The secret sex life of Billy Graham
An Evangelical leader had a dark side
Evangelicalism is famous for its “sex rules”—and for the leaders who break them. But the religion’s greatest leader, everyone agreed, was perfectly behaved.
Billy Graham was also, as scholars note, “notoriously protective of his public image.” I wondered why someone so ‘good’ would go to all that trouble. I went in for a look at his sex life.
Born in 1919, Billy grew up real girl crazy.
That was the ‘official’ narrative. “I was pretty wild in those days,” he’d say of his teenage years. “All I thought about was girls and baseball.”
He drew the line at kissing, he’d insist, and said that the deity was helping him not have sex. As he’d put it: “God kept me clean.”
There were some unholy scenes as the teenager struggled to be ‘pure’. A girl at school once pulled him into an empty classroom. Billy recalled:
“I silently cried to God for strength and darted from that classroom the way Joseph fled the bedroom of Potiphar’s philandering wife in ancient Egypt.”
He’d also say he wasn’t too Christian.
As Billy put it in 1958: “I had always thought of religion as more or less ‘sissy stuff,’ and that a fellow who was going to be an athlete would have no time for such things.”
But his life often feels like a story of two men. There was the young man he’d been, called ‘Billy Frank’, who had no time for Christianity.
Then there was ‘Billy Graham’, the famous evangelist. Early on, he’d been someone else—and later had to manage the difference.
He got converted because of a sex scandal.
That’s the official story. When Billy was 16, a traveling evangelist came to Charlotte, North Carolina to do weeks of ‘revival’. To stoke attendance, Mordecai Ham had a habit of using bits of local “scandal” in sermons.
On October 28, 1934, Ham made a claim that landed on the front pages of the newspapers. He said there were “houses in this town that are used almost exclusively as assignation houses for your High School boys and girls.”
High school kids were having sex? Could that be?
Ham pointed to one house, and added: “What about that house down here, where high school girls and boys have been going into by couples?”
It was scandalous—and proof was demanded.
At first, Ham assured that his source, referred to as “certain boys,” would be stepping forward to provide public testimony.
When that didn’t happen, Ham was left with egg on his face.
Who were these “certain boys,” I wondered, who’d been Ham’s source for the idea of teens having sex? If he’d asked for local scandal, he might’ve asked Billy Graham’s father, who was an organizer for the revival!
Later, without referencing the sexual context, Billy said that he went to the rally to hear a rant about his own shameful acts. As he’d put it:
“This man would stand up there and point his finger at you and name all the sins you had committed. It made you think your mother had been talking to him.”
Billy had just gotten with his first real girlfriend.
This needs a bit of background. Billy Graham was very adept at shaping his public image, but did once hire, by mistake, a biographer who’d wanted to tell the truth.
Marshall Frady’s 1979 book, Billy Graham: a Parable of American Righteousness, was an official biography, but it had unexpected information. When it was published, Graham and his forces fanned out to attack the book, saying it was all made up. The information was not repeated in later Graham biographies.
Frady says that shortly before attending the Ham revival, Billy had taken up with the titillating Pauline Presson. A friend described her: “Pauline was just built for this world. She loved fun, pleasure, dancing, and that was about all.”
Pauline was interviewed. “Lord, he was good-lookin’,” she recalled. Billy. “Tall and blond and with that winning grin.” Minutes after meeting, she said, they were kissing. “We didn’t waste any time, believe me.”
After the Ham revival, she recalled that a terror had entered Billy’s soul.
Suddenly, he was despairing of her not being as ‘Christian’ as he was—or rather, the kind obsessed with sex and dying. She recalled: “He was far more religious, almost fanatic, but it still didn’t seem natural in him somehow. He was really all tangled up, whether he knew it or not.”
Billy didn’t mention Pauline in his autobiography, Just As I Am, but he spoke of her with Marshall Frady. He said the break-up had been his initiative owing to their religious differences: “I told her my life had taken a different direction, that we couldn’t go on together.”
But Pauline said that Billy had asked her to marry him, and she’d refused. She didn’t want to be a pastor’s wife. She said: “You wouldn’t believe how he sat there and pleaded, pleaded, pleaded with me.”
Crying, he left—and for months, she said, bombarded her with gifts and appeals to go to a Christian college with him. Finally, he went alone.
‘Christianity’ was little more than avoidance of alcohol and sex.
To young Billy, it seems, neither came naturally. When he arrived at Florida Bible Institute, notes biographer William Martin puts it, he’d “quickly started prospecting among the school’s forty or so female students…”
With his flashy clothes and friendly manner, Billy was popular with girls. Then another sex scandal greatly shaped him. A disgruntled employee spilled the beans on the school’s director having an affair. As William Martin writes, “a band of scandalized students tracked them to their trysting place and exposed their liaison to public inspection.”
But Marshall Frady, again, has more sex details. The students had marched to a house where they thought the school’s director, Dr. W.T. Watson, was having sex with his mistress.
They found him alone—in the closet, naked.
Billy had been in the student mob. “I can still remember how the man’s hands were trembling,” he told Frady.
