Tammy Faye Messner

Tammy Faye Messner (born March 7, 1942, International Falls, Minnesota—died July 20, 2007, near Kansas City, Missouri) was an American televangelist and singer best remembered as the diminutive wife of Jim Bakker and as his cohost on the television talk show The PTL Club (also called The Jim and Tammy Show).

Tamara Faye LaValley grew up poor in a strict religious household. Her parents divorced when she and her younger brother were very young, and her mother married a widowed textile mill worker and would go on to have six more children. When she was 10 years old, she began speaking in tongues at her mother’s Pentecostal church. That experience had such a deep impact on LaValley that she promised to devote her life to God.

LaValley met Jim Bakker while they both were students at North Central Bible College (now North Central University) in Minneapolis. He proposed to her on their third date, and the couple married in 1961. They worked for several years as itinerant Bible Belt preachers, and she created a Christian puppet show. In 1965 their lives and careers took a dramatic turn when they made a shift to television on Pat Robertson’s new Christian Broadcasting Network. The couple eventually began hosting their own TV show, The PTL Club, which was syndicated on the PTL (Praise the Lord) network that they founded in 1974. At its peak in the mid-1980s, the show reportedly reached up to 13 million households. The couple built a $125 million empire that included Heritage USA, a religious theme park and retreat in Fort Mill, South Carolina, which drew a reported six million people annually. Although beloved by their viewers, the Bakkers were often criticized for their lavish spending and the prosperity gospel they preached. The couple had two children: Tammy Sue (born 1970) and Jamie Charles (“Jay”) (born 1975).

Tammy Faye Bakker became known for using heavy makeup, especially for applying large amounts of mascara, which would flow down her cheeks as she broke down in tears on camera while making prayerful appeals. Her cheerful spontaneity, worshipful singing, and emotional vulnerability became part of her appeal to viewers. In 1985, at a time when many people were fearful and judgmental of those infected with HIV/AIDS, she drew attention with her compassionate live interview with Steve Pieters, a gay pastor living with AIDS. During that groundbreaking broadcast, in which she and Pieters spoke with each other via satellite because of his frail health and the safety concerns of The PTL Club’s crew, she tearfully observed, “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.” Pieters subsequently became a national figure in promoting AIDS/HIV awareness and survived to continue his activism into the 21st century. Known for her willingness to discuss unconventional topics, Bakker was also open with her viewers about her struggle with addiction to prescription drugs.

In 1987 the Bakkers lost their TV ministry following a series of sex and money scandals. The couple divorced three years after he was convicted in 1989 of having bilked followers out of $158 million; she was never implicated in any crimes. In 1993 she married Roe Messner, a wealthy contractor behind Heritage USA. Although in later years her lifestyle was often parodied on TV, she handled such treatment good-naturedly. She released three autobiographies: I Gotta Be Me (1978; with Cliff Dudley), Tammy: Telling It My Way (1996), and I Will Survive…and You Will Too (2003), in which she wrote candidly about her battle with colon cancer. She would later die of the disease.

In 2022 Jessica Chastain was awarded her first Oscar, for best actress, for her portrayal of Tammy Faye Bakker in the biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021).