He piloted career of wife, Anita Bryant

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. That's what happens "if you don't let your faith rise up and you give in to all those anxieties.

"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 on June 13, 1931, in the Bronx, to Swedish immigrants. He was an Air Force veteran and suffered from heart problems.

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.

Flush with victory in Miami-Dade, 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.