12. A Nasty Piece of Work

Pushkin. For most of Mickey's adult life, he was on the run, hiding, changing identities, trying to stay one step ahead of everyone. He called himself a gypsy. He called himself a wandering rabbi. He saw himself as cast out of Golden Malibu as it changed before his eyes. Linda Kai was with Mickey on and off for the better part of a decade. She was his longest term romantic partner, his confidante, and his partner in crime. And when they weren't together, he wrote to her.

And there's some There are sixty four letters from all over the world with addresses in sta amps and this was all with Mickey. And see his artwork. Yeah, this is a lot of us must there's a lot of lure in here, would you say? The love letters.

Linda and I are sitting at the breakfast table of her mobile home in Ventura. Light streams in through the windows. On the table between us is the black binder where she keeps the letters from Mickey. Flipping through the binder, I'm overwhelmed by the explosion of strange drawings of cats and witches and cataclysmic world events.

Also jokes.

There's a clipping from a newspaper of a man surrounded by credit card applications. Quote mister plastic fantastic collector has seven hundred and eighty eight credit cards, can't stop applying, and what appears to be a photo of Mickey Dora pasted onto his head. There are formulas, equations and references to the episodic wave. There's some mathematical formulas.

Yes, everything is a secret, and you know, well, it's like I was. I was scared to death when I would get one and I had to let it sit for a while. Wow, this is yeah. I had to let them sit for a couple of weeks before I actually would open them to get I'm head right, you know, to be sure. I was ready to read this some of this stuff because a lot of it's super paranoia about the world and collapse from the Russians. And you know, he was.

Way In the letters, Mickey makes liberal use of the N word. He also indulges in blatant Internet style anti Semitic conspiracy theories. Quote the Jews Zionists are the richest people in the world and control much of its destiny. Jews like Lord Rothschild every day in ironclad secrecy decide and flat around the world how high the price of

The conspiracies rent rampant in his head. No, he never was like talking about aliens. It was always the nuclear bomb. This was all about New Zealand. You know, let's go to New Zealand where it's safe. He didn't want to be in the northern hemisphere. He said, Oh, it's going to be radiation, it's going to be trouble, everything's going to blow up. A lot of the letters contain all this, and sometimes I couldn't read them. I was like, this is awful.

You know.

It says here in this letter. Can you smell it? It's the asshole conspiracy. The spread of assholeism during the last century has been orchestrated on the part of a secret international conspiracy. Experts have believed that the problems of society could be blamed on poverty, ignorance, exploitation, racism, sexism,

Yes. When I started reading and educating myself, I was thinking, this is you know, where is Russia getting us in? Why are we having a thing with Russia? There's nothing going on, you know, Mickey saw something bad in situations, probably a lot of them in I was interested in the surfing bar, not all this conspiracy stuff.

You know.

At a certain point, the darkness it threatened to engulf her, and she fled. But Mickey's fear, whatever he was running from, it affected Linda's whole life, and not only Linda's. The dark Prince cast a shadow over Malibu and surfing, and it was the people around him that paid the price. I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, episode twelve, A nasty piece of work. Mickey's whole life was a giant fu to society.

I used to say to people when they would give me the oh, by god, Mickey Dora, unbelievable euch a, you know, and I would just say, if you really like Mickey Dora, you never met the guy.

California Surf Museum president Jim Kempton, I.

Don't know anybody that really knew Mickey well that would say, what a great guy, what a friend, what a pal, what a dude that really went out of his way for me. There just isn't There isn't one person I know who's ever said that.

Mickey has his place in his He's the man who mastered Malibu.

That is something that you won't get much better than Mickey, you know. There aren't many people who rode a surfboard and more elegance and more refinery, more style, more arrogance than Mickey, you know. And that is, as I say, it's that's the work. And you just can't take that. No matter what else, that image, that that thing will always be iconic.

