Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, Lost Hills listeners, it's Dana. I wanted to
Speaker 1: let you know that you can hear the entire new
Speaker 1: season of Lost Hills ad free, along with other great
Speaker 1: binge listens by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin
Speaker 1: Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus. I'm at Duke's
Speaker 1: Restaurant in Malibu. It's perched on the rocks right above
Speaker 1: the ocean. Out front is a giant statue of legendary
Speaker 1: Hawaiian surfer and swimmer Duke Kahanamoku, who helped introduce surfing
Speaker 1: to California in the early part of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: Where Gidget, the real Gidget works.
Speaker 2: Hey, we're here to interview Kathy Kathy khonor.
Speaker 3: She's a hostess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Gidget.
Speaker 3: Cool.
Speaker 1: Thanks. Gidget's real name is Kathy Kohener Zuckerman. The summer
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty six, when she was fifteen, she hung
Speaker 1: out at the beach in Malibu. She befriended Mickey, Dora
Speaker 1: and Tube Steak, who was later given the name The
Speaker 1: Big Kahuna. She fell in love, but most of all,
Speaker 1: she learned to surf, and her stories became the basis
Speaker 1: for the original Gidget, a novel written by Frederick Khoner
Speaker 1: her Dad. It's hard to overstate the cultural impact of Gidget.
Speaker 1: When the book was released in nineteen fifty seven, it
Speaker 1: hit the La Times bestseller list, ahead of Jack Kerouax
Speaker 1: on the Road. It went on to sell how a
Speaker 1: million copies, but the book was only the beginning. In
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine, Gidget was adapted for film with Sondra
Speaker 1: d as Gidget.
Speaker 4: What in the world is a Gidget? It's a girl,
Speaker 4: a cuddling, befuddling teen who set out to find her
Speaker 4: a man of her own and found seven seven young
Speaker 4: beach combers with a single thought to enjoy life and
Speaker 4: love without working. Meet Kahuna Leaves.
Speaker 1: Sequels follow Gidget goes to Hawaiian, Gidget goes to Rome,
Speaker 1: Gidget grows up, Gidget gets married, Gidgets Summer Reunion. It
Speaker 1: was also a TV show starring a then unknown Sally
Speaker 1: Field as Gidget. Today, Kathy works as a kind of
Speaker 1: informal celebrity host at Duke's. She seats Steiner's, chats with them,
Speaker 1: and signs copies of the Gidget novel. Around the corner
Speaker 1: from reception, there's a wall with some old photos of Kathy,
Speaker 1: including one of her with Mickey Dora.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, look at this.
Speaker 1: That's Kathy and Mickey.
Speaker 2: There's sort of a pack of dudes in the background.
Speaker 2: And blurt out, Oh, here she comes. She's got a
Speaker 2: cute little flower in her hair. The person coming toward
Speaker 2: me is tiny, with a big, warm smile and a
Speaker 2: bunch of chunky necklaces around her neck. This is the person,
Speaker 2: Mickey Dora says ruined Malibu. She's eighty two and vibrant,
Speaker 2: and I'll just say she doesn't feel much like a
Speaker 2: villain to me.
Speaker 3: I just do high finance here because somebody made me
Speaker 3: a couple of really great photos of me, went at
Speaker 3: the shack and went so I love.
Speaker 1: Kathy, says she sometimes sells photos of herself as a
Speaker 1: teenager on the beach in Malibu to Duke's customers.
Speaker 3: It just always hustling. No, I love mine. Yes, you know.
Speaker 3: So that's the shack. That's amazing. That's the original shock.
Speaker 3: You know, the board the big Mahuna lived. I mean
Speaker 3: that's he was called Khuna, by the way, but he
Speaker 3: lived in that shack. So that's me in front.
Speaker 1: Of the check Kathy. Shift is over and the plan
Speaker 1: is for me to give her a ride back to
Speaker 1: her house in the Palisades. Okay, okay, let's you.
Speaker 2: Want to go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we'll let you home. Thank you. I have
Speaker 3: to clock off. Okay, bye, everybody, see you tomorrow. Bye,
Speaker 3: thank you, thank you. Why didn't you come around to
Speaker 3: the passenger side in the front.
Speaker 1: As we head out of Malibu on Pacific Coast Highway,
Speaker 1: we start talking about what it was like for her
Speaker 1: when the Gidget movie came out in nineteen fifty nine.
Speaker 3: When you're in.
Speaker 2: College and the movie comes out, did people start to
Speaker 2: recognize you?
