Cruising with Anita

So put yourself in my place right now. Here's the setting: I am a stranger in a strange land--Des Moines--perched in the back of a sleek black limo, parenthesized by an escort of Iowa state police flashing their cherry tops and blaring their sirens, rushing to meet the governor. I am flanked on my left by Anita Bryant and on my right by her husband-manager of 17 years, Bob Green.

Anita is quite distraught--who can blame her? She is trying to regain a modicum of composure; 45 minutes ago, in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a press conference, just as she was outlining the Almighty's salvation recipe for sexual aberrants, an envoy dispatched by her dread nemesis, the "militant homosexual community," had unceremoniously plastered her, bull's-eye, with a pie in the face. Since her moment of ignominy, Anita has alternately joked ("At least it was a fruit pie"), prayed ("We ask, dear Lord, that You deliver this man from his deviant lifestyle"), cried (real tears) and frantically tried to erase the sticky remains of the meringue from her upper torso. She's been only moderately successful in the latter pursuit, and she knows it--her hair looks like a stiff orange swirl of cotton candy. She fidgets. She looks vacantly out her window. She worries. She pouts.

Bob, decked out in his smartest polyester ensemble, looks out his window, feigning nonchalance. He is the single lay member of the holy trinity on whom Anita depends. (The two other slots are occupied by God--He's the boss of the bunch, naturally--and her pastor, affectionately known as plain old Brother Bill.) As such, Bob is the moving target for the slings and arrows of Anita's abuse, and right now, Anita is feeling plenty abusive. Although he's a mite jumpy, Bob knows that sooner or later his wife will come to her senses, as always, and realize that the Lord is pissed at her for being pissed at him.

For, as Anita knows, her greatest sin against the Lord is her innate reluctance to "submit" to her man, as the Lord says a good wife must. Furthermore, Satan's shadow is always lurking about and his black angels continually egg her on to kick Bob's ass when Bob does something dumb. But the Lord's forces--and those she must please, if she is to sip from the divine chalice in the hereafter--command her to be meek, humble and, above all, submissive. She is to obey Bob, no matter what he tells her to do. The Bible tells her so.

So when husband and wife are together--and Bob usually makes sure that the family's chief breadwinner is at least within shouting distance--there is seldom a dull moment. A battle is fermenting, raging or winding down at all times.

This ongoing tug of war is normally a private matter between Anita and Bob. So my debut into their little jungle introduces a curious element; to wit, I provide Anita with an audience. I act the charming, neutral interrogator, a cross between maître de and devil's advocate. My posture has its advantages, its disadvantages and its awkward moments.

One of which is right now, in the back of the limo on the way to meet the governor, in the first quarter of the latest battle. Anita has made it clear that she regards my conduct in the wake of her gooey assault as chivalrous. (I was seated next to her, and when a big glop of the pie splattered on my lapel, I immediately returned to sender that portion of the glop I could scoop up, muttering epithets all the while.) She has made it equally clear that she thinks Bob acted the Milquetoast. (It was his idea to make her pray for her assailant, in the midst of which she broke down, oncamera, and sobbed.) The silence in the back seat is deafening. I am determined to break the ice.

"I found the pie box," I announce brightly. No response. "It's a Banquet banana cream and the price is, let's see, here ... sixty-nine cents."

Bob regards me solemnly. "You know what, Ken? Anita doesn't even know what that means."

Anita jerks her head around faster than the proverbial speeding bullet. "What what means, Bob? Huh? What what means? Answer me, Bob!"

Bob averts his eyes. His larynx dances a jig and his cheeks flush. Anita instinctively apes his embarrassment. Bob looks out his window. Anita looks out her window. I look straight ahead.

Now, as I say, put yourself in my place right now. Wouldn't you jump at the chance to tell Anita Bryant something about the birds and the bees, if only for the exquisite irony of it all? Well, I jumped, you betcha. "Anita, give me a pencil and paper."

Bob snorts. "What're you gonna do, write it out for her?"

"Just give me the pencil and paper."

Anita quickly proffers her vinyl note pad with the built-in pencil holder. Four foreign eyes are squarely trained on my lap as I scrawl a large figure six, around which I snugly cushion a large figure nine. Anita looks, understands. Anita gasps. The round brown eyes--her emotional scoreboard--tilt back in their sockets. "Is ... is that what it means?" Bob looks out his window. Anita looks out her window. I look straight ahead. I feel like a child molester.

•

For such a sexual naïf, Anita can with startling incongruity become quite the barroom flirt. "Just wait till you see my show, Ken," she bubbled as she made up her face before her Mississippi State Fair show last fall. "It'll surprise you--it's so much different from my image." She stood up and looked away from her mirror. "I have to dress now, so y'all shoo." I headed for the exit, along with Bob and several local yokels. "Oh, Kennnn...." Anita lifted her skirt to mid-thigh and winked. "You can stay if you want to. Hah hah."

"No, I can't," I said, as Bob took hold of my elbow.

On occasion, she can even be moved to indulge her own brand of risqué humor. One night over dinner, a merchant at our table was bemoaning his burgeoning shoplifting problems. "At least the A-rabs have the right idea," he opined. "They just cut the thieves' hands off."

Anita's eyes twinkled. "Ken, I wonder what the Moslems cut off when they catch people fornicating." She laughed. "Now, promise us you won't print that." I laughed and said nothing.