For many surfing insiders, Mickey was the definition of the true surfer. He claimed to be authentic compared to all the phonies and the fakes and the gidget wannabes.

My whole life is this escape. My whole life is this way. If I drop into set, the whole thing up, pull up the bottom, true, and pull up into it and shoot for my life. I'm going in for me, and behind me, all of this shit goes over my back, and I'm shooting for my life.

This is the classic Mickey Dora rebel yell. There's more of it. Mickey goes on behind me, all this shit goes over my back. The screaming parents, teachers, screaming teachers, police priests, politicians, knee boarders, windsurfers, They're all going over the falls, head first into the reef, head first into the motherfucking reef. And I'm shooting for my life. And when it starts to close up, I pull to the bottom, out to the back, and I pick up another one

He was performative. Mickey was theater.

This is David Renson again. He's the author of the Mickey Dora Oral History All for a few perfect Waves. He spent years trying to root out Mickey's secrets, whatever they might be. David and I have been talking about Mickey's dark side, the swastikas, the Nazi posturing. He wants to give me some context.

Mickey came from an era of guys who liked to rat fuck each other, who wanted to be in the face of conformity in society, like Marlon Brando on a motorcycle or James Dean at the Griffith Park Observatory, that whole thing. And I just think that in the forties and the early fifties, what would be something he could throw in society's face. I think he put a swastik on a board, and I believe Mickey also had a

With the letters Mickey sent Linda, I saw a number of references to David Renson, the person Mickey feared was going to expose him in the pages of California Magazine back in the early eighties. When I was with Linda, she brought out this binder of letters that Mickey had sent her and I took pictures of a bunch of them,

Well this is the one where you call me a third rate carpetbagger, or well I.

Can show you he doesn't say your name, so I don't.

Yeah, I'd like to know for sure. Yeah, I may have shaded a paragraph there. Fat You from New York has spent six months researching My life, huge anticipated article to be published in July for okay, has been bugging my asshole father and other assholes. This guy's going frantic to locate my whereabouts. So far I'm safe. Snooper's talking everyone I hate, including guests who none o the Pirate captain m Yeah, okay, well it's toxic, but so fucking.

What it gets uglier. Mickey wrote to Linda, quote, we both knew that some hook knows MF would sniff out a story one day. He also wrote that the Pirate captain Don Wilson, Linda's X, who talked to Rensen quote kissed the feet of this Jew bastard. And then, when the article was optioned by the producer David Geffen, Mickey wrote quote, I've found out some beady eyed, copulating Jew faggot has bought my life story from the other Jew and are making my life into a film starring another

People ask me how I can celebrate Mickey Dora. You know, but I don't think I'm celebrating him. I mean unless the act of writing about somebody is celebration. I mean, he's a too bit hustler to some people, and he's God on a surfboard to other people. I just thought it was an interesting story to tell. I agree with you. Yeah, well, I'm glad you show me those letters, because Micky was a nasty piece of work at times.

It's subtle, but it literally feels like a change has come over David, like he's revising his opinion in real time in front of me, and there's this other feeling disappointment. Micky didn't even say his name. He reduced him to a slur.

I really, I've lost weight, Mickey. He just can't take this up personally. I mean, it sucks, but I mean it just shows, you know, he he was anti Semitic when it suited him, so I you know, and I wouldn't be his friend.

David's thinking, still trying to make sense of his subject. Twenty plus years after his death.

Somebody said to me that they listened to Mickey and what he said sounded great, made no sense at all. And you know, when you're somebody hero, you're more willing to give them a break.

Mickey and Linda's romance played out across a dozen countries in hotel rooms and hideouts and campgrounds. They were chasing the surf, living by their wits and getting away with it, stealing from the market for breakfast and dining with the Rothschilds for lunch. They did exactly as they pleased. Mickey thought this made them free, but Linda found out nothing is for free. Is there anything that you sort of took away from your relationship with Mickey when you reflect back on.

