Tammy Faye Messner

The eldest of eight children, she was born Tamara Faye LaValley in International Falls, Minnesota, to Pentecostal preachers Rachel Minnie (née Fairchild) and Carl Oliver LaValley.

Her parents were married in 1941. Shortly after she was born, a painful divorce soured her mother against other ministers,[5] alienating her from the church.

In 1960, she met Jim Bakker while they were students at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota.[6] Tammy Faye worked in a boutique for a time while Jim found work in a restaurant inside a department store in Minneapolis. They were married on April 1, 1961. The next year, they moved to South Carolina, where they began their ministry together, initially traveling around the United States; Bakker preached, while Messner sang songs and played the accordion.[7] In 1970, she gave birth to their daughter Tammy Sue "Sissy" Bakker; in 1975 she gave birth to their son Jamie Charles Bakker.

Bakker and Messner had been involved with television from the time of their departure from Minneapolis until they moved to the Charlotte area via Portsmouth, Virginia, where they were founding members of The 700 Club.[8][7] While in Portsmouth, they were hosts of the popular children's show Jim and Tammy. They then created a puppet ministry for children on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which ran from 1964 to 1973.[8]

Messner with then-husband Jim Bakker during a PTL broadcast, circa 1986.

Messner co-founded (with Bakker) The PTL Club (Praise The Lord) in 1974, a televangelist Christian news program that they initially hosted in an abandoned furniture store in Charlotte.[8] The series mixed "glitzy entertainment with down-home family values" and preached a "'prosperity gospel' which put a divine seal of approval on both the growing affluence of American evangelicals and the showy lifestyles of their television ministers."[8] The PTL Club soon grew into its own network and a corporate enterprise within a year of its founding, generating $120 million annually in the 1970s.[8] In 1978, Messner and Bakker used $200 million of PTL funds to build Heritage USA, a Christian retreat and theme park that, at the time, ranked alongside Disney World and Disneyland as one of the most popular theme parks in the United States.[8]

Throughout the series, Messner provided a sentimental and emotive touch to stories,[7] and also often sang Christian songs.[8] She was also noted for her candid discussion of topics considered taboo amongst many of her Evangelist peers, ranging from penile implants to acceptance and compassion for the LGBT community.[8]

At the height of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s, Messner emotionally interviewed Steven Pieters, a gay Christian minister with AIDS on "Tammy's House Party," a segment of The PTL Club, during which they discussed his sexuality, coming out, diagnosis with AIDS, and the death of his partner.[9] During the program, Messner emotionally addressed her viewership, saying: "How sad that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, we who are supposed to be able to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care."[9] Throughout the AIDS epidemic, Messner advocated for viewers of The PTL Club to follow Christ and show compassion and pray for the ill,[10] and also invited drug addicts onto the show to interview them about substance abuse.[8] In 1987, it was reported that Messner was herself being treated for a prescription drug addiction.[11]

Messner's friend, the Reverend Mel White, commented on her presence on The PTL Club:

Her fans were people who grew up in a very fundamentalist tradition, not being able to wear make-up, or dance, or go out in public. So here comes Tammy, with her dyed hair and make-up, her ebullient spirit and outspoken ways with both men and women. She talked about sex, and flirted with Jimmy. She took on the caricature of an obedient wife, and blasted it. You have never seen Pat Robertson's wife, or Jerry Falwell's wife. They stay at home, doing what those wives do.[8]

The Bakkers' control of PTL collapsed in 1987 after revelations that $287,000 had been paid from the organization to buy the silence of Jessica Hahn,[12] who claims Jim Bakker raped her.[13] In his 1997 book, I Was Wrong, Bakker disputed Hahn's account, claiming that he was "set up" and that the sex was consensual.[14] The revelations invited scrutiny of the Bakkers, and charges made about their opulent lives, including media reports of an air-conditioned doghouse at their Tega Cay, South Carolina, lakefront parsonage as well as gold-plated bathroom fixtures, dominated newscasts in the 1980s. When asked about her income, Messner told reporters in 1986: "We don't get what Johnny Carson makes, and we work a lot harder than him."[15] The couple's Tega Cay home was later sold by the ministry and burned to the ground not long thereafter. Bakker wrote in his book I Was Wrong that he watched the home burn on live television while incarcerated.[16] The Charlotte Observer subsequently ran exposés of PTL's finances and management practices. PTL went bankrupt after being taken over by Lynchburg, Virginia-based Baptist televangelist Jerry Falwell, who offered to step in following the scandals in 1988.[17]

