“We were a bit nervous, but they really hit it off.” “The other guest was Sister Paula, a transsexual preacher from Seattle,” Barbato recalled with a laugh. Still, before that fateful first talk-show shoot, they weren’t sure how their idol would respond to their more liberal politics. AFP via Getty Imagesīailey and Barbato - who run the production company World of Wonder - sympathized with the 4-foot-11 Tammy Faye. (In a truly soap-operatic turn, she later married Roe Messner, the property developer for Heritage USA, who then also went to jail, for bankruptcy fraud charges.) Jessica Chastain stars in the new biopic “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” in theaters Friday. Tammy had to sell off her glitzy wardrobe for money.
Two years later, he would go to jail for defrauding his followers of $158 million. The Bakkers had a veritable Christian empire, with their own Jesus-themed amusement park, Heritage USA, before Jim got embroiled in a sex assault scandal and lost it all in 1987. It inspired a new biopic of the same name, starring Jessica Chastain, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival Sunday and is in theaters Friday.
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“She was a camp icon even back then,” Barbato told The Post, citing Tammy Faye’s high hair, artificially tanned skin and spidery eyelashes.īailey and Barbato would later make “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” a wild documentary released in 2000. The two gay pals had spent the 1980s watching the gloriously gaudy televangelist on the Praise the Lord (PTL) Network, which she founded with her first husband, preacher Jim Bakker. The first time Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato met Tammy Faye Messner, in the mid-1990s, they had invited her to their LA home for a new talk show they were shooting for British TV. Meg Ryan staging rom-com comeback after more than a decade awayĭwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s birth chart: Cooking up success since 1972 Strange’ on track to break 2022 box office record Who is the actress playing ‘America Chavez’?