It, Yeah, I'd say it. I used to be very, very trusting, and I think now I really look at stuff twice or three times or four times, you know, to be sure. Yeah, it's a hard one to really go deep into that. It's like the love thing, you know, like what is it?

Linda says there was a moment in nineteen seventy six when she saw Micky clearly and could never unsee him. They were on the run from the FBI and Linda needed Mickey's help.

I get we were coming back from I think it was Kenya, and we flew into we were in Europe, and I was sick well. I couldn't hold anything down.

This was when they stopped in Germany and Mickey bought his dark green Mercedes camera van. They were on their way to France to disappear.

I was losing weight. I couldn't eat, it was throwing up every morning. And Mickey was not very sympathetic. It was like, you deal with your problem. He kept giving me this German Undenberg, which you take. It's if you've had a hangover and you've sick to your stomach, you down this stuff. It was horrible. He gave me a couple of those, and I was sicker and I said, this is not a hangover. I said, I'm pregnant because I was missing periods and you know, I knew the symptoms.

By being pregnant. Yeah, she was pregnant on the run and living in a camera van, and add to that, her passport had been stolen and Mickey wasn't there for her.

I was scared. I was scared, you know, because when that happens like that, you're on your own.

Man.

You know, you're not married, you're not in a house, you're on the road. You don't even have right id you were, you know, money. It's not an environment where you want to have a child. Come period. This was real, real scary.

And you couldn't raise a kid with Mickey if Mickey didn't want to raise a kid. No, Linda won't say exactly what happened with the baby, but she does tell me why Mickey didn't want a child. Clearly, a baby would have complicated their international surf bandit plans, but Mickey's reluctance to become a father came from a deeper, more tortured place.

Mickey was worried about a child, especially a girl, that she would be abused in the future by people trying to get back at him. And he even said, you know, he said, a boy, he said, I don't care, you know, let him get his ass kicked. You know, if a son would be like, okay, your turn now to figure it out. A daughter, he was like, very very worried. He said, some asshole is going to come along and fuck her and get her pregnant just to get back at me.

This makes Mickey seem truly sick, unless it was just his excuse. Linda broke up with Mickey for good in nineteen eighty, not long before Mickey was arrested. Linda went to Ireland and spent years living in a rusted out VW on a desolate beach, purging Mickey from her system. He visited her sometimes, but Ireland was too cold for him. He begged her to join him in South Africa.

Found the perfect right point Jeffrey's Bay Come Good movement. I was stuck. Love was gone. That wasn't love, but you know there was something fascination, Yeah, the fascination there, it is. The fascination was gone.

Mickey wanted to rekindle what they had, but Linda had reached her limit long ago.

I think I saw too much, you know, I was experiencing too much and I was done. You know, I wanted to just be calm. And it wasn't going to be New Zealand, and it wasn't going to be France, and it wasn't going to be Jeffrey's Bay.

Mickey put her through a lot. As exhilarating as their shared adventure was, it was exhausting. He was exhausting. For a long time, she'd believed they were pursuing freedom together. Then she realized he was only for himself. I'm gonna ask you to read this little passage at the end of your book and then sort of, you know, people can do what they want with it. I passed Linda a copy of her book, The Surf Sting. It's an account of her adventures with Mickey, Dora and Don Wilson,

She need reading? Is there the blue?

This is a passage that comes right at the end. It's set apart from the rest of the text in a larger typeface.

Mikola. She's beautiful, dark brown, curly hair, big brown eyes, almost gipsy looking, maybe a bit Italian. She's a young woman now speaks three languages, raised by a wealthy and prominent wine connoisseur. Does she serf? Maybe she definitely skis any pictures?

What for?

You might get lucky and meet her sometime? Any more questions? Nobody bothered to ask Mickey. I didn't have to I was there. It is what it is bittersweet.

It's bittersweet because the life she's just described. Mikola's life sounds wonderful in many ways, wherever she is, whoever she is. But I can't help thinking of all that Linda lost, sacrificed for Mickey's fear and selfishness that could make a person fall right out of love.

