Carver Discovers a Lost Art on a Faraway Island

Waiting for Leonard McKenna to come to the phone, wife Neva passes the time. “While you’re looking out the window at smog,” says Neva--renowned novelist, poet, historian--”I’m looking at a great big beautiful bay, headlands and clear blue water bathed in sunshine. Out of the back window there’s a lovely little boat harbor. . . .”

Leonard gets on the line. Yes, the view is incomparable, he agrees. He’s just come in from the local village: Mangonui (“It means ‘Big Shark’ ”), population 800, on Doubtless Bay on the coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

With a trace of reluctance, McKenna will return to Southern California later this month to deliver one of the carved jade tikis for which he has become renowned. Bert Cohn of Beverly Hills has one. Princess Diana wears one around her neck. Ronald Cooperman of Bel-Air commissioned the tiki McKenna is delivering. All of which pleases McKenna, and amuses him.

Twenty-two years ago, McKenna wouldn’t have known a tiki from a Tinkertoy. He’d just put in 31 years at Lockheed in Burbank, working up through the ranks to the position of procurement manager for the Polaris project. “I wasn’t terribly ambitious, corporate-wise,” he says. “I wasn’t wedded to my job.” At 55, he decided “there are things in life you just have to do.”

McKenna split--definitively it turns out--to New Zealand, “a place I’d always wanted to see.” “Most curious,” says son Phil, a Santa Barbara financial consultant, “was that Dad had no apparent talent as an artist, no interest in art.” What interested him, though, was the Maori people, “their dignity,” Len says, “their beauty, their way of life.” And their talent.

McKenna struck up a friendship with the late John Taiapa, Maori woodcarver extraordinaire. He wondered aloud why the Maori no longer worked jade, a lost art.

With Taiapa’s encouragement, McKenna decided to try it himself. “I was blissfully ignorant,” he says, “but it struck me that dentists’ drills probably would be useful tools.” McKenna bought some drills, secondhand. Three years later, the ultimate acceptance: “John asked me to make a tiki for him.”

McKenna, content in his new life, his art, insists “it’s just a hobby,” though “I have a bit of a reputation as a local carver.”

Neva gets back on the line, just to set the record straight. “No,” she laughs, “we’re not five hours behind you. We’re 19 hours ahead of you.” Could be.

Culver City’s Movie Tribute: ‘Gone With the Wind’

Frankly, most film fans don’t give a damn. The Culver City Historical Society does, though. They’re tired of assertions that “Gone With the Wind” was made in Hollywood, and they hope their tribute to the film’s 50th anniversary next Sunday will set the record straight.

As part of the celebration at the Culver Studios, there will be a Clark Gable look-alike contest. The winner will participate in a commercial “casting session,” but it won’t be as easy as it seems. “They’ll need a mustache, dimples and a wink,” says society spokeswoman Joy Jacobs, but that inimitable swagger may have gone to glory with the actor. Not to mention The Stare. “That’s what I call it anyway,” Jacobs says. “I’ve seen a lot of actors, but Gable had a way of looking at women that’s never been approached, let alone duplicated.”

There’ll be tours, unpublished photos and an auction at the fete ($10 admission; call (213) 558-3818), but mostly there’ll be lore. “The ‘burning of Atlanta’ scene was shot right here,” Jacobs says. “They had to clear one of the lots to make room to build Tara, so they decided to burn down the sets.

“They’d been having that worldwide search for the perfect Scarlett, of course, and the story is that Vivien Leigh’s agent brought her to the set-burning. As (producer) David O. Selznick saw the firelight reflected in her eyes, he said: ‘I’ve found her!’ ” Not in Hollywood, mind. In Culver City.

Riding Into the Sunset--All the Way to New York

Interim report:

At 6 a.m. on May 19, Lucian and Sweet William, not necessarily in that order, left the Pacific Surf at Huntington Beach and headed east. Within half an hour, they passed several workers reporting to the early shift of a power plant on the Santa Ana River. “Where you headed?” they asked. “New York,” Lucian said. “Sure,” the workers said. Willy just snickered.

Several hours later, it was the turn of Orange County commuters to do the double takes--at Lucian Spataro, still astride his gray Arabian gelding, puzzling over a street map while waiting for a red light to chance in mid-Anaheim.

Subsequently, thousands of Americans have been startled, then curious, ultimately pleased at the spectacle of horse and rider clopping across America to drum up interest in, and support of, the Rainforest Action Network.

In California, they moseyed along Interstate 10 to Palm Springs, then took to the High Desert and on to the Arizona border.

En route, they and their small support group encountered terrain both benign and ferocious. (In Morongo Valley, Lucian says, “The wind sometimes blows so hard they have to change ZIP codes.”) And characters equally gusty, including rodeo legend Larry Hobbs, 73, the “Cyclone Kid” who’s had 13 wives and hasn’t stopped looking.

Right about now, the party should be somewhere near Albuquerque, 25% into their trip. While the quixotic canter continues to be a blast to both man and beast, contributions and pledges already number in the thousands.

Lest we lose sight of the objective, Lucian, in an otherwise rollicking note from Somewhere Out There, reminds: “As you’ve been reading this Letter From the Road, an area of rainforest the size of metropolitan Los Angeles has been lost to us forever.”