Tammy Faye Messner, the mascara-laden former wife of televangelist Jim Bakker, the charismatic TV preacher with the choir-boy face with whom she appeared on their popular Christian talk-variety show until his downfall amid scandal in the late 1980s, has died. She was 65.
Messner, who underwent surgery for colon cancer in 1996 and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2004, died Friday, her booking manager, Joe Spotts, told the Associated Press on Saturday night.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday July 25, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 29 words Type of Material: Correction
Betty Ford Center: The obituary of Tammy Faye Messner in Sunday's California section said the Betty Ford Center was located in Palm Desert. The facility is in Rancho Mirage.
In a letter posted on her website in May, Messner said that doctors had stopped treating her cancer and that her weight had dropped to 65 pounds. "Now," she wrote, "it's up to God and my faith."
She revealed that she had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer during a March 2004 appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live." That Messner would publicly announce her diagnosis on King's talk show underscored her status as a faded yet enduring pop culture icon.
Indeed, her radiation treatments even became part of a 2005 documentary, "Tammy Faye: Death Defying."
"During radiation," she said at the time, "I did not lose my hair, but I lost my eyelashes, which is the funniest thing in the world to me, because it's my trademark."
As Tammy Faye Bakker in the 1970s and '80s, she was known as "the first lady of televangelism," a high-profile pioneer of the "electronic church."
At 4 feet, 11 inches tall (not counting 3 1/2 -inch spike heels) and with her red hair and heavily made-up eyes, Messner was described in the media as a "human kewpie doll" and someone who seemed to "ooze kitsch."
As prone to giggling as she was to crying mascara-stained tears on camera, Tammy Faye Bakker proved to be irresistible fodder for late-night comedians.
"She was the most laughed-at woman in the Western world," Fenton Bailey, codirector of "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," a largely sympathetic documentary on Messner's life, told the Los Angeles Times in 2000.
"I don't know of any woman in our time who has been so ridiculed, put down, maligned," singer Pat Boone said in the 2000 film. "Really, I equate her with Hillary Clinton, because these two women have both suffered tremendously by the things that their husbands may have done, and yet she just keeps going."
During the heyday of the Bakkers' television ministry, "The Jim and Tammy Show" reportedly was carried on more than 1,400 stations and their PTL ministry took in millions of dollars a month.
