Tamara Faye Messner was an American evangelist, singer, author, talk show host, and television personality. She gained notice for her work with The PTL Club, a televangelist program she co-founded with her husband Jim Bakker in 1974.
They had hosted their own puppet show series for local programming in the early 1960s; Messner also had a career as a recording artist. In 1978, she and Bakker built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park.
Messner garnered significant publicity when Jim Bakker was indicted, convicted, and imprisoned on numerous counts of fraud and conspiracy in 1989, resulting in the dissolution of The PTL Club.
She released three autobiographies during her lifetime, I Gotta Be Me in 1978, Tammy: Telling it My Way in 1996 and I Will Survive and You Will Too! in 2003.
What Happened to Tammy Faye’s Second Husband?
Less than three years after Tammy Faye Bakker married her second husband Roe Messner, Messner was arrested and sent to prison for bankruptcy fraud, which, per the Associated Press, involved “concealing assets from creditors” Messner owed and intentionally giving “false statements about the bankruptcy case,” per AP.
In addition to being ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars in restitution to those he defrauded, Messner served two years in prison, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
But rather than divorcing Messner, as she did with her first husband, Tammy remained faithful to Messner, and it stayed that way until her death in 2007.
Though Messner has been evasive concerning his own conviction while speaking to the public, the same can’t be said for sharing his feelings about Tammy.
Speaking to The Columbia Dispatch in 2015, Messner recounted his admiration and deep love for Tammy. “She was the most common, down-to-earth person you ever saw,” Messner recounted.
Did The Eyes of Tammy Faye Make Money?
The film was one of the first big productions to be released since theatre restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic began to ease, yet it has been something of a disappointment for the film studio which has thus far been unable to recover the massive outlay in production costs.
Despite expanding into 900 theatres, the Jessica Chastain vehicle ‘made just $200,000 on Friday night [it’s opening weekend], which will give it a $600,000 weekend and spell the end out pretty clearly for Searchlight.’
It went on to say ‘Chastain, I predict, will survive all this and still get awards love. But no amount of preaching can get audiences into the theatres’ Ouch.
The precise budget for the movie is unknown but based on the well-known cast, expensive film rights, and large-scale production values (huge sets for the couples’ TV shows, expensive costuming, etc), it is believed that the studio must have invested many millions of dollars into the production.
Off the back of this, Tammy Faye has thus far only clawed back around $2.4m globally – certainly way, way under the total required to break even.