Speaker 1: Pushkin Hey, Lost Tails listeners, it's Dana. I wanted to
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Speaker 2: I first saw him in fifty six. I went out
Speaker 2: there and he was very dark, you know, dark tan,
Speaker 2: you know, he's just dark figure, a swarthy kind of guy.
Speaker 2: And I saw him out there on this board and
Speaker 2: he was all by himself. My brother Tom, Mickey Chapin,
Speaker 2: and that's what they called him back then. It wasn't
Speaker 2: Mickey do it was Mickey Chapin. Oh, that's Japin.
Speaker 1: This is Danny Auburg again. He's talking about the first
Speaker 1: time he laid eyes on Mickey Dora. This was three
Speaker 1: years before he had his run in with Mickey in
Speaker 1: the water when Mickey refused to kick out of the
Speaker 1: wave and Danny nearly drowned. Danny used to hang out
Speaker 1: at the beach with his older brother Kemp, and Kemp
Speaker 1: was friends.
Speaker 2: With Mickey for the first few years. I only knew
Speaker 2: him as Chapin, and that's because his stepdad was Guard Chapin,
Speaker 2: who was a very well known early surfer from the forties.
Speaker 2: For many years, my brother, they'd always talked about Chapin.
Speaker 2: I mean, Chapin did this, Chapin did that. And then
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, I remember distinctly. Oh no, his
Speaker 2: name's Dora. Now he's called himself Dora. Don't use Chapin,
Speaker 2: you know. And the story is that Guard Chapin got murdered,
Speaker 2: you know, down in baj Or something like that, and
Speaker 2: so Mickey got kind of paranoid using that name. It
Speaker 2: was like the story. So he said, I'm going to
Speaker 2: call myself Dora for no on and they can't find me.
Speaker 2: That's the way he thought. But so from then on
Speaker 2: he was Nicky Dora.
Speaker 1: This was something Mickey would do again and again, ease
Speaker 1: out of one identity into another, like a snake shedding
Speaker 1: its skin. He liked to keep everyone guessing, especially the cops.
Speaker 1: They couldn't catch him if they couldn't figure out who
Speaker 1: he was. When his stepfather, Guard was alive, Mickey had
Speaker 1: called himself Mickey Chapin spelled m I c K E
Speaker 1: Y like the mouse. The name was pure California surfer boy,
Speaker 1: almost wholesome. Then overnight when Guard died, Because Guard died,
Speaker 1: he became Mickey m I K I Dora. Mickey Dora
Speaker 1: was mysterious. Mickey Dora was secretive and paranoid and shifty.
Speaker 1: Mickey Dora was Malibu's dark prince. I'm Dana Goodyear and
Speaker 1: this is Lost Hills, Episode two, Death in Mexico.
Speaker 3: The thing about Mickey and the facts of his life
Speaker 3: is that no one knows the truth.
Speaker 1: This is David Renson. He wrote the definitive oral history
Speaker 1: of Mickey Dora. It's called All for a Few Perfect Waves.
Speaker 3: And as I will tell you, I'm sure this will
Speaker 3: be a great podcast, but you will never find out
Speaker 3: the truth.
Speaker 1: Even after doing hundreds of interviews about Mickey, David says
Speaker 1: he still finds Mickey unknowable.
Speaker 3: And I need to read the part in my book
Speaker 3: where John Millius is saying, it's like Citizen Kane. You
Speaker 3: know just as much about Cain at the beginning as
Speaker 3: you do at the end. But it's a fabulous ride.
Speaker 3: It's a fabulous ride.
Speaker 1: Mickey's contradictions start right at the moment of his birth.
Speaker 1: The ultimate Southern California beach god, was born in Budapest, Hungary,
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty four. His mother, Ramona Stancliffe, was from California.
Speaker 1: She had just graduated from Beverly Hills High and was
Speaker 1: traveling around Europe with her mother and younger siblings. Seventeen
Speaker 1: years old and strikingly attractive, she was on a riverboat
Speaker 1: on the Danube when she met Miklo Stora, a law
Speaker 1: student and second lieutenant in the Hungarian cavalry, and he thought, I'll.
Speaker 3: Talk to this girl. Then they started flirting and she
Speaker 3: was enchanted. And Miklos has told me, he said, you know,
Speaker 3: you can't get with a girl in Hungary because they're
Speaker 3: too proper. But maybe I get lucky. And anyway, they
Speaker 3: spent a few months there and he I guess she
Speaker 3: did get pregnant, but hit it.
