Cleveland Amory had a soft spot for burros and an irresistible attraction to puns. He split his time between interviewing celebrities and saving bunnies; and was equally at home reviewing TV shows such as Green Acres and Flipper, and writing about Boston Brahmins and the war in Vietnam.

Journalist Marilyn Greenwald, a professor at Ohio University and the author of biographies of New York Times style columnist Charlotte Curtis and Hardy Boys creator Leslie McFarlane, has written a lively account of Amory's varied life.

She starts with his childhood in a WASP New England family and ends with the scattering of his ashes from a shaker around the neck of a donkey at an eastern Texas ranch. Some people knew Amory as the author of a sardonic series of books about American high society -- including The Proper Bostonians and The Last Resorts. Others recognized him for his two decades of monthly columns in The Saturday Review or his weekly reviews of shows in TV Guide during the 1960s and '70s.

He drew plenty of publicity as founder and director of the nonprofit Fund for Animals, which staged dramatic rescues of wild horses and baby seals. He reached a new audience with The Cat Who Came for Christmas and two other best-selling memoirs about his cat, Polar Bear.

Greenwald's biography is at its best in offering anecdotes about Amory's life and snippets from his often-humorous writing. Stories about his failed attempt to ghostwrite an autobiography for the Duchess of Windsor or about a stormy weekend with George C. Scott -- who said, "This was supposed to be an interview, not a way of life" -- hint at Amory's occasionally hot temper. Perhaps because she interviewed mostly staunch supporters of Amory -- such as Marian Probst, his assistant of many decades -- Greenwald paints a rosy picture of the writer.

Occasional hints of a darker side emerge: His stepdaughter says caustically, "He was a lot of fun when he was in the mood to be fun," and Greenwald notes that Amory was nowhere near as fond of children as he was of animals.

But what seems to have been Amory's nonstop infidelity to his wife is confined to a paragraph or two, and Greenwald consistently makes excuses for his sexist remarks, which grew in intensity as the feminist revolution progressed.

The biography would have benefited from more careful editing: Certain anecdotes recur almost verbatim several times, and the narrative moves choppily. At the end, Amory stays a mystery: His varied facets shine clearly, but how they fit together to make a whole human being remains unexplained.