Revelations of a Decorator

Raul Mitchky, an interior decorator, told Camilla Warrick, the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter, that he had moved a bookcase in the study at the Grants’ Fort Wright mansion while he was working there, and a bundle of $20,000 in $100 bills fell at his feet. At that point, he’d been working in the house for only four days and didn’t know that “Dr. Grant” was the evangelist W. V. Grant. He wrote across the wrapper “Thank God for honest paper-hangers!” and replaced the money. He described to me his impressions of the Grant house:There was a lot of old furniture in the house, a very lavish home with lots of antiques.... One time, [Shirley Grant] came in and she’d just bought a $25,000 painting, and they had antiques like you wouldn’t believe and the whole house was—their cars were worth three times [the $24,000 a year Grant claimed was his income].... I had to move 60 pairs of shoes out of his closet.... And jewelry! I’ve never seen so much jewelry. Gold! There was more on their dresser top than in a jewelry store! [About Shirley Grant]: She had more gold on her than I’ve ever seen on anybody in my life. And she had three closets of clothes for her fat, intermediate and skinny stages.

More Real Estate

In addition to the Fort Wright mansion, Grant maintained a penthouse apartment at 1 Lytle Place in Cincinnati, renting for $30,000 a year. Russ Grant (no relation) installed a burglar alarm system there, and estimated that they had $200,000 worth of antique furniture. Those prices are circa 1979. Mitchky was called in to do the interior work on this new residence. He told me:[Grant] was taking this place just to have a place to spend the weekends. There was going to be an installation of about 60 rolls of [wall]paper. They chose really expensive wall coverings for their homes. It could have been anywhere from eight to nine thousand dollars just for the cost of the paper. That’s not including the labor. They bought all new bedroom and dining room furniture, and lots of other stuff.

High Living in Texas, Too

Recently, Grant moved the whole operation to Texas. His scale of living did not suffer from the move. The new Grant mansion outside Dallas cost $800,000, plus another $200,000 for the play area, outdoor night lighting, swimming pool, patio, and assorted electronic pinball machines, which Grant adores. One night shortly after Grant moved into the estate, during a discussion of the new stereo equipment he had just had installed, he noticed that it did not include a cassette player. He called to “Reverend” Larry King, his truck driver, and handed him a fistful of cash with instructions to go out and buy him a player, “something you think I’d like.” He could easily afford it. At that point in his career, W. V. was taking in some $25,000 a crusade. The Reverend Grant pleads for donations to keep his show, “Dawn of a New Day,” on television, basing his begging on his claimed $8-million-a-year cost for air time. Between October 1985 and October 1986, he was spending $375,700 ($7,225 each week!) on one TV station alone, KHJ-TV in Los Angeles. But that was his single biggest market. It was also his most expensive by far; some small UHF stations can sell that same half-hour for as little as $500. The Los Angeles bill represented about 10 percent of his annual air time budget. Actually, the total cost was just half what he claimed, or $4 million. The week after I exposed his operation on television, RKO affiliate KHJ-TV dropped his show. Grant does not even show up in the top ten of the 87 syndicated U.S. religious television programs listed by Arbitron, the media research group that monitors such matters. Evangelist Rex Humbard, who never had a day’s schooling in theology and was simply appointed as a “reverend” by his father, was performing as a TV minister before some present incumbents were out of puberty. He claims there are some 1,100 television preachers operating today, though this estimate may be inflated and surely covers every 10-watt local station. Robert Schuller’s “Hour of Power,” conducted from the $15 million space-age Crystal Cathedral, commands the number-one position in that competition, spending $30 million a year on TV production costs alone and reaching 1,123,200 households. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, formerly of television’s “PTL Club,” established in the mind of the public that money-hungry evangelists can flout every standard of moderation that has been established in civilization. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt would have envied some of their excesses. An air-conditioned doghouse, a 50-foot-long clothes closet with three cut-glass chandeliers hanging in it, and a breathtaking selection of mansions supplied by their ministry all came to light when the media finally decided that religious figures were, after all, fair game for investigation. Bakker even built himself a new studio dressing room enhanced by a sauna and an array of gold-plated fixtures. The gold plating alone cost his contributors $27,000.