Chapter One
###
In 1980 on West 57th Street in New York, you could set your watch by the chanting of the Hare Krishnas. Every afternoon at five o’clock the saffron-and claret-and tangerine-robed throng serenaded midtown with an ecstatic, impassioned, a cappella performance punctuated by a trembling tambourine. Actually, I heard them before I saw them, faintly when they rounded the corner of Seventh by Carnegie Hall, louder as they moved east toward the Russian Tea Room, and louder still as their spiritual conga line reached the office building of The Fund for Animals, where I was working. From a large bay window, I would gaze down at them as they snaked along the street, their daily devotional drifting from the gum-stained sidewalk, rising up the elegant but soot-covered building, and permeating the dingy windows.
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare Some of the other employees must have taken the song-and-dance routine as a sign from God that they should straighten their desks, pack their belongings, and call it a day. No one looked at me to see how long I was staying. By now they knew that I was more the ten-to-six type, or even the eleven-to-seven type, and no one was willing to stay at the office that late. And why should they? They arrived hours before I did. When they realized I was not watching them, they stopped watching me.
In fact, I barely noticed their departure. My interest was in the show on the street. It wasn’t the Krishnas’ bright swirling hues or exotic sounds that caught my attention, although I could hardly be blamed if it was. Between New York’s precarious financial footing and skyrocketing crime rate, these were bleak, even dangerous, times in the city. Any pop of color or hint of optimism was a welcome respite.
Neither was my interest in their ritual a result of my being shocked by every sight and sound in New York. I may not have been a native New Yorker, but I grew up little more than an hour away. It was vital to my father, if not always to me, that I be well traveled and well educated, someone who hailed from New Jersey, not Joisey. When we weren’t traveling the world, we were visiting the crossroads of the world, New York.
Although I was affected by the Krishnas, surely it was not in the way they intended. I experienced no subsequent compulsion to bolt from the office, renounce my few worldly possessions, and join the devotees. My fascination was more practical than spiritual: they seemed not only to have discovered their calling, but knew what to do with it once they did. I could not say the same for myself.
My twin passions—wanting to write and wanting animals in my life—had been whispering in my ear for as long as I could remember. In Greyhound racing circles, they might have said I came out of the box with early speed. My mother unleashed a monster when, between music and art appreciation, she also taught me to read. By age three I had exhausted her homemade curricula and insisted on attending kindergarten. My parents enrolled me at the only school that would accept a child my age: a Victorian-era relic directed by its equally old-fashioned founder, Miss Ireland. By age five I grabbed my crayons, found some index cards, and wrote my first story, “The Book of a Kid’s Life.” The plot, thinly disguised propaganda: A girl refuses to take a nap unless her mother agrees to get both a cat and a dog from the local shelter. The mother relents, and both creatures become part of the family (using a writer’s prerogative, I dropped the nap subplot).
In real life, my desire for animal companions was only partially fulfilled. We always had a cat or two, ragged males we found, or who found us. These scrawny, dirty, beat-up toms walked the thin line between feral and domesticated. With enormous scarred heads, and equally oversized testicles, their pleading eyes told a cautionary tale of what comes of being a slave to lust. If any stick-thin female cat tried to slither in our door, she would be whisked to an uncle’s farm to live out her life as a mouser in an empty barn. Once there, I would never see her again; but I would never forget her, either.
I was given to understand that acquiring a dog was an impossibility. My father declared that they were too much trouble, had to be walked, had to be licensed, and, worst of all, held the potential to bite. He knew my proclivity for picking up and snuggling cats: I had the scars to prove it. But with a dog, the consequences of unwanted affection could be worse. So I made do with the old toms, and an assortment of short-lived creatures—birds and fish and hamsters—whose fragile bodies I carried home in flimsy containers from Woolworth’s. Having no brothers or sisters, these animals became my de facto siblings.
Perhaps in the same way that I assumed the Krishnas were living out their dream, others might have assumed the same of me. After all, I was working side by side with author Cleveland Amory, the legendary founding father of the modern animal protection movement and president of The Fund for Animals. Yet I experienced my position as something of a double-edged sword. I had nearly free rein to choose and complete my own projects; and certainly by sitting at the feet of the master I was exposed to people and ideas I would otherwise have missed. But I had trouble finding my voice in the presence of such an august figure. None of the tasks I had tried—lobbying, picketing, or even working on the Fund’s publications—had really been a good fit. It seemed that Cleveland was better at everything than I was, and I was left to wonder what, if anything, I really had to offer.
###
Cleveland Amory was the dominant figure in animal welfare. The towering Boston Brahmin with a booming voice and commanding presence had altered the public’s consciousness about how we treat animals. Under his influence, the cause became more assertive, even aggressive. His goal, as he put it, was “to put cleats on the little old ladies in tennis shoes.” After lending his name and his voice to other more established humane groups, he founded The Fund for Animals in 1967 with the motto “We Speak for Those Who Can’t.”
