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Academy Awards Special: Jessica Chastain cheered Tammy Faye Bakker’s “radical acts of love.” When I profiled the Bakkers for Vanity Fair, I may have met another Tammy Faye. Here’s my piece…

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Mar 28, 2022
Category: Drama

For 99.99% of Oscar viewers, the takeaway moment was Will Smith bitch-slapping Chris Rock. I may have been among a tiny minority of viewers who were also struck by Jessica Chastain’s acceptance speech for winning Best Actress as Tammy Faye Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.”

This is what jumped out at me from Chastain: “We’re faced with discriminatory and bigoted legislation that is sweeping our country with the only goal of further dividing us. In times like this, I think of Tammy, and I’m inspired by her radical acts of love.”

“Radical acts of love?” Granted, I had not talked to Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker since the summer of 1987, when I spent an afternoon with them for Vanity Fair. That interview almost didn’t happen. I was in Nashville when my editor called: Annie Leibovitz had taken the photographs (among them, the image above) and then Tammy Faye decided she couldn’t do the interview. I had expected something like this and had spent about $500 of Si Newhouse’s money at Bergdorf’s. I called Tammy Faye: “Mrs. Bakker, I completely understand that you won’t do the interview, but my car is filled with Bergdorf gift boxes — please say it’s okay for me to deliver your presents.” You bet it was okay! The Bakkers and I talked for hours. Two years later, Jim Bakker would be convicted of fraud and sentenced to federal prison.

People change over time, and yet, I think, our core personality endures. It is true that, unlike Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, she was an outlier: she just plain loved Jesus, and believed Jesus loved gays and women. She also loved being Tammy Faye, and maybe she loved that more. Here’s “At Home with Jim and Tammy Faye.” You make the call..

Up in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where the natives long ago made peace with Dolly Parton, Jim and Tammy Bakker didn’t quite get off to a rousing start. No sooner had their silver Lincoln pulled into this ersatz Alpine village than the police chief grumbled that swarms of tourists driving past the Bakkers’ house might blow his budget for overtime pay. A cruel joke around town asked what Jim Bakker did with his first fifty-cent piece. The answer, sort of inevitably, was “He married her.” And waitresses in Gatlinburg knew which thrift shops in South Carolina were selling Tammy Faye’s ever-so-slightly worn clothes.

The evangelical duo has been enduring that kind of pettiness ever since Praying Jim got himself caught in a jam with a church secretary (and Lord only knows about the men). By the time I arrived in town, letters to the editor of the Mountain Press in this easygoing part of the Great Smokies were running three to one against them.

A mile above all the rank feeling, Jim and Tammy Faye themselves were unpacking boxes at their $148,000 Elba, a modest chalet undergoing transformation into something more suitable. They’d already erected a two-foot-thick, stone-and-spike fence known as the Great Wall of Gatlinburg. Now additional bedrooms were slowly taking shape.

It looked as if the Bakkers were here to stay.

But nobody really believed this.

On a hot day, with a wall of cardboard packing boxes behind him, Jim Bakker stood in his driveway looking considerably more serene than a man should when he has, by his count, $37,000 in the bank and a posse of government types on his tail. He was, apparently, doing no business, for he wore a dark-blue shirt, blue corduroy shorts, and white sneakers.

Jim led me through the garage, up the stairs, past the blowup of the picture of him shaking hands with Ronald Reagan, and into a living room with a view of the mountains that would give an atheist second thoughts. The walls were covered with homey prints and copper pots; the sideboard was filled with china that didn’t require hand-washing. Jamie Charles, a dark-haired boy of eleven, sat on the couch watching the Three Stooges on an oversize TV. It was a moment right out of a catalogue for Ethan Allen furniture.

Then Tammy Faye bounded in. She had on a stone-washed denim top with rhinestone-dotted jeans pockets sewn on the shoulders, denim pants, and denim shoes. Her hair was tastefully short. Her earrings were gold hoops, with a single diamond stud for punctuation. She wore considerably less makeup than the present president of the U.S. usually does. There was no indication that underneath it she was really Jimmy Hoffa.

A few weeks before my visit, other reporters had gained entrance here. But the meanies from Time hammered away at Jim about Jessica Hahn and million-dollar salaries until he fled the room, references to homosexual acts ringing in his ears; for my visit, therefore, the Bakkers had laid down some ground rules. I was to talk only to Tammy, and we weren’t going to dwell on the past.