Speaker 1: Ramona wrote a letter to her best friend back home,
Speaker 1: boasting about her adventures without mentioning her pregnancy.
Speaker 3: She says, you'll never guess I'm married. I missus Miklostor,
Speaker 3: she's pregnant. He does the right thing, he marries her.
Speaker 1: Ramona and Miklos Senor decided to bring young Mickey to California,
Speaker 1: a few months after he was born. Miklosch said it
Speaker 1: was because Ramona was sick of Europe and missed the
Speaker 1: malted milks at the drugstore counters in La. He really
Speaker 1: did not understand his new bride, but he agreed to emigrate.
Speaker 1: They arrived in La in January nineteen thirty five. Miklos
Speaker 1: Senior later credited the unplanned birth of his son Micky
Speaker 1: was saving his life. During World War Two, the Nazis
Speaker 1: took over Hungary and Miklosch's regiment was sent to the
Speaker 1: Russian Front, where most of them died. In La Miklosch
Speaker 1: reinvented himself in the hospitality business. With some money from
Speaker 1: Ramona's family, he started a Hungarian restaurant called Little Hungary.
Speaker 1: Was that kind of his first venture when he came
Speaker 1: to La.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he'd sold some wines. I believe he worked at
Speaker 3: Victor Hugo's restaurant, But then you know it started his
Speaker 3: own little place, and it was on Sunset West, on
Speaker 3: the same side of the street as a Whiskey a
Speaker 3: Goo Goo up a few stores.
Speaker 1: Little Hungary sat at the center of Golden Age Hollywood
Speaker 1: and was in particular a gathering place for European emigres.
Speaker 1: People like the actress and singer Marlena Dietrich and the
Speaker 1: director Billy Wilder hung out there. Ramona loved the glamour,
Speaker 1: maybe more than she loved the daily grind of parent I.
Speaker 3: Guess, you know. She adored Mickey, but really was what's
Speaker 3: the word self indulgent, you know, wanted to connect with
Speaker 3: all the famous people that came into a little hungry.
Speaker 1: There's a picture I've seen of Mickey with Ramona. He's
Speaker 1: about two years old and is wearing a little military
Speaker 1: type suit. She's ravishing, head tilted back, eyes closed like
Speaker 1: a starlet on a movie poster. He's kissing her cheek intently,
Speaker 1: holding onto her chin as if for dear life, and
Speaker 1: she looks like she's a million miles away.
Speaker 3: So, you know, micklas was working all the time and
Speaker 3: Ramona was sleeping until the afternoon. I don't know if
Speaker 3: she was drinking. I mean, that's what happened to her
Speaker 3: later in life. She drank and ended up just tithing
Speaker 3: money to an I'm a TV evangelist, Mickey. I think
Speaker 3: it was a complex relationship for Mickey, you know, and
Speaker 3: carried on through all of his relationships with women, they
Speaker 3: want to nest, but he didn't want to nest.
Speaker 1: Ramona definitely wasn't the nesting type. In nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 1: she went to Las Vegas and filed for divorce from Miklosch.
Speaker 4: Mickey.
Speaker 5: Dora was definitely, unquestionably robbed of having a secure, comfortable childhood.
Speaker 5: There's a zero question about that.
Speaker 1: This is the surf historian Matt Warshaw.
Speaker 5: Mickey was born to this gorgeous alcoholic mother who married
Speaker 5: a Hungarian sort of gentleman, and the marriage I think
Speaker 5: was unhappy almost from the jump.
Speaker 1: Mickey's parents just basically had nothing in common. Ramona was
Speaker 1: on a path to self destruction. Miklosch was an old
Speaker 1: world athlete, a wine connoisseur, an art lover, the epitome
Speaker 1: of the European gentleman. After the divorce, Ramona moved on quickly,
Speaker 1: and the person she found, Guard Chapin, was nothing like Miklosch.
Speaker 1: Guard was six foot one, buff a carpenter. People who
Speaker 1: knew him described him as a quote aryan blonde.
Speaker 5: And Ramona almost right away started dating the hottest, the
Speaker 5: best surfer in California and possibly the world. Which didn't
Speaker 5: mean a whole lot in the nineteen forties because there
Speaker 5: weren't a whole.