Speaker 3: And I know you weren't and nobody recognizes me, But
Speaker 3: did they make the connection between you and this famous movie? Well,
Speaker 3: it wasn't famous when it came out. And I saw
Speaker 3: it at the White Side Theater in Corvallis, Oregon, and
Speaker 3: I wish you'd slow down a bit on and I
Speaker 3: thought it was you know, it was like, oh my god,
Speaker 3: this is a movie about my life at Malibu. You know,
Speaker 3: obviously based on the book that my dead wrote.
Speaker 1: Surfing, Kathy says, is completely different now from when she
Speaker 1: was a kid.
Speaker 3: When I was surfing, there were no contests, no surf music,
Speaker 3: no surf clothing. It was all That's what I loved
Speaker 3: so much about it was. It was way off dead center.
Speaker 3: I was the tomboy, you know, I was. You know,
Speaker 3: the kids would write in my annual when I graduated,
Speaker 3: good luck with your water skiing. You know, they didn't
Speaker 3: know what surfing was. You know.
Speaker 1: With the phenomenal success at Gidget, the weird little boho
Speaker 1: scene that was happening on the beach in Malibu became
Speaker 1: instantly pop culture. Malibu got overrun. Mickey was furious and
Speaker 1: in his mind, in the minds of all those dudes
Speaker 1: who worshiped the ground, Mickey walked on. Gidget became the
Speaker 1: one who ruined everything. I'm Dana Goodyear and this is
Speaker 1: Lost Hills Episode three, Gidget Goes to Hollywood, Part one.
Speaker 3: I believe Gidget was the trailblazer.
Speaker 1: Yes, Gidget ushered in the era of surfing as a
Speaker 1: pop culture phenomenon.
Speaker 3: Well, the thing is.
Speaker 5: Thrill is surfboarding.
Speaker 3: The art of surfboarding is part of a Hawaiian culture,
Speaker 3: surf movies, and then you got beach blanket bingo, Ride
Speaker 3: the Wild surf. You know Elvis Presley movieses b a
Speaker 3: net Funicello because people say, oh, you're a net Funicello, Like, no.
Speaker 6: Take a look at those waves out there.
Speaker 3: Well, you know there's nothing out there, but you see
Speaker 3: the sky, you make it sound good. And I actually
Speaker 3: never watched any of those beach movies. I didn't ever
Speaker 3: watch a Frankly Avalon muscle Beach Party. I don't even
Speaker 3: know the names of them.
Speaker 4: Ah, this is the life.
Speaker 6: How did he son the serf?
Speaker 1: This is it surf music. It's the beach boys.
Speaker 7: Let's surfing now.
Speaker 3: Everybody's learning now surf competitions and a good cutback that
Speaker 3: time by Donald Takeyama surf brands. There was no leashes,
Speaker 3: there was no wetsuits. There was no merchandising. I mean,
Speaker 3: who'd heard of surf clothing or Roxy or Quicksilver, rip Curler, hurlier,
Speaker 3: any of these things you know we're seeing today some
Speaker 3: of the world's finess. Serv Serving became a business.
Speaker 5: Looking for a seven Conday.
Speaker 1: Before Gidget, there was just the waves and the beach
Speaker 1: and the birds and a few stray humans doing something
Speaker 1: very few people would credit as worthwhile. The early California
Speaker 1: surfers were iconoclasts. Some of them were teenagers ditching school.
Speaker 1: Some of them were disillusioned veterans of the Second World War.
Speaker 1: All of them were rejecting the clean cut, dutiful stereotypes
Speaker 1: of the era.
Speaker 8: I mean, even if you were a surfer, your parents
Speaker 8: wanted to go to school, but we would rather go surfing.
Speaker 8: So we were kind of outcast, would be the best
Speaker 8: way of putting it looked at differently.
Speaker 1: This is Henry Ford, another early surfer who became a
Speaker 1: lifeguard at Malibu.
Speaker 8: You probably weren't working as much as other people because
Speaker 8: you were bitten by the werewolf, as we call surfing
Speaker 8: surfing bidtis.
Speaker 9: And it's like you, once you're bitten, you're stuck with it.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 1: Malibu has a number of surf spots, but when people
Speaker 1: say Malibu, they're usually talking about surf right or beach.
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful wave that peals slowly to the right
Speaker 1: instead of breaking all at once. Malibu is so consistent.
Speaker 1: Surfers call it the machine or the conveyor belt. That
Speaker 1: green unbroken water that was Mickey's canvas.
Speaker 8: Malibu had a perfect right point. It's kind of like
Speaker 8: manufactured wave. If you looked at it, there were perfect
Speaker 8: and it was the right hand point break and it
Speaker 8: was put in the right place where the wind would
Speaker 8: blow down the coast, and so it just it offered everything,
Speaker 8: good waves, good conditions, and unknown at that time because
Speaker 8: there were nobody else surfing.
