Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are going
to do something a little bit different. We are
going to try to look behind one of the most famous
masks in American history. And you mean that
in the most literal sense possible? I do. I really
do. I'm talking about a mask of mascara and false
eyelashes and, you know, that tattooed on permanent
eyeliner. We're talking about Tammy Faye Messner,
formerly Baker. Yeah. And that name, for anyone
who lived through the 80s, it just instantly
conjures this very specific image. Oh, 100%.
And usually it's a caricature, right? It's the
crying woman on the news standing next to her
disgraced preacher husband. She was the punchline
of a thousand late night monologues. Exactly.
If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, she was basically
a walking cartoon character. But the thing is,
the more I looked into the stack of research
we have for today, the more I realized that the
cartoon version is, well, it's just not the whole
story. It's boring even. The real story is so
much weirder. darker and honestly a lot more
inspiring than I ever would have expected it
is a story of extremes I mean you have extreme
poverty then this unbelievable extreme wealth
you have extreme faith and then this this just
colossal scandal and then a third act that nobody
saw coming the incredible third act of redemption
yeah it's not just a story about a televangelist
it's really a story about American culture about
the media and you know how we treat women who
are just maybe a little too loud or take up too
much space yeah that's a big part of it so we've
got a massive stack of records to get through
today biographies, court documents. We have transcripts
of old Larry King interviews, which are fascinating,
and even accounts from reality TV show tapings.
Right. And our mission today is to try and figure
out how a girl from the freezing cold border
of Minnesota co -built a multimillion dollar
religious empire, watched it all burn to the
ground in this spectacular ball of fire, and
then somehow... somehow emerged from the ashes
as a gay icon and a beloved pop culture figure.
It's an incredible arc. And along the way, we
really have to unpack the prosperity gospel,
which is a huge piece of this. We have to talk
about the cultural panic around AIDS in the 1980s
and just the bizarre psychology of living your
entire life. I mean, even your darkest, most
humiliating moments in front of a television
camera. I'm really interested in the whole air
conditioned doghouse side of things. Just the
sheer drama of it all. And for me, it's analyzing
how she really deviated from those traditional
evangelical gender roles. She was not the quiet
wife standing in the background. Not at all.
So let's start at the very beginning. Before
the gold plated bathrooms, before the theme park,
let's go to International Falls, Minnesota. The
icebox of the nation. I've never been, but the
name alone just makes me want to put on a sweater.
It's brutal. I mean, we are talking about a town
on the Canadian border where winter lasts for
what feels like half the year. Tammy Faye was
born there in 1942 as Camera Faye LaVallee. Okay.
And to really understand her, I think you have
to understand the isolation of a place like that.
In the 1940s, International Falls wasn't just
cold. It was, you know, it was disconnected from
the rest of the world. And from what I read,
her home life wasn't exactly warm and fuzzy either,
was it? No, it wasn't. And this is a really crucial
piece of psychological context for everything
that comes later. Her mother... Rachel Minney,
had a very, very difficult life. She's a dedicated
homemaker, but she'd gone through a really painful
divorce shortly after Tammy was born. Which today,
a divorce is, you know, it's common, but we're
talking about a very conservative religious community
in the early 1940s. That's a huge scandal. Oh,
it's a scarlet letter. Absolutely. And the fallout
from that divorce. deeply deeply affected tammy's
mother the records show that the whole experience
soured her mother against ministers wow she felt
alienated by the church she felt judged so tammy
grows up in this house where the institutional
church is viewed with deep suspicion, if not
outright hostility, by the most important person
in our world. Which is such a massive irony when
you think about it. The woman who would go on
to become one of the most famous televangelists
in history was raised by a woman who just did
not trust preachers. It creates this fascinating
tension right from the start, doesn't it? Tammy
is the eldest in a large blended family. Both
her parents remarried and she has all this responsibility.
But she also has this innate magnetic pull. toward
the very thing her mother distrusts, the altar.
