People: PERSONALITY

ABOVE the entrance to the specially built 8,000-seat “tabernacle,” a banner proclaims: BILLY GRAHAM’S GREATER ALBUQUERQUE CRUSADE. Despite the threatening windy weather which has dusted the nearby Sandia Mountains with the season’s first snow, some 7,000 people are already waiting in the steel and tar-paper structure—the largest indoor gathering ever assembled in Albuquerque. A Plymouth sedan drives up, and out of it steps the Rev. William Franklin (Billy) Graham, showman, salesman, pressagent, preacher— the hottest Protestant soul-saver since the late Billy Sunday quit the sawdust trail. Albuquerque last week had the honor of celebrating Billy Graham’s birthday: he had just turned 34.

Billy Graham has taken evangelism to the tailor. He wears a jaunty sky-blue gabardine, cut full to flatter his spare figure (6 ft. 2 in., 180 Ibs.). Accessories: a blue and white tie and square-folded white handkerchief, thick-soled, reddish-brown shoes, a cowboy belt with a silver buckle and silver tip. (“You know,” muses Billy, “when I was a kid, I used to think that preachers all wore black suits and long faces.”) In his campaign posters, Billy’s face is sleekly handsome; the reality seems gaunter and more impressive—deep-set, remote blue eyes, sharp nose and cheekbones, matted blond hair.

Graham is an ordained Southern Baptist, but he preaches a fundamentalist common-denominational brand of Christianity. As a teenager, Billy sold more Fuller brushes than any other salesman in his North Carolina area because he was convinced that there are no finer brushes than Fuller brushes, and his conviction was contagious. The grown-up Billy believes in a heaven & hell as tangible as a Fuller brush. Graham likes to talk about his evangelism in Fuller brush terms: “How much of my product can I get them to take?”

Billy’s theology is plain, pointed and graphic. Like a Biblical Baedeker, he takes his listeners strolling down Pavements of Gold, introduces them to a rippling-muscled Christ who resembles Charles Atlas with a halo, then drops them abruptly into the Lake of Fire for a sample scalding. His language is a strange, original blend of farm-boy idiom, Shakespeare, the New Testament and the newest slang. Sample Grahamism, aimed at those who protest that they were raised in good Christian homes, therefore don’t need to be “converted”: “Just because you were born in a garage, does that make you an automobile?”

WHEN Graham preaches about pride or venality, he struts; when he speaks of the unregenerate’s awful doom, he covers his eyes with both hands; and when he warns that “it can happen to you,” his forefinger slashes at every sinner’s heart. To keep himself mobile, Billy clips a lipstick-shaped microphone to his necktie; an assistant holds the coiled slack of the wire, and pays it out to him as he moves about. On the pulpit, Billy rests two black leather books. One is a notebook containing a typed outline of tonight’s sermon, the other a Bible. The outline Billy never mentions but fleetingly consults; though each new sermon is rehearsed before a mirror, Graham’s delivery is always convincingly ad lib. The Bible Billy mentions constantly: “The Bible says . . . Now don’t get mad at me. Billy Graham didn’t say it. The Bible says it.” (The word “Bible” rolls up from Billy’s diaphragm and out over the audience like a thunderclap.)

When the sermon is over, as the 700-voice choir softly hums an “invitation” hymn (Almost Persuaded) to wavering sinners, Billy’s voice speaks out again, this time in a coaxing, soothing register: “Come on . . . We’re waitin’ on you. Don’t you want to be born again? . . . You come on, now.” Down the aisles, by ones and twos, and then in groups, they come.

Trained workers step forward, lead each newcomer off to talk over his problems, give him some Bible verses to memorize, get him to sign a card accepting Jesus as his savior. Critics say that evangelism’s converts are only “Christians for a night.” But within 24 hours, the “Graham team” has dispatched a letter to the nearest preacher of each convert’s denominational choice with instructions to follow him up.

BILLY made his own “decision for Christ” at 16, as a lanky farm boy in Charlotte, N.C., who played first base for the local semi-pro team and dreamed of the big leagues. One night, during the invitation at a revival, Billy nudged a school chum in the ribs and stage-whispered: “Pal, I’m goin’.” Billy went all the way: he began to study for the ministry. He went to the St. Petersburg Bible Institute in Florida, then Illinois’ Wheaton College (where he met his wife), then accepted a pastorate in Western Springs, Ill. But a pastor’s life seemed an unexciting routine of baptisms, marriages, fund-raisings and funerals. Billy had an itch for new places and new faces; the vineyard he needed was a national hookup, not a village church.

Today Evangelist Graham produces his own TV and radio shows (cost: $20,000 a week), is president and featured player of his own motion-picture company (it has made two movies-with-a-message), and leads month-long crusades in cities from coast to coast. (Last June 1, in Houston’s Rice Stadium, Billy drew his alltime record crowd: 60,000.) For his considerable labors, Billy draws an annual salary of $15,000, plus professional expenses, as president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The association’s funds come from the collection plates passed at Graham crusades, and from dimes and dollars mailed to Billy by thousands of TV and radio fans.

OFFSTAGE, Billy Graham chews his nails, snaps his fingers and paces the floor. He does not smoke or drink anything stronger than buttermilk. For recreation, he plays golf (middle 90s), drives his car at high speeds, fishes, reads Zane Grey westerns, and talks a blue streak. Inevitably, Billy’s closest companions are members of his ten-man team, six of whom, including the pressagent, are also ministers. (His wife seldom travels with him.) A close-knit and devoted group, they handle the organizational details, and do their best to buffer Billy from the constant press of the crowd. They do their job so well that the president of the Southern Baptist Convention once told Graham: “Billy, I’m sure glad the Lord is easier to get to than you are.”

Alone in a hotel room, which is usually in wild disorder, Billy studies his Bible, drafts new sermons and revises old ones, reads news magazines or listens to radio commentators to keep his preaching topical, dictates his correspondence into a bedside Dictaphone, and catnaps. Most of the time, he wears a gaudy, green baseball cap to train down his hair for public appearances.

In occasional fits of depression, Billy reproaches himself and his team for vainglory, for giving the credit to Graham rather than God; he lives in private foreboding that a wrathful Lord may some day punish him by turning his magic lips to clay. In red ink Billy’s press releases carry a self-humbling reminder: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts. Zechariah 4:6.”

Eleven months Billy labors; the twelfth he rests with his wife, three daughters and baby boy, and a Great Pyrenees dog named Belshazzar. The Graham family lives in a six-room, grey stone house in Montreal, N.C. with picture windows, rhododendrons, a hammock by a mountain stream, a TV set, and a log fence to keep out nosy tourists. But the Rev. William Franklin Graham is at his happiest when he is at his busiest and loneliest: on the platform in a vast amphitheater, or drawling into a mike the Tarheel tag line to his ABC broadcast, “May the Lord bless you real good.”