Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [194]
My feet hardly touched the ground—literally, for Random House kept me out on the road selling the book as long as they could, from city to city, until, finally, I reached some kind of apotheosis at a gathering of self-help stars in some huge arena in Dallas. The heavyweights of the self-help trade were there, so my appearance came rather late in the program, behind such stars as Robert Ringer, author of Winning Through Intimidation, and old troupers such as Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill, and Joe Girard (“The World’s Number One Salesman”). There wasn’t an empty seat in the house. The audience was mostly white males in their forties and fifties, with the slightly desperate looks of men who never quite made it in whatever job they had and believed passionately that there existed somewhere a formula that would change their lives.
I was already mildly uneasy at the thought that I was about to tell these people how to change their lives for the better when the speaker before me, a robust, red-faced cleric of some Southern fundamentalist offshoot church, wearing a suit that appeared to have been made from parachute silk, a white Stetson, and alligator cowboy boots, rose to his feet and approached the podium. He grabbed the mike, walked to the front of the stage, threw his Stetson at the front row, and in a voice that would have woken the dead had there been any in the audience, cried out, “Jesus wants you to be rich!”
There was an uneasy stir in the audience, while he repeated this, louder each time. “I mean he wants you to be rich, my friends. No doubt about it. But you’ve got to want it too. So I want each and every one of you to get on your feet right now and shout after me, ‘Jesus wants me to be rich!’ ”
A few people stood and mumbled, “Jesus wants me to be rich,” with rather shamefaced expressions.
The preacher cupped his ear. “I cain’t hear you,” he complained. “And if I cain’t, he sure cain’t. Heaven is a lot further away than this stage. You got to get to your feet and holler so he can hear you. You got to shout it out like you believed it. Now let’s go!”
A group of attractive young women, rather like football cheerleaders in matching green sweaters and short but demure white skirts, appeared onstage behind the preacher, smiling with perfect teeth, and added their voices in chorus to the chant. By now, the audience was whipped into a kind of frenzy, shouting “Jesus wants me to be rich!” over and over again to shake the rafters, their faces suffused with passion and belief. It was beginning to dawn on me in a panic that I was going to have to follow this act with my little talk on power, which was bound to come as something of an anticlimax, when the preacher reached into his pockets and began to pull out thick wads of dollar bills, which he flung out toward the audience. Bedlam ensued as people struggled for the bills floating down in the hot, still air of the auditorium while at the same time keeping up the chant, accompanying it with pounding feet in time to “JE-SUS-WANTS-ME-TO-BE-RICH!” over and over again, with the ear-splitting, repetitive effect that had characterized French supporters of the Algerian colonists in the 1950s, who liked to sound out “L’AL-GÉ-RIE-FRAN-ÇAISE!” on their car horns all through the night.
By the time the preacher had finished, wiped off his face, and handed the mike over to me, I had