Speaker 4: Lot of us.
Speaker 1: The problem with Guard Chapin was that he was a bully.
Speaker 1: According to his contemporaries, he was aggressive and narrow minded
Speaker 1: and always going on about who was or was not
Speaker 1: a jew. Miklos Senior thought he was a disaster. Miklos said.
Speaker 1: Guard thought laws were for his own protection, but didn't
Speaker 1: believe he had to abide by them as a grown man.
Speaker 1: Guard would steal from the ice cream vendor at the
Speaker 1: beach and think it funny. He was that guy. Guard
Speaker 1: took to fathering Mickey in an erratic, eccentric way. Mickey
Speaker 1: revered him and feared him. Mickey's stepdad. Guard Chapin was
Speaker 1: a surf pioneer, part of the first generation of Californians
Speaker 1: to try the ancient Polynesian pastime of riding waves in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties. When Guard started surfing, it was largely
Speaker 1: unknown on the California coast, just a few extreme guys
Speaker 1: doing a very offbeat thing. The early California surfers rode
Speaker 1: heavy homemade redwood planks. They could weigh over one hundred pounds.
Speaker 1: That's like riding a dining room table, especially when compared
Speaker 1: to the fiberglass potato chips people ride today. Here's Matt
Speaker 1: warshaw surface story in again.
Speaker 5: Before the war, surfboards were mostly all wood. They were
Speaker 5: either hollow or solid wood, and they were mostly finless,
Speaker 5: and so there.
Speaker 4: Wasn't much control.
Speaker 1: Most of the early surfers didn't move around on the wave.
Speaker 1: They just went straight locked into a rigid statuesque stance.
Speaker 4: A lot of it was.
Speaker 5: Just standing up and looking good, just sort of holding
Speaker 5: your arms or your shoulders a certain way and just
Speaker 5: trying to look like you were in control.
Speaker 1: Guard didn't do that. Guard was a charger. You do
Speaker 1: this move where he would drop to one knee and
Speaker 1: cut back toward the breaking part of the wave to
Speaker 1: pick up speed and momentum, then turn back toward the
Speaker 1: unbroken wave and fly.
Speaker 5: If you're riding the right kind of wave and you're
Speaker 5: coming in at an angle and the wave's barely breaking,
Speaker 5: and you do a big swooping turn kind of back
Speaker 5: towards breaking a little bit more.
Speaker 4: It's a cutback.
Speaker 1: Ving to Matt, Guard invented the cutback. That's like in
Speaker 1: skiing being the person who invented the pole plant, and.
Speaker 5: The surfers who were all around in the forties, there
Speaker 5: were the surfers that everyone sort of heard of, much
Speaker 5: more famous than Guard to a man, and it's all
Speaker 5: men say that Guard was the guy.
Speaker 4: He was the high performance guy.
Speaker 1: Guard surfed just like he lived on the edge of aggression,
Speaker 1: spoiling for a fight.
Speaker 5: Guard Chapin knew how to turn his board ride high.
Speaker 5: He could literally surf past surfers, and as he was
Speaker 5: doing that, he'd beat, you know, yelling.
Speaker 4: Abuse at everybody.
Speaker 5: He just get out of here, coop coming through. And
Speaker 5: that was Guard Chapin.
Speaker 4: He was.
Speaker 5: He was the best surfer. He was the most aggressive surfer.
Speaker 1: Guard was a regular at Santa Nofre, a long stretch
Speaker 1: of beach in Orange County where the waves are soft
Speaker 1: and crumbly and roll in one after the next. It
Speaker 1: was a community. The surfers made big bonfires and brought
Speaker 1: their ukuleles and slept on the beach. After Guard got
Speaker 1: together with Mickey's mom, Ramona, he started taking Mickey there
Speaker 1: and sometimes he just left him there to fend for himself.
Speaker 1: Mickey's nickname at Sano was Meatball. He was a sandy,
Speaker 1: sunburned version of a Victorian street urchin. He had a
Speaker 1: reputation as a petty thief, and Mickey was.
Speaker 5: Just this, I mean, middle school age kid hanging around
Speaker 5: these older guys and going up the point to go
Speaker 5: serve a place called Trestles and stealing food to sort
Speaker 5: of he was hungry, and he was just sort of
Speaker 5: semi abandoned, having a great time, I think, having a
Speaker 5: huge adventure. But you know, then Guard would show up
Speaker 5: later on and say where's Mickey, and somebody would find
Speaker 5: him and off they'd go back up to La.
