From: dmillard@encore.com (Debbie Millard)
Subject: Cleveland Amory
Organization: Encore Computer Corporation, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 21:29:07 GMT


Ok, I admit it - I'm having a slow day at work...

I found this article about Cleveland Amory in an
old issue of Cats Magazine and remembered the
discussion and confusions about him that went on
a couple of weeks ago.

I just hope that you can all take it for what it is...
information... and not start up a bunch of flame wars.
I do, however, take full credit for all typos.

Press 'n' now to skip it, or better yet, 's' to save it
for later.  It's quite lengthy.

If I get a chance, I'll type in a sidebar that has some
quotes from Amory on different topics.

Debbie

"Cleveland Amory
Author; Activist, Cat Lover...Cantankerous, Stubborn, Sincere"
By Phil Maggitti 
(reprinted without permission from Cats Magazine, October 1990)

"What are you writing down?  Let me see," demands Cleveland Amory in
a gruff, curmudgeonly timbre when he notices the interviewer
looking at the rug beneath his desk.

"I'm writing that there are two dozen burn marks on your rug,
probably from cigarettes."

"Well that's Sean," snaps Amory, contriving to sound put out as
he lays the blame on his office manager Sean O'Gara, who isn't in
the room to defend himself.

The burn marks, impressive as they are in number and length, are
not the first thing you notice about Amory's lair in the Fund for
Animals homey, congested suite in the 200 block of West 57th in
New York.  There's a battlefield-strength, wooden chess set on a
table to the left of the doorway that catches your eye first as
you walk in.  The pieces are half a foot to a foot high, and some
of them are as pointed as Amory's remarks.

Beneath the table are three catnip toys, which Polar Star,
Benedict and Little Girl-the office cats-use in their own
diversions.  All three cats are strays that have been rescued by
various members of the office staff.  Polar Star, a blue-eyed
white, is the friendliest of the three.  While Amory holds forth
during the afternoon, Polar Star paddles in and out of the office
on polydactyl feet.

Like the chess set, Amory, who started the Fund for Animals in
1967, is larger than your average bear: 6 feet 3 inches tall,
several stone over 200 pounds, with a Don King coiffure that
makes him seem 3 inches taller.

Three days before denying authorship of the rug burns, Amory had
spoken in Washington, D.C., at the March for the Animals, a
rally that had drawn nearly 40,000 animal-rights supporters.  Or
24,000, depending on whether you talked to the organizers of the
march or the National Park Service.  Either Way, Amory was
delighted by the turnout.  "Compared with other marches-blacks
and anti-Vietnams and the abortion people-40,000 is a small crowd
for Washington.  But having started at a time when 15 people in
the basement of a church or a synagogue was a good crowd, to see
that many people at a rally was very exciting."

A large segment of the choir that Amory preached to in Washington
was there, either directly or indirectly, as a result of his
25-year influence on the struggle for animal rights.  "Cleveland
is owed a real debt by people in the movement today," says Kim
Bartlett, editor of The Animals' Agenda magazine, "He's very
much responsible for the growth of the movement - through his
visibility with the Fund, his writing, and the people he's
nurtured.  He and Paul Watson (founder of the Sea Shepherd
Society) were responsible for sinking the pirate whaling ship
Sierra.  He brought Alex Pacheco (co-founder of People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals) into the movement.  Most people
would agree that Amory, who was 73 in September, is the
grandfather of the animal-rights movement in this country."

A row of five double windows, four panes of glass in each,
occupies the upper half of the wall that runs from behind the
Paul Bunyan chess set to behind Amory's desk.  Many of the window
ledges hold foreign-language editions of Amory's "The Cat Who
Came for Christmas", which has sold 1.5 million copies - in
English and 15 other languages - since it was published three
years ago.  Though Amory has written that the happiest moment of
his childhood was the Christmas morning when he got his first
dog, the happiest event in his later years occurred on Christmas
Eve 1978, when he discovered Polar Bear, star of his book, in an
alley in Manhattan.  Amory took the frightened, undernourished,
white cat and a cheek full of scratches home to his apartment,
and set about becoming a first-time cat owner.  He gathered his
observations about his subsequent baptism by feline into one of
the best-selling cat books ever written; then he trumped it with
the sequel "The Cat and the Curmudgeon", scheduled for release in
October this year. [note from Deb: remember this article was
written in 1990]

"The Cat Who Came for Christmas was an instant classic, and a lot
of Cleveland's talent and experience came together in it, yet The
Cat and the Curmudgeon is actually a superior book," says Walter
Anderson, editor of Parade magazine, for which Amory has been a
contributing editor for the last 10 years.

"Cleveland's voice comes through on every page of The Cat and the
Curmudgeon," says Anderson.  "You learn about him, you learn
about Polar Bear, but more than that, he makes our foibles and
our passions accessible.  He's really one of the finest writers
in the English language."

