FALWELL’S GOOD OL’ BOY BOOK

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, back home in Lynchburg, Va., is furiously scribbling a new final chapter for his autobiography--due out in November from Simon & Shuster--so that it will include the financial and sex scandal rocking TV evangelism.

“Some very surprising, even radical things have happened in the last 45 days,” Falwell told Outtakes, “and I’m adding a chapter I didn’t plan on, trying to write whatever I can before deadline next week.” The chapter, he conceded, will have to be incomplete, “because the events are continuing.”

S&S; editor-in-chief Michael Korda promised that Falwell’s “examining the Jim and Tammy Bakker story deeply--the whole book will be a real page turner.”

Korda described the book, titled “Strength for the Journey,” as “Faulknerian, a good ol’ boy work of art complete with killings and bootlegging.”

The controversial Moral Majority leader, who also has taken over the beleaguered PTL, got a $1 million-plus advance for his account of his father’s legitimate and illegitimate businesses--from running a dance hall to selling bootlegged whisky during Prohibition.

“I’m going to tell things that have never have never been told,” Falwell said. “There will be general surprise across the country about my background.”

According to Falwell, his father killed his own younger brother in a family feud. Falwell is convinced that his father’s guilt over the murder caused acute alcoholism, which finally killed him when Jerry and his twin brother Gene were 15. “Most people think I was a Christian 10 years before I was born. (His father was agnostic and his grandfather an atheist.) I didn’t even own a Bible until my spiritual rebirth at 18 1/2.”

Two years ago, Korda got the idea for the book and asked super agent Irving Lazar to go after it, never expecting such timing.

“Quite propitious,” Lazar told us, laughing.

A 250,000-copy first printing and 12-city author tour is planned.

Falwell promised that “all the money (from the book) will go into a foundation furthering the cause of Christ.”