Speaker 1: Over time, miklosch Mickey's father began to lose influence over
Speaker 1: his son. Miklos was busy at his restaurant Little Hungary,
Speaker 1: a reality that Guard seemed to make a mockery of.
Speaker 1: He would come into the restaurant, hot off the beach,
Speaker 1: Mickey in toe, shouting that his wife owned the place.
Speaker 1: Guard and his sidekick Mickey would storm into the kitchen
Speaker 1: and grab whatever food they wanted.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: For his part, Miklos, who I get the feeling, was
Speaker 5: just sort of in over his head because again he's
Speaker 5: the one coming over from far away, and he was
Speaker 5: very handsome, sophisticated. He also loved the beach. But with
Speaker 5: Guard and with Ramona, Miklos still had the thick accent.
Speaker 4: He can only be so sort of so cool.
Speaker 1: Guard seemed determined to turn Mickey into an American boy.
Speaker 1: Over Miklos's objections, he forced Micky to get circumcised at
Speaker 1: the age of twelve. I wonder what kind of mockery Guard,
Speaker 1: a quote unquote arian and a xenophobe, subjected Mickey too.
Speaker 1: This dark, complexed child from Budapest whose father spoke heavily
Speaker 1: accented English. God was a carpenter and worked with a
Speaker 1: legendary surfboard shaper named Bob Simmons. Micky hung around the
Speaker 1: shop and learned a lot from them, but as an adult,
Speaker 1: he really didn't talk that much about God and his influence.
Speaker 1: Occasionally he dropped cryptic hints about God's odd disciplinary programs. Once,
Speaker 1: toward the end of his life, Mickey made the offhand
Speaker 1: remark that God was a dangerous psychopath. When Nicky did
Speaker 1: open up about God, the stories were alcohol soaked and violent.
Speaker 5: Every now and then Micky would get in sort of
Speaker 5: a confessional mode and say, yeah, you know. Guard used
Speaker 5: to come home drunk, wake me up, and beat the
Speaker 5: shit out of me. There was a lot of famous
Speaker 5: surfers from that period in the forties and fifties who
Speaker 5: said all seemed to say the same thing, which was
Speaker 5: that they thought he was, you know, in their words,
Speaker 5: the living in when it came to surfing. But he
Speaker 5: was just someone that you want to do keep a
Speaker 5: distance from at a party, you know, especially as it
Speaker 5: got later. He just wanted to sort of stay away
Speaker 5: from him. The story that I've been told a few times,
Speaker 5: and I think Mickey tells the story, is that one
Speaker 5: night Guard came home drunk, woke up, Mickey said, come
Speaker 5: with me, and they drove somewhere in LA. I don't
Speaker 5: know what street it was, but it was the first
Speaker 5: street where La had just put in parking meters and
Speaker 5: Guard got out of the car drunk. He grabbed a
Speaker 5: baseball bat and just went down the block and just
Speaker 5: smashed the head off every meter and said something like,
Speaker 5: this is what they're trying to do to us. Mickey,
Speaker 5: look at what they're trying to do. And then, you know,
Speaker 5: I don't even know why he had to have Mickey there,
Speaker 5: but he wanted Nicky to see him doing this, committing
Speaker 5: this act of violence because you know, the city of
Speaker 5: la or you know the county was you know, screwing them,
Speaker 5: screwing everybody over by putting in parking meters, put Mickey
Speaker 5: back in the car and drove home and passed out.
Speaker 5: I do think Mickey later realized that Guard.
Speaker 4: Was a monster.
Speaker 1: Miklos Senior grew concerned that Mickey might be in danger
Speaker 1: and did the best thing he could think of at
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 5: At one point, when Guard and Ramona were both being
Speaker 5: you know, sort of particularly bad parents, Miklos sent Mickey
Speaker 5: to a boarding school, and Mickey hated.
Speaker 1: That Mickey was sent to Saint John's Military Academy, which
Speaker 1: was run by the Sisters of Mercy Nuns.
Speaker 5: I do think that Miklos did that not as punishment.
