Jessica Chastain could win her first Oscar for ‘Eyes of Tammy Faye’
Tammy Faye and her first husband Jim Bakker launched the PTL Network, to huge financial success. In 1974, they launched the PTL Network, which at its peak broadcast to 13.5 million homes and generated more than $120 million in annual revenue. The two went on the road as itinerant preachers, and in the 1960s hosted a Christian puppet show on TV. At 18, she met Jim at a Bible college in Minneapolis and married him pretty much immediately. She found God at 10, falling on her back and speaking tongues during a Pentecostal meeting. Tammy Faye LaValley was born in 1942 and grew up the oldest of eight kids in International Falls, Minn. “And I think that really resonated, particularly for artists, for outsiders, for drag queens, for drag connoisseurs: who didn’t care what other people thought, and she wore that proudly.” “Tammy Faye always been about not judging others,” said Barbato. It vaunted her from the depths of disgrace into queer sainthood.
But it also emphasized her radical empathy, particularly toward the LGBTQ community. That’s largely thanks to the original “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” That film, a cult classic documentary narrated by drag diva RuPaul, celebrated Tammy Faye’s camp qualities - her garish get-ups, her perpetually running mascara, her creepy doll collection, pill-popping and Diet Coke addiction.
The new movie paints her as the ultimate queer ally. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” Season 4 winner Sharon Needles has a tattoo of Tammy Faye on her arm. Elton John is currently working on a musical about her. So is Kristin Chenoweth. Nowadays, Tammy Faye - who died in 2007 at the age of 65 - is more famous as a gay icon than as a Bible thumper. RuPaul narrated the original 2000 documentary. “We were a bit nervous, but they really hit it off.” “The other guest was Sister Paula, a transsexual preacher from Seattle,” Barbato recalled with a laugh. Still, before that fateful first talk-show shoot, they weren’t sure how their idol would respond to their more liberal politics. AFP via Getty Imagesīailey and Barbato - who run the production company World of Wonder - sympathized with the 4-foot-11 Tammy Faye. (In a truly soap-operatic turn, she later married Roe Messner, the property developer for Heritage USA, who then also went to jail, for bankruptcy fraud charges.) Jessica Chastain stars in the new biopic “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” in theaters Friday. Tammy had to sell off her glitzy wardrobe for money. Two years later, he would go to jail for defrauding his followers of $158 million. The Bakkers had a veritable Christian empire, with their own Jesus-themed amusement park, Heritage USA, before Jim got embroiled in a sex assault scandal and lost it all in 1987.
It inspired a new biopic of the same name, starring Jessica Chastain, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival Sunday and is in theaters Friday.
“She was a camp icon even back then,” Barbato told The Post, citing Tammy Faye’s high hair, artificially tanned skin and spidery eyelashes.īailey and Barbato would later make “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” a wild documentary released in 2000. The two gay pals had spent the 1980s watching the gloriously gaudy televangelist on the Praise the Lord (PTL) Network, which she founded with her first husband, preacher Jim Bakker. The first time Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato met Tammy Faye Messner, in the mid-1990s, they had invited her to their LA home for a new talk show they were shooting for British TV. Lady Gaga wrote ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ ballad as ‘love letter to the world’ Meg Ryan staging rom-com comeback after more than a decade awayĭwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s birth chart: Cooking up success since 1972