A Different Kind of Starring Role for Actress

She was a Broadway musical star, swathed in fur, eating a steak a day.

But Gretchen Wyler’s worldview changed in the late 1960s after a visit to a local dog pound near her country home in Warwick, N.Y. That chance encounter provided the inspiration for what would be the actress’ second-greatest passion: animal rights activism.

Within a few years of that visit, Wyler shed five furs -- a mink coat, mink stole, chinchilla cape, full-length silver fox and a nutria-lined coat -- and started a more humane animal shelter in Warwick. (The shelter animals got the furs to use as bedding.)

Eventually, she became a vegan and a board member of several animal rights groups. In the last few years she has transformed a leadership role in the Hollywood office of the Humane Society of the United States into a high-profile spot and become something of an irritant to the Los Angeles Zoo.

“I don’t think anyone should have a right to see a wild animal up close,” says Wyler, who extols the virtues of housing captive elephants on preserves, rather than in zoo enclosures. She lambastes zoo Director John Lewis for his recent comment on the difficulty of viewing elephants in a very large space. “Oh, my God, this is not about people, it’s about animals!” she says.

It seems as if nothing can dim her energy. Not age (Wyler is 74), not a recurrence of breast cancer and drug therapy. She plans to retire in June as vice president of the Hollywood office of the Humane Society, but tonight she’ll preside -- as she always has -- over the Genesis Awards, a ceremony she started to spotlight animal rights issues.

Over a vegan dinner at the Beverly Hilton for the 20th annual event, celebrity presenters including Ed Begley Jr., Zooey Deschanel, Jorja Fox, Lauren Holly, Amy Smart and Tori Spelling are scheduled to hand out 20 brass plaques to honor TV shows and movies, documentaries, news programs, and newspapers and magazines. The show will be taped to air May 6 on Animal Planet.

She insists that the ceremony is unlike the self-congratulatory award shows that crop up at this time of the year in Hollywood.

“We’re about an issue, not about craft,” she says. “Two million people are going to see this and hear about 20 issues.”

Wyler is one of a group of high-profile Hollywood actresses of un certain age who, as they grew too old for the entertainment industry’s notions of what is bankable, became animal welfare advocates. The list includes Doris Day, Brigitte Bardot, Betty White and Tippi Hedren.

“Doris stopped wearing fur in ’72 publicly,” Wyler says. “And Brigitte was on the ice floes in the ‘60s protesting the clubbing of the baby seals. Those are the two women in my generation who inspired me.”

Wyler has channeled the flamboyance she wielded on stage in such vehicles as “Bye Bye, Birdie” and “Guys and Dolls” into her animal rights work, galvanizing admiring activists and alienating zoo officials and sympathizers.

She prides herself on taking a belligerent stance and dismisses the term “animal welfare” as too neutral. She prefers “animal rights” and adds: “I live to see the day when animals have the right to run if they have legs, have the right to swim if they have fins, have the right to fly if they have wings.”

All that sometimes puts Wyler at odds with the people who run the Los Angeles Zoo, which is a city department.

“Her heart’s in the right place, but she doesn’t really know the animals’ biology,” says Manuel Mollinedo, head of the zoo from 1995 to 2002 and now the San Francisco Zoo’s leader. “She tends to look at animals more from an emotional perspective.”

Nonetheless, Mollinedo appointed her to the L.A. Zoo’s Animal Management Advisory Committee in the mid-’90s. And he credited her -- with a plaque -- as one of several figures who successfully lobbied for a state-of-the-art chimpanzee exhibit.

“She is emotional, but these significant issues need our emotional engagement,” says Wayne Pacelle, chief executive and president of the Humane Society. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with emotion, as long as it’s blended with logical thinking. She’s a very smart woman, and she brings a blend of rationality and raw emotion.”

No recent issue has polarized the zoo and animal rights activists like the care of the elephants. Wyler has been on the front lines of that fight, demanding more space for the pachyderms and denouncing the zoo for sending one of its females, Ruby, to the Knoxville Zoo in 2003. (Ruby was returned to Los Angeles at the end of 2004.)

L.A. Zoo Director Lewis declined to comment on Wyler.

Tom Mankiewicz is chairman of the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn., the facility’s fundraising arm. He has known Wyler in both her incarnations. “She was a wonderful actress,” says Mankiewicz, a television writer who directed Wyler in an episode of the ‘80s TV show “Hart to Hart.”

He’s more circumspect about her animal rights work. “She’s obviously very sincere in her beliefs. She’s been complimentary about some aspects of the zoo, and we disagree with her about elephants,” he says.

Wyler’s life story sounds like something out of one of the musicals on her resume. She left her hometown of Bartlesville, Okla., at 18 with dreams of dancing on Broadway. Cast in a musical, “Where’s Charley?” -- which starred Ray Bolger, the scarecrow from “The Wizard of Oz” -- she took his advice to change her last name from Wienecke.

“I said, ‘Mr. Bolger, maybe you could think of a name for me.’ He came in the next night and said, ‘Guess what? Hello, Gretchen Wyler!’ ”

She came to Los Angeles in 1979 with a stage production of “Sly Fox,” starring George C. Scott, and stayed, hoping to land her own TV series.

That didn’t happen, but she got plenty of guest work on TV and stage and had a small part in the movie “Private Benjamin.” She continued to balance acting work and animal activism.

In 1994, Wyler started to criticize a zoo renovation plan that included more money for the front entrance than housing for chimpanzees and orangutans.

“She called and said, ‘I think the master plan is all wrong,’ ” recalls Renee Weitzer, an aide to then-City Council President John Ferraro, whose district included the zoo.

Weitzer, now chief of staff for the district’s current councilman, Tom LaBonge, credits Wyler with getting Ferraro involved in redirecting funds to build new exhibits for the chimpanzees and orangutans. “She’s not nuts,” said Weitzer. “She gets it. She believes strongly, but she knows it’s not a perfect world.”

Wyler says she has never wanted “all or nothing” in the crusade for animal rights. She does not believe in so-called no-kill shelters and thinks that euthanasia is better for an animal than being turned away.

Nor does she proselytize among her friends -- but she can be a nudge. She recalls the time her friend Zsa Zsa Gabor came backstage after a show.

“She said, ‘Oh, Gretchen, I love what you’re doing for animals, because I love animals too.’ I said to her, ‘Zsa Zsa, you love dogs and cats. Don’t you know you’re standing there in 25 dead foxes?’ She sort of laughed -- and stopped wearing fur.”