Cleveland Amory; Best-Selling Author, Critic and Activist for Animals Was 81

Cleveland Amory, the Massachusetts Brahmin with the rapier wit who penned several bestsellers and became one of the world’s leading advocates for animals, died in his sleep Wednesday night at his New York City home. He was 81.

As a humanitarian, Amory founded the Fund for Animals in 1967 and was known to many for his work saving the burros of the Grand Canyon and the goats of California’s San Clemente Island. But to millions of readers, he was the humorist and social critic who spun touching stories about his beloved white cat Polar Bear into three best-selling books.

“He liked to step back and cause people to think about what they were doing,” said longtime friend and fellow animal activist Wayne Pacelle. “But he did it with humor instead of moral outrage.”

Over the years, the self-described curmudgeon served as the youngest-ever editor of the Saturday Evening Post, writer for Parade magazine and chief critic for TV Guide. In his later years, he was executive director of the Fund for Animals.

On Wednesday, the solidly built, 6-foot-4 Amory worked a full day at his New York office.

He had joined forces with numerous celebrities, including Mary Tyler Moore and Angie Dickinson, in his fight against hunting, trapping and the fur industry. He appeared in television commercials with the slogan “Real people wear fake fur” and joked that his own shock of thick hair could place him at risk.

“He was always worried that furriers looked at him so intently,’ Pacelle said.

Born in 1917, Amory was the scion of a long line of Boston merchants. His affluent and well-connected upbringing left him with a self-assured demeanor and independent spirit. Amory displayed a lifelong love for chess, which he saw as a traditional social event more than a competition.

He attended Harvard and became editor of the Harvard Crimson. He once said: “If you have ever been editor of the Harvard Crimson . . . there is very little, in afterlife, for you.”

After college, he became editor of the Saturday Evening Post and served in Army intelligence during World War II. After the war, he wrote a trilogy of historical studies, still considered classics: “The Proper Bostonians,” “The Last Resorts” and “Who Killed Society?”

Despite his learned background, Amory never shied from popular culture. He was a social commentator for the “Today” show on NBC, critic for TV Guide from 1963 to 1976 and columnist for Saturday Review.

But his later years were clearly marked by his passion for animals.

At the New York-based fund, whose motto was “We speak for those who can’t,” Amory spearheaded low-cost neutering clinics and animal care facilities. He also protested testing on animals and the use of leg-hold traps on wild creatures. He once faced down a mob trying to club rabbits to death in a South Carolina field.

In the 1970s, Amory joined other activists in raising public consciousness against the clubbing of baby seals on the eastern shore of Canada.

Amory helped Paul Watson, now president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, buy a boat to use in his struggle to uphold international whaling and seal hunting laws.

“The Sea Shepherd Society wouldn’t be in operation had it not been for him,” Watson said Thursday from his boat off the Washington coast. “He was a very big man, but a very gentle man. He was one of the most humane individuals I ever met and has been an inspiration to thousands and thousands.”

In 1980 near Dallas, Amory founded the Black Beauty Ranch, named after the Anna Sewell novel about the abuse of horses. The ranch became a refuge for discarded and neglected animals, including elephants, deer, ostriches, llamas and rhesus macaques. That year, Amory started a program to save wild burros across the West.

He gained new fame that summer as he stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon with the governor of Arizona while his organization airlifted and guided 580 burros out. The National Park Service said the animals were threatening the landscape. Amory’s operation employed two helicopters, 40 horses, four mules, 17 dogs and eight cowboys and cost $500,000.

“We didn’t use a drop of tranquilizer,” he told a newspaper.

In 1985, Amory convinced his old Harvard classmate, then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, to allow him to save thousands of goats that were being killed by military sharpshooters on the Navy-owned San Clemente Island off San Diego County.

Amory’s operation transported more than 7,500 goats and pigs from the island to Black Beauty Ranch. He also fought to save pigs on Santa Rosa Island, one of the Channel Islands.

When a California judge temporarily barred bear hunting, Amory said: “This is victory for the 98.5% of Californians who don’t hunt and a victory for 100% of the bears.”

Said Watson: “He was always joking. He felt you had to have a sense of humor. He felt a lot of people in the animal rights movement took themselves too seriously.”

In 1987, Amory’s book “The Cat Who Came for Christmas” became a national bestseller, followed by “The Cat and the Curmudgeon” and “The Best Cat Ever.” The books were inspired by Polar Bear, whom he found on a New York street on Christmas Eve 1978. The cat died in 1992.

Amory will be laid to rest next week beside Polar Bear at his now-1,000-acre Black Beauty Ranch. He is survived by his sister, stepdaughter and granddaughter.