Right. She talks about feeling the spirit at
a really young age. It was almost an act of rebellion
for her to become so deeply religious. That's
a really interesting take, religion as teenage
rebellion. You know, usually it's rock and roll
or sneaking cigarettes. For Tammy Faye, it was
speaking in tongues. Precisely. And that drive,
that ambition, it took her out of the icebox
and down to Minneapolis to North Central Bible
College in 1960. She was trying to make ends
meet, working in a boutique. And this is where
the movie really starts. This is the moment she
meets Jim Backer. The big meet cute. It really
was. Jim was good there, too, and he was working
at a restaurant inside a department store. They
met in 1960. And the chemistry must have been
just, I don't know, nuclear. Because they did
not waste any time, they got married on April
Fool's Day, 1961. April Fool's Day. You really
can't write this stuff better than reality does.
It's a detail that biographers always, always
point out. It just feels like this giant piece
of foreshadowing. Yeah, it really does. But at
the time, of course, it was just young love.
They actually dropped out of Bible college to
get married. They chose each other over their
formal education. And almost immediately... They
hit the road. Right. This is the itinerant preacher
phase. I have this mental image of them in a
beat up old car just driving from one tiny church
basement to the next. That is pretty much spot
on. They were traveling evangelists. Jim would
preach. And Tammy, well, Tammy was the secret
weapon. She played the accordion and she sang.
The accordion. You don't see a lot of accordion
in modern worship bands, do you? No, you do not.
It was very of its time, very down home. But
it signaled something really important about
them. They weren't just theologians. They were
entertainers. They understood that to keep people
engaged, especially in these small rural churches,
you had to put on a show. But the accordion wasn't
what launched them into the big time. It was
something much, much weirder. It's so much weirder.
Are we about to talk about the puppets? We are
about to talk about the cops. Okay, I need you
to explain this to me. Because when I think of
televangelism, I think of these, you know, guys
in slick suits shouting about hellfire. Do you
not think of, what were their names? Susie Moppet.
Susie Moppet and Allied the Alligator. Yes. And
this is a critical part of their evolution that
often gets skipped over. In the 1960s, they started
working for Pat Robertson at CBN, the Christian
Broadcasting Network. Right. But they weren't
hired to preach to adults. They were hired to
do children's programming. So they were basically
the Christian Muppets. In a way, yeah. They created
a show called Jim and Tammy, which ran for almost
a decade, from 1964 to 1973. And this experience
is absolutely the key to understanding all of
their future success. How so? Well, think about
it. Working with puppets taught them how to be
comfortable on camera for hours and hours at
a time. It taught them how to simplify complex
theological ideas into these little bite -sized
digestible nuggets. And there's a psychological
safety in puppets, isn't there? You can make
the puppet say things that you might be too afraid
to say yourself. 100%. Tammy voiced Susie Moppet.
So Susie could be sassy. Susie could ask the
dumb questions about God that maybe people in
the audience were thinking but were too afraid
to ask. It allowed Tammy to develop this persona
of the innocent inquirer. It made her incredibly
relatable. So they spent a decade doing this
children's show. They're building a following.
They're learning the ropes of TV production.
But clearly they had bigger ambitions than just
holding a fake allegation. Much, much bigger.
In 1974, they decided to strike out on their
own. They left CBN, and they briefly helped found
TBN, the Trinity Broadcasting Network. But that
ended pretty poorly with some infighting. So
they moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, and
they started the PTL Club. PTL, praise the Lord.
People that love, or as the cynical bumper stickers
would later say, pass the lewd. Right. But in
1974, it was praise the Lord, and they set up
shop in an abandoned furniture store. I just
love that detail. It's so scrappy and American.
It was. But it did not stay scrappy for very
long. The growth was just, it was explosive.
Within a few years, they weren't just a TV show.
They were a full -blown network. They were broadcasting
24 hours a day via satellite. Which was revolutionary
at the time. It was completely revolutionary.
You have to remember, the mid-'70s, 24 -hour
television just wasn't really a thing. CNN didn't
even launch until 1980. The bakers were absolute
pioneers of the 24 -hour news cycle, but for
Jesus. And the money, I assume the money started
pouring in. It was a firehose of cash, an absolute
torrent. By the late 70s, the PTL club was generating
$120 million annually. Wait, say that again?
$120 million in 1970s money? That is... Yeah.
That's the GDP of a small country. It was staggering.