Speaker 9: You'd drive by there, you'd see six people out. That
Speaker 9: would be it. That would be a big day. In
Speaker 9: those early.
Speaker 1: Years, Malibu was secluded, a private paradise. There were movie
Speaker 1: stars living in the Malibu Movie Colony, a group of
Speaker 1: houses clustered at one end of Surf Beach.
Speaker 9: There wasn't like a crowd that hung there every day.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 8: You know, there were a few movie stars that would
Speaker 8: come down there in those early days, guys like Peter Lawford,
Speaker 8: Richard Jacob.
Speaker 1: Other than that, there were a bunch of misfits.
Speaker 10: It was you know these characters, you know, they're they
Speaker 10: were different because they were they were like the Old
Speaker 10: West or something. There were you know, there's a freedom
Speaker 10: because they were away from any kind of society.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 10: They once they entered the Malibu Beach, it was their domain.
Speaker 1: Here's Denny Auburg again, the surfer who started going to
Speaker 1: Malibu in the fifties, tagging along with his older brother Kemp.
Speaker 10: So you got down there and you saw all these
Speaker 10: different kinds of characters. They dressed like one guy just
Speaker 10: found it an old uh beaver coat that that washed
Speaker 10: up on the beach and that became his surfing coat.
Speaker 10: Full of holes. Monthy just people wore army jackets. It
Speaker 10: was kind of like improvisation. There's no technology for surfing.
Speaker 10: People roping their board on their car was rope, you know,
Speaker 10: there's no special wetsues, no wetsues. And he cut off jeans.
Speaker 10: You know, a lot of people just cut off jeans
Speaker 10: for their trucks. So it was like the beginning infancy
Speaker 10: of the surf thing.
Speaker 1: The characters at Malibu were basically beatnicks and dropouts. Some
Speaker 1: of them were what we would now think of as homeless.
Speaker 1: At the start of the summer of nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 1: one of them, Terry Tracy aka Tube Steak aka the
Speaker 1: Big Kahuna, decided he was just going to live on
Speaker 1: the beach and party NonStop with his friends. So we
Speaker 1: built himself a shack out of palm fronds, and that's
Speaker 1: where Kathy Kohner, a fifteen year old whose parents had
Speaker 1: brought her to the beach, found him, and that's where
Speaker 1: she met Mickey, Dora, the surfing God, the Dark Prince
Speaker 1: of Malibu. After sitting in traffic on Pacific Coast Highway
Speaker 1: and then climbing up into the palisades, we get to
Speaker 1: Kathy's house. It's a wooden ranch house red with white
Speaker 1: trim that she shares with her husband Marv. A table
Speaker 1: just outside the front door is piled with avaloni shells
Speaker 1: and sandbellars, and a wooden sign that says a beach
Speaker 1: girl lives here with her big kahuna.
Speaker 3: I love your house.
Speaker 2: What year is it?
Speaker 7: Belt?
Speaker 3: I love my house too. It's a fifteenth. It's so great.
Speaker 2: You don't see too many houses that our original watch
Speaker 2: us anymore in this neighborhood.
Speaker 3: It's got a very.
Speaker 7: Kind of like.
Speaker 3: This is so sure, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: Kathy leads me into a back bedroom, which looks like
Speaker 1: a museum of nineteen fifties girl hood. She opens a
Speaker 1: drawer and a bedside table and pulls out two old books,
Speaker 1: which she clutches to her chest.
Speaker 3: So these are the truths, Dana, These are my diary pages.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, Oh my God. Now she's like, oh, look
Speaker 3: at those look at your sweet Oh. I had to
Speaker 3: wroke up where I wrote about Mickey Dora. Of course
Speaker 3: I wrote it down. I can't find the oh here.
Speaker 2: Just oh my god, that's so great, amazing, amazing, amazing.
Speaker 1: I just love the way they look. To My Wonderful
Speaker 1: Year Gidgets diaries. The covers are faded pastel, pink and green,
Speaker 1: and the spines are splitting apart with age. One of
Speaker 1: them shows a boy and a girl holding hands. My
Speaker 1: Wonderful Year is written in bubbly lowercase script. These are
Speaker 1: basically the golden tablets of the surf religion. This is
Speaker 1: where Kathy recorded everything that happened in the summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty six when she learned to surf in Malibu.
Speaker 3: I have written down in the diary the first day
Speaker 3: I went surfing, and I'm happy to read it to you.
