12 - A Bite of Salvation

Summary

All gold rushes are essentially negative.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald to Gerald Murphy, September 14, 1940

PREAMBLE

More than once as a youngster in the 1950s I watched Oral Roberts laboring in prayer on the little television screen, inside his giant tent that could seat thousands. I had seen such a tent only once before, when in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) the Ringling Bros. circus filled the big top. The word that Roberts used most emphatically—his language was peppered with “Lord”s and “Jesus”s and “prayer”s and “Come up, my daughter”—was: heal. He summoned divine agency to bring remedy to one destitute soul after another, quivering, quaking, palsied, lame, blind, mute, the whole gamut. And one at a time, like guests in some odd talk show (or the sufferers marching to the springs in Fellini's 8 ½ [1963]), they would head to the platform and allow him to lay hands upon them. He would open his fingers upon a trembling head, look up to the heavens (that is, the top of the tent), clamp his eyes shut, and scream, “Heal!!! Heal this ailing man!!! Heal this woman!!!! Heal!!!!!!” While I watched him, stunned but entirely uninformed, I did not know that, along with Jay Silverheels, who was Tonto in my weekly episodes of The Lone Ranger, I was seeing in Roberts one of the very earliest Native Americans of my experience, and certainly an indigenous pioneer to the mass media. He was Choctaw American. Perhaps he had the power of a shaman. In screen truth, however, in snowy black and white, while he screamed and while his hands shook with the force that causes hands to shake when one is devout in prayer, he looked white to me. White, white, and blistering white. White thunder. White lightning. In Richard Brooks's Elmer Gantry (1960), Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons) copies this routine again and again, once with a deaf penitent (Max Showalter) calling the fire of Heaven to descend through her fingers.

Roberts founded his Pentecostal Ministry in 1947, by which time Sinclair Lewis's satirical novel had been in print for twenty years, and revivalists like Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Billy Graham were heating up the environment with fervor. These folk, but Graham especially, were models for the film, writes Burt Lancaster's biographer Kate Buford, although this was “carefully denied by the director and star”: