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Anonymous biographical comment from 2005 edit
I met Gardner in 1991. I was making sculptures out of discarded objects at the time and I knew he was an ex-TV star and had an office in a nearby shopping center. I thought he might be able to help me promote my work so I popped into his office one day and he was very receptive. He liked my work and I gave him a print-out of epigrams I'd come up with and he said he had a similar collection which he called "codgerisms", a word his friend Jimmy Buffet had suggested. He was 58 at the time (the age I am now).
After that, we would meet in the mornings at a coffee shop in Kailua, where he and his wife lived. I would tell him about what a sleepy, charming little village Kailua was when I was a kid and he would tell me about his career as a sculptor, a keeper of lions, a playwright, and the screenwriter he was trying to be at the time. His play Toyer had done well and Hollywood had paid him a lot of money to write a screenplay. He was not happy about it, as I recall.
At the coffee shop we talked about art, movies, women, the ocean, and whatever came to mind. A couple of memorable things he said during those talks were: "I'll never be old enough to play golf", and "Fast food should never be eaten slowly".
Apparently his screenplay was rejected but ended up becoming a novel. By that time he'd moved to Hawaii Kai on the other side of O'ahu. This was after I'd taken him to look at my aunt's house on Kaneohe Bay that was for sale. The house had been built in 1940 and he liked it but he said his wife would not like the kitchen.
I visited him once at his new house and that was the last I saw of him before I moved to the Big Island. A few years later I saw the Vanity Fair article on him. The last I heard from him was a letter in which he mentioned that he and his wife had been to Samoa. Next thing I knew, I was reading his obituary in Time.
Rating edit
I've rated the article stub class mainly for the lack of inline citations, but adding a bit more content wouldn't hurt. Whyaduck 22:58, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
Plays and novels? edit
The article says McKay "wrote many plays and novels," but mentions only "Sea Marks." Can someone write up something on his other plays and novels of note - with links? Thanks.