Speaker 3: Of that June twenty fourth, nineteen fifty six, Sunday, Dear Diary,
Speaker 3: I didn't do too much but go to the beach.
Speaker 3: I didn't think i'd have fun, but I met Matt
Speaker 3: and he took me out on his surfboard. He let
Speaker 3: me catch the waves by myself and once I flew
Speaker 3: off and the board went flying in the air, I
Speaker 3: didn't get hurt at all. He also rode the waves
Speaker 3: with me. Then I rode the board in alone. The
Speaker 3: surf wasn't high at all. I hope Matt will take
Speaker 3: me surfing again. So that's the first entry about going
Speaker 3: surfing at Malibou.
Speaker 1: Kathy lived about fifteen miles away in Brentwood, but her
Speaker 1: parents were out doorsy and they loved the beach, so
Speaker 1: she'd been going to Malibu since she was a baby.
Speaker 1: She was aware of surfing.
Speaker 3: So there was a group of guys, you know, from
Speaker 3: nineteen forty eight or so that my mom used to
Speaker 3: take a couple of those guys to the beach to
Speaker 3: Malibu and took the boards in the Rumble Sea. So
Speaker 3: my earliest recollection of those boards were when you know,
Speaker 3: it was eight or nine years old. But we always
Speaker 3: went to Malibu, so I didn't stumble upon them. I
Speaker 3: saw them. I knew where they were. Usually they were
Speaker 3: in the pit. I remember them in the pit. That's
Speaker 3: when that was called the pit.
Speaker 1: The pit was a spot in the sand along the
Speaker 1: wall by the entrance to the beach. It was where
Speaker 1: the cool kids hung out.
Speaker 3: The pit seemed to be more hardcore surfers men's club,
Speaker 3: you know, all about testosterone. I mean a lot of
Speaker 3: them had nicknames. So there was some he called the Fencer, uh,
Speaker 3: the Kahuna, quick Higgye. Frank Higginson was called quick Kigge. Well,
Speaker 3: see Mickey was called to quet.
Speaker 1: The scene at the pit could be intimidating. Here's Danny
Speaker 1: Auburg again. He surfed with Mickey.
Speaker 10: Everybody would laugh and they everybody sit in the pit.
Speaker 10: You know, was this area where kind of the bigger names,
Speaker 10: you know, the n crowd would sit and surfers had
Speaker 10: to walk through that pit and be scrutinized, you know,
Speaker 10: like little beginners, and they throw pebbles at the board
Speaker 10: or yell something just to kind of asslem a little bit,
Speaker 10: you know, a.
Speaker 1: Little farther up the beach was the shack where Terry
Speaker 1: tube Steak Tracy lived.
Speaker 10: Tube Steak Tracy, who was the leader of the pack.
Speaker 10: But people would hang around his shack and old beat
Speaker 10: up couches.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 10: They just dragged down an old car seat and lay
Speaker 10: it on the beach or an old chair, and it
Speaker 10: was very primitive. You know, and he had this. He
Speaker 10: would come out of his grass shack and you're spending
Speaker 10: the night, and I am the kahuna. You know.
Speaker 1: It was funny, the big Kahuna ruled the beach.
Speaker 10: In fact, he would say in Malibu on the beach,
Speaker 10: it's me in the water, it's Mickey Dora.
Speaker 1: This was way before contests and rankings, but no one
Speaker 1: had to measure Mickey's dominance. It was self evident.
Speaker 10: You know, he was king of the water, you know.
Speaker 10: And that's and surfing. It wasn't because you won something.
Speaker 10: It was nothing to win. It's a funny sport. It
Speaker 10: was just it was all by reputation.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 10: It had a lot to do with the way your
Speaker 10: style on the water. Now you just you did something magnificent,
Speaker 10: but you didn't really win a contest, but the reputation
Speaker 10: would grow because you just looked beautiful on a wave.
Speaker 10: People would notice that you just rode that wave so well.
Speaker 10: I mean, the wave's over, is nothing left to show
Speaker 10: for it unless it's on. But people would remember. They'd
Speaker 10: be their hero, you know, like they'd idolize these people
Speaker 10: that were so good. It's a funny sport like that.
Speaker 1: Of course, Kathy noticed Mickey. Everyone did you know?
Speaker 3: He was dark and dark skin, dark hair, white trunks.
Speaker 3: I think I remember white trunks. He was a great surfer.
Speaker 3: He was a great surfer. I mean you could pick
Speaker 3: him if you looked outside. You could pick him up
Speaker 3: in a lineup. He was fantastic. He had hand gestures.
Speaker 3: I don't know if anybody's God, my name is Micky Tora.