And, for a few minutes, Jim did sit in the living room and stare out at the mountains while I stood in the kitchen with Tammy, watching her slice carrots into a stew.

“Our financial situation is laughable,” Rapmistress Tammy said with a pleasant twang. “It’s real different, not having a paycheck. Everybody says we have all this money. If we do, I don’t know where it is, because I’ve never seen it.”

“Did it all go away?” I asked.

“It was never there to begin with! We received a paycheck like everybody else. And people took care of everything. Jim has had to learn how to write checks and pay bills!”

“What’s coming in?”

Tammy shook salt and pepper carefully into the stew, perhaps remembering the culinary tips she and Jim had outlined in their 1979 book, “How We Lost Weight and Kept It Off.” “Not a whole lot. We’re living on our retirement fund—and that won’t last long. We have to get back to our new book.”

“Who’s your agent?” I asked, as if the most natural subject for us to schmooze about was the publishing business.

“His name is Cohen. He’s in New York.”

“Don’t know him.”

“Hey, Jesse. . .New York! Don’t you know a Cohen there?” she said, her giggles expanding into a laugh. Laughter produced Jim, and the public-relations reason for this visit. To wit: the Bakkers were planning a “farewell” tour. No preaching, just Jim as host, a full orchestra backing Tammy Faye, and a pop group behind their seventeen-year-old daughter, Tammy Sue.

“We haven’t had a chance to say good-bye to people we’ve known for twenty-six years,” Jim explained. “We were cut off without any chance of communicating. But we’re not going to use the media the way other people do. Whatever we do, we want to at least do it the way we know how.”

“‘Farewell’ means you’re not coming back, Jim.”

“There’s a song that’s been written for the tour called ‘Farewell… for Now.’ Unless the people make it pretty evident that we’re to come back, we won’t come back. We’ll finish the tour, work on the book, and then, for all practical purposes, I’ll retire.”

“You won’t be a public figure anymore?”

“Unless things happen,” Jim said agreeably as Tammy sipped a Diet Mountain Dew and nodded. “That’s the way my whole life has been. I don’t force things to happen.”

Have several months in Palm Springs and the long drive to this mountain retreat mellowed the Bakkers? If so, we’d be looking at a character change of considerable moment. For Jim and Tammy didn’t come to Bible bashing as a scam, they were born into it. All they did was add a dab of Johnny Carson, a dollop of “I Love Lucy,” and a whole lot of the Jerry Lewis telethon.

For all that, Jim Bakker’s chat-’em-up proved to be remarkably sophisticated. Once the elderly rural folk who made up the nucleus of his audience got on his mailing list, his pleas for help tended to arrive on the same day as their Social Security checks. He stepped back and let Tammy share the spotlight, knowing that many tuned in just to see what duds she’d wear next. And, because the true business of television evangelism is converting the already converted, he preached the gospel that politicos like Jerry Falwell and fire breathers like Jimmy Swaggart ignored; there’s no reason evangelical Christians should be second-class citizens. “Jesus wasn’t teaching poverty,” Bakker claimed. “He was teaching heart surrender to Jesus Christ.”

In that cosmology, rich men pass effortlessly through the needle’s eye. The beauty part was that you wouldn’t have to be rich to pass through the gates of Bakker’s self-described “21st century retreat center,” Heritage USA. In 1978, Jim broke ground on 2,300 acres in Fort Mill, South Carolina. The idea was for a Christian Disneyland, but with free admission. Visitors could come to the television tapings of the Bakkers’ show, where, in addition to the predictable “miracles,” they might personally witness Tammy’s asking an armless woman, “How do you put on your makeup?” They could stay at the Heritage Grand Hotel, where, though they’d be greeted by a smartly uniformed bellman, they’d have to carry their own bags. On Main Street, they’d buy carbohydrate-drenched snacks under a fake blue sky. For the kids, there’d be one of the largest water parks in the world. And for those moments when religious inspiration was in order, there was the Upper Room, which was, if you took out the carpeting, a replica of the site of the Last Supper.

To create this $123 million showplace, Bakker turned his ministry, PTL (Praise the Lord or People That Love), into an ongoing fund-raiser. The best appeals were teary; from their earliest days on television, the Bakkers say, people in their studios would become so filled with love for Jesus that weeping cameramen left their posts and cameras came to rest on veritable puddles of tears. But even the lesser appeals were pitched with such urgency that PTL’s legion of widows — Jim called them the “Grandma Grunts” — sent Jim and Tammy their gold wedding rings.

In the late 1970s, Bakker’s frenzy for funds became so great that he committed what is said to be a common mistake among TV evangelists. He appealed for funds to support a foreign ministry, then used the money for other purposes. In 1979, the Federal Communications Commission began an investigation to see if Bakker had engaged in misleading fundraising activities. Later, after Bakker appeared before the commission, there was some question about whether he’d given false testimony. But in a four-to-three vote the F.C.C. decided to give PTL only a light slap. The organization agreed to sell its one commercial TV station, thus avoiding further confrontations with the regulatory agency.

All that did, of course, was sweep PTL financial irregularities under that Upper Room rug. For, as the world now knows, Jim Bakker is no businessman. In a memo, cherished by cynical former employees, he wrote, “I want the American Express bill paid every month, whether we have the money or not.” Clearly, he felt, the Lord would provide. And, manifestly, He did. He sent Jessica Hahn.

“The thing is, we are having to live the message we preached,” Tammy was saying as the stew cooked away beside us. “It won’t work for anybody if it won’t work for Jim and Tammy Bakker right now.”

I’d expected tears. Wasn’t she Tammy Teardrops anymore?

“I’m really not a big crier,” she said. “I can go for months without crying. I am a tough, tough lady. The only time I cry is when I talk about God. I really love God so much.”

“Do you have an uninterrupted channel to God?” I asked. “Have there been times when you’ve asked God to communicate and there’s been nothing?”

“Yes! This whole six months!”

“God, where are you?” Jim called out from the living room.

“God, where are you? Do you know I’m here, God? Hey, don’t forget I’m here,” Tammy echoed. “There’s many times when I’m no better than anybody else. A lot of times when I don’t know where He is. The only thing I lay my hope on is that I know what God has done in our lives before. And I know He’s promised never to leave or forsake us. So… He must be there.”

“And your good-time friends?”

The Bakkers said they’d had a lot of calls. More than they had expected. But there were many rats who had jumped ship, close friends — like their security people — who didn’t call.

“Those are the hurts we wake up with every day, the hurts that make you want to wake up crying,” Tammy said.

Jim looked glum. “Every day for five months, we’ve been kicked again and again by Mr. Falwell,” he said, anger edging into his voice. “You wonder how much you can hurt. My problem is, I believe in the Bible: ‘Vengeance is mine.’ We’re trying to do it God’s way.”

“And what if God says, ‘Jim, 1 want you to have a storefront ministry in the lowliest area’?”

“No problem,” Tammy shot back.

“That’s where I started,” Jim added.

And then we got into Little Kevin.

Little Kevin is a boy with a bone disease so serious that, at eighteen, he stands only twenty-two inches tall. But he is, I’m told, bright and aware, and, it turns out, interested in the singing of Tammy Sue Bakker. He came to Heritage USA last year to hear her in concert, and, as might have been predicted, met the Bakkers. And, just as you’d expect, Jim Bakker built a PTL campaign around Little Kevin. But not just this poor lad—Bakker had in mind a facility at Heritage USA that would house many disabled kids. Want to help, folks? Bakker asked. If you do, you might care to order a $125 silver medallion inscribed “With love from Jim and Tammy on our 25th silver anniversary.” The checks flooded in. Jim Bakker had that house up in a month. And now, Jim was saying, Jerry Falwell has gone and given Little Kevin thirty days to get out.

“Falwell talks about morality,” Jim fumed. “But it’s so immoral.”

It’s one thing to take a man’s church from him in the ecclesiastical equivalent of a hostile takeover. It’s another to put a twenty-two-inch-tall crippled boy on the street. For all that is loathsome about Falwell’s politics, somehow I didn’t see the man making that particular move. So I called the PTL public-relations department.

“Don Hardister,” the man said.

Could this be the Don Hardister who was one of the kingpins of Jim Bakker’s security team? Who the Bakkers talk about as their biggest personal disappointment?

“You worked for Jim Bakker?” I asked.

“Let me tell you something, friend. I gave the guy the last eleven years of my life. I was raisin’ his kids when my kids didn’t have a dad.”

“Is Little Kevin being evicted?”

“We’re honoring our commitment. He’s being moved.”

“Jim Bakker says he’s got thirty days to make that move,” I said.

“Well, he’s got a lot of nerve,” said Hardister, turning away from the phone to swear. “I’m trying to keep a good attitude with him, but he’s making it difficult. Jim knew when he was building that house it didn’t meet the proper fire codes. I told him, and I set up a meeting between Jim and Randy Thompson, the York County fire marshal, and Randy told him. But Jim thought he could skirt the law by having the Whittums [Bakker’s cousins] legally adopt each child who came to live there—that way, it would conform to the single-family standard. Considering the cost of that house, you know, it wouldn’t have taken that much to make it right.”

“How much did it cost?”

“Well, they raised $3,300,000 for Kevin’s House. It’s 14,000 square feet. For four people. It’s costing us $200,000 a year to operate it just the way it is.”

“Can I ask you some more questions?”

“You caught me at a good time, man, let me tell you.”

“What about the alleged homosexual incidents? See any of that?”

“It was definitely behind my back,” Don said. “Bakker knew what my views were. I don’t hate homosexuals, and I’m a lot of stuff — but queer’s not one of them.”

I wondered if Don had had the chance to say any of this to the Bakkers.

“No, but Tammy called me up last week at midnight and screamed for an hour. Yellin’ how good they took care of me. The fact I could walk in their house anytime I wanted to — which I could. But big flippin’ deal, man! They’ve ruined my life! They’ve ruined my career! And not only mine. Many, many others’. But there they are, saying ‘Oh, woe is us.’ ” He paused, and then his voice conveyed considerably darker urgency. “I’ll tell you something. He’s not going to hide from me in the Great Smoky Mountains. We’re gonna run into each other one day, and he’s gonna talk to me.”

Then I told Don about the tour.

“Good,” he said. “I think I’ll go.”

It should come as no surprise that the purpose of the Bakkers’ tour isn’t just to touch the faithful. “I’ve never seen your show, and I don’t need to,” promoter Jeff Franklin told Jim when he pitched the idea of a seventy-five-city jaunt. “But I think I know what a 44 share on Ted Koppel means.” And in case the concerts don’t bring in 10,000 people a night, Franklin devised a nationwide phone number for the Bakkers. Each day Jim will tape a four-to-five-minute update for the still-faithful, the press, and the merely curious; at the end of Jim’s message, callers can pledge their contributions to the Bakkers’ legal defense fund.

If the Bakkers truly are broke, those contributions and the tour revenue will be necessary. The grand jury convened in mid-August is expected to be gathering testimony well into 1988; sources close to the investigation say they won’t be surprised if the Bakkers are indicted for their old albatross, mail fraud. But, for the former contributors to PTL and the wider audience of American scandal lovers, those indictments may not answer the multimillion-dollar question: what happened to the $4.8 million that the Bakkers took home since 1984?

The Bakkers’ new advisers note that because their financially unsophisticated clients didn’t have investments to depreciate, the Bakkers paid 50 percent taxes. And Jim Bakker had no trouble spending that $2.4 million—in addition to his own travel and entertainment, he claims he personally paid for many of the sets and costumes used on PTL. But his greatest failing, as he sees it, is that he “allowed” the PTL board (which, of course, he’d appointed) to pay him and Tammy those outrageous salaries instead of keeping their income in the $100,000 range and then holding on to the copyrights on his books and Tammy’s thirty-five records. Had he done it that way—the way most televangelists do, he says — he and Tammy would have very quietly taken home $9 million in royalties over the last four years.

Bakker is onto something here. Billy Graham, the dean of the field, has never reaped more than $76,800 a year for his efforts; his aides say he’s given away the copyrights on ten of his thirteen books, holding them back only in the years his five children were in college. Rex Humbard banks $84,000 a year, lives in a two bedroom house on half an acre, is the largest single donor to his ministry, and, says his son, takes the same twenty-five dollar Christmas bonus as everybody else on his staff. But Graham and Humbard are exceptions. The ministries of Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell all own their own planes. Swaggart has nine relatives on the payroll; the eight members of Robert Schuller’s family who are on his staff earn more than $360,000 a year.

