I test-drove Tammy Faye’s makeup look
Makeup artist from film ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ helped me bring it to life
In a scene from “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” the titular character, Tammy Faye Bakker (played by Jessica Chastain), sits in front of blinding vanity mirror lights. Off camera, a makeup artist is amazed that her ostentatious beauty look cannot be altered. Bakker’s lips are tattooed with permanent liner. Brows, too. The artist suggests that they soften the look, to which Bakker politely replies while swigging from a can of Diet Coke, “You can do whatever you want, but my eyelashes stay right where they are.”
Those lashes — thickly coated and jutting out in spidery patches — were central to making Bakker into a television icon, camp queen and the subject of a hotly anticipated biopic that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.
For those unfamiliar with Bakker, she was a televangelist who, along with her husband Jim Bakker (played by Andrew Garfield in the film), was famous in the 1970s and ’80s for preaching with puppets, belting out pop ditties about Jesus and even opening a Christianthemed amusement park. She was also an unlikely ally to the LGBTQ community, using her platform to embrace HIV/AIDS patients on live television at the height of the epidemic. But Bakker became permanent tabloid fodder when her husband was indicted, convicted and imprisoned on numerous counts of fraud and conspiracy in 1989.
And although she was forever marred by crimes she was never personally accused of, her celebrity held steady. In the later years of her life, before dying of colon cancer at age 65 in 2007, Bakker appeared on numerous TV shows spreading the gospel of acceptance and intersectionality.
“So many people were interested in how she presented herself in the world, judging her makeup,” said Chastain at a TIFF news conference. “Her mascara was this huge thing about her and not really what she was doing, which was — in a time when all evangelicals were these white Christian men — she was going on TV and saying, ‘We as mommies and daddies need to love our children when they come out to us as gay.’ She really rocked that world and we never gave her the credit for doing that.”
Back to that mascara, though. “I think the eyes are so important. I believe the eyes are the soul,” Bakker once said. (She also once proclaimed, “You don’t have to be dowdy to be Christian,” which deserves its own mention.)
Bakker used those copious mascara tubes as the ultimate tools of self-expression. This deeply resonates with me. As a lifelong disciple of the cult of camp, my personal esthetic isn’t too far off from Bakker’s. I, too, favour animal prints and big lashes.
And having spent much of my childhood on road trips through the Southern U.S., I’ve always felt a strange kinship with the earnestly over-the-top ladies of the Bible Belt (Bakker was from Minnesota, but close enough?).
And so, while I’d like to say it’s implausible that I decided to embody Bakker on a random Tuesday night in Toronto, that simply wouldn’t be true. Enlisting the help of Linda Dowds, Chastain’s makeup artist on “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” I got behind-the-scenes tips on recreating that legendary face. Unsurprisingly, she instructed me to start with the eyes.
“Shadow first and then go from there,” she said. “In (Bakker’s) early years, there was a very specific look to the lashes that we created by using one of our favourite ‘strip’ lashes,” said Dowds. “I pulled out every other two so that they appeared a little more spiky and less dense. I used the individual lashes, in true Tammy fashion, and we layered those with multiple applications of mascara.” Pink blush and a variety of lip and nail colours finished the on-set look.
Using Dowds’ tips as a blueprint (as well as a candid shot of Bakker in her later years), I went to work. I applied multiple shades of pastel eyeshadow from NYX’s Ultimate Utopia Shadow Palette: lilac on the lid, sparkly mint green in the crease with a layer of gold on top … then silver (more is more, Bakker might say). I then encircled my eyes in Cleopatra-esque liner, topping my waterlines with a swipe of teal. Why not?
Then came the pièce de résistance, an abundance of mascara from two different brands: L’Oréal Paris’s Voluminous Lash Paradise and Pupa’s Vamp! Sexy Lashes. I added a jelly blush, traced my lips with M.A.C liner and slicked on a generous serving of a Fenty lip gloss. I completed the look with a vintage leopard print dress with shoulder pads and a keyhole opening, larger-than-life gold Jenny Bird hoops and a choking-hazard amount of hairspray.
And with that, I hopped on my bike and set out to the Ossington strip where I met my friend Ryan at the new Paris Paris wine bar. While waiting for him to arrive, my friend Gigi walked by, hollering, “Randi! You look hot!” which I can’t say was the response I was expecting. Over the top? Sure. Hot? Well, OK! After a couple of drinks, I headed home, not realizing that the sky had opened in a torrential downpour. I gunned it home — mascara streaming down my face just like Bakker’s did during one of her particularly emotional sermons.
If I wasn’t Jewish, I’d have been humming along to the lyrics of one of Bakker’s disco era hits: “Jesus keeps taking me higher and higher.”