Versatile performer that she is, Anita has developed two separate stage shows--secular and evangelical, depending on who's footing the bill. Her Mississippi show was secular (one of her few last year), a medley of pop hits (her loudest applause came when she sang her orange-juice commercial) and sexy cowgirl numbers mixed in with some upbeat God ditties. Her Des Moines show was religious, so the pop/Okie routine was supplanted by a prolonged "witnessing" to the Lord, heavy on the organ, if you please.

Master of timing that she is, Anita always leaves her audience shouting for more as she sashays offstage in animated slow motion. Then, without even changing her sweat-soaked costume, she spends the next half hour holding court for the backstage legion of admirers who want a little piece of her and sometimes a big piece (religious groupies are no less possessed than their rock counterparts).

•

Even a dime-store psychoanalysis can accurately size up a crucial part of (concluded on page 232)Cruising with Anita(continued from page 97) Anita: She has rerouted all of her sexual energy into religious fervor. She is constantly on the make for Christ. Her passion is all-consuming and, at the same time, all-nurturing. Whereas Ignatius Loyola carefully systematized the self-hypnotic aspects of Christianity, Anita simply stumbled across them way back yonder and, like the severest Jesuit, intuitively harnessed them. She is completely sincere--let there be no doubt of that. Those who suspect that she harbors ulterior motives are simply off base. She is incapable of duplicity--her eyes would be her downfall. (If she played poker, I'd be rich right now.) No, her very uncomplex goal in life is to lead every stray sinner back into the clutches of Jesus and to arouse every righteous soul in Christendom to do likewise.

Believe me, the woman is relentless. After a couple of days on the road, she began to take a serious interest in my salvation. Her concern, sad and pathetic though it seems in retrospect, was quite moving at the time, because she really cared. Her approach was neither phony nor pious but childlike, down to earth.

"Ken, I've been wondering..." she confided one day as we sat side by side, 40,000 feet in the air. "If this plane crashed right now, where do you think you'd go?"

"Hmmm.... Maybe I could just tag along behind you. Do you think Saint Peter would let me in?"

"You mean you don't know?"

"What do you think would happen?"

"Well...." She eyeballed me intently. "I think your heart is in the right place, but your head may be standing in the way of your salvation."

She kept up her preachifying for the duration of our journey--she was never pushy, but never lax, either. The clincher came when I said goodbye as I prepared to re-enter a less rarefied atmosphere after an interminable week in the buckle of the Bible Belt. It was our final moment together. Anita kissed me lightly on the lips, then took my hands in hers and squeezed. "Ken, I know you're going to encounter much temptation when you write about me. Just remember to do what I do whenever I am tempted. Close your eyes, clench your fists real tight and say, 'Satan, get thee behind me! Satan, get thee behind me!' Do you promise me you'll do that?"

Several months later, in her last phone call to me, Anita suggested a more pointed variation on the theme. "Hiya, boyfriend," she drawled in her fetchingest corn pone. She was calling, she said, to wish me good luck for the new year and to tell me that her whole family prayed for me every night. And, oh, yes ... by the way--"Ken, I hope you realize that I have made myself tremendously vulnerable to you. I opened myself up to you in ways I've never done before. I've shared some things with you I'd never even shared with my husband." A beat. "Now, that's a sacred obligation on your part." I mumbled something about doing my best. "Well, do a good job, now, or I'll put the curse of God on ya, hear?" She laughed. I did not laugh.

•

Although it's a tempting exercise, Anita is simply too asymmetrical to pigeonhole. She is a confection of contradictions: pristine nun and gamy tease. Old pro who's paid her dues and wide-eyed waif who's still seeking the jackpot. Guilt-wracked sinner who's terrified of hell and perfervid white knight who's determined to lead mankind on a forced march into paradise. Independent spirit, cowering wife. Chaplain one minute, warden the next. She is a demonstrably intelligent woman who stays steadfastly ignorant. Not that these discrepancies bother Anita. She rendered herself unto God at the tender age of eight and, after 30 years, He has finally whipped her into shape. She knows now that questions are the work of the Devil: answers are the work of the Lord. One thing only matters--the Big Payoff when she dies. Heaven. Quietude. Forever and ever.

Anita broaches the topic of martyrdom in an almost cavalier fashion. Mind you, she'll gladly go on doing God's bidding while her soul is still caged by her flesh. But whenever He's ready, she's ready... eager, even, somewhere. She thinks about dying every day. Not from some deep-seated death wish or a hungry paranoia but from a realistic appraisal of her situation. During the past 12 months, she has weathered bomb threats, snuff letters and numerous close calls with mayhem. She has learned to take it all in stride. Bob has learned to cover his investment by smothering his wife with security guards. But, in his own words, "Let's face it--when some militant homosexual kills Anita, the guy will be an instant hero."

For better or worse, Anita is a natural symbol. America has a nasty track record when it comes to symbols, be they George Lincoln Rockwell or Malcolm X. Bluntly put--Anita fully expects that she will be assassinated. Her eyes moisten when she ponders the reaction of her beloved children, but she also knows that she can be a much better mother once she's safely situated Upstairs. And after 38 years of mortal travail--after the decades of fear, envy, guilt, bitterness, sadness, disappointment and exhaustion--Anita is quite content to claim her just deserts, thank you. Imagine--no more orange juice to push.

Hallelujah.