That was roughly how Amory presented himself half a century ago
when he came to New York from Boston, freshly graduated from
Harvard, where he had been editor of the Crimson in his senior
year.  After he was turned down at Little, Brown and Company, his
current publisher, the mother of a friend wrote a letter to the
Saturday Evening Post on Amory's behalf.

"When I was at Harvard, I dated Peggy Hepburn, who was Katharine
Hepburn's younger sister," says Amory.  "So Mrs. Hepburn wrote to
the Saturday Evening Post, saying that if they didn't hire me,
she would not allow their publication the privilege to come into
her house anymore.  She was a democrat, and the Post was very
republican.  I was as good as hired before I got there. I walked
in with utter confidence and told them I was one of the great
writers of our time."

Amory was made the editor of the "Postscripts" page, which
featured cartoons and other humorous material.  He also wrote
feature articles for the five-cents-an-issue magazine.  "When you
got an article in the Saturday Evening Post in those days," he
says, "that was it.  Booth Tarkington, Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair
Lewis - everybody you ever heard of wrote for the Post.  I
remember watching people read my articles around the city.  It
was an incredible feeling."

There is no elaborate communication system in the Fund for
Animals suite, which used to be an opera composer's apartment.
When Amory needs to ask a question of his assistant Marian
Probst, he bellows "MARIAN," and if he doesn't get an answer
after two or three bellows, he rings a small dinner bell on his
desk.

Probst has known Amory too long to be perturbed by his bellowing.
An "editor at the source," according to the boss, she has typed,
copy-edited and proofread whatever columns, TV scripts, critical
reviews, books, or magazine pieces Amory has worked on for nearly
30 years.

"I began working for Cleveland when 'Who Killed Society' was number
two on the best-seller list," Probst recalls.  Since that was the
third book of social history and sature that Amory had published
in 13 years, she was afraid that "this job would be terribly
social and that I wouldn't fit in at all."

By 1961, however, Aamory was more interested in reforming society
than he was in describing it.  "I used to write about Mrs. Astor
and her pet horse," he has said, "now I just write about the
horse."

What turned Amory from social chronicler into seething crusader
was a visit to a bullfight in Nogales, Mexico.  After several
years at the Post and a stint with military intelligence, Amory
took a job with the Tucson, Arizona, Daily Star, which sent him
to cover the bullfight.

"It was the most awful, miserable place," says Amory.  "I can
still see that bull walking along the side of the arena as if he
were thinking, 'Aren't they going to let me die in the shade?'"

Amory was so incensed by what he saw that as the matador was
strutting about the ring after the last fight, Amory took the
cushion from his seat, walked down into the front row of boxes,
and hurled it as the matador passed by.  The cushion, which had
soaked up a lot of rain and humidity earlier in the day, caught
the matador in the back of the neck and brought him down to
earth.

Amory never wrote the article about the bullfight, but he did
join every animal-welfare group he could find; and he began, in
the mid-60s to write articles about the brutality of leghold
traps, laboratory experiments on animals, and the annual carnage
inflicted on wildlife by hunters.  He brought to the tame,
animal-welfare movement a free-wheeling, wild-hare approach that
inspired those who agreed with him and enraged those with whom he
disagreed.  One morning on the Today Show he anounced the
formation of the Hunters Hunt Club, a society dedicated to
culling hunters so that they wouldn't have to starve in the
woods.  Ater people who had seen him on television or had read
his articles in the Saturday Review, TV Guide, and other
magazines began sending him donations to help fight the various
abuses he had challenged, he decided to start the Fund for
Animals "to put cleats on the little old ladies in tennis shoes."

Norman Cousins, former editor of the Saturday Review, says that
Amory created this "congenial disturbance at considerable risk to
his writing career and at considerble personal cost, not only in
terms of his writing time but in the amount of financial support
he provided to the fund."

Neither Amory nor Probst draw salaries for their work at the Fund
for Animals, which has a donorship of 240,000 people, major
offices in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Louisville, Washington,
D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego; a 605 acre ranch
in Murchison, Texas, which houses many of the animals the fund
has rescued, a wildlife rehabilitation cennter in Ramona,
California, and a rabbit sanctuary in Simpsonville, South
Carolina.

"The most exciting project we have right now," says Amory, "is
the spaying-and-neutering work we're doing in Mexico with a new
drug that keeps animals from coming into heat.  This will affect
far more animals than anything else we've ever done, and for me
it means a kind of full cycle to have a massive Mexican program
now because my desire to work for animals started with the
Mexican bullfight almost 45 years ago.  I would very much like
this to be, perhaps, the final major program in what we're able
to accomplish, at least in the cat and dog field."

It is difficult to imagine a last campaign, major or otherwise,
for the endearingly disheveled curmudgeon.  Like some books,
there are some people - and Amory is certainly one of them - that
you want to last forever.

Walter Anderson has said, "a book is always better than the
person who writes it."  To the vast following of the curmudgeon,
however, Cleveland is almost as good as his books.  And that's
about as good as it gets.