100 New Yorkers of the 1970s | Page 5

daily from Maine to California. His latest novel, nearing completion, is
due to be published next fall.
TV Guide perhaps brought Amory his widest fame. He was the
magazine's star columnist from 1963 to 1976, when he gave it up in
order to devote his time to other projects, especially the Fund for
Animals, a non-profit humane organization that he founded in 1967. He
has served as the group's president since the beginning; now it has
150,000 members across the United States. Amory receives no pay for
his involvement with the organization.
The national headquarters of the Fund for Animals is a suite of rooms
in an apartment building near Carnegie Hall. The central room is lined
with bookshelves, and everywhere on the 25-foot walls are pictures and
statues of animals. Amory enters the room looking utterly exhausted.
He is a tall, powerful-looking man with a shock of greyish brown hair
that springs from his head like sparks from an electrode. As we sit back
to talk and his two pet cats walk about the office, his energy seems to
recharge itself.
Amory's quest to protect animals from needless cruelty began several
decades ago when, as a young reporter in Arizona, he wandered across
the border into Mexico and witnessed a bullfight. Shocked that people
could applaud the death agony of "a fellow creature of this earth," he

began to join various humane societies. Today he is probably the best
known animal expert in America. His 1974 best-seller, _Man Kind?
Our Incredible War On Wildlife_, was one of only three books in
recent years to be the subject of an editorial in the New York Times --
the others being Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Ralph Nader's
_Unsafe at Any Speed_.
"A lot of people ask me, 'Why not do something about children, or old
people, or minorities?'" he begins, lighting a cigarette and propping one
foot on the desk. "My feeling is that there's enough misery out there for
anybody to work at whatever he wants to. I think the mark of a
civilized person is how you treat what's beneath you. Most people do
care about animals. But you have to translate their feelings into
action. ... We're fighting a lot of things -- the clubbing of the baby seals,
the killing of dolphins by the tuna fishermen, the poisoning of animals.
The leghold trap is illegal in 14 countries of the world, but only in five
states in the U.S.
"The reason this fight is so hard is that man has an incredible ability to
rationalize his cruelty. When they kill the seals, they say it's a humane
way of doing it. But I don't see anything humane about clubbing a baby
seal to death while his mother is watching, helpless.
"One of our biggest fights right now is to make the wolf our national
mammal. There's only about 400 of them left in the continental United
States. The wolf is a very brave animal. It's monogamous, and it has
great sensitivity."
One of his chief reasons for dropping his TV Guide column, says
Amory, was because "after 15 years of trying to decide whether the
Fonz is a threat to Shakespeare, I wanted to write about things that are
more important than that." His latest novel, a satirical work that he
considers the finest piece of writing he has ever done, "is basically a
satire of club life in America. ... I sent it down to a typist here, and it
came back with a note from the typist saying, 'I love it!' In all my years
of writing, I don't think I've ever had a compliment like that. So I sent
the note to my editor along with the manuscript."

An expert chess player, he was long ranked number one at Manhattan's
Harvard Club until his recent dethronement at the hands of a young
woman. "I play Russians whenever I get a chance," he confides. "I
always love to beat Russians. I want to beat them all." Once he played
against Viktor Korchnoi, the defected Soviet who narrowly lost to
world champion Anatoly Karpov this fall.
"I think he threw that final game," says Amory of Korchnoi's loss. "He
didn't make a single threatening move. I think he was offered a deal to
get the kid and wife out. It was all set up from the beginning. I hate
facts, so I don't want any facts to interfere with my thesis."
Born outside of Boston, he showed his writing talent early, becoming
the youngest editor ever at the Saturday Evening Post. His first book,
_The Proper Bostonians_, was published in 1947. "Then I moved to
New York," he muses, "because whenever I write about a place, I have
to leave it." Nineteen years ago, he took on