‘Falwell Inc.‘ sees pastor through new lens

By Darrell Laurant

Published: August 16, 2008

In the end, Dirk Smillie wound up having to sell his new book, “Falwell Inc.,” three times — once to a publisher and twice to the Rev. Jerry Falwell himself.

“It was Jerry Jr. who first suggested I do the book,” said Smillie (pronounced “Smiley”), who initially became acquainted with the Falwells through a Forbes magazine article he wrote in 2006, “and Jerry Sr. signed on to it.

“Later, though, some of his board members decided they didn’t like the Forbes piece, saying it was condescending. ‘It’s like we’re the tribe by the river,’ one of them said. I got on a conference call with Jerry, Jerry Jr. and Ron Godwin, and tried to convince Jerry that this would be strictly about his career as an entrepreneur.”

By this time, Smillie had all but written the project off. But to his surprise, “Jerry thought about it a minute and said: ‘OK, let’s do it.’”

And so it was done. The 215-page book came out earlier this summer and gained national attention when it was excerpted in the New York City tabloids and on the Forbes Web site.

The fact that Falwell had died just a few months after his conference call with Smillie lent special poignancy and immediacy to the project.

Still, acceptance initially proved as difficult to come by outside the Falwell circle as within.

“I was amazed at how many publishers were vehemently opposed to having anything to do with Jerry Falwell,” Smillie recalled. “I kept saying, ‘But he’s such a fascinating character. He’s Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson and Billy Graham rolled into one.’”

Smillie’s career at Forbes had given him a foot in the door of the publishing business, however. His go-between was from the high-powered William Morris Agency, and eventually they found a collaborator — St. Martin’s Press, a subsidiary of MacMillan’s.

What emerged is not, as one might suspect from the product of a business magazine, simply a dutiful tracking of Falwell’s wildly fluctuating bottom line over the years. Smillie begins his introduction with a description of what Falwell ate on the last day of his life, as well as what was said in his last conversation with Godwin (his longtime associate and former Moral Majority head). He begins the book itself with a detailed and riveting account of how Carey Falwell, Jerry’s father, had to shoot his brother Garland to death in 1931.

After 10 months of interviews and research in and around Lynchburg, Smillie came to realize that much of Falwell’s success (and his failures) had to do more with his personality than budgeting and bookkeeping.

“Whatever you may think of Jerry,” Smillie said, “and I heard it from both sides, what he did to create what’s there now is just astounding. I flew to Richmond from New York, drove to Lynchburg through all these little rural towns, and then I walked into the lobby of his new church and my jaw dropped.”

It has often been said that a glowingly positive book could be (and has been) written about the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and every bit of it would be true. But then, the same could be said of a negative book.

Other writers who have taken on Falwell as a project have almost universally approached him from one of those two perspectives. Smillie somehow managed to include both facets of the man without being either judgmental or fawning. The central spine of “Falwell, Inc.” is, of course, financial — the salesmanship, the product, the overreaching, the moneymen who always seemed to arrive in the nick of time, wielding monster checks. But it is also a good read.

“My guess is, some people won’t like this because it removes Jerry from the lens through which they’re used to seeing him, which is that of the Bible-believing preacher,” Smillie said. “He was that, but he was other things, too.”

Thus, Smillie can write about some of Falwell’s envelope-pushing financial schemes while also noting that “Macel never let him have a checkbook, because he was always giving money away.”

He hasn’t heard from the Falwell family, he said, “maybe because I went over all of this with them beforehand. There won’t be any surprises.”