From Down Here, She Looks Like an Angel Now

What was she under all the maquillage? (In the 2000 documentary "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" she is seen patiently explaining to a makeup artist at a photo shoot that her lip liner, eyebrows and some of the eyeliner are tattooed on, so stop trying to wipe it all off.) What was she, beamed to the world via PTL Network satellite, singing those synthy hymnal ballads, wearing those mid-1980s Chanel jackets belted so tight around her Munchkin middle that she threatened to burst? What was she, beyond being the woman who, with her first husband, Jim Bakker, had matching Rolls-Royces and built God's own water park, only to see it all come tumbling down in a true American scandal?

In Tammy Faye's telling she was just a simple, small-town Minnesota girl. Just your everyday naif who goes to a revival and starts speaking in tongues at age 10, discovers makeup, and runs off to Bible college, where she finds love (Rev. Jim) and puppets (Susie Moppet, the kiddie TV show star whom she created by gluing yarn pigtails onto a plastic Porky Pig head on a bubble-bath bottle), and, ever so circuitously, works her way into pop-culture immortality.

She was impervious to the academic definition of camp, which made her one of its shrewdest practitioners. Hubris was just a fancy word for reality show. She knew people loved the details, and she wasn't afraid to share any of them. "I think the eyes are so important," she tells the camera in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye": "I think you can look in someone's eyes and really tell what kind of a person, what their heart is. And so when my precious friends die, I always ask if I could please have their glasses. . . . When my mom died, I got my mama's glasses, and they're very, very precious to me. I like to put them on sometimes and think, you know, Mama looked through these."

Tammy Faye was simple in a rather complex way. She loved dolls, tiny dogs, and L'Oreal Lash Out. She loved Diet Coke. She loved children. She loved sinners. She loved attention.

She loved nerve-calming Ativan pills, until her husband and church leaders sent her off to the Betty Ford Center. She lasted there one day, she said, because that's all it really took, because she immediately got the point, realized she was addicted, and never succumbed to another drug -- not counting the addictive allure of telling the world over and over about one's recovery.

Tammy Faye's drug addiction was merely a hint of the shadowed valley that lay ahead. In 1987 the world would learn of Jessica Hahn, a church secretary who'd been paid $265,000 after threatening to go public with her affair with Bakker. Despite the rivers cried by Tammy Faye, prayer could not keep Bakker from going to prison on fraud and conspiracy charges relating to the mismanagement of the PTL Network's millions. Jerry Falwell took over the Bakkers' businesses and riches and promptly banished the couple. (Symbolically, it seemed, the Bakkers went to the desert -- Palm Springs.) Tammy Faye faced the press and sang: "On Christ the solid rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand."

If anything, Tammy Faye was addicted to the brink -- not to calamity so much as the part where one bounces back from it. She is not often credited for being a pioneer in this particular strain of media management, but any time someone weeps shamefully yet resolutely in front of a bank of microphones (which people do all the time now), he or she owes some debt to Tammy Faye.

She divorced Bakker in 1992 and married one of his closest PTL associates, Roe Messner, who, among other things, had overseen the building of Heritage USA, the theme park and hotel compound that once rivaled Disney World and eventually was shuttered. Messner would himself go to prison, in 1996, for bankruptcy fraud, and was released in 1999.

She who could have been a clownish icon of televangelism's moment of disgrace instead became a steadfast heroine of all God's marginalized or scandalized people -- a symbol of hope, of aftermath, of human epilogue; someone who could, after a nasty bout with colon cancer, market a self-help video in which she is seen, in all seriousness, squeezing lemons into a pitcher and making lemonade, "because that's what you do when life gives you lemons."

Tammy Faye's new lemonade was made in the secular world. She became a fixture of basic cable, happy to do almost any talk show, reality show or shopping-network guest appearance that came her way. Churches slowly invited her back, to sing and preach the power of positive thinking. Cancer, diagnosed in 1996, recurring in 2004 -- she finally succumbed Friday morning at age 65 -- would kill Tammy Faye, but it also lent her its one special redemptive quality, in American culture, in that it betters the person who faces it bravely, resolutely, and keeps Larry King informed of its progress.

"The Eyes of Tammy Faye," a hit at Sundance, was infused with a gay sensibility, narrated by the drag queen RuPaul, with chapters announced by a pair of falsetto-voiced Christian sock puppets. After the film achieved cult status, Tammy Faye was a special guest at gay pride parades everywhere. It was a Judy Garland-type love. It was tragedy and tarantula eyelashes. It was "I Will Survive," with Yorkies. "When we lost everything, it was the gay people that came to my rescue," she told Larry King last week, in response to a viewer's e-mail. "And I will always love them for that."

And why did gay men love Tammy Faye so much? To ask is to have skipped the last 25 years of the obvious. It wasn't all about the makeup; more deeply, it was about acceptance. Tammy Faye talked early about AIDS, and to people who had it. Moved to tears (sure, everything moved Tammy Faye to tears), she chastised her congregation for their judgment against those who were ill. This won her a lifetime of goodwill from the gays. And she took it. It was an easy friendship to have, and profitable PR for both.

The real lesson is forgiveness. Tammy Faye's was a story about letting go, and really meaning it. (It's in the book -- hers and the Bible.) She forgave Jim Bakker, right away. She forgave Jessica Hahn, wherever she is. Most impressively, she forgave Jerry Falwell. She forgave the media, including the reporter at the Charlotte Observer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for exposing the financial shenanigans within PTL.

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Five nights ago, nearly dead and looking it, Tammy Faye went on Larry King one more time. She said she weighed 65 pounds. The makeup -- whether tattooed on or applied with a trowel -- couldn't hide the fact that the end was near. She could barely talk or breathe, the cancer having spread to her lungs. She was filled with the sorts of Tammy Faye details that endeared Americans to her, and also made us wince with recognition: She craved a cheeseburger, yet "all I eat is chicken soup and rice pudding." She said she was looking forward to meeting Billy Graham, and Larry had to remind her Graham wasn't dead yet, and she suppressed that giggle.

Larry asked her why she wanted to come on television. She said she wanted us all to know something: "I genuinely love you and I genuinely care. And I genuinely want to see you in heaven someday. . . . I want you to find peace, and I want you to find joy."

The more she talked, the less horrifying she looked. She wanted us to see it: Here I am, dying right in front of you. Here I go, leaving behind all this sparkly pretty world. Here I go, and someday you'll go, too. Be not afraid, Tammy Faye was telling us.