Transcript: The heartthrob of the years 1959 to 1962 was born George Cadogan Gardiner McKay in New York City. His birthdate is June 10, 1932. His father, an advertising executive, was credited with coining the Lux toilet soap slogan, “For the schoolgirl complexion.”
The McKays moved about a great deal. For several years they lived in Paris. Altogether, Gardner attended more than a dozen schools before graduating.
After two years at Cornell, where he worked on the campus newspaper, Gardner settled in Manhattan. He sculpted in his spare time, earning his living as a commercial model. On his return on the Ile de France from Paris, where he and Suzy Parker posed for a Richard Avedon fashion layout, McKay’s ship took on survivors of the Andrea Doria. The photographs Gardner took of the rescue were purchased by a national publication.
A photo of him in Town and Country magazine in the early fifties surrounded by his sculpture drew an agent, who promised a contract with a major movie studio. Years later Gardner described his feelings at the time: “It was all a stupid fluke. I’m an introvert and even in high school and college I was into writing. Acting had never appealed to me. It is as if I opened an invitation meant for someone else. But I thought I needed the money.”
The zenith of his career as an actor was reached before he really got started. A Life magazine cover story by Shana Alexander proclaimed him the “new Apollo.” His studio continued to hype him throughout his brief career. Gardner McKay was one of Hollywood’s most oversold commodities.
Despite bad scripts and hostile notices, his series Adventures in Paradise ran on ABC-TV for three seasons, beginning in 1959. Many, including one much quoted TV critic, believed the real viewer interest was not McKay but his boat, the Tiki. As the saying went, “no ‘Tiki’, no watchee.”
Fox executives knew differently. McKay received more fan mail than all the other actors at the studio put together. Most of the requests were for photos of Gardner stripped to the waist, as he frequently appeared on the shows.
When the series concluded in 1962, Gardner retreated for eighteen months into the deserts of Libya and Egypt. Next he went to Venezuela, where he spent long periods in the jungle. It was during this period that he began to write again.
Upon his return McKay told Hedda Hopper that the monkey she happened to notice perched on his shoulder was the son of the one he ate at one point during his adventures. He arrived for the interview in Tony Curtis’s old Rolls Royce. Sitting in the back seat of the convertible was “Pussy Cat,” the large shaggy dog the columnist described as “Famous” to residents of Beverly Hills.
He made a few features, such as The Pleasure Seekers (1964) and I Sailed to Tahiti With an All Girl Crew (1969), but he received very little media attention after Adventures in Paradise left the air.
He fame quickly faded nationally, but his profile within his immediate area remained strong due to the menagerie he kept on his property in Coldwater Canyon. Local papers reported the complaints of his neighbors when any of his three lions, two cheetahs, or five dogs caused disturbances or escaped. Eventually, he was forced to dispose of the lions.
When his play “Me” was produced in Los Angeles in 1973, its cast included Geraldine Fitzgerald and Richard Dreyfuss. McKay was quoted at the time as saying, “They’re congratulating me not because I wrote the play, but because I directed it. This town always values the interpreter over the creator.”
From 1979 through 1981 he was drama critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Then he taught playwriting at a UCLA extension course.
His play “Sea Marks” won the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Award for Best Play of 1079 and was produced for television by the Public Broadcasting System. In 1981 it had a brief run off-Broadway.
McKay was linked romantically with the fashion model Dolores Hawkins and with Suzanne Pleshette, Diane McBain, and Ann-Margaret. His relationship with Greta Chi began when she was in her teens and continued for more than a few years. As he neared forty a newspaperman remarked on his perennial bachelorhood. “Yes,” replied Gardner, “I just have affairs.”
In 1984 McKay married a native of the Irish Free State, the mother of a teenage daughter by a previous union. Since then the couple have leased their new England-style farmhouse in Beverly Hills and traveled. They spent a year in the United Kingdom and have since spent periods in northern California and the Hawaiian Islands.
Adventures in Paradise is still seen in syndication in some parts of the world. In 1974 the former actor told journalist Bert Prelutsky about encountering fans: “It’s like I used to be a hooker and I keep running into ex-clients. They’d either love and respect me or despise and resent me and it was for nothing.”
He will be interviewed only as a writer, not on his acting career. Approached for inclusion in this book, he said, “Just say he was never heard from again.” |
