I’ve written about Tammy Faye before, specifically “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” starring Jessica Chastain.
This musical failed in NYC, while it was a smash hit in London, and there’s a big question of Why?
I think in part, and this is without having seen it, it’s because they are elevating her to almost a gay rights activist, for the very simple reason that she dared to speak to a gay man with AIDS on her television hour. She wasn’t in the room with him. He was in his apartment or some studio in California. Her sympathy for the guy was thousands of miles apart.
She was a stupid and greed-filled religious televangelist. The real story behind her and her husband’s rise and fall is the damn television show and the station they built. It was PTL (Praise The Lord) network — and it was far more successful than CBN (Christian Broadcast Network), Pat Robertson’s network, which only had a few thousand viewers. There were a whole lot of transactions that went on between the Bakers and others, but when they became hosts on CBN of a show called The 700 Club, it ended up becoming the flagship program on CBN. When they left that network, they started their own network and it left other televangelists in the gutter. Everyone was jealous of them: craved their ratings, their world satellite network, and so on. So when scandal hit because of Jim Baker and a woman named Jessica Hahn, Jerry Falwell stepped in to become the chairman of the network and Jim and Tammy left or were tossed out. Not unsurprisingly, the donations to the station completely dried up and Falwell had to contribute 20 million to keep it afloat. He had lied to Jim Baker that Jim would get control back and instead called him “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.” Of course that just shows what an idiot Falwell was too. Christianity didn’t begin the day Christ died. In fact it wasn’t until 400 some years had passed that the four main gospels were codified, the apocrypha created, and Rome turned away from paganism. So 1600 years to be more precise. And of course there was Judas who you could accuse of being a stain on Christianity if he and Jesus weren’t, in fact, Jewish.
But never mind that. Falwell is dead and we are all better off for it. Tammy Faye died but Jim Baker still lives on, has repurchased the PTL name and logo and is trying again. But why did this show fail? Not sure. But I have a feeling it really gets the story of these two totally wrong. Jessica Chastain’s portrayal was probably closer. It might also be a much more amusing show in England, whose people, I sometimes think, are continually perplexed at the United States as a nation.
I sometimes watched the Jim and Tammy show for laughs and one time, to the very apparent annoyance of her husband, Tammy told a story about shopping in the middle of Indiana in this mall that must have been 500 years old. That is how stupid she was.