It's almost impossible to comprehend. And this
is where we have to talk about the theology that
drove this engine. Because you don't make $120
million a year by telling people to sell all
their possessions and live in poverty. No, you
definitely don't. You make it by preaching what's
known as the prosperity gospel. Right. This is
a term we hear thrown around a lot. But what
does it actually mean in practice? Like, how
did they sell this idea to people? So the prosperity
gospel or the word of faith movement essentially
flips the traditional Christian script on its
head. Historically, you know, Christianity often
viewed wealth as a spiritual danger. It is easier
for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
and all that. Right. Be humble. Be poor. The
prosperity gospel says the opposite. It says
that God wants you to be rich. It interprets
financial success and physical health as the
divine seal of approval. So if you're driving
a Cadillac, it's not because you're greedy. It's
because you're incredibly faithful. Exactly.
And the flip side of that is also true. And this
is the dark part. If you are poor or if you are
sick, it might be because you lack faith. Wow,
that's a heavy burden to put on people. It is.
But it's also a very seductive message, especially
in the economic uncertainty of the late 70s and
early 80s. It told people that they had control
over their destiny. If they just sowed a seed,
which meant, you know, donated money to the ministry,
God would repay them a hundredfold. It's basically
spiritual investment banking. That is a perfect
way to put it. And the bakers embody this completely.
Their show mixed this, this. Glitzy entertainment
with down -home family values. They didn't hide
their wealth. They flaunted it as proof of God's
blessing. The flashy suits, the gold jewelry.
The sets that looked more like the Tonight Show
than a church service. It was all part of the
testimony. And right in the center of this gold
-plated stage was Tammy Faye. She was the heart
of the entire operation. Jim was the visionary.
He was the builder. He was the guy asking for
the money. But Tammy was the emotional connection,
and she was totally unlike any other televangelist's
wife of that era. How so? What made her different?
Well, think about the other major figures of
that time. Mrs. Falwell, Mrs. Robertson. They
were very traditional, very demure. Right. They
stood in the background and smiled. They smiled.
They played the piano. They were silent partners.
Tammy was loud. She was 4 feet 11 inches of pure,
unadulterated energy. She was on screen just
as much as Jim was. And she wasn't talking about
baking cookies. Oh, no. She was breaking taboos
left and right. She talked openly about her marriage
struggles. She talked about sex. There is a famous
clip where she discusses penile implants on air.
I'm sorry. She discussed what? On a Christian
network? Penile implants on a Christian network
in the 1980s. Her intention was to help couples
who were struggling with intimacy. But you can
just imagine the shockwaves that sent through
the fundamentals community. I can't even imagine.
She even admitted to her own prescription drug
addiction and her treatment for it in 1987. She
just made the private completely public. And
the makeup. We have to talk about the makeup.
It wasn't just a little lipstick and powder.
It was a construction. It was her armor, the
heavy foundation, the tattooed eyeliner, the
famous spider leg eyelashes. People mocked her
for it relentlessly. They called her a clown.
But for her fans, that excess actually made her
more accessible. It signaled that she wasn't
perfect, that she was trying hard, that she was
covering up insecurities just like they were.
She was sort of the patron saint of being too
much. She absolutely was. And that emotional
rawness, that willingness to be vulnerable, led
to what I consider the single most important
moment of her entire career at PTL. It wasn't
a sermon. It was an interview. You're talking
about Steve Peters. Yes. And we really need to
set the scene here. It's 1985. The AIDS epidemic
is absolutely ravaging the country. And the stigma
is, I mean, it's suffocating. It's hard to even
explain to people who weren't there. People were
terrified to touch doorknobs. Families were disowning
their own children. And the church, the evangelical
church, was largely leading the charge of hate
and judgment. Jerry Falwell was on the record
famously saying AIDS was God's judgment on homosexuals.
That was the prevailing narrative in their world.
And then on the PTL network, broadcasting into
millions of conservative Christian living rooms,
Tammy Faye brings out Steven Peters. Who was
a day Christian minister living with AIDS. And
he was visibly sick. He had Kaposi's sarcoma
lesions on his face. And Tammy didn't recoil
from him. She didn't lecture him. She didn't
tell him to repent for his sins. No. She leaned
in. She cried with him. They talked about his
faith. They talked about the death of his partner.
And then she turned to the camera and she delivered
a monologue that was absolutely radical for that
time and for that place. I have the quote right
here. She said, 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. And tell them that we care. It
was a direct challenge to her own audience. She
was essentially telling them that their fear
was unchristian, that their judgment was wrong.
That moment alone just separates her from the
entire rest of the televangelist pack. It does.
It showed that her empathy was fundamentally
stronger than her dogma. And ironically, it was
that empathy that would end up saving her later
when the church itself turned its back on her.
But before we can get to the redemption, we have
to go through the fire. We have to talk about
Heritage USA and the collapse. Because they didn't
just build a TV studio. They built a Disneyland
for Christians. Heritage USA. It was located
in Fort Mill, South Carolina. And Disneyland
for Christians is not an exaggeration. At its
peak, it was the third most visited theme park
in the entire United States, behind only Disney
World and Disneyland. That is a mind -blowing
statistic. It's just hard to wrap my head around
what was actually there. What did you do at Heritage
USA? Everything. Absolutely everything. There
was a massive water park. There was a shopping
mall designed to look like a Victorian village,
but it was indoors and air -conditioned. There
was a huge hotel called the Heritage Grand, a
retreat center, replicas of the upper room chapels
from Jerusalem. It was a completely immersive
environment where you could be entertained and
spend money without ever having to encounter
the world. It sounds incredibly expensive. It
was incredibly expensive to build and to run.
And this is where the prosperity gospel turns
into what was, for all intents and purposes,
a Ponzi scheme. Okay, break that down. How did
that happen? They needed a constant flow of cash
to keep building. So they came up with this idea
to sell lifetime partnerships. For a donation
of, say, $1 ,000, you were promised three nights
a year at the Heritage Grand Hotel. for the rest
of your life. This sounds like a pretty great
deal for the donor. It was a fantastic deal for
the donor. It was a terrible deal for the ministry
because it created this massive future liability
that they could never possibly sustain. But the
real fraud was in the math. Oh. They sold tens
of thousands more of these partnerships than
they had hotel rooms. They oversold the hotel
by something like 800%. So they were just taking
money for rooms that literally did not exist.
Exactly. It was a classic Ponzi structure. They
were using the new money from new partners to
pay the operating costs and the promises made
to the old partners. It was a house of cards.
And the wind that finally blew it all down came
from a very specific direction. 1987. The year
everything changed. The catalyst was a sex scandal.
But really, it was always about the money. In
1987, it was revealed that PTL had paid $287
,000 to buy the silence of a woman named Jessica
Hahn. Now, the details of this encounter are,
they're very disputed. Highly disputed. Jessica
Hahn was a church secretary from New York. She
claimed that back in 1980, Jim Baker and another
preacher, John Wesley Fletcher, drugged and raped
her in a hotel room in Florida. But that wasn't
Jim Becker's version of the story. No. In his
later book, which was titled I Was Wrong, Jim
Becker claimed he was set up and that the encounter
was consensual, though he did admit it was a
terrible sin that he regretted. But regardless
of what actually happened in that room, it was
the cover -up. The cover -up is what exploded
the bomb. Yes. PTL paid her off to stay quiet.
And when that payment came to light, it opened
the books. And once the books were open, the
financial fraud was just... And the media frenzy
was unlike anything people had really seen before.
This was pre -Internet, but it was wall -to -wall
coverage. It was on the cover of Time, Newsweek,
every single nightly news broadcast. The public
was completely obsessed. And I think they were
obsessed with the hypocrisy of it all. Here were
these people preaching holiness and sacrifice,
yet living in this absolute unbelievable opulence
on the backs of, you know, grandmother's Social
Security checks. And the symbol of that opulence
became the doghouse. The infamous air -conditioned
doghouse. You have to describe this. It's just
so perfect. So at their massive lakefront home
in Tega Cay, South Carolina, which was already
a mansion. They had a doghouse for their pets
that was fully heated in the winter and fully
air conditioned in the summer. All while people
were sending in their last $20 to help build
God's kingdom. Exactly. It became the perfect
metaphor for their complete disconnect from the
reality of their followers' lives. And Tammy,
bless her heart, did not help matters at all.
No, she did not. When reporters cornered her
and asked about their lavish lifestyle, she said,
and this is a direct quote, we don't get what
Johnny Carson makes, and we work a lot harder
than him. Oh, Tammy, that is... That is a lack
of reading the room on a galactic scale. She
truly believed it, though. That's the thing.