The biggest winner of them all, though, may be Jerry Falwell, he of the $100,000 salary and four-wheel-drive car. Last summer, Falwell announced that he had gotten $1 million from Simon and Schuster for his new book. This isn’t to say that the publishing world really believes Falwell’s book will earn back its advance at B. Dalton; it’s understood that Falwell’s ministry will order the majority of those books and then give them away “free” to those who pledge substantial sums to the ministry. We may never see how Falwell spends that S&S income. Though aides make much of the fact that Falwell bought his Lynchburg, Virginia, home from his ministry two years ago for a reported $200,000, a former associate says the house is more impressive than its price suggests. “It’s got eleven or twelve bedrooms, a high wall, a guard shack, and seven acres of prime land,” he says. “When I hear Falwell attack Bakker for his excessive life-style, 1 have to laugh.”

There’s certainly nothing excessive about the Bakkers’ Gatlinburg home, which, as it turns out, they no longer own. When the scandal hit, they signed it over to Roe Messner, the sole contractor for Heritage USA (and the intermediary who wired money to set up a trust for Jessica Hahn, then billed PTL the same amount for work he never did on the amphitheater where the Passion play is performed). Jim told me that Messner is paying for the improvements on the house; there’s very little reason even now for Jim to dip into his Vuitton wallet.

The marvel of financially painless home renovation is not, however, the greatest of the Gatlinburg miracles. That distinction goes to the surprising reincarnation of the Bakkers as a harmonious nuclear family. Ever since Tammy’s 1979 flirtation with singer Gary S. Paxton, the Bakkers’ relations have been widely reported as glacial in the extreme. And at the peak of the family’s troubles, Tammy Sue eloped with a twenty-four-year-old Heritage USA lifeguard. Yet here they all are, the past behind them, exemplars of the new cult of self-forgiveness. Inevitably, therefore, we got onto the subjects that American families of the self-created kind like best: clothes, accessories, and makeup.

“I’m a bargain hunter,” Tammy explained, avoiding the issue of her fourteen fur coats and focusing on her more austere purchases. “The first racks I run to are the sale racks. At PTL, when I shopped I got exercise — and I didn’t dwell on raising $3 million every week. It was a way of keeping well mentally.”

Makeup, too, is downplayed now. “I put my makeup on in fifteen minutes, twenty minutes at the max,” Tammy told me. “I get up in the morning, put it on, and never think about it the rest of the day. It’s no big deal. I like color. I don’t like anything dull. I believe God wants us to look as good as we can. I see it this way: who’s gonna want what I’ve got if I don’t have something worth showing?”

In the next few minutes, I learned that Tammy has devoured the oeuvre of Danielle Steel. That she likes to clean house, but hates doing dishes and grocery shopping. That she truly despises laundry because—compulsive-personality time— she’s got to be there exactly as the dryer stops so she can put clothes on hangers right away. That she has always ironed her own clothes. And, oh, yes: she loves bowling.

“That person they talk about, I don’t even know her,” she concluded.

Jim had told me that Tammy and Tammy Sue were about to have new record deals, with recording starting in a matter of days. As we were winding down, I asked Tammy Faye how she’d picked her new songs.

“I’m going to use what’s happened in my heart during this time,” she said. “There’s a song written by the man who dedicated me to the Lord: ‘Got any rivers you think are uncrossable, / Got any mountains you can’t tunnel through. / God specializes in things thought impossible, / And He can do what no other power can do.’ And I’m going to put that on the album. And then I’m going to do something I’ve never done—I’ve never put a secular song on an album, but I’m going to record ‘Over the Rainbow.’ Because many times I’ve looked out. . .” (And now they came, the signature tears, the tears that flow so passionately only ogres would think them manufactured. The mascara did not streak. Tammy did not daub her eyes. She was at one with her crying.) “… at a rainbow… during this time… wondering where God was… and wondering if He really did care about me.”

She pulled herself together, and went on, stronger now. “And I’ve often wondered what’s, you know, over that rainbow for us.”

“Do you think,” I asked, “that you’ll be able to get through this song?”

“Not on the first take,” she said.