Bob Green, 'Mr. Anita Bryant,' dies at 80

MIAMI -- Bob Green, a onetime radio DJ who married pop singer and Miss Oklahoma Anita Bryant, was found dead Jan. 26 in his Miami Beach home. He was 80.

Green managed his wife's rise to stardom as an entertainer and Florida citrus spokeswoman, then followed her into anti-gay activism, which ultimately destroyed their careers -- and marriage in 1980.

For more than 30 years, Green lived quietly, alone and resentful.

"Bob internalized a lot of his own anger and frustration and disappointments," Bryant, 71, said Wednesday from her Oklahoma City home. "The trouble with life is that it's so daily. You have to have a mindset that you're going to work out your problems and God is going to help you. But he's not going to lay it all in your lap."

Robert Einar Green was born in the Bronx, to Swedish immigrants. He was an Air Force veteran and suffered from heart problems. He was on kidney dialysis at the time of his death, his sons said.

In 1977, Green and Bryant led a successful effort to repeal Miami-Dade County's newly passed gay rights ordinance, Bryant out front and the tall, handsome Green behind the scenes, as he had been when he managed her singing career. 

"He would maintain publicly that he was perfectly happy being Mr. Anita Bryant and making arrangements backstage instead of being the one in the limelight," son Robert Jr. said. "Maybe there was some kind of subconscious resentment."

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His son, a Chicago-area editor, said that Green "grew up a nominal Lutheran," and became a devout Christian after his marriage.  The family's pastor convinced Bryant to launch the successful gay-rights campaign, Green told the Miami Herald in 2007.

The couple founded Anita Bryant Ministries, which offered "deprogramming" and halfway houses for gays, and a lecture series called "Design for Successful Living," aimed at battling divorce.

But Bryant's campaign against the ordinance tanked her image. She lost her orange-juice gig, convention bookings and her big-ticket income.

In June 1980, she filed for divorce, a scandal in the very Christian circles where she'd been revered.