Celebrities at His Feet

Grant’s fans include musician Billy Preston and former football player Rosie Greer, who shows up at many religious functions and on television evangelists’ programs. Preston, having worked with a very hard-nosed faith-healer who calls herself “Amazing Grace,” is quite accustomed to the shenanigans that take place at these meetings. But Greer, says cameraman Gary Clarke, was astonished:The first time we did a show with Rosie, he didn’t expect that healing stuff. It was kinda funny, watching his face. He’s standing there, and W. V.’s doing this healing act, and Rosie is thinking, “What’s going on here? What am I doing here? Someone’s going to catch me sitting here!”

Clarke, besides being the lead cameraman, was supervisor of remote operations for All-American Video, the production company owned by W. V. Grant. While head man Rod Sherrill flew from location to location in style, Clarke loaded and unloaded the trucks and drove between locations. In the opinion of Clarke, who videotaped some 200 of Grant’s shows, “He sure knows how to grab an audience.” Clarke would marvel to see Grant, sensing that an audience was not yet quite ripe for the offering baskets to be passed around, launch into a back-home story about his childhood that the people could relate to, and thus rescue the situation. Clarke easily solved some of Grant’s tricks:It was such a phony operation. At first, when people would give in checks, [the checks would] all come backstage and he’d memorize the names and addresses on them. A lot of people were so excited to talk to him, that if he told them they’d had indigestion problems, for example, they’d just agree.

Another Grant cameraman was Danny Jenkins, son of faith-healer Leroy Jenkins. Grant told him with great confidence that he could never be “set up” by skeptics supplying him with a phony identity during his pre-show interviews—which is exactly what we succeeded in doing. Grant told Danny that he was always suspicious when someone came up to him and voluntarily told him his name, ailment, the name of his doctor, and other details. But he was too smart for his own good. When we set him up, one of my first instructions was for my colleagues not to approach Grant, but to let him find them. He did, and we got all the evidence we needed. Shortly after I first began my investigation of the faith-healing business, I’d received a letter from Danny Jenkins, offering to “rat” on W. V. Grant and Peter Popoff, but insisting that his father, unlike them, was the real thing. He exhibited a knowledge of Grant’s methods in that letter, but seemed to have genuinely been deceived by his father, and he said that he believed he could supply me with evidence of healings. He never did. Danny had become so familiar with Grant’s trick of questioning his audience in advance and memorizing the data in order to “call them out” that he was even able to focus in on the next victim that Grant would approach, because he’d seen that person being interviewed and knew that Grant would be approaching his subjects in the same sequence he had memorized them. Once, when he confronted Grant with this observation, the answer was typical. Said Grant, quoting from scripture, “The Holy Ghost will bring all things to your remembrance.” Well, that satisfies me!