Messner stood by Bakker through the scandal, including several instances when she cried on camera. In 1989 Bakker was sentenced to 45 years in prison on 24 fraud and conspiracy counts. In 1992, while Bakker was still in prison, she filed for divorce, saying in a letter to the New Covenant Church in Orlando, Florida: "For years I have been pretending that everything is all right, when in fact I hurt all the time... I cannot pretend anymore."[18]

On October 3, 1993, she married property developer Roe Messner in Rancho Mirage, California, after he divorced his own wife. They moved to the Charlotte suburb of Matthews, North Carolina.[2] Tammy and Roe were neighbors to Christian recording star and friend David L Cook.[19] Roe, who had a contracting business, Messner Enterprises in Andover, Kansas, had built much of Heritage USA as well as numerous other large churches and had been a family friend to the Bakkers throughout the PTL years.[20] Roe was the one who produced the money for the $265,000 payment to Hahn, later billing PTL for work never completed on the Jerusalem Amphitheater at Heritage USA.[12] In the Bakkers' fraud trial, Roe testified for Bakker's defense saying that Falwell had sent Messner to the Bakker home in Palm Springs, California, to make an offer to "keep quiet."[21]

In 1996, Roe was convicted of bankruptcy fraud, having claimed to have owed nearly $30 million to more than 300 creditors in 1990. As he faced sentencing in 1996, he said he could not afford to treat his prostate cancer because he lacked health insurance.[22] He was sentenced to and served 27 months in prison.[7]

The same year, Messner published her autobiography, Tammy: Telling It My Way, and she co-hosted a TV talk show titled The Jim J. and Tammy Faye Show with Jim J. Bullock.[23]

In July 2007, on more solid financial footing, the Messners relocated to Loch Lloyd, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City. Jim Bakker had relocated his operations to Branson, Missouri, in 2003. She told Entertainment Tonight they had moved to the "dream house" to be closer to Roe's children and grandchildren from his first marriage.[24]

As her second husband was jailed and she was first diagnosed with colon cancer, she re-entered the public eye in a series of books, movies and television appearances.

She was the subject of a documentary titled The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000), which was narrated by RuPaul,[8] and a follow-up film titled Tammy Faye: Death Defying (2004).

She appeared twice on The Drew Carey Show in 1996 and 1999, playing the mother of character Mimi Bobeck (Kathy Kinney), who was also known for wearing excessive amounts of makeup.[25] On September 11, 2003, she published a new autobiography, I Will Survive... and You Will, Too!, in which she described her battles with cancer and her life with Messner.

Despite her background in Christian fundamentalism, Messner became a gay icon after her parting from PTL, appearing in Gay Pride marches with such figures as Lady Bunny and Bruce Vilanch. Unlike many American Christian fundamentalists she "had long refused to denounce homosexuals" and also expressed compassion towards, and urged support for Americans with HIV/AIDS when it was still a much feared and unknown disease.[10] In the 1980s she interviewed an AIDS patient on her program, "making an impassioned plea to Christians to love and accept their gay brethren."[26] She was benevolently referred to as "the ultimate drag queen,"[27]  and said in her last interview with Larry King that, "When I went — when we lost everything, it was the gay people that came to my rescue, and I will always love them for that."[28]

In early 2004 she appeared on the second season of the VH1 reality television series The Surreal Life. The show chronicled a twelve-day period wherein she, Ron Jeremy, Vanilla Ice, Traci Bingham, Erik Estrada, and Trishelle Cannatella lived together in a Los Angeles house and were assigned various tasks and activities.[29]

Together, the six put on a children's play and managed a restaurant for a day. She also attended a book signing for her best-seller, I Will Survive... And You Will Too.

At the end of the show, Messner said she thought of Vanilla Ice and Trishelle Cannatella as children and could relate to them deeply because she had similar feelings and problems when she was their age.