — the slightest — clue that there was anything off base there. Never!”

Then Ruth began to cry.

When she died in 2007, the religion barely noticed.

She was “the media-shy Presbyterian poet,” wrote Terry Mattingly, the newspaper columnist. He thought back on the Ruth Bell Graham he’d never been able to meet—as many times as he’d interviewed her husband.

The shine of Billy Graham’s career, he writes, was somehow her.

“She was nothing less than the X-factor, the source of that sense of otherness that, when blended with her husband’s essential humanity and North Carolina sense of grace, added a note of mystery to his career.”

Patsy kept talking about her. It was a curious situation? The world’s most famous lesbian chatting about being an accessory to the Billy Graham household. Bringing her girlfriends over?

“By the way, Ruth knew about me and didn’t care,” she tells The Advocate in 2008. “Everybody who I had a semi-serious relationship with I took up to the Grahams’ house.”

She recalls in The Guardian in 2015: “I don’t know that I would be alive today if it wasn’t for her.”

She thinks back to that lost world in Montreat, North Carolina:

“It was such a puritanical place and very ignorant. You never heard anything about women being gay. It didn’t exist. It was only men. And they were paedophiles, of course.”

I sit thinking about Ruth in her solitude.

She must surely have wondered about that strange ingredient in Cornwell’s interest in her, and those odd passages in the book.

“Ruth had become more lovely. Her face was older now, and it seemed that all she had ever been or done was etched there. It was the face of one who often smiled: Her brow was smooth and lines radiated from her eyes; two fine creases ran from the wings of her nose to the corners of her mouth, lifting her cheeks in tucks when she smiled, her teeth bright between them like the sun shining through sashed curtains. Her eyes were wide and expressive: sparkling like water when she laughed, winking like light on a windowpane when she teased. At pensive moments, when she was alone with her thoughts, weariness and wisdom wavered through them like the shadow of a fish swimming through a pond. Her bones were more sharply defined, exquisite: the straight nose, the high cheeks, the strong jaw. Her skin was taut, her veins prominent as a leaf’s.”

It was a love letter.

Was it the only one Ruth ever got?

Even the official Billy Graham story can hint that his marriage wasn’t exactly a love story. Their daughter Anne looked back on her mother having not been lonely…since she had Jesus.

“He was the love of her life.” 🔶