It wasn't about love. I don't think it ever was. Because love, what is love? I mean, what's the definition of love? You have to I mean, love can be different for everybody. I don't think it's something you can really say this is how it works, you know, because I love my husband. My husband is just the pickle, and I would have never had that with Mickey or don Period. I know that for sure.

Did you have other kids in your life?

No, but my husband has two boys. They're both very, very good, good kids. He raised them well. And it's funny because I think about if I had a kid with him, it would have been wonderful, you know, but life can bite you sometimes big time. It's funny too because my mom, when I told her, you know, she was so mad at me.

She said I.

Would have raised her. I would have raised my grandchild. And I said, Mom, it wasn't like that. I said, you couldn't just have her here because somebody would know who she was, you know, I said, it wouldn't.

This is Linda's regret that she believed Mickey bought in for a time to his dark view of the world. Back then she couldn't see beyond it, and now she has no daughter.

But it's okay.

It's all hard. Everything was fun and breezy and nice, and then that was the hard part. So you get slapped in the end. You know, in some way you'll pay. I paid the price. Not nice.

The promise of the Mickey and Linda adventure had been that it would all be free. They would travel and surf and not have to work. The lifestyle would be free and they would be free. But it didn't really turn out that way. So I was going to ask you, but I think you may have just answered this. What these adventures cost you.

I got from your daughter, Yeah, which would have been very amazing, you know, to have brought her here. But it's okay. She's fretet and easy.

Mickey paid to he went to prison, but he never grew up the way Linda did. He never had to. He continued to write her letters from the ends of the earth. Wherever he was. He referred to it as never never Land. Mickey will always represent the worst impulses of surf culture, the pull toward exclusion and xenophobia, But the surf media that fanned Mickey's legend has never forsaken him.

How hard is it to just say, Gee, this guy who died a long time ago, who was just a good surfer in the fifties. That's all he was, was a handsome guy who was a good surfer, said some really nasty, gross things that suggest really dark hatreds in his heart. Writer and surfer Dan Dwayne again, that question, to myself is right, what is the big deal? Why is it so hard to say that was kind of gross? Maybe we shouldn't worship that guy anymore. Why can't we

Surfing now is so much bigger than when Mickey was in his prime, and that Dan says is a good thing.

This is a global culture, and more and more it's in everybody culture in a kind of a beautiful way, Like that's better that way for it to be in everybody culture. I'm glad it's in everybody culture. I don't want to go back to when it's not in everybody culture. I didn't like it more that way.

And when I think of an everybody culture, I know that doesn't come from Mickey. It comes from a spunky fifteen year old who didn't let a few pineapples in the face get between her and the waves.

Oh no, back again.

Any objections you want me to reel off the whole list that I like to start?

How does on Mickey blamed Gidget for ruining Malibu? But I have to disagree. I think Mickey ruined Malibu by treating it like it belonged to him and trying to scare everyone else away. There's a thread that seems to lead from Kathy's identity and her family's history in Hollywood to the popularization of surfing and Mickey's vitriol about all of it, not to mention Mickey's SS leather trench coat and the swastika on his surfboard. Did he express specific frustration about Gidget.

Yeah, he didn't like the whole thing because it was the start. It threw everything up into the air and everybody had a look, you know, And he never liked her. He always had to of a racist attitude.

Because she was Jewish.

Yeah, and he used to like to throw that around. True.

The Gidget movie, with its daffy blonde starlet, isn't really what surfing's all about. But Gidget, the person, an intrepid Jewish girl who insisted that the guys on the beach except her, is the living proof that surfing doesn't belong to the guard Chapins and Mickey Dora's of the world.

That the women to the surfing community, which was really unheard of back then.

Former Malibu lifeguard Henry Ford, there are.