In her mind, she saw herself as an entertainer
on the same level as Johnny Carson. But the public
did not see it that way. They saw a grift. So
the empire collapses. PTL goes bankrupt. But
there's another villain in the shadows here,
isn't there? Someone who kind of swooped in to
pick at the bones. Jerry Falwell. And the irony
here is just so thick. When the scandal first
broke, Jim Backer actually entrusted the entire
ministry to Jerry Falwell. He thought Falwell,
a fellow preacher, would hold it together until
the storm passed. That's like entrusting your
sheep to the wolf. It was a fatal... Fatal miscalculation.
Falwell was a strict fundamentalist. He hated
the PTL style, the charismatic theology, the
contemporary music, the women wearing makeup.
He had called the bakers a cancer on the body
of Christ. So he took over the ministry and effectively
dismantled it from the inside out. There's this
bizarre image of him going down the giant water
slide at Heritage USA in his full suit and tie.
He was essentially burying the backers in everything
they had built. So Jim goes to court. And it
was an absolute circus. In 1989, Jim Backer was
indicted on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy.
The trial was a media sensation. And in the end,
he was sentenced to 45 years in prison. 45 years.
That is basically a life sentence. It was. It
was eventually reduced, and he ended up serving
about five years. But at that moment, when the
gavel came down, it felt like the end of the
world for them. And through all of this, Tammy
was there. standing right outside the courthouse.
We've all seen that footage, her, the tears streaming
down her face, mascara running everywhere, singing,
on Christ the solid rock I stand. It was just,
it was pathetic, but also kind of heartbreakingly
loyal. It was. She stood by him. But loyalty
has a breaking point. And this brings us to the
next very painful chapter of her life, the divorce.
So Jim goes to prison. Tammy is left with absolutely
nothing. No money, no home, no TV show. And for
a while, she does try to stick it out. She did.
She moved to Florida. She tried to keep a low
profile, which is not something she was good
at. But in 1992, she filed for divorce. And her
reasoning was incredibly poignant and revealing.
What did she say? She wrote a letter to her new
church in Orlando. And in it, she wrote, I cannot
pretend anymore. I cannot pretend anymore. That
feels like the first completely honest thing
she'd probably said in public in 20 years. It
was the moment the mask finally slipped. The
character of the happy televangelist's wife was
dead. She was just a woman who was tired and
broke and incredibly lonely. But she didn't stay
lonely for long. And this is where the story
takes a twist that feels like it was written
for a soap opera. She gets remarried. To whom?
To a man named Ro Messner. And who is Ro Messner
in this universe? He's not just some random guy.
Not at all. He is not a stranger to this story.
Ro was the property developer who physically
built Heritage USA. He was one of Jim's best
friends in the business world. He was the guy
who constructed the empire. Okay, that's already
incredibly messy. But it gets even messier, doesn't
it? Oh, it does. Because Ro Messner was the man
who actually wrote the check for the $287 ,000
in hush money to Jessica Hahn. Wait! Just to
be clear... She divorced the husband who allegedly
had the affair, and then she married the man
who paid the hush money for that affair. That
is 100 % correct. The Thanksgiving dinners must
have been just a little bit awkward. You would
think so. Now, to be fair to Roe, he always testified
that he didn't really know the specifics of why
the money was being paid, that he was just following
Jim's orders to handle a problem. But yes, the
optics were just wild. And the drama didn't stop
with the wedding, because Roe had his own set
of legal problems brewing. Of course he did.
Of course. In 1996, Roe himself was convicted
of bankruptcy fraud. He owed nearly $30 million
to creditors, a lot of it stemming from the collapse
of Heritage USA. He was sentenced to 27 months
in federal prison. Let's just picture this timeline
for a second. Jim Backer gets out of jail and
almost immediately, Tammy's new husband, Roe,
goes into jail. She essentially traded one inmate
for another. It was this bizarre revolving door
of incarceration. And once again, Tammy was left
on the outside, alone and broke. Most people
would have crumbled at that point. Most people
would have changed their name and moved to a
cabin in Montana and just disappeared. But this
is the deep dive into Tammy Faye. She didn't
hide. She pivoted. She completely reinvented
herself. And she did it by leaning into the very
things that people had always mocked her for.
She realized that while the evangelical church
had completely rejected her, there was another
community out there that knew exactly what it
felt like to be judged and rejected and mocked
for being too much. The LGBTQ plus community.
Exactly. And this is part five of our story.
The unlikely emergence of a pop culture icon.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, Tammy Faye Messner
started appearing at gay pride marches. I remember
seeing photos of this and it was just surreal.
There's Tammy Faye with the full lashes and the
big wig standing shoulder to shoulder with famous
drag queens like Lady Bunny. Visually, it just
made perfect sense. It was meeting of minds,
aesthetically and spiritually. She was often
referred to as the ultimate drag queen. She had
the aesthetic down the camp, the drama, the exaggerated
femininity. But it went so much deeper than just
the look. She refused to denounce her gay fans.
That was the key. She never did. She was asked
about it constantly by conservative media who
were just aghast. And she would always say, when
we lost everything, it was the gay people that
came to my rescue. They didn't judge me. They
loved me. It was this reciprocal relationship.
They saw a survivor in her. They saw someone
who had been kicked out of the family but refused
to die. And this newfound popularity led to her
second career in television, but this time not
on a religious network. On VH1. The surreal life.
Oh my God, the surreal life. If you're too young
to remember this show, you have to understand.
It was the precursor to things like Celebrity
Big Brother. They took a bunch of washed up celebrities
and put them all in a house together to see what
would happen. And the cast for season two in
2004 is a pure fever dream. You have Tammy Faye
Messner. You have Ron Jeremy. Who was at the
time the most famous male porn star in the world.
You have Vanilla Ice. You have Eric Estrada from
the show Chips. You have Trishel Canatella from
the original The Real World, Las Vegas. It's
an insane combination of people. It sounds like
an absolute disaster waiting to happen. I mean,
you put a Pentecostal televangelist in a house
with Ron Jeremy, that should be a bloodbath.
And it's exactly what the producers wanted. They
wanted conflict. They cast Tammy to be the scold.
The church lady figure. Yeah. Who would judge
everyone for their sinful ways. But she didn't
play the role they gave her. No. She completely
flipped the script again. She became the house
mother. There were these incredibly tender scenes
where she bonded with vanilla ice of all people.
I remember that. Vanilla Ice was having this
existential meltdown about his career and his
reputation. And there's little Tammy Faye just
comforting him and telling him it's okay. She
saw Vanilla Ice and Trishel almost as her children.
She understood the specific pain of being a public
joke. She connected with them on the level of
celebrity trauma. And it completely humanized
her to a whole new generation of viewers. People
watched that show and thought, wait a minute,
she's not a monster. She's actually really sweet
and kind of funny. She had a great sense of humor
about herself by that point. She did cameos on
the Drew Carey show playing Mimi Bobeck's mother.
Which is just perfect casting. It's genius. She
was finally in on the joke. She knew the makeup
was ridiculous, but she owned it. It was her
brand. And that ownership is what transformed
her from a villain into a beloved icon. But there
is a very dark shadow. hanging over this entire
period of her reinvention. While she was filming
these reality shows, while she was laughing with
RuPaul in documentaries, she was dying. Yeah.
This brings us to the final and really the most
painful chapter of her life, her long battle
with cancer. The timeline of her illness is actually
quite long. People forget that she was first
diagnosed with colon cancer all the way back
in 1996. And there is a detail in the notes here
that just really stuck with me. It says the diagnosis
was delayed because she was embarrassed to see
a doctor. Yes. She was having symptoms, bleeding.
But she was too modest, too embarrassed to go
see a male doctor. She put it off and put it
off until the pain was just unbearable. It's
this heartbreaking reminder of that conservative
1940s upbringing that she had. Even after everything
she'd been through, that shame about the body
was still there. So that cancer went into remission.
But then in 2004, the same year she was on The
Surreal Life, she went on Larry King Live and
announced that she had lung cancer. and that
it was inoperable. She and Larry King had this
very special ongoing relationship. She used his
show almost like her new pulpit. Whenever there
was a major life update, good or bad, she went
to Larry. And she didn't hide the illness, just
like she didn't hide the tears back in the 80s.
She didn't hide the effects of chemo in the 2000s.
No, she lived and she died completely in public.