In Christianity, sex means you get hunted.
Narrating the scene in his memoir, Billy does not mention adultery, the student mob, the naked, trembling man in the closet or his own participation. He just says he’d learned a ‘Christian lesson’.
“It was a big learning experience for me in many ways, and it taught me to be very careful myself,” as he puts it.
But as he conceals the details of the story, his lesson would seem to be: don’t get caught.
By age 18, Billy was desperate to marry, and proposed to a fellow student.
In the famous story, Emily Kavanaugh accepted, then told Billy he didn’t look like he was “going anywhere” and she married someone else.
The official narrative is that Billy then started to get ‘serious’ about God.
That meant sexual renunciation and avoidance of women. Young Billy is imagined praying to God: “No girl or anything else will come first in my life again. You can have all of me from now on.”
Billy would look back on that period: “I simply forgot about girls for a long time after that, two or three years maybe.”
But Marshall Frady’s narrative is again very different. He writes that Billy was dating “more frenetically than ever before…”
Billy turned to dating “lower class” girls.
It was startling to friends. Marshall Frady quotes one:
“You should have seen some of those things he started taking out. Man, I didn’t understand why anybody’d wanna go out with bags like them after he’d been dating somebody as beautiful as Emily. They were wholly unlike the sort of girls he’d always dated. I told him that — but he didn’t want to hear it.”
The story the religion tells is that ‘godliness’ is learned through sexual control. The evidence tells a different story. When Billy wanted to master the religion, he began dating many women who read to him as ‘inferior’.
I wonder if ‘Christianity’ was experienced by these men as a woman you have under your control.
In his own narrations, he was nervous with women.
He felt especially bashful around one female student. In Billy Graham’s 1997 memoir, Just As I Am, he narrates the moment:
“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.”
After the urging of a friend, he popped the question: “Ruth, how would you like to go to church with me Sunday night?”
A 1983 biography of Ruth Bell Graham tells a very different story of their courtship. She never thought of him as a man with hesitation around women. Indeed, a friend came to her “presenting a list of girls that Billy had dated, and dropped.”
It was a warning against a man seen to be a womanizer.
Billy was very struck by Ruth Bell.
If she was very glamorous to him, it might be noted she looked very like his mother. Is that the secret of a Christian marriage?
Billy never much believed in ‘partnership’.
He did not see women having much status as spiritual workers or independent beings. He insisted to her:
“Woman was created to be a wife and mother.”
Declarations of love would be in short supply. Of his honeymoon, Billy’s autobiography only says, oddly, that he couldn’t sleep in the hotel bed. He slept on the floor.
They often fought. Billy didn’t like Ruth’s cooking and informed her. If she was delayed in cleaning up after him, he let her know that as well.
She’d give her input on matters. He set her straight. “I have never taken your advice before,” he said, “and I don’t intend to begin now.”
Parking her in a house in Montreat, North Carolina, Billy took to traveling for most of the year.
For the next decades, he’d be away up to six months at a time. He came home to rest. He left her — five times — with another child. He didn’t even come home for their births.
Ruth was needed for public appearances. She always hit her marks. Then she’d return to the solitary work of being Billy Graham’s wife.
She’d call her marriage “an odd kind of cross to bear.”
Billy and Ruth were icons of Christian fertility.
Photos of the family, surrounded by smiling children, were distributed widely. In retrospect, they were staged appearances with a man the family barely knew. His children had a single-mother.
Though Ruth, ever ‘nervous’, sent them to boarding school. As their first daughter, Bunny, would put it: “Daddy was burdened, Mother was overwhelmed. It was easier to send us away.”
The newspapers carried no photos of that scene.
Billy’s entire career, really, is a sex story.
After World War II, the traditional messaging about all sex being ‘sin’ was reading negatively. The religion was losing ground. Then a young leader, seen as handsome and masculine, was thrust into the spotlight with a new concept of ‘Christian sex’.
All sex wasn’t bad, Billy Graham assured. If married, then sex is “a gift from God,” as he’d put it.
That became common talk in the Evangelical world, but at the time it was very unfamiliar. As Grant Wacker writes, Graham “marched somewhat ahead of his evangelical constituents…”
He seemed a glamorous, charismatic figure.
Admirers would go on about his “muscular body,” about him being “fantastically handsome,” a “tall, handsome blond man.”
He seemed dignified, cerebral—and unlike other Christian leaders, perfectly sexually controlled. He assured that he was.
As his line went: “sex is something you were built for, but it was made to be controlled…if you lose the sex battle you have lost the battle of life.”
Throughout Billy Graham’s career, there was no hint in the public eye of tawdriness. That was the appeal. As biographer Grant Wacker puts it:
“Marital fidelity was so much a part of Graham’s public image that it is hard to imagine what proof of an extramarital lapse might have done to his career. Part of his aura grew from the real and supposed contrast between him and other evangelists in this respect.”
On the road, he’d say, “the temptation was great.”
He spoke of this most fully in a 1993 interview, saying that he had never committed adultery or “touched a woman in the wrong way.”
