TV Radio Mirror (Jan - Jun 1963)

Why w£is Ixe hiding' "rom what? W*irom wVkoni Gardner McKay had walked out of Hollywood — perhaps "run" is a better word — without leaving so much as a forwarding address. He had disappeared, too, out of the lives of all but a few close friends — you could probably count them on one hand and still have fingers left over. But when a man like Gard disappears, there are bound to be questions. The answers came to us in a letter postmarked Paramaribo, Surinam — port of entry to one of the wilder and more uncivilized sections of South America. As Gard explained, when he paused there long enough to write, "I've returned to civilization for a while." He had grown a beard and he enclosed a picture of his new gone-native look. "Next Wednesday," he continued, "I go back into the jungle for ten days. I'll be with a Bush Negro and an Amerindian — good company for the hostile areas. We were four days on the Maronijne River, which seems to be wider than the Mississippi. Wide, flat, mysterious. And the jungle . . . the eagres and piranhas . . . Bush Negroes who are descended from escaped slaves. . . . The Amerindians are wonders — I saw one stand in fire for thirty seconds! . . . I'm going back tonight . . . this time I want to reach the Amazon ... I shot some film here — Surinam and a couple of experiences such as a wild boar hunt and catching piranhas (fish). We're leaving at 2200 hours by boat and will go from the Surinam River to the Coesewejne to the Coppenaime (?) to the Tibiti River. I love the jungle. Sleeping at night (Brazilian hangmat with mosquito net so thick you can hardly see through it) and hearing the sounds is thrilling. There are boa constrictors, and fB I have seen them and ^^ they don't want to make trouble. But if you cross the path of an animal while he's hunting, you're on your own! There are tapirs, wild boar, deer, jaguars and plenty of monkeys and parrots. I've never been closer to animals than I am here. I want to tell you more but can only give you vague impressions — the river, big ... the trees high and spreading ... the people good ... the air can be fine and dry, and then again humid. I'll try to shoot a pakira, which is the best pork around. . . . It's nearly nine and I'm off on a beautiful night of river travel, followed by several days of wandering in untouched, deep, fantastic country. . . . All my love to you and to the dog (Pussycat). Gard." It's strange . . . Gard's letter was like a promise kept. When he was filming "Adventures in Paradise," he was always saying that one day he would do this — take off for parts unknown and untamed. But with a career like he had going — in high-gear — nobody had thought he would really do it, perhaps not even those of us who thought we knew him best. Gard never hid the fact that he felt there were serpents in Hollywood, that the pace people lived at, the compromises they had to make, the fronts they thought they had to put up, spoiled this "paradise." Yet it's, too easy to blame Hollywood for too much. There was another reason Gard had walked out of the town and into the jungle. And that was himself. Not yet thirty, Gard has had a crowded life — as a writer, a painter, a professional photographer and, last of all, an actor. Perhaps he has been so busy doing, he hasn't had the time he needs for simply being. And perhaps only the deepest jungle was big enough and lonely enough to give a man like Gard the protective cover he needed while he hid from his own false selves and worked at discovering who he really was. . . . We found Gardner McKay ... we can only hope that his own search for himself has the same happy ending. Reading between the lines of his latest letter, we think it has. Gard says he's coming home! The End 27