Speaker 3: He'd go like that.
Speaker 1: Mickey makes frequent cameos in Kathy's diaries.
Speaker 3: Jazzed on Mickey. He didn't kiss me though. We drove
Speaker 3: into Palmdale, where Mickey went to meet these people who
Speaker 3: were going to take him to Mammoth God. I wanted
Speaker 3: to go so badly. I came home, I found a
Speaker 3: letter waiting for me from Dick. I called up Bill
Speaker 3: and he told me that he Lester and Jesse and
Speaker 3: Tube Tubs Sake, we're all going to Mammoth that night.
Speaker 3: I called up Jesse, but he had already left. Skiing
Speaker 3: was a big deal. I am completely jazzed, and I
Speaker 3: don't know on whom. So there were these series of
Speaker 3: male interests.
Speaker 1: Kathy was, in her own description, completely boy crazy and
Speaker 1: very sporty. She didn't want to spend all day at
Speaker 1: the movies like the other girl. She knew she wanted
Speaker 1: to have adventures.
Speaker 3: So Mickey would come over to the house and play
Speaker 3: ping pong. He would take me to the ski slips
Speaker 3: and I found it where he'd have me climb up
Speaker 3: the rope toe, so he didn't want to pay for
Speaker 3: a ski whip ticket.
Speaker 1: Mammoth Mountain was only a few hundred miles north in
Speaker 1: Mono County.
Speaker 3: Mickey was a good skier, so Mickey would take me,
Speaker 3: and I wrote it, let's see, well, I didn't go
Speaker 3: to school today, but instead I went skiing. Mickey's friends
Speaker 3: picked me up at seven to ten on the corner
Speaker 3: of Bundy and Coin. Fantastic weather, only no snow. God.
Speaker 3: We drove to Moonridge, where we spent the day on
Speaker 3: a dripping rope toe. What a fiasco. Mickey came with us.
Speaker 3: All he did was ski up and down the rope toe.
Speaker 3: He left around four, and Mickey had some beer and
Speaker 3: we got feeling good. I snuggled close up to Mickey
Speaker 3: and it felt terrific. I think I'm sort of really.
Speaker 1: Kathy lived a safe, comfortable, conventional life, but she hadn't
Speaker 1: really found her people. Strange as it sounds, she felt
Speaker 1: more at home at the beach.
Speaker 3: I did not like going to school, so I didn't
Speaker 3: really enjoy high school. Girly girly things. Had a couple
Speaker 3: of great English teachers that I remembered liking, but I
Speaker 3: didn't have a boyfriend in high school. I just always
Speaker 3: liked boys. Most of them were from the beach. I
Speaker 3: found the place that I always wanted to go to
Speaker 3: was Malibu because I felt that I had a little
Speaker 3: community there, like cheers. You know, everybody knows my name. Well,
Speaker 3: I got a nickname. They all called me Gidget. And
Speaker 3: so any chance I could get, I would go to
Speaker 3: the beach and the language and the whole millieure of
Speaker 3: you know, coming down there carrying your board, getting to
Speaker 3: know who these what their names were, and wanting to
Speaker 3: be part of the crew, a place to belong. I mean,
Speaker 3: you're a teenage kid. We had school, and we had home,
Speaker 3: and then the third place, as a sociologist would say,
Speaker 3: for me, it was the beach.
Speaker 1: Kathy was inspired by what she saw going on around her,
Speaker 1: inspired to serve but also to document it.
Speaker 3: I think that the pinnacle was the guy that lived
Speaker 3: in a shack at the beach. I thought, whoa, this
Speaker 3: is kind of interesting, so I thought, yeah, I thought, wow,
Speaker 3: I'd like to write a story about this guy who
Speaker 3: lives in a shack all summer. You know, doesn't he
Speaker 3: have a mummy and daddy? You know, doesn't he have
Speaker 3: a car.
Speaker 1: Kathy's father, Frederick Kohner, was a screenwriter.
Speaker 3: So I remember my dad would pick me up in
Speaker 3: the dino ful buick and I sat next to him
Speaker 3: in the car, and I said, I'd like to write
Speaker 3: a story about what's going on in Malibu. You tell me,
Speaker 3: I'll write the story for you. And he did. He
Speaker 3: wrote Kitchen.
Speaker 1: Kathy's memories of those days in Malibu are now part
Speaker 1: of the collective unconscious. But there's another story one she
Speaker 1: does not like to tell about a side of Mickey,
Speaker 1: Dora and her surf friends. She'd probably rather she did
Speaker 1: not know.
Speaker 8: Please, no tourist, Kahuna, Hey Francis, no tour She's got
Speaker 8: a real yend to pick up on servant.