Speaker 5: I think that he felt that Mickey, living with Guard
Speaker 5: and Ramona was in a situation that Mickey needed to
Speaker 5: be removed from.
Speaker 1: Mickey wasn't cut out for military boarding school if a domineering,
Speaker 1: unpredictable stepfather had given him an uneasy relationship to authority
Speaker 1: a bunch of drill sergeants and nuns only intensive. Mickey
Speaker 1: was not a good boy at school. There's even a
Speaker 1: story of him putting fiberglass shavings from shaping a surfboard
Speaker 1: in the head nuns Cotex. Micky was about fourteen when
Speaker 1: Miklosch sold Little Hungary. Miklosch, who had remarried and fathered
Speaker 1: a daughter, moved to South America to get into shrimp farming.
Speaker 1: Micky was set adrift, but on the beach he was someone.
Speaker 1: He was Mickey Chapin Guard's kid. He wasn't abandoned. He
Speaker 1: decided he was free. When Mickey Dora became a famous
Speaker 1: surfer in the nineteen sixties, an interviewer for so For
Speaker 1: magazine asked him why he had dropped the name Chapin.
Speaker 1: Mickey's answer quote, Guard's untimely, premeditated murder in Mexico can
Speaker 1: only be linked with his individualistic personality. For my own
Speaker 1: peace of mind, I felt it would be safer to
Speaker 1: use my given name. The events that led up to
Speaker 1: Gard's death in the late fifties were depressing, a noirresh
Speaker 1: downward spiral for the beautiful Ramona and her surfing stud
Speaker 1: surf historian Matt Warshaw.
Speaker 5: Guard was rear ended while waiting in a traffic light
Speaker 5: and broke his neck and he couldn't work and he
Speaker 5: couldn't surf for something like a year. He was in
Speaker 5: a lot of pain for the rest of his life,
Speaker 5: and that didn't help with his drinking, so he became
Speaker 5: a worse drunk and he would dry out and then
Speaker 5: go back to drinking.
Speaker 1: Ramona and Guard broke up, and Ramona became a secretary downtown,
Speaker 1: living in hotels with various boyfriends. According to Mickey's half
Speaker 1: brother God and Ramona's son, Guard got addicted to codine,
Speaker 1: an absinthe that he smuggled in from Mexico. He was
Speaker 1: already a liability. Now he came fully unglued.
Speaker 5: At some point he was down in Mexico, I think,
Speaker 5: fishing and trying to not drink, and then he was
Speaker 5: going to row a dinghy out to a friend's boat.
Speaker 5: And the dingy turned up the next day, and Guard's
Speaker 5: body turned up five days later. And it looks like
Speaker 5: he just had been drinking or something and fell off
Speaker 5: the boat or some kind of late night one man accident.
Speaker 5: Micky talked about it as if Guard knew too much
Speaker 5: about too many people and he was killed, you know,
Speaker 5: And again you're just cutting through layers of weirdness. Micky
Speaker 5: tried to make it sound like Guard was murdered, which
Speaker 5: I don't think is.
Speaker 1: True, but Mickey believed it, or said he did. He
Speaker 1: hinted at dark conspiracies. Micky told his friends that Guard
Speaker 1: knew too much about what he said. The state was
Speaker 1: somehow after him. It was all very mysterious. What's clear
Speaker 1: is that Mickey was not the same after Guard's death.
Speaker 1: He became more enigmatic, more paranoid, but he also started
Speaker 1: to seem much less like a California kid and more
Speaker 1: like a European dandy. Mickey was back in touch with
Speaker 1: his birth father, Miklosch, who had returned from South America
Speaker 1: and was working in the wine business. Eventually, Mikloch would
Speaker 1: work for the eminent winemaker Baron de Rothschild, representing his
Speaker 1: wines in the United States and frequently traveling back to Europe.
Speaker 1: He got Mickey a job working for a distributor, but
Speaker 1: it didn't last. Micky slept with the boss's wife. That
Speaker 1: was okay. Didn't want to work, he wanted to surf.
Speaker 1: Rerent wasn't an issue. Micky crashed with Mieklosch's mother, Nadina
Speaker 1: at her place in West Hollywood. Nadina, who was born
Speaker 1: in Russian spent most of her adult life in Vienna,
Speaker 1: was a voice coach, known to her students as Madame
Speaker 1: de Sanctis. Now Mickey started talking with an accent and
Speaker 1: using quirky Eastern European hand gestures. It was like he
Speaker 1: was becoming some impressionistic air quotes version of Miklosch. When
Speaker 1: Guard died, Mickey Chapin died with him. From then on,
Speaker 1: in most circumstances, he would be known as Mickey Dora.