His thriving writing career, ranging from best-selling social commentaries such as
The Proper Bostonians and
Who Killed Society?, to being the well-known television critic for
TV Guide, gave him access to like-minded celebrities and socialites who helped popularize his campaigns. His trademark wit (“I started out writing about Lady Astor and her horse, and later I just wrote about the horse”); his social standing; and his prominent career made the whole thing palatable to those who had never before considered the cause worthy. Besides, the times were ripe for social change. Only a few decades earlier, the civil rights movement had led the way, followed by the antiwar movement, and the feminist movement. Why not the liberation of animals?
I met Cleveland in 1974, after attending one of his lectures. I had never read a word he had written, barely knew who he was, but I was so galvanized by a pre-lecture radio interview that I pulled over my car to give the program my full attention. He had just published a book,
Man Kind? Our Incredible War on Wildlife, that stirred a national debate on the subject of “sport” hunting. He and the interviewer discussed animal cruelty in a way I had never before heard it done—as a serious problem, one as worthy of people’s attention as any other social ill. It signaled that concern for animals had reached the mainstream, that it was no longer the sole domain of fanatics, or softhearted women. When the radio host announced that Cleveland would be speaking that evening at the Art Alliance in Philadelphia, nothing could have kept me from attending. I had, even then, been seeking my place in the world, wondering how I could alleviate the suffering of animals. Fighting extinction was important; but the pain, the fear, the exploitation of animals was ubiquitous and urgent and spoke to me on many levels. I wanted to help, but how? I suspected Cleveland had the answer.
That evening, as the emcee joined the audience in applauding their guest, Cleveland rose to his full height of some six feet, four inches, strode to the podium, and slipped the emcee a familiar handshake. He stood for a moment, surveyed the audience while gathering his thoughts, and ran his long slender fingers through his hair. This last move was a mistake. Hair that previously had been under some tenuous control now broke loose entirely. It seemed that a fine head of hair was the one gift he lacked. It wasn’t thinning or receding, but it was an odd combination of wavy, straight, and wiry; and like the man himself, had a mind of its own. Adding to the catastrophe was the way it was styled, if you can call it that: it appeared to have been mowed, rather than cut. The unkempt hair drew my eyes to his overall appearance and the best I can say is that his hair matched the rest of him. Clearly, he was someone who had other things on his mind than sartorial splendor.
Cleveland’s speech was not accompanied by photographs or charts, nor did he refer to any notes. In fact, his entire talk was off-the-cuff and conversational. But the moment his thunderous voice poured forth, the audience was his. I recognized a certain similarity between his tone and that of the evangelists my mother used to listen to on the radio as she washed the breakfast dishes. Cleveland was a preacher, too, but his gospel wasn’t Jesus, it was kindness to animals. He gathered steam slowly, referring to his professional history, his books, his columns, his television appearances. But, he said, it was witnessing animal cruelty—a bullfight in Nogales, Mexico—that changed the course of his life. Some of what he said that night was recycled from his earlier radio interview, such as, “The mark of a civilized person is how they treat those beneath them,” but in the context of the evening, it didn’t seem stale. These were points worth repeating.
While he told gruesome stories in graphic detail, he also found a way to lighten the mood by injecting humor, especially at the expense of the perpetrators of abuse. He said the best way to irritate a woman wearing fur is to say, loud enough so she can hear it, “But doesn’t it make her look fat!” He repeated a remark he made in a review of the show
American Sportsman that landed him in trouble with
TV Guide: when a hunter pursuing his quarry was left hanging on the edge of a cliff, Cleveland said he was rooting for the cliff.
Half an hour passed in what seemed like minutes. Cleveland’s last point was that he would be available afterward to speak to anyone in the audience who wanted to join him in his anticruelty crusade.
I was so stunned that he was actually asking for volunteers, that for a few seconds I hesitated. By the time I went forward, an eager if elderly throng of supplicants—the sort of women he wanted to equip with cleats—already had him surrounded. Some insiders called him Clip, or Clippy, his childhood nickname. Others wanted their books signed. Still others whispered in his ear as they discreetly pressed a check into his hand. Whenever I tried to move closer, there was always a shoulder or elbow in my way. I hovered on the fringe, resisting the urge to give up. I had no book for him to sign, and, in fact, had not even read his book. I didn’t know him, barely knew who he was. Yet something told me that this was my chance. We made eye contact and he indicated nonverbally that he would get to me as soon as he could.
From the start, it was as if we were old friends. I told him I had been turned away while offering to volunteer with an endangered species program at the zoo because I was neither a scientist nor a veterinarian. Without missing a beat, Cleveland assured me that the lack of scientific credentials was no impediment to alleviating suffering, and that exactly the reverse might be true.
He took both of my hands in his and asked if I was free for breakfast the next morning. I had no idea what my schedule was like the following day, but I knew I’d make it work. He wrote the name of his hotel and room number on a scrap of paper he dug out of his pocket and told me he’d see me at eight sharp.
###
Copyright © 2021 by Cynthia A. Branigan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
