Behind the Mascara

Against the tinkling of a piano in a fancy New York restaurant, Tammy Faye Bakker Messner orders a burger, fries and vanilla ice cream and eats almost none of it.

She’s too busy talking. Talking about her years in the wilderness, which have come to an end with the release of Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey’s “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” opening Friday in general release. It documents the rise and fall of her and her husband Jim Bakker’s television ministry, PTL (Praise the Lord), and their evangelical theme park, Heritage USA.

Theirs was one of the great ‘80s backlash scandals, complete with fraud, adultery, Jerry Falwell and an air-conditioned doghouse.

“She was the most laughed-at woman,” says Barbato. “In the Western world,” says Bailey.

Not anymore. Because of the film, which also sympathetically recounts her drug dependency, her bout with cancer and the imprisonment of her second husband, Roe Messner, Tammy Faye has become a media darling--ironic, because she feels the media did her wrong in the first place. As she is the first to admit, the passage of time has helped too.

“Time heals all wounds, wounds all heels,” she says, referring to the Christians who shunned her. “Finally, people are stopping to watch both sides instead of just the side the media portrayed. We in America are too quick to judge and to say if it’s in the paper or on TV, it’s got to be true.”

Of course, Tammy Faye owes her early success to one form of media (television) and her rehabilitation to another (film).

She’s a natural in both, and she’s equally vivid in person: 4 feet, 11 inches tall, red hair, green eyes enhanced by contact lenses, a raccoon-like encircling of eye shadow, several sets of eyelashes, garish lipstick. She giggles winningly, manages to invoke “the Lord” without seeming preachy and seems refreshingly candid.

For example, she notes that though she’s still in the doghouse with the Christian world, ex-husband Jim, now released from prison, has been allowed to resume his ministry. “I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’m a woman or if it’s the fact that I’m a divorced woman and remarried, but Jim is also divorced and remarried, so I don’t understand what it is,” she says. “Maybe they don’t like my eyelashes and makeup. I’ve gotten a lot of crap over that, haven’t I?”

She has. When it’s suggested that she’d have an easier time if she took it off, husband Messner bristles, “Guys like you say, ‘Why don’t you take it off? Why don’t you change?’ I always tell Tammy to be herself.”

“It would probably be easier, but I’ve never been known to take the easy way out,” Tammy Faye says. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything, and I stand for the right to be myself, and I stand for the right of every person to be who they are.”

Barbato and Bailey say they expected to find out who that person really is beneath all that mascara, but they never did. She is exactly who she appears to be, no apologies.

This is the key to her appeal, particularly, as it turns out, for the gay community, which has supported her for years, especially when Messner was in prison. She says they gave her money, robes and afghans with her name in gold, “leopard stuff of every kind.”

‘They Better Check Their Walk With God’

Obviously, there’s a campy side to this encouragement, which is reflected in the movie. It’s narrated by drag star RuPaul, features puppets introducing chapters in Tammy Faye’s life and generally has an air of melodrama and suffering worthy of a Joan Crawford movie.

Tammy Faye, who says she had a couple of gay men staying at her house recently point out campy items so that she would know what the term meant, is both grateful for the support and critical of Christians who believe homosexuality is sinful.

“If they can’t embrace and love the gay community, they better check their walk with God,” she says. “The Bible is all about two things. It’s about Jesus dying on the cross to save us from our sins, and it’s about love thy neighbor as thyself and forgive people. I question when Christians hate one part of a society, I really question their walk with God.”

Filmmakers Barbato and Bailey share this approach, if not the religious sensibility behind it. They came up with the title to the movie first, which served as an obvious reference point and marketing tool and, perhaps more important, a point of view. This was going to be the world as seen through Tammy Faye’s eyes, though they didn’t have the slightest idea what that world would look like.

Although laudable from a journalistic point of view, it proved an impediment when they tried to get Tammy Faye’s cooperation. And then she was expected to convince Jim Bakker (over his wife’s objections) and her own two press-shy children, Tammy Sue and Jamie, to sit down for interviews. But she did, and they did.

“The reason I trusted them was because they were upfront with me right at the top,” she says. “They said, ‘You will have absolutely no control of content, you will have no say as to what is said, you will not have any control over the editing, we’re going to put in it what we want, and, furthermore, you can’t see it until everyone else does.’ ”

In fact, Tammy Faye didn’t see it until three days before it was to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, and even then she was so nervous her husband had to twist her arm to get her to watch it. She says that within the first five minutes, she knew it would be all right.

It is all right, from her point of view, to such a degree that the filmmakers have been accused of going too easy on her. They contend that their mission was to tell her side of the story and that they did approach Falwell--the chief villain of the piece--and others for comment but that they refused.

And it’s not as if Tammy Faye does not find aspects of the film uncomfortable. Surprisingly, the most painful moment for her is a scene in which she pitches story ideas to Stephen Chao, president of USA Cable. He looks dubious as he shoots down one after another. She’s floundering.

“It made me almost sick because of his cruelty,” she says. “I thought he showed such a lack of concern for producing anything that would be helpful. I felt ill-prepared.

“To me it showed the industry for what it is. It’s all money. I think the most wonderful medium in the world to reach and help people is television. You can reach them in the middle of the night, you can reach them when they won’t walk into a church. I think it’s very bad when the secular world does not allow shows that are truly helpful. But if it doesn’t make them gobs of money, they don’t even want to look at it.”

Now Fielding Offers From Media Firms

Tammy Faye feels the filmmakers “overdid that part” a little bit, but it could have been worse. Originally, they were going to make it the centerpiece of the movie, with footage of her daily life edited around it. But then they became immersed in and then enthralled by the “back story,” the PTL scandal, which took over the film.

The result has Tammy Faye, who’s moved back to Charlotte, N.C., to be with her grandchildren, fielding offers from production companies (for hosting jobs and other on-air duties) and monitoring her Web site (https://www.tammyfaye.com).

“I’ve grown, I’ve become an adult,” she says. “I have learned that people can be mean, and I always thought people were good. But every one of us is born into sin, and we’re going to be mean if God doesn’t come and change our heart.”