Speaker 9: That gidget.
Speaker 3: Gidget. Oh wait, wait a minute, fellas, look look me
Speaker 3: on the gag too.
Speaker 5: Huh, Well, you see it's right there through osmos.
Speaker 4: Yeah, girl, and midget a Gidget.
Speaker 1: That's a scene from the original nineteen fifty nine Gidget movie.
Speaker 1: It captures the teasing Kathy endured, the playful side of
Speaker 1: it anyway. Kathy Kohner's diaries are like Kathy, full of
Speaker 1: sunshine and optimism. She loves that she was she is Gidget.
Speaker 1: Through Gidget, she gets to relive the thrills of her
Speaker 1: adolescence every single day.
Speaker 3: One entry captures the language and the world of Malibu.
Speaker 3: This is from Gidget's diary the Boo Malibu gets good
Speaker 3: once a summer, and it got good. It got bitchin. Brother,
Speaker 3: Was I ever jazzed? I was riding four footers and
Speaker 3: lining all the way across into the bay. Brother, was
Speaker 3: I ever stoked? It was so bitchin I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 3: No kooks were out in the water, and it was
Speaker 3: practically open door all the way. I took gas a
Speaker 3: couple of times, but otherwise, I really look good. Sets
Speaker 3: are coming in off the point so consistent, I couldn't
Speaker 3: believe it. The sets were actually better formed than last year's.
Speaker 3: All the kooks stayed out of the water while the
Speaker 3: men really turned on. There must have been fifty boards
Speaker 3: in the water at seven in the evening. Everyone from
Speaker 3: the whole coast was there. Actually, it was pretty exciting.
Speaker 3: Those bigger waves are so easy to ride. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 3: I really had a ball and looked better. I still
Speaker 3: miss having a boyfriend, but everything happens for the best,
Speaker 3: and I'll die being an old maid. But it's a
Speaker 3: grand life. That's a really good, a really good piece
Speaker 3: of writing from my diary.
Speaker 1: The Gidget story is one of triumph. A bubbly tomboy
Speaker 1: stumbles on a scene full of quirky surfer guys, falls
Speaker 1: in love, gets her heartbroken, and learns to surf. It's
Speaker 1: a classic teen coming of age story with a refreshingly
Speaker 1: feminist take. It's a winning narrative so powerful that it's
Speaker 1: taken Kathy most of her lifetime to awaken to some
Speaker 1: of the other dynamics that were at play in Malibu.
Speaker 3: Well, it wasn't welcoming for me all the time. It
Speaker 3: wasn't right away. Oh she's so cute, you know, she
Speaker 3: can serve. No, I had to surf. I had to prove.
Speaker 3: And I and one of those photo that I think
Speaker 3: you saw me surfing, a really good one where I'm
Speaker 3: wearing trunks. Now those trunks, I'm aware that I wanted
Speaker 3: to look like a boy. I wanted surf trunks. You
Speaker 3: couldn't find surf trunks at Henshe's department store, Pennies Departments,
Speaker 3: or Miss California or whoever made bathing suits at the time.
Speaker 1: The guys did not accept her right away.
Speaker 3: Well, they did haze me a bit. You know, they
Speaker 3: gave me a rough time. You know. Sometimes they disconnected
Speaker 3: the distributor to my car so I couldn't go home.
Speaker 3: You know, they threw a pineapple in my face. Said,
Speaker 3: you know, you're bothering me. You're still breathing.
Speaker 1: As she revisits the diaries, she's confronted with the harshness
Speaker 1: of this treatment. Her collaborator, Ken, who's helping her transcribe
Speaker 1: the pages, is sometimes shocked by what he reads.
Speaker 3: Ken would look at the diary pages and said, oh
Speaker 3: my god, they threw a pineapple in your face and
Speaker 3: you just like, h you know whatever.
Speaker 1: Mickey Dora deeply resented Gidget, Gidget the book, Gidget, the
Speaker 1: movie franchise, Gidget, the TV show, Gidget, the cultural juggernaut.
Speaker 1: He referred to the period around when the first movie
Speaker 1: came out in nineteen fifty nine as the dry Rot Era.
Speaker 1: He was not too charitable about Gidget the person either,
Speaker 1: never mind that he took her to Mammoth or played
Speaker 1: ping pong at her house. This is what he wrote
Speaker 1: to a journalist who was working on a story about Kathy. Quote.
Speaker 1: I only mumbled a few unpleasantries to her a couple
Speaker 1: of times. She was a hairy little thing for her age.
