1942–1959: Early life She was born
Tamara Faye LaValley in
International Falls, Minnesota, to
Pentecostal preachers Rachel Minnie (
née Fairchild; 1919–1992) and Carl Oliver LaValley, who married in 1941. Shortly after she was born, a painful divorce soured her mother against ministers, alienating her from the church. Both of her parents remarried, her mother to Fred Willard Grover, forming a large blended family, in which she was the eldest child.
1960–1973: Marriage to Jim Bakker; early work In 1960, she met
Jim Bakker while they were students at
North Central Bible College in
Minneapolis, Minnesota. 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; Jim preached, while Tammy Faye sang songs and played the
accordion. 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." During the program, Tammy Faye 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." Bakker's friend, the Reverend
Mel White, commented on her presence on
The PTL Club:
1988–1995: Collapse of The PTL Club and aftermath 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, In his 1997 book,
I Was Wrong, Jim Bakker disputed Hahn's account, claiming that he was "set up" and that their sex was consensual. 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, Tammy Faye told reporters in 1986: "We don't get what
Johnny Carson makes, and we work a lot harder than him." The couple's Tega Cay home was later sold by the ministry and burned to the ground not long thereafter. Jim wrote in his book
I Was Wrong that he watched the home burn on live television while incarcerated. 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. Tammy Faye stood by Jim 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 (he served 5). In 1992, while Jim was in prison, Tammy Faye 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." On October 3, 1993, she married property developer
Roe Messner in
Rancho Mirage, California, after he divorced his first wife. They moved to the Charlotte suburb of
Matthews, North Carolina. 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. In the Bakkers' fraud trial, Roe Messner testified for Bakker's defense, saying that Bakker had no knowledge of the payment to Jessica Hahn, and that Falwell had sent him to the Bakker home in
Palm Springs, California, to offer generous compensation "if he kept his mouth shut."
1996–2007: Later life and illness In 1996, Roe Messner was convicted of bankruptcy fraud, having claimed to owe nearly $30 million to over 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. He was sentenced to and served 27 months in prison. That year she published her autobiography,
Tammy: Telling It My Way, and co-hosted a TV talk show titled
The Jim J. and Tammy Faye Show with
Jim J. Bullock. 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. On September 11, 2003, Messner published a new autobiography,
I Will Survive... and You Will, Too!, in which she described her battles with cancer and her life with Roe Messner. She was the subject of a documentary titled
The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000), narrated by
RuPaul, Despite her background in
Christian fundamentalism, Messner became a gay icon after parting from PTL, appearing in
Gay Pride marches with figures such as
Lady Bunny and
Bruce Vilanch. Unlike many American Christian fundamentalists, she "had long refused to denounce homosexuals" and publicly expressed compassion toward, and urged support for Americans with HIV/AIDS when it was still a much-feared and unknown disease. She was benevolently referred to as "the ultimate drag queen," and said in her last interview with
Larry King that, "When I wentwhen we lost everything, it was the gay people that came to my rescue, and I will always love them for that." 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. 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 her children and could relate to them deeply because she had similar feelings and problems when she was their age. 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. ==Death==