Other Christian leaders, he knew, didn’t have his remarkable sexual control. In the 1993 interview, Billy proceeds to tell a story:
“I was with a friend of mine who was a great Christian leader and he became so overwhelmed by temptation that he not only took cold showers, but he took the keys to his room and threw them out the window. It was in Paris. He didn’t want to be able to get out of his room.”
But more is known of this incident — in another version.
The ‘great Christian leader’ was Chuck Templeton.
The friendship of Billy and Chuck is a minor Christian legend. They were close friends in the late 1940s, each promising to be the future leaders of the religion. But Templeton became unsure about Creationism, and de-converted. Or that was his story.
I’m looking over photos of the two men from Chuck’s collection. It’s a side of Billy Graham one wouldn’t find in Christian sources.
In 1982, Templeton published a memoir.
In a startling chapter in An Anecdotal Memoir, he tells of traveling with Billy across Europe in 1948. The two men stopped in Paris, a city full of prostitutes. Women were “soliciting openly,” Templeton writes, and in one afternoon walk on arrival, they were “accosted at least fifty times.”
At a restaurant that night they arrive, two women joined them. He writes: “They were very young, not yet in their twenties, and quite beautiful.”
Chuck suggested he and Billy part to escort each woman to their respective homes. Chuck narrates himself going into the apartment building of the woman he was with. He tells a strange story about hiding his wallet in a hallway toilet. The scene reads as if he’d planned to have sex with her, but didn’t want to be robbed.
He ended up being overcome with fear, he writes, and fled to his hotel. But Billy Graham was nowhere to be seen.
Hours later, Billy appeared, he writes, “panting, his face shining with perspiration, his hair disheveled, his tie in a pocket, the collar of his shirt open.”
Billy told an involved story.
He’d planned to walk the girl home, he said, but she hailed a cab. It took them a long ways, out into a suburb of Paris. The girl prompted Billy to pay the cabbie. Graham did — and the cabbie took it all.
The girl led him into her home. Graham, quoted, tells his story:
“It was a dump. We got inside and she closed the door. I was trying to think of something I could say or do to let her know I was leaving. She went over to the bed, and without a word, unbuttoned her dress, tossed it aside and fell back on the bed. And Chuck, she was stark naked!”
Graham fled, he says. He had no money. He “walked and walked,” until seeing the Eiffel Tower, and navigated back to the hotel.
But in the 1993 interview, Graham wanted to revise the story to say Chuck was the one with the sex problem.
He lived in a world of male staff.
He mostly ate meals in his hotel room. Since he was known to be so “pure,” there were efforts to embarrass him. Once he was at an airport and was ambushed by several semi-clad women while a photographer jumped out to get a ‘compromising’ shot.
Graham used his influence in the media to suppress the photos.
Other suggestions could linger in full view. He’d go on about the dangers to men who had extra-marital sex—like he knew about that subject?
“Ohhh yes, you can go ahead and have a good time — for a season, a short time. Then something happens. You become satiated, venal, full. You no longer get the same kick and the same ecstasy and the same joy.”
Then he had a rather low view of himself.
In 1963, he wrote his wife a letter, trying to figure out why he’d been “blessed” with such enormous fame. As he puts it:
“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.”
A strange message for the woman he rarely saw?
There was his curious interest in porn.
In 1969 when in New York City he visited a porn store in Times Square. It was some effort to promote his upcoming ‘crusade’ in the city, making a show of protesting porn.
It resulted in an unexpected visual: Billy Graham and a wall of gay porn.
Even more curiously, not long afterward, he published an article titled “The Sickness of Sodom” that opened with a different scene:
“One day I put on dark glasses and a hat and pasted on long sideburns, and I went to some of these stores in New York. I had thought that Sweden was bad, but Sweden hasn’t gone near to the depths of various sex deviations and obsessions that we have gone.”
Billy Graham wanted to tell the world he’d put on a disguise and wandered through adult bookstores — in New York and Europe?
One could only wonder what he didn’t want to tell the world.
By the 1970s, he and his wife were noted to have separate bedrooms.
It was because of her cough, Ruth explained. They did vacation together. Billy loved tropical settings. As he was often said to be very frugal, Ruth worried about the apparent expense, but went most years.
Mostly, though, Billy Graham lived his life alone. The great advocate of marital sex wasn’t even really married. His official story is that he was celibate for much of his life.
I guess I ended up wondering…if I believed that?
He managed his narratives until the end.
In 2005, age 86, on CNN’s Larry King Live, the Christian icon goes on. “I was away from home 50, maybe 60 percent of the time and that’s quite a lot, but somebody said it was 90 percent but it hasn’t been that much.”
“Have you ever, Billy, been tempted?” Larry King asks.
“No. I have, I’m sure,” Billy replies, “but I can’t remember it because I believe that there is no temptation taking you but such is of God, that he allows you to be tempted, but you are able to overcome it with the help of the Lord.”
His thoughts seem to drift over the theme. “Love to see a beautiful woman,” he says. “Not as an old man so much. I like to see the beauty, the inner beauty of people, but the other beauty is something of the past.” 🔶