Speaker 1: The name and the mannerisms would stick. Matt Warshaw again, Mickey.
Speaker 5: Dora did have this way of talking that apparently everybody
Speaker 5: at maliveryone else where would started emulating where you know,
Speaker 5: a lot of sort of hand gestures and a lot
Speaker 5: of there was sort of a pause in the way,
Speaker 5: and it wasn't He didn't talk like other surfers at all.
Speaker 5: There was none of that kind of California nasally thing
Speaker 5: that surfers do. You know. He talked in a sort
Speaker 5: of a precise way. Or if you see people in conversation,
Speaker 5: you'd see people doing these kind of gestures that Mickey did,
Speaker 5: and it was all kind of old world. Somehow it
Speaker 5: wasn't southern California surfy stuff. That's all coming from Miklos
Speaker 5: the father.
Speaker 6: He was this really uneasy split between two very different fathers.
Speaker 5: DV.
Speaker 1: Divasentis, the film writer was fascinated by Mickey's two dads
Speaker 1: and how they shaped him.
Speaker 6: He had Michlas as his birth father, who was this erudite, aristocratic,
Speaker 6: accomplished businessman, lover of the arts, expert of fine wine,
Speaker 6: and by all accounts, a real gentleman and a lovely man.
Speaker 6: And then you had Guard his stepfather, who is, you know,
Speaker 6: widely recognized to be a very very difficult, problematic person,
Speaker 6: and he was paranoid, He fought a lot, loved guns.
Speaker 6: He was a very angry man by all accounts. And
Speaker 6: you can see both of these things in Mickey. You
Speaker 6: can see all of the appreciation of art and imagination
Speaker 6: and curiosity about culture and seeing culture where others might not.
Speaker 6: And then you also see the fierce, almost violent protectionism
Speaker 6: about territory and paranoia, thinking people want to know what
Speaker 6: you're doing, thinking people want to break into your house.
Speaker 6: I mean, Mickey had a bear trap inside of his
Speaker 6: front door. There's nobody trying to break into Mickey's house.
Speaker 6: Nobody cares for Mikula, you know what I mean, Like
Speaker 6: it's paranoid, and you see these very distinct fathers very
Speaker 6: much alive in him.
Speaker 1: As a child, Mickey had been more or less abandoned.
Speaker 1: Ramona hadn't taken care of him, Miklosch hadn't either. Guard
Speaker 1: seemed to mostly nurture Mickey's weaknesses. I get the sense
Speaker 1: that Mickey grew up with this feeling of having been
Speaker 1: denied his birthright, the elegance and sophistication and air of
Speaker 1: wealth that clung to his father, and he was pissed.
Speaker 1: He used to doodle the word retribution on his drawings.
Speaker 1: Mickey wanted that mister Dora suave, but he'd grown up
Speaker 1: with Guard and Guard's questionable ethics.
Speaker 6: I think when it came to the criminal stuff, it's
Speaker 6: a synthesis.
Speaker 4: Of the two.
Speaker 6: It's the willingness to take a sucker from Guard, and
Speaker 6: it's the sophisticated way of doing it is for Michlas.
Speaker 1: A few years before Gard's death, Mickey had stopped going
Speaker 1: down to Santa No Frey. He'd found a new spot, Malibu,
Speaker 1: a long right breaking wave that ran from the Malibu
Speaker 1: movie colony or the movie stores had their hideaways to
Speaker 1: Malibu pier a wave with no one on it. This
Speaker 1: is almost incomprehensible today when there can be fifty people
Speaker 1: in the water even on a mediocre day. Malibu is
Speaker 1: the most discovered of the discovered waves.
Speaker 2: It was a wild beach. It was like actually out
Speaker 2: in the country. It was kind of like going to
Speaker 2: the outskirts, out into the country. You know, you go
Speaker 2: up and there's empty lots where the beach houses are now,
Speaker 2: and you wind up this road. It was just like
Speaker 2: an adventure. You know, you're going way out to Malibu.
Speaker 1: You know, this is Danny Auburg again in the early fifties.