Speaker 1: She asked me some asinine question. I told her to
Speaker 1: fuck off. Unquote. Mickey's campaign against the Gidget takeover of
Speaker 1: Malibu is pretty absurd because he was in the movie.
Speaker 1: When Hollywood producers showed up in Malibu looking to cast
Speaker 1: real surfers for the first Gidget movie. Mickey was hired
Speaker 1: to be the stunt double for James Darren, who played
Speaker 1: Gidget's love interest Moondoggie. But you really wouldn't know that
Speaker 1: from the way he talked. A few months ago, I
Speaker 1: got a tape of Mickey Dora, recorded two years before
Speaker 1: his death. It's never been heard before, and I'll play
Speaker 1: more of it later, but for now, notice how worked
Speaker 1: up Mickey still is about Gidget forty years after the fact.
Speaker 1: He's the second voice.
Speaker 7: I've never even saw that saw.
Speaker 5: Did it?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Is it bad shit?
Speaker 7: Is it disaster? It's a new erything.
Speaker 6: And everyone holds me responsible when people will connect me somehow,
Speaker 6: So all lies. I had nothing to do with these people.
Speaker 6: They all hated me. Unbelievable. I only rode waves. And
Speaker 6: now that's the longing you did. It's hard hard to believe.
Speaker 6: So I get all this propaganda, bad press.
Speaker 7: And Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: Do you remember some of your friends, including Mickey and
Speaker 1: some others, being there and working as extras.
Speaker 3: Mickey was the extra. He served for James darn He
Speaker 3: had great hand gestures. People mimicked him. People mimicked him
Speaker 3: a lot. And I didn't know much about what happened
Speaker 3: to Mickey after I left Malibu, because you know, we
Speaker 3: got it. He's a bad boy.
Speaker 1: Kathy remembers one thing Mickey used to say to her
Speaker 1: all the time, the classic warning from a local to
Speaker 1: a kook to stay off his wave.
Speaker 3: Don't drop in on me, Gidget.
Speaker 1: Don't drop in on me.
Speaker 3: I won't make it. I won't, I promise.
Speaker 1: Kathy went to college in Oregon, and when she came
Speaker 1: back to Malibu a year after the movie came out,
Speaker 1: it was a different place when you.
Speaker 3: Came back here. Had Malibu already changed? Yes, when I
Speaker 3: came back, Malibu had changed. Malibu was crowded.
Speaker 1: At Malibu, the Gidget effect was palpable. All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: there were hundreds of non surfers in the water trying
Speaker 1: to surf, oblivious of what they were jumping into. Gidget
Speaker 1: had definitely dropped in on Mickey metaphorically, and an army
Speaker 1: of wannabe gidgets were doing it literally. To Malibu locals,
Speaker 1: surfing was a rite of passage, not a fad you
Speaker 1: picked up from watching a movie. Henry Ford, the early
Speaker 1: Malibu lifeguard.
Speaker 8: You had to kind of fit into that waterman mentality.
Speaker 8: You had to be able to swim, dive, how to
Speaker 8: read the water, read the ocean. Watermen were very important,
Speaker 8: and that's I think the early surfers would be termed watermen.
Speaker 1: There was a culture clash, Henry says, between those he
Speaker 1: calls the pure surfers and the cum latelies who had
Speaker 1: essentially been inspired by Gidget.
Speaker 3: What's the pure surfer?
Speaker 8: The guy who's committed to it. Whether he works or not,
Speaker 8: is not that important. It's just the fact the commitment
Speaker 8: to it, commitment to it being a discipline, something that
Speaker 8: you believe in, something that you love, and you've got
Speaker 8: to figure that on some days, you're paddling out the
Speaker 8: water's fifty five degrees, maybe fifty eight degrees. You don't
Speaker 8: have a wet suit, you don't have a leash, you
Speaker 8: have one hundred and twenty pound board, and you love
Speaker 8: it and you cannot get enough of it.
Speaker 1: Malibu was being invaded by outsiders.
Speaker 8: When these other kids came over that just showed up
Speaker 8: in were in everybody's way. That made it difficult.
Speaker 1: Henry was hired to work at Malibu right when the
Speaker 1: crowds were getting out of control. Because the crowds were
Speaker 1: getting out of control.
Speaker 9: You had to have somebody there to help control it.
Speaker 8: Because now what was happening where people who were trying
Speaker 8: to learn how to surf join into these people who
Speaker 8: have made this.
Speaker 9: Their lifestyle or developed their own culture.
Speaker 8: So these people that were coming in after seeing each
Speaker 8: Bingo party, Gidget the.
Speaker 1: Movie, these people are what surfers call kooks. We've talked
Speaker 1: about this word. I asked Henry to give me his definition.
