You may remember Tammy Faye Messner as Tammy Faye Bakker, a singer and televangelist
who dominated the Christian circuit for decades with her first husband,
Jim Bakker. Let's unpack the untold truth about her life, from her humble beginnings
to her massive successes and scandals. She was born as Tammy Faye LaValley
in International Falls, Minnesota, a town with an estimated population of less than 6,000 people. It
sits by the Rainy River, which divides the US and Canadian border. According to Tammy's first book,
"I Gotta Be Me," she lived in a home with no bathroom, but rather an outhouse.
She was the oldest of eight children, the youngest of whom she helped raise. At age 10,
she went to a prayer meeting at her mother's Pentecostal church.
There, she made the decision to pray Jesus into her heart. Tammy said:
"For hours I lay on the floor and spoke in an unknown language. I wasn't aware of
anyone else. I was walking with Jesus."
Ever since that prayer meeting her desire was to become a minister. After high school, she went to
North Central Bible College in Minneapolis. It was there that she met her future husband Jim Bakker.
At the time, he was the hall monitor in her dormitory. According to her 1996 memoir,
"Tammy: Telling it My Way," on their first date he took her to church.
He told her his dreams of starting a ministry. At the end of the date he confessed:
"Tammy LaValley, I have loved you ever since the minute I saw you walk into school."
He asked her to marry him, and two weeks later they were officially engaged.
Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker married to little fanfare in 1961.
Jim's family is said to have disapproved of the marriage and did not go to the wedding,
while Tammy's family was too poor to attend. The couple was then thrown out of school, unaware that
their college had a strict rule stating that no one was allowed to marry before graduating.
They quietly worked their way up the ladder at their local church,
ministering to teenagers. Tammy Faye sang and Jim preached. According to "Tammy:
Telling it My Way," a visiting preacher from North Carolina approached them and
told them he wanted them to work for him. He sold his proposition by saying:
"Jim and Tammy, God has spoken to me. The Lord has a divine plan for the two of you."
They became popular among The Assemblies of God churches and were paid to visit
and minister to other churches. In 1965 they met Pat Robertson, the evangelist and minister
who ran CBN — the Christian Broadcasting Network. Robertson offered to turn the
couple's puppet show ministry into a children's television show. Jim accepted on the condition
that if it was successful, he'd be allowed to create a Late Night-type show for Christians.
That show eventually became "The 700 Club," and is still the network's most popular show.
But the Bakker's next show, 1974's "PTL Club," a.k.a. The Praise the Lord Club,
put their personalities on the map in the world of televised evangelism.
In "The PTL Club," Tammy Faye and Jim preached to their viewers what was known as "the
prosperity gospel," which urges people to give their own money to evangelical
organizations for the sake of receiving wealth in return from God. This philosophy ultimately
brought in revenue totaling not just in the millions, but hundreds of millions.
"And if you want to put it on a credit card, you want to guarantee you have it,
we have our operators standing by right now at 1-704-554-6000."
Jim began expanding their production facilities to encompass multiple buildings that became known
as the Heritage Village. Meanwhile, Tammy stayed at home and took care of the couple's children
with little to no help from Jim, who was too busy building an empire. Not too surprisingly,
a division in their marriage began taking root.
As the money started rolling in, plans to expand the Heritage production compound
into an amusement park called "Heritage USA" began. According to Religion and Politics:
"Heritage USA combined the Bakkers' growing televangelism empire with
theme-park hedonism, offering an immersive experience in the sights,
sounds, and practices of American conservative evangelicalism."
It had all the trappings of a typical park, but with special attractions for Christians such as
a Jerusalem marketplace, a replica of Billy Graham's childhood home, and passion plays.
The park became the third most popular in the US, right behind Disneyland and Disney World.
At the height of their ministry, Tammy Faye and Jim were often criticized for their extravagance.
According to The New York Times, they had an air conditioned dog house and matching
Rolls Royces. Tammy was always dressed up and dripping in jewelry. But what she was best
known and mocked for was her mascara. Comedians loved to impersonate Tammy's maudlin performances
and tearfulness, joking that her crying would lead to thick black streams down her face.
You could buy T-shirts with slathered makeup on it that said: "I ran into Tammy Faye at the mall."
Despite essentially becoming a joke, she learned to embrace her image and use it to her advantage.
According to "Tammy: Telling it My Way," Tammy said:
"Makeup artists all over the country have tried to get me to take off my
eyelashes or quit wearing so much mascara. [...] I just laugh and say,
'That would be like Dolly Parton having a breast reduction.'"
According to the Los Angeles Times, if a makeup artist wanted to take off her
eyeliner it would be impossible, being that in the 90s she got her eyeliner, eyebrows,
and lip liner permanently tattooed on her face.
In 1987, Tammy was diagnosed with pneumonia and sent to a hospital in Palm Springs, California.
She had a high fever, cough, and suffered from hallucinations. While under treatment,
the medical staff grew concerned that Tammy must have had a heart condition because
her heart rate was low. After a series of tests, they learned her heart was fine,
but that she had been on a considerable amount of Ativan. In her memoir, she described it as:
"[...] a tranquilizer that had been originally prescribed to ease my fear of flying. But it
seemed to quell so many of my other anxieties that I had begun to rely on it more and more."
When Tammy was released from the hospital,
she was driven directly to the Betty Ford Clinic against her will.
There she asked if she could do an outpatient program. Her family took a break from PTL and
stayed in Palm Springs while Tammy recovered. According to UPI, Tammy said of her time there:
"The experience has drawn the family closer together. We have turned
this mistake into a miracle. We are the happiest we've ever been.'"
"We have the whole gang back together this week, and we're going to have a wonderful time."
According to Tammy's memoir, Jim was involved in a sexual encounter with a 21 year old woman at
a Florida hotel in 1980 — an event that had lasting consequences for the Bakker empire.
The woman, Jessica Hahn, claimed that she had been sent to the hotel under the pretense of
watching Jim's children. Subsequently, she was allegedly drugged and coerced into having sex
with him by PTL Club co-host John Wesley Fletcher. Jim denied these allegations.
Not long before Tammy went into recovery for pneumonia and dependency on prescription drugs,
John Wesley Fletcher was fired from PTL. Not long after, a woman claiming to be Hahn
began calling PTL requesting money to pay for medical bills because her health was in decline
after an encounter with Jim Bakker. Supposedly, Hahn was paid hush money,
but still contacted the Charlotte Observer in an effort to get the truth out into the world.
A reporter, Charles Shepard, followed the story, and in 1987 published it in print
which became the beginning of the end for the Bakkers' empire.
Speaking more of the Hahn scandal, Tammy says in her memoir:
"Jerry Falwell had cleverly seized upon this time,
one of the lowest points in our lives, to do his dirty work."
Jerry Falwell was a preacher known not only for creating the Moral Majority,
a political Christian movement during the Reagan era, but also for creating Liberty University,
a college based on fundamental Christian principles. When Falwell
learned the Hahn story was about to break, he offered to step in and take over PTL.
Against Tammy's wishes, Jim agreed and stepped down. According to Tammy,
Falwell wanted to destroy PTL because he was trying to help Bush win the White House and
was worried PTL would support Pat Robertson — who was considering a run for president.
Falwell spread a rumor that Jim Bakker was gay, and that both the Bakkers had extravagant
paychecks and demands, ruining their reputations. Then Falwell began dismantling the company,
laying people off and getting rid of property. According to the Belleville News,
PTL filed for bankruptcy in 1987, and in 1988, Jim Bakker was, quote,
"indicted for wire and mail fraud charges as part of an IRS investigation." In 1989,
Jim was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison. According to Religion and Politics,
Investigations revealed that Jim had been misappropriating funds raised for Heritage USA
to pay large salaries and bonuses in addition to overselling lifetime partnerships to the park.
The problems in Tammy and Jim Bakker's marriage started long before Jessica Hahn, fraud claims,
and Jim's imprisonment. In her memoir, Tammy explained the reality of their marriage
after the birth of their second child and the expansion of Heritage Village:
"A deep and profound separation of souls had begun to take place.
We were two people living separate lives."
She goes on to say that this separation led her to have an emotional affair with a man that made
Jim jealous, and quite possibly led Jim to have an affair with Hahn in the first place.
Scandal after scandal broke and their life became a media circus. Per her memoir,
Tammy's religious beliefs told her that, quote, "God hates divorce," but in 1992,
she gave up and filed for a divorce from Jim while he was in prison.
Many people thought she was wrong to leave him while he was in prison, but she stated:
"How cruel it would have been for me to have waited until he walked through those prison doors,
happy and filled with dreams and plans for Jim and Tammy."
According to her memoir, Tammy met her second husband, Roe Messner, through Jim. The Bakkers
enlisted Messner, who was a professional contractor known for building churches,
to help build Heritage USA. After Tammy's divorce from Jim was finalized,
she and Roe struck up a friendship. At the time Messner was also married, but revealed to
Tammy he and his wife were separated and also getting a divorce. According to The Ledger:
"Within a year, she married Messner, who also had recently divorced and filed for bankruptcy."
Roe lost millions of dollars on Heritage USA. Both
Tammy and Roe were rebuilding their personal and professional lives after the fall of PTL.
According to the Charlotte Observer:
"In 1996, second husband Messner, who'd been diagnosed with prostate cancer,
was sentenced to nearly three years in prison on bankruptcy fraud charges."
Messner was convicted for "concealing assets" in his bankruptcy. He spent 27 months in prison.
After his sentence, he and Tammy reunited and Messner began building churches again.
The gay community took to Tammy for a few reasons. One, she was camp — her makeup,
her over-the-top emotions, and all the drama of her life. Two,
the community admired famous women who overcame adversity, as most people do. But thirdly,
and most importantly, Tammy Faye Bakker supported gay men diagnosed with HIV and AIDS at a time when
most of the Christian world had turned their backs on them. She even interviewed Steve
Pieters — a gay minister who suffered from AIDS — on PTL. According to Wussy Magazine:
"After the segment, Steve heard that network executives pressured Tammy
to do an interview with a Christian psychiatrist who would give advice
on how to 'cure' homosexuality or pray away AIDS. She refused."
When Tammy started to make her comeback, she was able to do it in part because of her queer
following. Per the Charlotte Observer, she began going to Pride parades and queer events.
She even went on to create a talk show with Jim J. Bullock, an openly gay actor.
In 1996, while working on the show with Jim J. Bullock,
Tammy discovered she had colon cancer. According to her memoir,
she started seeing symptoms earlier, but waited a year to see a doctor, and said:
"By then it was too late."
She underwent surgery to have it removed and was cancer free for a time. In 2004,
she was diagnosed with lung cancer. In an interview with Larry King she
said doctors were unable to do surgery because of the location of the cancer,
that it would be too dangerous. Tammy Faye underwent chemotherapy instead.
According to ABC, she went into remission, but in 2005, the cancer returned. In 2007,
she gave one final interview on Larry King Live, and died shortly thereafter. She was 65 years old.
Tammy Faye's optimism and uninterrupted grace in the face of so many indignities, is what
has drawn people to her. Per the Washington Post, religious leader Mel White said of her:
"For the evangelical community, she was Dr. Joyce Brothers, Martha Stewart,
and Carol Burnett, all rolled into one."
Tammy Faye inspired millions of fans while she was alive and continues to do so through her legacy.
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, please call the Substance Abuse
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that's 1-800-662 four three five seven