Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 14, 1994 TAG: 9409150001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MIKE CAPUZZO KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS NEW YORK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Police around the globe are asking ...
Who was that dashing 6-foot-5 criminal in plastic shoes, polyester belt, 100-percent cotton clothing, nothing dead? That sensitive rogue, part Robin Hood, part St. Francis of Assisi, hero of young people and animals, vegetarians, gays, celeb writers and true fringe groups, such as chinchillas?
Like all radicals of note, Dan Mathews, the man who helped put PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) on the post office wall, has an impressive dossier.
``Dan Mathews, 29, once a model, once an actor in spaghetti westerns:'' ``WANTED in Nevada for arson. (He torched a coffin filled with furs outside a casino, then fled to Arizona). JAILED in Hong Kong for parading naked (he wore a banner, ``I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur''). NOTORIOUS for'' avoiding arrest after vandalizing Calvin Klein's New York offices on Jan. 25 with a can of spray paint while shouting, ``FUR SHAME! FUR SHAME!'' (``You gotta admit,'' he told Klein later, ``it was a tasteful color.'')
This summer morning, in a graffiti-marred building deep in the bowels of the meatpacking district, with the stench of dead beef in the air, Mathews' activism requires him to hand a PETA T-shirt to a nearly naked Cindy Crawford.
Crawford is fairly purring in a feline position, wearing only a cat and a hat. The hat, by Todd Oldham, of fake fur made from recycled glass and plastic, is Cindy's Major Statement against the killing of fur animals. The cat, a Siamese that wandered by, is serving more or less as Cindy's bra. Mathews, through Oldham, a PETA supporter, talked Crawford out of her clothes and into modeling for PETA's fall-winter catalogue, to be shipped to PETA's 500,000 members.
Mathews can hardly contain his joy. After the shoot, he rolls around on a grimy street, gamboling with a golden retriever he has just met.
``This is unbelievable,'' the fuzzy-cheeked director of PETA's international campaigns gushes. ``Cindy was really into it with the cat and hat. When this comes out, magazines are going to be fighting to run the picture - everyone from Glamour and YM to Time and Newsweek. This will be huge.''
Mathews arranged the Crawford shoot through back channels, ``behind the back of her handlers, the big PR agencies that want to control her every move,'' he said. Mathews reached Crawford through friends. The same way he became best pals with k.d. lang, the singer and PETA activist who joined the anti-meat campaign while one of her albums was being marketed in beef country. The same way he recruited pals Paul and Linda McCartney, who are so good at bending the will of British celebs to the PETA cause. The same way he befriended actors Kim Basinger and her husband, Alec Baldwin, who each time he sees Mathews brags that he has given up some new evil habit, such as fish. The same way he acquired his ``soulmate,'' singer Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, and inspired actress and PETA activist Bea Arthur of ``The Golden Girls.'' The celebs are like ``extended PETA staff,'' Mathews says. ``They'll do anything I ask whenever I ask it, and without pay.''
Crawford is only the latest, but certainly the biggest, supermodel to join PETA's all-out war on the fur industry, following Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks and Christy Turlington who, along with Basinger, bared their flesh because they'd rather be naked than wear fur.
Although fur sales are up for the second year in a row, the campaign has helped establish PETA, once seen as a rowdier edge group, as glamorous and hip. The British magazine Time Out recently called animal rights the No. 1 ``hip cause,'' ahead of even AIDS.
``We're taking the fashion industry by storm,'' Mathews said, crossing Manhattan in a cab after the Crawford shoot, heading to meet and greet in magazine offices he had recently raided. ``Todd Oldham's fake fur hats have given us an open door in the fashion press that we never had, and now we're going to meet people who used to be afraid of us. It's a great opportunity for us.''
But the rather tame experience left Mathews yearning for fake blood.
Wearing his trademark plastic accessories, all-natural fabrics, a boy-scout-style chino shirt with animal patches, Mathews totes a bag of fake-fur hats along Central Park South after the Crawford shoot. It is a steamy afternoon, and the activist is in a foul mood.
All along the sidewalk, horse-and-buggy drivers wait for business, their trained beasts tethered mute to carriages in the suffocating heat.
Mathews strides right up to the first driver he sees and glowers down at the man. ``It's disgusting what you do for a living!'' Mathews says. ``You're abusing this poor horse.'' The driver, stunned for a moment, shouts back using a string of obscenities.
Within 10 minutes, Mathews has confronted four drivers and a family of four in a carriage, shouting, cajoling, pleading with them to be kinder to the horses. When one of the drivers says in Italian to another driver, ``That bastard told me I should be ashamed of myself! Can you believe it?'' Mathews shouts back, in Italian himself, ``You should be ashamed of yourself, and so should you for that other horse!''
He works himself into a fury, blue eyes blazing, but he seems to know just how high to raise the flame. ``I take it to the edge, but I'm always in control,'' he says. ``In Vegas, when we torched the coffin filled with furs, we scouted for the safest spot, some grass in front of the Sands Hotel. We calculated the wind. There was no chance the fire would reach people or traffic. We had fire extinguishers hiding in the bushes.''
Later, he notes how vulgar the horsemen were in their responses, without ever considering that his own actions could be interpreted as offensive to these men whose living he was threatening. It is the higher purpose of the zealot, a characterization Mathews acknowledges.
It's not enough for PETA to educate. Mathews, it seems, won't rest until everyone on the planet is wearing polyester belts. He says he ``won't be happy'' until people everywhere have stopped eating meat and otherwise victimizing animals.
A new enlightened age ``is coming,'' he predicts, over a meatless, soy-free grain-burger at Hard Rock Cafe, ``though not in my lifetime.''
Such passion has put PETA, and Mathews, on the map in recent years.
Mathews and his PETA cohorts got worldwide notoriety this winter when they not only raided Calvin Klein's headquarters but also occupied the Conde Nast offices of Vogue magazine. Mathews had Kate Pierson, the vocalist for the B-52s, by his side as PETA soldiers ripped around the Vogue office unleashing symbolic gestures, stickers and shouts for a whole hour while Vogue editor Anna Wintour ``barricaded herself in her office,'' Mathews said.
Mathews launched the Vogue raid, he says, because the magazine had refused to cover the anti-fur angle, or cruelty-free fashion. This fall, Vogue is planning fake-fur coverage, he says.
After Mathews and cohorts restyled the waiting area of Calvin Klein's offices, Klein agreed never to design real furs again. When news spread of PETA's victory, designers Anne Klein and Donna Karan fell ``without a shot,'' Mathews says. Revlon and other cosmetics giants have agreed to stop testing cosmetics on animals after protracted battles with PETA.
None of this has spoiled Mathews, who still sleeps in a closet in a friend's Tribeca loft when he visits New York City on a campaign. In Los Angeles, the digs are fancier - Elvira's mansion. But the motive is the same: Mathews' PETA salary is $30,000 a year, and he's always looking to save on hotel bills.
It's not hard to find the sensitivity, and the sense of outrage, that drove Mathews to an animal activist's life. One of three boys raised by a single mother in Orange County, Calif., Mathews recalls that his mother, herself an orphan, ordered her children to bring home all stray cats they could find. They owned 22 at one point, even though the apartment building they were living in forbade animals.
In high school, Mathews found another reason to champion the underdog. He was teased and sometimes beaten, he says, for being gay in conservative Orange County. His success in proselytizing the fashion world, he acknowledges, is helped by the fact that ``it's my tribe.'' Gays, he thinks, are especially sensitive to other victims, including animals.
After graduating from American University in Washington, D.C., with a history degree, Mathews moved to Rome and began a career as a model and actor. But just as his career was taking off after a role in an Italian spaghetti western, he quit. ``I couldn't admit to people that I was a model,'' he says. ``I wanted to be an animal activist.'' Six years ago he took a $10,400-a-year job at PETA, which has its headquarters in Rockville, Md., and immediately impressed his superiors by chaining himself to a car, a million-dollar General Motors prototype, at an auto show in San Francisco while wearing a sign that said, ``GENERAL MURDERERS.'' (GM admitted to killing more than 20,000 animals in crash tests).
``Dan's the epitome of the youthful spirit,'' PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk told Out magazine. ``He'll do whatever it takes. Because he's young, he has a sense of outrage.''
In late afternoon, after Mathews brings his PETA-style apocalypse to the four horsemen, he is crisp and businesslike calling on the Big Apple's influential fashion editors. He is also astoundingly successful, considering that the last time he entered a fashion office he was committing a crime.
The fashion editor of Vibe, a black music magazine, commits to putting PETA's fake-fur hats in a fall issue - with tips on how Vibe readers can order the hats from PETA's catalogue. The Spin editor, a 24-year-old woman, adores the hats, predicts mega-sales for PETA, and says her twentysomething readers connect with PETA issues (all the twentysomething women on the Spin staff, she says, are vegetarians). Elle loves Todd Oldham's hats, too. The Hard Rock Cafe has agreed to host an autumn PETA party, replete with veggie menu, Naomi Campbell singing, and a ``Fur is a Drag'' revue - drag queens modeling fake-blood-splattered fur. Another Mathews production.
by CNB