Tammy Faye Messner

Tamara Faye Messner (previously Bakker, née LaValley; March 7, 1942 – July 20, 2007) was an American evangelist. She co-founded the televangelist program The PTL Club with her then-husband Jim Bakker in 1974. They had hosted their own puppet-show series for local programming in the early 1960s; Messner also had a career as a recording artist. In 1978, she and Bakker built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park.

During her career Messner was noted for her eccentric and glamorous persona, as well as for moral views that diverged from those of many mainstream evangelists, particularly her advocacy for LGBT persons and reaching out to HIV/AIDS patients at the height of the AIDS epidemic. She released three autobiographies during her lifetime, I Gotta Be Me in 1978, Tammy: Telling It My Way in 1996, and I Will Survive and You Will Too! in 2003.

Jim Bakker was indicted, convicted, and imprisoned on numerous counts of fraud and conspiracy in 1989, resulting in the dissolution of The PTL Club. She divorced Bakker in 1992, while he was in prison, and married Roe Messner. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996, from which she suffered intermittently for over a decade before dying of the disease in 2007.

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.

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. In 1970, she gave birth to their daughter Tammy Sue "Sissy" Bakker, and in 1975 gave birth to their son Jamie Charles Bakker.

Jim and Tammy Faye had been involved with television from the time of their departure from Minneapolis until they moved to the Charlotte area via Virginia Beach, Virginia, where they were founding members of The 700 Club. 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.

Jim and Tammy Faye co-founded The PTL Club (Praise The Lord) in 1974, a televangelist Christian news program that they initially hosted in an abandoned furniture store in Charlotte. 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." 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. In 1978, the Bakkers 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.

Throughout the series, Tammy Faye provided a sentimental and emotive touch to stories, and also often sang Christian songs. 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.

Messner's 11 years with cancer were highly publicized. She was first diagnosed with colon cancer in March 1996, but later revealed she had endured bleeding for a year out of embarrassment at the prospect of seeing a male doctor. The disease went into remission by the end of that year.

In March 2004, Messner made an appearance on Larry King Live and announced that she had inoperable lung cancer and would soon begin chemotherapy. She continued to receive chemotherapy throughout mid-2004. In November 2004, also on Larry King Live, she announced that she was cancer-free once again. She described the details of her chemotherapy and continued to appear regularly on King's show.

A television documentary of her struggle with cancer was produced in 2004. It was on King's program again that she announced in July 2005 that her cancer had returned. In a March 2006 appearance on the show, she said she was continuing to suffer from lung cancer, which had reached stage 4, and that she was continuing to receive treatment for it. She also mentioned having difficulty swallowing food, suffering from panic attacks, and enduring substantial weight loss. As her health continued to worsen, a "Talk of the Town" article in an October 2006 issue of The New Yorker stated that she was dying in hospice care, and a December 2006 article in Walter Scott's column in Parade reported that her son Jay was "at a North Carolina hospice with his mom, [who is] gravely ill with colon cancer".

Messner was a guest by phone on Larry King Live in December 2006, and said that she was receiving hospice care in her home. She appeared in her son Jay's documentary series One Punk Under God, wherein they talked about her cancer treatments. In one episode, she required the use of oxygen in order to talk.

In May 2007, she issued a statement on her website saying that chemotherapy had stopped, and she urged her fans to continue to pray for her. The story was reported on NBC's The Today Show, and a feature in which fans and well-wishers could post get-well messages to Tammy was added to her website.

Frank Zappa's song "Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk", from his 1988 album Broadway the Hard Way, is about Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, as well as Pat Robertson.

Crowded House's song Chocolate Cake from their 1991 album Woodface has multiple lyrical references to Tammy Bakker.

In June 2006, a stage musical titled The Gospel According to Tammy Faye opened at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival and was subsequently developed as a larger professional production. The show features songs by J. T. Buck and a book by Fernando Dovalina. The musical is described as a fantasia which takes a balanced and fair look at its subject. The impetus for the show was provided by a lengthy interview that Messner gave the authors in March 2005. The musical aired in August 2006 in Portland, Oregon and Hood River, Oregon, and it was presented on stage at Houston's Alley Theatre at the end of July 2007 under direction of Les R. Wood. Industry readings presented by the Columbia Gorge Repertory Company were held at the Manhattan Theatre Club in December 2007, the cast including Tony nominee Sally Mayes and veteran Broadway performers William Youmans, Ken Land, Julie Foldesi, James T. Lane and Heather Parcells. The readings were directed by Mindy Cooper. Seth Farber provided musical direction.

Another musical following her life, titled Big Tent, debuted in May 2007, at off-Broadway's New World Stages, in New York City. The show features music and lyrics by Ben Cohn and Sean McDaniel, a book by Jeffery Self, and direction by Ryan J. Davis. A star-studded concert of songs from the show opened in February 2008, at New York's Metropolitan Room.

A play about her final hours, Tammy Faye's Final Audition by Merri Biechler, premiered at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival in June 2015. The play takes place in a fevered dream at the end of her life, wherein she enlists the men in her life for one final TV talk show audition.