As the publicity about her anti-gay views died down, she returned to television in 1980 with a two-hour variety show special, “The Anita Bryant Spectacular,” smiling big but with what struck one media critic as a giant chip on her shoulder. “Miss Bryant’s cause is never defined too clearly,” John J. O’Connor wrote in his New York Times review of the show, “but seems directed at anyone who may differ from her particular concepts of godliness and cleanliness.”
Mr. O’Connor added that, despite “careful projections of wholesomeness and benevolence,” Ms. Bryant’s message appeared to be “persistently hostile and aggressive.” The special was sponsored by her religious organization, which supported “conversion therapy” for gay men.
Two months after the special, Ms. Bryant ended her marriage to her manager, Robert Einar Green, a New York-born former disc jockey whom she married in Oklahoma in 1960. Some conservative Christian fans, shocked by the divorce, turned away.
Later, Ms. Bryant spoke openly about having considered suicide in the late 1970s. “I went into hiding,” she said in a 1990 interview for the TV program “Inside Story.” “Today I can honestly say that there is such a peace and a confidence and a maturity, if you will, that can only have come out of going down to those pits of despair and despondency and wanting to take my life.”
Ms. Bryant became an author with books like “Amazing Grace” and “Bless This Food: The Anita Bryant Family Cookbook,” but her most talked-about title was “The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality” (1977).
She was always an object of teasing. In 1974, when her purse was stolen, a column in The Times reduced her to “the singer who sells orange juice on television.” So it was probably inevitable that she would be skewered on television shows like “Saturday Night Live.” In 1977, Jane Curtin, co-hosting the show’s news segment, screened the pie incident and reported, “Fortunately, Ms. Bryant, who was not injured, enjoyed a good laugh and said it was OK if the assailant dated her husband.”