Very few women in those early days that came down and I think Gidget opened that up. Kathy opened that door for a lot of women, and women became part of the surfing community. And now almost any day you've had out in any of the surf spots that you'll see at least at least a third of the people in the water are women. Nowadays, maybe even more depending on where you are. So I think that it started with Kathy and those films and moving forward.

Mickey and Kathy were from the same world of European emigres. They met and found fame on the same beach in Malibu, riding the same waves. Mickey vanished and by disappearing became the most legendary surfer of all time. Kathy stayed put, but she was more or less forgotten after her reputation in the surf world was destroyed. Mickey said, Gidget was what was wrong with surfing, but finally people are starting to recognize that she represents what's right about it.

From that Gigan on having the California Serti Museum, we'd like in you this silver Server reward. So let's hear it from the gind.

That's jim Kempton again. Back in November twenty twenty two, the California Surf Museum honored Kathy with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to the surf industry.

I give you the one and only Kathy kohnor Zuckerman, aka the real Gidget.

They say, keep company with those that make me feel better, and how Honestly, this has been unbelievable.

Like me, like me, and really like me.

Gidget opened the door for women to surf. She gave them a template, an iconic figure they could relate to and try to imitate.

I loved Didgit the TV show as a kid like I always the Sally Field.

And even an accidental icon a twenty ten documentary about Kathy's life. Many professional female surfers credited the Gidget franchise with making surf a more welcoming sport for women to the sport.

I grew up seeing images of Gidget surfing on TV, and she's the only woman that I ever saw surfing on TV. And it never occurred to.

Me that girls didn't surf until I was a teenager and looked around in the lineup and saw that I was the only one.

You know.

I used to watch all those movies when I was a kid and just.

Like fantasize about the whole beach life.

And when I got to, you know, live at myself, it was awesome, you know. And without her, and without those movies, who know where surfing today would be.

That last voice belongs to Cassia Miador. She's one of the best long borders in the world and a surf mentor to me. A few times now, I've gone with Cassia and her friend Leah Dawson, another amazing longboarder, to spend a few days at Santa Nofre, that beach where Mickey learned to surf. It's a bunch of women surfing and camping and sitting around the fire pit. I don't think I've heard anyone mention Gidget, but she's there in

It was never going to be anything other than what's sort of happening now, which is come one, come.

All, surf historian Matt Warshaw.

Because being in the ocean, riding waves, talking about riding waves is a really fun, compelling, gorgeous thing to do, and why shouldn't everybody do it.

Kathy doesn't surf anymore. She and Marv walk every day, rain or shine, and often they go down to the beach. She likes to watch the surfers.

You know, my husband. I went to the jetty the other day and the water was like churning, and it was after the rain, and a guy comes in a wetsuit by himself, throws his backpack down on the sand and heads out to surf, and I was impressed with that because that's what it was about. He just went out for a ride. I want to ride, and I know what I'm doing, and that's you know what surfing to me is all about. Am I going to catch this one? Or am I going to hang back? Am

And a board and a board.

And you know, it doesn't have to be a fancy triple fin board. It can be a longboard, a short board, one fin, little rocker, no rocker, but it's you on the board in motion.

What Kathy's saying reminds me of the end of her father's novel, where Gidget sees a set rolling in and grabs her board and heads for the ocean, leaving a lot of drama with the big Kahuna and Moondoggie behind her. She cheers herself on. Shoot at Gidget, shoot the curl, and she does.

It's powerful.

Book, Yeah, it's powerful. So whatever you do, you can do it. Maybe that's a broader message, but there's something really fun about just getting a wave and peddling out. It just leave everything on the sand, you know.

The last line of the book is, maybe I was just a woman in love with a surfboard. It's as simple as that. Maybe it's always been that simple. Mickey brought so much drama to surfing, and he left a stain on the sport that has not yet been expunged. Gidget's true contribution to surf culture was overlooked for decades. She's not important because she helped make surfing popular. She's important because she made surfing accessible. The Ambassador of Aloha says,