Bankruptcy, ill will plague Bryant
Margaret Cole expected great things when she went to work at the Anita Bryant Music Mansion, a plantation-style showplace with towering white columns and sparkling chandeliers set in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains.
“There’s something about the theater business that just gets in your blood,” she said.
The first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night, Cole, a 58-year-old Baptist, felt she was doing something good for the world: Anita Bryant, the show’s star, would belt out tunes from her ’50s and ’60s heyday, but the cornerstone of her act was a lengthy segment in which she preached her Christian beliefs.
Attendance was so sparse some nights that the manager put employees in the seats to boost the cast’s morale. Cole, who worked in the ticket office, didn’t mind.
“I thank God daily I have a Christian place to work,” she told Tennessee labor investigators in August 2000. She scowled at locals who started to bad-mouth Bryant and Charlie Dry, the singer’s husband and business partner.
But even Cole gave up on the couple after six months of bounced paychecks and daily promises that God would bring forth new investors. She holds little hope of ever seeing more than $6,400 in missed pay.
Here in the hills of eastern Tennessee, the story is much the same for dozens of others who labored, often for weeks or months without pay, to produce Bryant’s jaunty, toe-tapping show, “Anita With Love.”
Twenty-five years after her famous antigay crusade in Florida ended a high-flying career, Bryant, 62, is known in three other states for not paying bills. She has spent the past few years in small entertainment capitals across the Bible Belt, gamely attempting a comeback but leaving bankruptcy and ill will in her wake.
It has been a long, difficult slide for Bryant, who, as a wholesome, 30-something singer in the 1970s, was proclaimed the “Most Admired Woman in America” by Good Housekeeping magazine three years running.
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