WASHINGTON – Beatrice Spencer Noyes, an author, artist and entrepreneur who was married to the longtime editor of the long-gone Washington Evening Star, died July 3 of a stroke at her home in Sorrento, Maine. She was 87.

Noyes, better known as “Beppie,” wrote three books, including two children’s tomes. “Mosby, the Kennedy Center Cat” (1978) was the “definitive” work on the feline, Henry Mitchell of The Washington Post wrote, although she never laid eyes on the famous stage cat who wailed through Eugene O’Neill’s tragic “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and cried like a baby through Jean Kerr’s family comedy “Finishing Touches.”

“I used to sit up there for hours,” she said, “hoping to catch a glimpse of him, knowing he was there, but I never did. I heard him, however.”

She also illustrated that book, as she did “Wigglesworth: The Caterpillar Who Wanted to Fly” (1985).

“As a rule, Beppie always allied herself with nature, be it fox or cat, caterpillar or Bunch Berry, slender grass or shining water,” her family said in a note announcing her death. “She didn’t just write about nature or observe nature – she inhabited it, writing as it were from the inside out.”

She and her husband, Newbold Noyes, lived on a farm in Potomac, Md., where she co-founded a magazine, the Potomac Almanac, which was full of her illustrations of foxes decked out in fox-hunting attire. She herself joined the Potomac Hunt, appointed to the position of whipper-in, but she always rooted for the fox.

Beatrice Spencer was born July 20, 1919, in Detroit and grew up a tomboy, a label she claimed all her life. She loved playing contact sports: football, ice hockey and beating up bigger, older boys.

Later, she developed a love of dancing, riding, golfing and intervening fearlessly in the occasional dogfight. As a child, she let it be known that she hated sewing and big baby dolls, so her grandmother gave her small dolls and let her draw instead of sew.

She graduated from Vassar College in New York with a degree in theater. She had met Noyes as a child in Maine, and they enjoyed singing together. When she married someone else, he sent her an upright Steinway piano as a wedding gift. That marriage, to William Baldwin, ended in divorce.

During World War II, while Noyes was overseas as a war correspondent, she wrote to him to accept his marriage proposal. “He used to say he married her to get the piano back,” their children said.

The couple left Potomac in 1972, living in Harvard, Mass., and Southern Pines, N.C., eventually settling in Maine in 1987. Noyes became the Blink Bonnie golf pro, and introduced hundreds to the game at the nine-hole course in Sorrento.

She wrote and illustrated many nature pieces for the Frenchman Bay Conservancy, collected in 2004 as “Beppie’s Musings.”

She always had a small herd following her around, her children said, and at her death, the menagerie included one dog, two cats, many wild birds, six gray squirrels and a newt.

A son from her first marriage, Howard Charles Baldwin Noyes, died in 2001. Her second husband, Newbold Noyes, died in 1997.

Survivors include three children from her second marriage, Newbold “Terry” Noyes III and Elizabeth Spencer Noyes, both of Sorrento, and Alexandra Ewing Noyes of Marshfield, Vt.; 13 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.