Fur-Loving Widower, Singer’s Estate Cut From Different Cloth : Legacy: Martha Raye left money to an animal rights group that opposes the business being started by her husband.

Martha Raye, the beloved and boisterous entertainer who died in October at the age of 78, loved animals enough to remember their welfare in her will. She set aside a chunk of money for the passionately anti-fur animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, better known as PETA.

She also loved her seventh husband--the bawdy and perpetual self-promoter Mark Harris--enough to leave him most of her estate, conservatively estimated at about $1.5 million.

But would she love what he’s doing as a new widower? In addition to starting a cabaret act and trying to sell a TV cooking show, Harris will become a fashion designer. He is going to design his own line of furs.

That’s right. Harris is going to make money from the skins of animals while PETA tries to save them using Raye’s money.

“Martha Raye would roll over in her grave if she knew Mark planned to do this,” said Dan Mathews, director of international campaigns for PETA, which has raised its profile through celebrity spokesmen, eye-catching ads and billboards featuring supermodels wearing nothing. “He’s showing not only a callous disregard for animals but a disrespect for his late wife.”

Not at all, said Harris, 45, who married Raye in 1991 and has been periodically ridiculed ever since over his motives.

“If my behavior now to save an industry that I happen to enjoy is not to the liking of the PETA people, let them eat steak,” said Harris in a characteristically flamboyant pronouncement. “I’m not doing anything that Martha would be ashamed of. Don’t forget that Martha was a rebel all her life.”

Can we resist it? We can’t. The fur will fly.

Of course, Harris doesn’t just stumble into controversy, he revels in it. A veteran of virtually every eponymous talk show you can name--Geraldo, Sally, Montel--and a frequent guest on Howard Stern’s radio show, he is readying himself for a day of plastic surgery as you read this. (Just days before his 46th birthday, every imaginable part of his body will be tucked and lifted.) A cable television show is sending cameras, he says.

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So Harris, who once worked in the garment industry, is not just quietly starting a fur business. He has drafted himself as a champion of the fur industry and challenged PETA officials to a verbal duel. He extols fur as “the privilege of people in a society of free enterprise” and links the freedom to choose fur with the freedom to choose abortion. He romps in a fur-lined leather coat for a photographer. This past week in Las Vegas he posed, fur-clad, astride a motorcycle at a convention of television program executives.

“Remembering the U.S.A. in the days of sweet dreams, hope and glamour, I recall the privilege of decent people in a society of free enterprise,” he said in an interview, reading from a statement he likes to give on behalf of his fur business. “After all, my childhood fear was of Communist regimes where dictatorships and conforming to a structured way of life was unquestionable. I do believe as an American I have the right to wear fur as long as the skins are not declared of an endangered species.”

“It’s against the law to wear endangered species,” Mathews said. “He seemed to be jumping into the fur fray without knowing all the facts.”

Fur industry advocates are pleased.

“He does not have any kind of an official position with our organization,” said Karen Handel, spokeswoman for the Fur Information Council of America headquartered outside Washington, D.C., “but he has been a very, very strong advocate of the fur industry as well as the consumer’s right to make choices about what he or she will or will not wear. We are thrilled he is thinking about launching his own fur line.”

As for the debate, PETA says it accepts.

“That would be great, that would be wonderful,” Mathews said. “We’re happy to be part of any debate anywhere.”

Harris does not see himself as particularly cruel.

“I’m not killing the minks with my hands. They’re farmed,” he said.

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For the record, PETA is against all farming of animals for clothing. And PETA will use some of Raye’s gift--which totals between $50,000 and $100,000, depending on the ultimate value of the estate--to continue its investigations of fur farms.

One of Harris’ defenses for his venture is his contention that Raye was a fur wearer.

He recalled guiding his wife’s wheelchair into a Beverly Hills gala slightly more than two years ago. “She was wearing gray fox cuffs on a gray jersey dress that was made for her and she was wrapped in her own sable with her name on it,” Harris said.

The fact that Raye may have owned furs comes as no surprise to Mathews.

“I’m sure she did,” he said. “Most of old Hollywood wore furs, but as time marched on they recognized the needless cruelty and hung up their fur coats. Mary Tyler Moore donated hers for us to use in protests.”

Harris said Raye neither hung hers up nor flinched when he pulled one of his several fur coats out of the closet.

“Let me tell you something,” Harris said. “We never had a conversation about PETA. I have in my closet three fur designs I did which Martha loved.”

Harris portrays Raye as a kind-hearted woman who supported a lot of causes. “You have to understand that Martha contributed to 90% out of 100 causes that would come through the mail,” he said. “Martha was such a sucker. She would get fan letters of people who said they couldn’t afford to bury their relatives and she would send them a check.”

But Raye’s will specifically names only a few groups for gifts of money. And she singles out a Vietnam Veterans group, an AIDS service group in Orange County and PETA for the larger gifts. Raye had been a member of PETA since 1988.

“Whether people start making a change by contributing to the cause or making changes in their own personal life, or both, she obviously made a step,” Mathews said diplomatically.

But don’t count on Harris to help PETA’s cause.

“I won’t put them in my will,” he chuckled.