She shared the details of her treatment. She
talked about the terrible side effects, the panic
attacks. She showed the world her dramatic weight
loss. The final interview. July 18, 2007. I watch
this again to prep for this deep dive, and it
is just, it is hard to get through. It is harrowing.
She weighed 65 pounds at that point. She was
just skin and bone. She couldn't eat solid foods
anymore. She was surviving on pudding and ice
chips. But she insisted on dying that interview.
And her voice was barely a whisper. But she was
still wearing the makeup. She still had the eyelashes
on. It was her war paint right until the very
end. Her husband, Roe, said later that she did
that interview because she wanted to say a final
goodbye to her fans. She knew it was the end.
And just two days later, on July 20, 2007, she
was gone. She died at her home in Lock Lloyd,
Missouri. She was 65 years old. A very quiet
end to a very, very loud life. But the conversation
about her didn't stop when she died. In fact,
her legacy has only grown and gotten more complex
since then. It feels like we are in the middle
of a Tammy Faye renaissance right now. We absolutely
are. There's been a significant cultural reevaluation
of her life and her story. I think we as a culture
collectively realize that we treated her very
unfairly. You have the 2021 film The Eyes of
Tammy Faye. Jessica Chastain played her. And
won the Oscar for Best Actress for it. That movie
did a lot of heavy lifting in terms of changing
the public narrative. It really portrayed her
as a victim of the powerful, manipulative men
around her. Jim Baker, Jerry Falwell. And as
a woman who was really ahead of her time on social
issues, was trapped in this deeply patriarchal
system. And then there are the musicals. Elton
John, of all people, wrote the music for a show
called Tammy Faye. Which is just the most perfect
pairing imaginable. Elton John loves a figure
who is flamboyant and tragic. ultimately resilient,
Tammy Faye is right in his wheelhouse. And I
have to mention this. For any Only Alerters in
the Building fans out there, there is a pig in
the show named Hammy Faye Baker. Which I honestly
think she would have loved. She wasn't precious
about her image in the end. She wanted to be
remembered with a smile, I think. So we've walked
through the international falls cold, the puppet
shows, the PTL empire, the fraud, the prison
sentences, the reality TV house, and the tragic
end. It brings us to the big question. The final
assessment. When you look at the whole picture,
was she a fraud or was she a saint? That is the
question, isn't it? And the only honest answer,
I think, is yes. Both. You can't erase the fraud.
She benefited from the PTL money. She lived in
the luxury that was paid for by deception. And
even if she didn't know the specific accounting
details of the Ponzi scheme, she knew the money
was coming from somewhere and she spent it. She
was complicit in a system that hurt a lot of
people financially, but she was also a survivor.
She survived what many would describe as domestic
control. She survived a level of media shaming
that would have absolutely destroyed most people.
She survived the temporary loss of her children
during the scandal. And through it all, she somehow
maintained this capacity for love that is genuinely
rare. It really makes you wonder about the nature
of her ministry, what it was really all about.
And that's the provocative thought I want to
leave you with. When she was at the height of
PTL, she had millions of viewers. She was powerful.
But she was insulated. She was preaching to the
choir. She was living inside a very carefully
constructed bubble. But after the scandal, after
it all came crashing down. After the scandal,
when she was stripped of the gold and the theme
parks and the mink coats, she was forced out
into the real world. And that's when she was
sitting in hospices with AIDS patients. That's
when she was marching in parades with people
that. society had completely rejected. That's
when she was comforting washed -up rappers on
reality TV. So you can make a pretty strong argument
that her ministry was actually more effective
after she lost the church. Exactly. She lost
the empire, but she might have found her actual
calling. She died beloved by the very communities
the church she helped build had condemned and
rejected. In the end, she bridged a gap that
almost no one else at that time could bridge.
That is a powerful and very complicated legacy.
From the puppet ministry to the air -conditioned
doghouse to the red carpet at the Oscars for
the movie about her life, Tammy Faye Messner
was a lot of things, but she was never, ever
boring. Never boring. And she never, ever took
off the eyelashes. Thank you for joining us on
this deep dive through all the mascara and the
mess. We hope you found the very human story
that was hiding underneath all those headlines.
And if this piqued your interest, seriously.
Go find that interview with Steve Peters. It's
on YouTube. It is an absolute masterclass in
empathy. Until next time, stay curious.