Speaker 9: It would be someone who just learning how to surf.
Speaker 8: And they called them cowboys from the other side over
Speaker 8: there on the inland side. The valley group Malibu belonged
Speaker 8: to those locals.
Speaker 9: That's pretty much the name of the game.
Speaker 8: So you can imagine what it'd be like if you
Speaker 8: were down there, and you were at that beach every day,
Speaker 8: then all of a sudden, there's fifty to one hundred
Speaker 8: guys there with new boards.
Speaker 9: And really kind of rubbing.
Speaker 8: The nose of the guy who's been there for years.
Speaker 1: So were there actual physical fights? Was it name calling?
Speaker 8: Was there just Oh, there was everything you could imagine.
Speaker 8: Flattened tires. If you went to the surf break and
Speaker 8: nobody knew who you were, they flat in your tires.
Speaker 8: I mean, there was all kinds of crazy stuff that
Speaker 8: went on in the water. Was dangerous because the guys
Speaker 8: that were learning how to surf had no concept, they
Speaker 8: had no I guess manners. They had not been taught
Speaker 8: the culture, they had not been taught what's acceptable and
Speaker 8: what's not acceptable. And there were a lot of injuries.
Speaker 8: There were a lot of people that were angry about it.
Speaker 8: And I mean, I've seen guys fight on the beach.
Speaker 8: I've seen guys throw rocks at their boards, other people's boards.
Speaker 8: I've seen all kinds of crazy stuff.
Speaker 1: No one was more pissed off by all these kooks
Speaker 1: than Mickey Dora.
Speaker 8: His area was invaded, that was his spot. I mean
Speaker 8: it became a little bit more contentious. Its separated the
Speaker 8: guys that could serve, who have spent their lives surfing,
Speaker 8: who invested their soul into surfing, and all of a
Speaker 8: sudden you got people coming over there and driving around
Speaker 8: with boards on their car, saying their surfers when they're
Speaker 8: really not. So it was hard for all of us,
Speaker 8: not just for Mickey. It was for all of us,
Speaker 8: but Mickey was probably the most outspoken.
Speaker 1: Do you think Mickey successfully scared some of them off?
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, I guarantee you. I guarantee you.
Speaker 1: Once upon a time, Mickey and Gidget had been friendly,
Speaker 1: but he turned her into a scapegoat for everything he
Speaker 1: hated about what Malibu became.
Speaker 7: He would have been, gosh, ten or fifteen years older
Speaker 7: than her. She was really young when she was down there.
Speaker 1: Matt Warshaw, surf historian.
Speaker 7: You see photos of them when Kathy was still on
Speaker 7: the beach at Malibu, and they're standing sort of next
Speaker 7: to each other, sort of like a brother sister thing almost,
Speaker 7: So there are pictures of the two of them, and
Speaker 7: there's no beef at that point. I think the beef
Speaker 7: comes later after everybody has decided collectively that Gidget room
Speaker 7: and surfing. And when I say Gidget, I mean the
Speaker 7: movie in the book, and then you follow the trail
Speaker 7: back to the person. I guess, but you're going, well,
Speaker 7: if she hadn't shown up, none of this would have happened,
Speaker 7: which is nonsense. Surfing was going to be just as
Speaker 7: crowded as it was. Gidget or no Gidget, right, But
Speaker 7: Gidget is the easiest thing to look at and say, well,
Speaker 7: there you go. That was what ruined it. And I
Speaker 7: think that's everything you need to know about why Mickey
Speaker 7: was angry at Kathy.
Speaker 1: But because Kathy was Kathy and her family was who
Speaker 1: they were, that anger took a particularly vile form. Next
Speaker 1: time on Lost Hills.
Speaker 3: And had there been a swastik on the driveway or
Speaker 3: no swastik on the driver, we just kind of like
Speaker 3: it was not a big We kind of didn't want
Speaker 3: to deal with something like that, so we just kind
Speaker 3: of like, who cares, you know, you want to throw
Speaker 3: my board over the fence. So I had a drive,
Speaker 3: I mean I had a drive to want to learn
Speaker 3: how to surf, to prove it to you know, maybe
Speaker 3: to myself, but to the guys that I could be
Speaker 3: just one. I could surf too. I'm gonna surf.
Speaker 1: That's next in episode four, Gidget Goes to Hollywood, Part two.
Speaker 1: Lost Hills is written and reported by Me Dana Goodyear.
Speaker 1: It's created by me and Ben Adair and produced by
Speaker 1: Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and
Speaker 1: you can hear the whole season ad free. Find Pushkin
Speaker 1: Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus