Anita Bryant, Singer and Crusader Against Gay Rights, Dies at 84
Anita Bryant, the pop singer and Oklahoma beauty queen who gained fame by convincing America that a “breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine” before seeing her popularity plummet as she railed against gay rights, has died. She was 84.
Bryant died Dec. 16 at her home in Edmond, Oklahoma, her family announced.
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A brunette who personified wholesomeness, Bryant was crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1958 and finished second runner-up in the 1959 Miss America pageant. She landed on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Till There Was You” from Broadway’s The Music Man in 1959 and with “In My Little Corner of the World” and “Paper Roses,” which made it to No. 5, a year later.
After marrying disc jockey Bob Green in 1960 and settling down in Miami Beach, Bryant released a string of albums; earned Grammy nominations in 1968, ’71 and ’73; was a frequent guest on variety and talk shows; and traveled for seven years with Bob Hope on his USO tours, making trips to entertain the troops in Vietnam.
One of Bryant’s biggest fans was President Lyndon Johnson. So taken by her rendition of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the Super Bowl halftime show in 1971, he asked her to sing it at his funeral, and she did so in 1973.
Bryant appeared in commercials for Coca-Cola, Kraft, Holiday Inn and Tupperware but became a household name after signing on as spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission in 1968. For more than a decade, she poured glass after glass of orange juice in dozens of nationally aired TV spots while singing “Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree.”
However, Bryant’s reputation was put to the test in 1977 after she organized a “Save Our Children” movement to repeal a Miami-Dade County ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. A born-again Christian, she did not want gay people teaching schoolchildren.
“I got involved only because they were asking for special privileges that violated the state law of Florida, not to mention God’s law,” Bryant told Playboy in a 1978 interview. “You know, when I was a child, you didn’t even mention the word homosexual, much less find out what the act was about. You knew it was very bad, but you couldn’t imagine what they tried to do, exactly, in terms of one taking a male role and the other taking a female role. I mean, it was too filthy to think about and you had other things to think about. So when I finally found out all the implications, it was a total revelation for me.”
As word spread of her crusade, Bryant gathered support from North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms and Virginia pastor Jerry Falwell, and six months after its passage, the ordinance was repealed by a vote of more than 2 to 1. Bryant then expanded the fight to other cities and states, and with her help, Falwell in 1979 created the Moral Majority movement for religious conservatives that denounced the LGBTQ community, abortion rights supporters and others.
Ultimately, Bryant would pay a price. Gay rights activists targeted her and launched a nationwide boycott of Florida orange juice. Bars stopped serving screwdrivers, replacing them with a mixture of vodka and apple juice called the Anita Bryant cocktail.
Bryant told Playboy that she lost about a half-million dollars in concert bookings and a deal to host her own TV show as her public appearances became magnets for gay-rights protesters. She also became a punchline for comedians, and the Florida Citrus Commission dumped her in 1980.
Bryant holds the dubious distinction of being perhaps the first recipient of a protest pie. She was speaking out against homosexuality during a 1977 news conference in Des Moines, Iowa, when she was creamed in the face by Thom Higgins, an activist from St. Paul, Minnesota. “At least it’s a fruit pie,” she quipped before saying a prayer for her attacker.
Anita Jane Bryant was born on March 25, 1940, in Barnsdall, Oklahoma. At age 2, as she started singing at a local Baptist church, her parents — Warren, who worked in the oil fields, and Lenora — divorced. She and her late younger sister, Sandra, moved in with her maternal grandparents. In 1948, after her folks remarried, she performed at a local radio station and was baptized.
The family moved to Oklahoma City in search of bigger opportunities for Bryant, and she won a contest that led to her own weekly TV show in 1952, then cut her first record a year later. Her parents divorced again, and her mother took the girls to Tulsa.
Bryant attended Will Rogers High School, sang in school and church choirs and starred in a regional production of South Pacific. While appearing on a local TV variety show, she was spotted by a talent scout for Arthur Godfrey and went on to take first prize on his Talent Scouts CBS program.
After graduating from high school in 1958, she signed a contract with Carlton Records and released her first single, the pop tune “Dance On.” She won the Miss Tulsa contest and was crowned Miss Oklahoma before losing to Mississippi’s Mary Ann Mobley in the Miss America pageant, then joined Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club, a Chicago-based ABC radio show.
She sang at both the Republican and the Democratic national conventions in 1968 and two years later published an autobiography, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.
When Green and Bryant divorced in 1980, she lost support from conservatives who said she was no longer a suitable role model. “There were those who said, ‘You’ve written all these books about family togetherness and we’re not supporting you anymore. We’re not into buying your books and records anymore,'” Green said in a 2007 profile for the Miami Herald.
“Blame gay people? I do,” Green said. “Their stated goal was to put [Bryant] out of business and destroy her career. And that’s what they did. It’s unfair.”
After her divorce, Bryant focused on Christian music and charity work through the Anita Bryant Ministries International, a nonprofit she had established in 1967.
She married the late Charles Dry, a former astronaut test crewman who had been her childhood sweetheart, in 1990. They made several attempts to resuscitate her career, but ventures such as the Anita Bryant Theatre in Branson, Missouri; a show bearing her name in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and the Anita Bryant Music Mansion in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, failed, resulting in owed bills and unpaid taxes.
Bryant occasionally resurfaced, most noticeably as herself in the Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me (1989), but mainly stayed out of the limelight.
Meanwhile, she had become a pop culture punchline, with The Carol Burnett Show, Saturday Night Live, The Gong Show, The Golden Girls, Will & Grace and the movie Airplane! making fun of her. She also was lampooned in Anita Bryant’s Playboy Interview, a 2016 play that was based on her 1978 magazine piece, and in the 2018 musical The Loneliest Girl in the World.
A long-planned biopic, written and directed by Chad Hodge, was reported in May 2019 to be in the works, with Ashley Judd to star as Bryant.
Survivors include her children, Robert Jr., Gloria and twins William and Barbara; two stepdaughters; and seven grandchildren.
“I’m not a goody two-shoes. I know now I’m a human being, just like anybody else,” Bryant told Playboy. “If it weren’t for Jesus Christ in my heart and life, I probably would have married several times. I probably would have slept around with guys and whatever. I always say that I’m just a sinner saved by grace.”
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