It takes a lot of money to look this cheap

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 18 NOVEMBER 2001

‘I THINK THE EYES are the windows of the soul,” said Tammy Faye, “so whenever one of my special friends dies I always ask if I can have their glasses.” It was one more reason not to be a special friend of Tammy Faye Bakker. The thought of her perched at the foot of my deathbed like a shoulder-padded homunculus, just waiting to put the pennies over my eyes and make off with my spectacles, is not one that encourages me to make a happy noise unto the Lord.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (M-Net, Monday, 10.15pm) was filled with noises unto the Lord. Some happy, others more like a strangled cry. Tammy Faye Bakker was the wife of Jim Bakker, the chipmunk-cheeked televangelist who first popularised religious television programming of the sort that revolves around saying “Hosanna” and asking the viewing public for cash donations.

Big Jim used many of those donations to build Heritage USA, the religious theme park that at one time was the third most popular tourist attraction in America. He also had a one-night stand with a Playboy bunny and was eventually jailed for misuse of subscriber funds.

Jim himself was interviewed, fresh from the penitentiary, posing with his new wife, wearing a Melton blazer and wire-rimmed spectacles and a swish new haircut. Prison does strange things to a man – in Jim Bakker’s case, it made him resemble Glen Hicks. All the same, you can’t hide those cheeks; he still looks as though he is concealing wads of hundred-dollar bills in his mouth.

The real focus was Tammy Faye, a Southern Baptist Zsa Zsa Gabor with facial make-up as thick as she is tall. “Tammy Faye was always religious,” said her brother. I think his name was Tommy Faye. “When she was little she had a wart on her finger and God told her to dip it in the Communion cup on Sunday. It worked.”

One more reason not to invite Tammy Faye around for drinks. I wouldn’t care to lay on a punchbowl only for Tammy Faye to discover she has a carbuncle on her toe.

Jim and Tammy Faye’s television empire had humble origins. We watched lurid 1970s footage of Tammy Faye operating a finger-puppet. As the Bakkers’ Praise The Lord network expanded, she added another finger-puppet.

While Tammy Faye’s fingers did the talking, Jim’s principal task was to ask for money. I still can’t get over his trademark sign-off. Just before the closing credits, he would look out at the audience and say, quivering with the effort of holding back a guffaw: “Jesus loves you, heh heh heh, he really does.”

Today, watching it, you think: “How did he get away with that?” True, audiences are no less gullible nowadays, but televangelists are thoughtful enough to wait until they are off-camera before they openly laugh at the rubes.

Whatever their other crimes, for me the Bakkers’ greatest sin was the part they played in kick-starting the modern trend for turning private moments into public performance. No less than Oprah, Tammy Faye was one of the great TV weepers. She wept with sorrow, she wept with joy, she wept with her mind on something else and her eyes restlessly roaming round the studio.

When she became addicted to prescription drugs, she lived the recovery in the open, for the gratification of her electronic parishioners. When the financial brouhaha broke, Jim and Tammy Faye filmed their last show sitting on the porch of their mansion. “And now,” said Jim, “before we leave our home, Tammy Faye will sing ‘The Sun Will Shine Again’.” And she did. She did a lot of singing. Next to the finger-puppet, song was Tammy Faye’s medium.

The show became a kind of winking, nudging celebration of Tammy Faye’s post-Jim life. A walking trademark by virtue of her Crayola-box make-up and mascara that make her eyes look like two fields of sooty asparagus spears, she rose to cult status when she remarried, then waved her second husband goodbye as he in turn was jailed for embezzlement.

To lose one husband to the fraudsters’ penitentiary is bad luck; to lose two is to become the butt of a nation’s jokes. To become the butt of a nation’s jokes is ultimately to find your way into their heart.

The documentary might have been a serious look at the American cash-for-redemption industry, or it might have been a serious examination of one woman’s relationship with sudden wealth and a weird kind of showbiz, but in the end it was neither of these things. The show was narrated by RuPaul, a famous drag queen famous mainly for being famous. RuPaul was a dead giveaway – the show was not about a ruined televangelist’s wife, it was about a Camp icon. We watched Tammy Faye at 60, having glamour portraits made and trying to pitch a puppet show to ponytailed young network executives. She was the very embodiment of the Camp female.

Exaggerated to the point of sexlessness, the Camp female is celebrated for being unaware precisely how she comes across to the world. Tammy Faye is so fabulously like a Bible-waving Dolly Parton drag act that you imagine she can’t possibly not be doing that on purpose. But she isn’t. Like Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe, she talks ironically about herself but can’t actually see the irony. She is her eyelashes. The celebration of her Camp is the celebration of her inability to grasp precisely why it is that life is always slightly beyond her control.

The problem with Camp is that, by definition, it illuminates nothing beyond itself. Showbiz glamour is skin-deep, but Camp doesn’t even get as deep as the skin. It is as deep as the last layer of cosmetics. The documentary was contemporary irony at its most empty. It posed knowingly, but it had nothing to say. Tammy Faye wasn’t a woman, she was just a cultural reference. Not even a televangelist’s wife deserves that.