Speaker 1: He said, almost no one knew what surfing even was.
Speaker 1: He was just there to go fishing.
Speaker 2: I had to sit there with a drop line and
Speaker 2: look across the cove and see these strange long things
Speaker 2: leaning against this fence, you know, this old bombed wire fence.
Speaker 2: I thought there are some kind of boats. I had
Speaker 2: no idea what they were. I wondered, what is that?
Speaker 2: And later I found out there were surf boards. By
Speaker 2: fifty six, it was a relatively unknown sport that came
Speaker 2: from Hawaii and people did it, but it wasn't generally
Speaker 2: non surfing.
Speaker 4: What is that?
Speaker 2: See people bobbing around out at see? Why are they
Speaker 2: doing that? And what are they waiting out there?
Speaker 1: Here? At Malibu? Mickey would perfect what came to be
Speaker 1: known as the Malibu style, a laid backstance with knees
Speaker 1: slightly bent and shoulders loose. The graceful, and Mickey was
Speaker 1: the most graceful, could keep foot to the front of
Speaker 1: the board and ride the nose. It was the golden
Speaker 1: era of Malibu, a period Mickey would call the Vintage
Speaker 1: years or the Genesis period.
Speaker 5: There was two guys that were sort of the kings
Speaker 5: of Malibu in this one really golden sort of period
Speaker 5: that Mickey thought of as the sort of the golden
Speaker 5: period in the nineteen.
Speaker 1: Fifties, Matt Warshaw again and.
Speaker 5: Mickey, the guy that kind of ruled in the water.
Speaker 5: And then Terry Tracy, who everyone knew was Tubesteak, ruled
Speaker 5: the beach. The two of them got along, okay, because
Speaker 5: they've each had their own little sort of fiefdom. But
Speaker 5: Tubesteak built this shack on the beach and he loved
Speaker 5: entertaining people. He was himself could be kind of cruel,
Speaker 5: but in general seemed to have a pretty big heart,
Speaker 5: and he was funny, and he liked a sort of
Speaker 5: old court and just sort.
Speaker 4: Of keep everybody laughing.
Speaker 5: And Nicky would sort of say hid everybody on his
Speaker 5: way out to go surf, and then usually Micky would
Speaker 5: just leave.
Speaker 1: This was a scene Mickey in the water tubesteak in
Speaker 1: a shack on the beach, that a skinny, short teenager
Speaker 1: named Kathy Kohner discovered in the summer of nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 7: He was a great surfer. He was a great surfer.
Speaker 7: I mean you could pick him if you looked outside,
Speaker 7: you could pick him up in a lineup. He was
Speaker 7: span he had hand gestures. I don't know if anybody's
Speaker 7: gold us, Ah, my name is Miki Dora. He'd go
Speaker 7: like that.
Speaker 1: Kathy's arrival herald at the end of the Golden Era.
Speaker 1: In Mickey's view, it ushered in a period of dry rot.
Speaker 1: You may have heard about Kathy. She became the world's
Speaker 1: most famous surfer. To nonsurfers, she's probably still the world's
Speaker 1: most famous surfer. But you don't know her as Kathy.
Speaker 1: You'd know her by the nickname the guys on the
Speaker 1: beach gave her. It's a little offensive, but it was
Speaker 1: the fifties.
Speaker 4: Girl and midget a kitchen.
Speaker 1: Mickey's world. The surf world would never be the same.
Speaker 1: Next time on Lost Hills, the guys at Malibu are
Speaker 1: in for a surprise.
Speaker 7: The boo Malibu gets good once a summer, and it
Speaker 7: got good. It got bitchen brother. Was I ever Jazz?
Speaker 7: I was writing four footers and lining all the way
Speaker 7: across into the bay. I really had a ball and
Speaker 7: looked better. I still miss having a boyfriend, but everything
Speaker 7: happens for the best, and I'll die being an old maid.
Speaker 7: But it's a grand life. And I think that's a
Speaker 7: really good, a really good piece of writing from my diary.
Speaker 1: That's next in episode three, Gidget goes to Hollywood, Part one.
Speaker 1: Lost Tails is written and reported by Me Dana Goodyear.
Speaker 1: It's created by me and Benadere and produced by Western
Speaker 1: Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you
Speaker 1: can binge the entire season right now ad free. Find
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus on the Lost Tail show page in Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus