Most famous people on the steep slope to their death fall out of the public eye months or years before their demise. Ego presumably has a lot to do with it. They dont want their admiring public to see them as humans wasting away to disease and age. So only family and close friends can see them.Tammy Faye Bakker Messner became the exception. To most peoples shock, she appeared Thursday night (albeit a taped interview) on CNNs The Larry King Show. By Friday, she had died from her colon cancer that had moved to her lungs. Her death, at 65, became public Saturday. The family had moved swiftly to have her cremated and a service performed.Her death, like that of televangelist Jerry Falwell, who died May 15, reminded us anew about zealous religionists whose flamboyance and personalities had a way of overshadowing their basic work. Tammy Faye, of course, was cartoonish. Her gushing and exuberance, going back to her days on the PTL Network and Heritage USA, were unsinkable. She and her husband Jimmy Bakker, the boyish evangelist, were the good-times, fun couple who praised the Lord in one breath and pleaded for viewers checks in the next. She sang joyously and prayed on camera with the greatest urgency that somehow had a financial appeal to it.She made a career out of public crying, wiping the tar of her mascara from her cheeks and tearfully talking as the spikes of her fake eyelashes flapped. Her pity-parties still gave God the glory.They mostly were a phenomenon to their Christian television crowd in the 1970s and 1980s until the scandals broke in televangelism. Millions of dollars given for ministry were swallowed up in wanton extravagance, then things got perverse when both Jimmy Bakker and evangelist Jim Swaggart were caught up in sexual infidelity. Their tearful displays of public confessions became part of TV history.In February 2001, I interviewed Jimmy Bakker at Phoenix First Assembly of God where he had spoken and was helping his second wife, Lori Graham Bakker, a one-time Mesa bedroom furniture store manager, sell her new book, More Than I Could Ever Ask. In 1989, Bakker had been given a 45-year prison sentence for mail and wire fraud for bilking followers of the Praise the Lord ministry of $158 million. He would serve just five years of the term and was released in 1994. Tammy Faye missed prosecution and was never implicated in crimes. The Bakkers were divorced in 1992 while Jimmy was in prison and, in 1993, she married Roe Messner, who happened to be a business associate of Jimmy and was sent to prison for bankruptcy fraud. Messner was commonly at Tammy Fayes side in the numerous TV interviews she would do over the years. When I interviewed Jimmy Bakker, the ex-con six years ago, he was still emphatic that he had not defrauded his PTL fans. Absolutely no, never, never, he said. My budget grew to about a million dollars every two days, and it got to the point where the budget became so big and I was broadcasting in all 50 states.It all grew too fast for him to manage, he said. At 7,000 percent growth in 18 months, he got in over his head. It was more than I could handle, he told me. I committed adultery one time that is wrong and that is a sin. And I got overwhelmed with the budget.Most of the interview related to Jimmy Bakkers bride a woman he married in 1998 just seven weeks after meeting her. The paparazzi was out in force with helicopters for the Burbank, Calif., wedding. Lori Graham Bakkers story was about the classical redeemed woman. A rise from disgrace was the article headline. I noted that Lori herself hadnt even known about the PTL Bakkers until the televangelism scandal. Meanwhile, she had gone through her own hell. Divorced in 1975 after a 10-year stormy marriage, she had husband that demanded abortions after each new pregnancy five in all. He gave me no choice either him or the babies.The decade of the first marriage for Lori was marked by beatings, drugs, alcoholism and emptiness, the one-time Mesa business operator said. After the divorce, she said she was a wild woman on the loose making the round at bars of the East Valley, calling herself the Nightclub Queen. But her fate changed when Jimmy Bakker came into her life.Tammy Faye Bakker Messners staunch fight against her cancer was emboldening for others. Her bio showed that was just 19 when she and Jimmy first began their ministry together. At one time, she ran a puppet ministry for Pat Robertsons 700 Club. The Bakkers joined Jan and Paul Crouch in launching the Trinity Broadcasting Network. The TV evangelists are a close family.One of todays highest profile televangelists, Pastor John Hagee, may have overstated Tammy Fayes impact, but here it is: She led the way for us all. The invention of the printing press in 1440 allowed the word of the Bible to reach people in unprecedented ways. Ms Bakker took it one step further. In broadcasting the Word of God across the world, Tammy Faye was responsible for bringing an uncountable number of individuals closer to God, and for that, she will be missed.

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