Tamara Faye Messner (née LaValley; known 1961–1992 as Bakker ; March 7, 1942 – July 20, 2007) was an American evangelist. She co-founded the televangelist program The PTL Club with her then-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. 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.
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 was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996, from which she suffered intermittently for over a decade before dying of the disease in 2007. who married in 1941. Shortly after she was born, a painful divorce soured her mother against ministers, alienating her from the church. Both of her parents remarried, her mother to Fred Willard Grover, forming a large blended family, in which she was the eldest child.
1960–1973: Marriage to Jim Bakker; early work
In 1960, she met Jim Bakker while they were students at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Tammy Faye worked in a boutique for a time while Jim found work in a restaurant inside a department store in Minneapolis. They were married on April 1, 1961. The next year, they moved to South Carolina, where they began their ministry together, initially traveling around the United States; Jim preached, while Tammy Faye sang songs and played the accordion. The series mixed "glitzy entertainment with down-home family values" and preached a "prosperity gospel", which put a divine seal of approval on both the growing affluence of American evangelicals and the showy lifestyles of their television ministers." During the program, Tammy Faye addressed her viewership, saying: "How sad that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, we who are supposed to be able to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care."
Bakker's friend, the Reverend Mel White, commented on her presence on The PTL Club: