FRANCINE KATZENBOGEN, 51;
GAVE CATS THE LAP OF LUXURY
Her aunt, Lorraine Katzenbogen of Spokane, Wash., said the cause was a chronic asthma condition aggravated by strong allergic reactions to the very cats that were her niece’s overriding passion.
In 1988, when she won a $7 million jackpot the first time she played the New York State Lottery, Miss Katzenbogen was a cosmetics consultant living at home with her parents and younger brother in Canarsie, where the whole family collected and sheltered stray cats.
Four years later, when a grief-stricken Miss Katzenbogen decided to move to the West Coast after the deaths of her mother and brother, she never considered leaving the cats behind, or allowing them to travel without her. So she booked space for herself and her brood on a cargo plane, packed up cats, Katzenbogen, kit and caboodle and, at a cost of some $8,000, including $4,000 in mandatory veterinary fees, flew off to a new life in Los Angeles. Her father, Irving, a retired housepainter, later joined her.
Even before she arrived and settled into a $1 million Studio City estate she had bought three years earlier, Miss Katzenbogen, who had deferred an earlier planned move after her mother became ill, found that she was not entirely welcome in her exclusive new neighborhood.
Her neighbors were not amused that she planned to house 20 cats in a converted two-story garage she had refurbished at a cost of $100,000. The luxurious cat complex included tile floors, climbing towers, scratching posts, skylights and cozy, low-lying window ledges where the cats could stretch out and watch the world outside their air-conditioned lair.
In Brooklyn, where a fictional cat named Rhubarb once inherited a baseball team named the Loons, Miss Katzenbogen’s expensive eccentricities on behalf of cats might have been shrugged off, but not on Laurel Canyon Boulevard.
Miss Katzenbogen had commissioned the renovations for what her neighbors called her cat house before learning that municipal zoning regulations imposed a limit of three cats per household. When she sought a belated exemption,50 neighbors opposed her petition, arguing that the large number of cats would lower property values and even lure pet-eating coyotes into the neighborhood.
After Miss Katzenbogen gave assurances that cat litter would be removed daily and that the cats would be confined to their quarters and not loosed on the timorous neighborhood, she received an exemption allowing her to keep her 20 cats as long as they lived.
With the cats taken care of, she plunged into her new life, becoming a mainstay of several animal care agencies both as volunteer and philanthropist.
For all the time she devoted to cats in general and her cats in particular, Miss Katzenbogen managed to live a rich, full and varied life, indulging her passions for expensive clothes, movies and the arts and enjoying an active social life with a wide circle of friends.
If her extravagances on behalf of her cats raised eyebrows along the way, Miss Katzenbogen stood her ground.
“If I went out and bought a piece of jewelry or an expensive car, nobody would think twice or criticize me,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1992. “If I want to spend my money and take care of my cats, which are my family, I don’t think it’s anybody’s business.”
Aside from her father and aunt, Miss Katzenbogen, who never married, is survived only by her cats, all of whom, her animal adoption friends vowed, would be placed in loving homes, although none perhaps as loving and certainly not as luxurious as the one they have been accustomed to.
November 7, 1997