Greed was just the backstory. Tammy Faye, who became known for the makeup that oozed down her cheeks as she wept along with her flock, had to be carted off to rehab for an addiction to tranquilizers. Meanwhile, her reverend husband was paying hush money to the church secretary, a young woman he had used sexually seven years earlier. Jessica Hahn told her story to Playboy. And if that kind of exposure was not enough, the same church official who had arranged for Bakker’s motel meeting with Hahn confessed that he had had three separate homosexual encounters with the TV pastor.39
The tabloid exploitation of the Bakker affair may have augured the official birth of “reality TV.” One can directly trace the unholy line from the out-of-control Bakkers to the gawking at rural Georgian white trashdom in TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Both the preacher’s perversions and the underage beauty contestant’s shenanigans tapped into the public’s attachment to the tawdry behavior of the American underclass. (Tammy Faye later starred in the reality show The Surreal Life in 2004.) The people whom the Praise the Lord Ministry conned were mainly poor whites; the majority of the program’s viewers were born-again, with less than a high school education, and were, most pitifully, unemployed. As one staffer revealed, PTL sent out appeals for money on the first of the month, when the Social Security and welfare checks were arriving. Critics of evangelical hypocrisy vented their rage, and one outraged editorialist attacked President Reagan himself for bringing “white trash front and center” when he entertained Bakker and other televangelists at the White House and told Americans they could learn from them about “traditional American values.” The Bakkers appeared on television day and night, “dressed like pimps,” massacring the English language and defiling religion.40
The Bakkers were not even native to the South. Tammy Faye was born into a poor family of eight children in a small rural town in Minnesota, in a house without indoor plumbing. Her parents were Pentecostal preachers. Jim, the son of a machinist, came from Michigan. They relocated to North Carolina because it was where they knew a market existed for their Pentecostal religious message. Tammy Faye was the charismatic heart of the show, singing, crying, and thriving on her gaudy reputation, “à la Liberace,” as one religious scholar has concluded. Her physical appearance projected a class identity: frosted blonde hair, thick makeup, tanned skin, loud, colorful dresses, and trademark fake eyelashes. She was the picture of nouveau riche femininity.41
The “excessive womanliness” of Dolly Parton captured in a stand-up poster of her in a Nashville music store. This photograph appeared in Esquire in 1977.
Esquire
In this way only, she shared a persona with the Tennessean Dolly Parton. The country singer known for her “voluptuously overflowing body,” garish outfits, big blonde wig—what one scholar has called “excessive womanliness.” Dolly’s grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher. Like Tammy Faye, the singer liked to buy her clothes at the cheaper stores. Her image, as Parton confessed in her autobiography, expressed the desire of poor white trash girls to see themselves as magazine models. She explained, “They didn’t look at all like they had to work in the fields. They didn’t look like they had to take a spit bath in a dishpan. They didn’t look as if men and boys could just put their hands on them any time they felt like it, and with any degree of roughness they chose.” Poverty, for a female, went beyond the wretchedness of having no money.42
Here lies a clue to the real appeal Tammy Faye had among her fans, who vicariously enjoyed the exhibitionism and excess. Parton’s style could be seen as a burlesque—a hooker on the outside and a sweet country girl on the inside; similarly, Tammy Faye’s drag queen look was embraced by the gay community. She was one of very few conservative evangelicals to show sympathy for gay men who were dying of AIDS. She also became for true believers a real-life Christian Cinderella story; one PTL partner made a handcrafted doll of her (marketed for adults, not children) that sold for $675. The Tammy Barbie was a fairy-tale princess with a large heart, adorned, as well, with exaggerated eyelashes.43
The seductive and materialistic message of prosperity theology. Tammy Faye Bakker on the cover of her album Don’t Give Up.
Tammy Faye Bakker, Don’t Give Up (1985)
Yet this fairy tale did not have a happy ending. The media storm made the couple appear completely pathetic; Tammy gained little sympathy as a na?ve wife. (Her kookiness probably saved her from indictment.) There was something almost gothic in the exaggerated white trash image of Tammy Faye Bakker. She achieved the American dream not because of her beauty, education, or talent, but because of having fashioned a cable TV personality that refused to partake of the fine manners of her social betters. Tammy Faye was the rejection of everything Pat Loud (of An American Family) and middle-class propriety stood for: emotional restraint, proper diction, subdued dress, and obvious refinement. Nor was she rustic, or the embodiment of old-fashioned yeoman simplicity. She embraced her garish self from head to toe. Her tawdry excess made her beloved among her poor white fans and unredeemable in the eyes of middle America.
The irony is that her white trash “roots” were hardly pure, if not wholly contrived. Her fake eyelashes and thick coat of makeup were part of a strange masquerade, consistent with the renegotiation of class identity that came with the expansion of mass media in the 1980s and 1990s. She said she borrowed her style of eyelashes from Lucille Ball . . . and Minnie Mouse. “In terms of broadcast hours,” Roger Ebert claimed, “she lived more of her life on live TV than perhaps anyone else in history.” Her public self appeared a composite of bad clichés—she was no closer to projecting authenticity than The Beverly Hillbillies. Tammy Faye was campy (mostly by accident), and more than anything else a creature of the surreal world of television that she loved.44
CHAPTER TWELVE
Outing Rednecks
Slumming, Slick Willie, and Sarah Palin
A dangerous chasm in the classes is alive and well in the United States of America. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s not.
—Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt, Maine (revised, 1995)
The Bakker scandal was not enough to stop the stampede toward white trash and redneck chic that prevailed in the eighties and nineties. Margo Jefferson in Vogue called the new rage “slumming.” One of the most surprising confessions in this vein came from John Hillerman, the American actor who played the prim and proper English butler Jonathan Quayle Higgins III on Magnum, P.I. Hillerman said that when he received fan mail from England, where he was claimed as one of their own, he wrote back, “I hate to disappoint you, but I’m a redneck from Texas.”1
A growing chorus sought to clean up the image, to make “redneck” a term of endearment. Lewis Grizzard, who made a name for himself as a redneck journalist, thought it was time to stop mocking rednecks. He praised the 1993 antidiscrimination ordinance in Cincinnati that made hillbilly a protected class, and he hoped that Atlanta would pass a similar law for rednecks in anticipation of the 1996 Summer Olympics. In Florida, a man was charged under the Hate Crime Statute in 1991 for defaming a policeman by calling him a cracker. For Grizzard, “redneck” meant “agriculturalist,” a person like his father who worked outside and acquired an uneven tan before there was sunscreen. He was wrong, of course, as the long chronology catalogued here has shown.2