2. Death in Mexico

Pushkin Hey, Lost Tails listeners, it's Dana. I wanted to let you know that you can hear the entire new season of Lost Hills ad free, along with other great binge listens by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus.

I first saw him in fifty six. I went out there and he was very dark, you know, dark tan, you know, he's just dark figure, a swarthy kind of guy. And I saw him out there on this board and he was all by himself. My brother Tom, Mickey Chapin, and that's what they called him back then. It wasn't Mickey do it was Mickey Chapin. Oh, that's Japin.

This is Danny Auburg again. He's talking about the first time he laid eyes on Mickey Dora. This was three years before he had his run in with Mickey in the water when Mickey refused to kick out of the wave and Danny nearly drowned. Danny used to hang out at the beach with his older brother Kemp, and Kemp was friends.

With Mickey for the first few years. I only knew him as Chapin, and that's because his stepdad was Guard Chapin, who was a very well known early surfer from the forties. For many years, my brother, they'd always talked about Chapin. I mean, Chapin did this, Chapin did that. And then all of a sudden, I remember distinctly. Oh no, his name's Dora. Now he's called himself Dora. Don't use Chapin,

This was something Mickey would do again and again, ease out of one identity into another, like a snake shedding its skin. He liked to keep everyone guessing, especially the cops. They couldn't catch him if they couldn't figure out who he was. When his stepfather, Guard was alive, Mickey had called himself Mickey Chapin spelled m I c K E Y like the mouse. The name was pure California surfer boy, almost wholesome. Then overnight when Guard died, Because Guard died,

The thing about Mickey and the facts of his life is that no one knows the truth.

This is David Renson. He wrote the definitive oral history of Mickey Dora. It's called All for a Few Perfect Waves.

And as I will tell you, I'm sure this will be a great podcast, but you will never find out the truth.

Even after doing hundreds of interviews about Mickey, David says he still finds Mickey unknowable.

And I need to read the part in my book where John Millius is saying, it's like Citizen Kane. You know just as much about Cain at the beginning as you do at the end. But it's a fabulous ride. It's a fabulous ride.

Mickey's contradictions start right at the moment of his birth. The ultimate Southern California beach god, was born in Budapest, Hungary, in nineteen thirty four. His mother, Ramona Stancliffe, was from California. She had just graduated from Beverly Hills High and was

Talk to this girl. Then they started flirting and she was enchanted. And Miklos has told me, he said, you know, you can't get with a girl in Hungary because they're too proper. But maybe I get lucky. And anyway, they spent a few months there and he I guess she did get pregnant, but hit it.

Ramona wrote a letter to her best friend back home, boasting about her adventures without mentioning her pregnancy.

She says, you'll never guess I'm married. I missus Miklostor, she's pregnant. He does the right thing, he marries her.

Ramona and Miklos Senor decided to bring young Mickey to California, a few months after he was born. Miklosch said it was because Ramona was sick of Europe and missed the malted milks at the drugstore counters in La. He really did not understand his new bride, but he agreed to emigrate. They arrived in La in January nineteen thirty five. Miklos Senior later credited the unplanned birth of his son Micky

Yeah, he'd sold some wines. I believe he worked at Victor Hugo's restaurant, But then you know it started his own little place, and it was on Sunset West, on the same side of the street as a Whiskey a Goo Goo up a few stores.

Little Hungary sat at the center of Golden Age Hollywood and was in particular a gathering place for European emigres. People like the actress and singer Marlena Dietrich and the director Billy Wilder hung out there. Ramona loved the glamour, maybe more than she loved the daily grind of parent I.

Guess, you know. She adored Mickey, but really was what's the word self indulgent, you know, wanted to connect with all the famous people that came into a little hungry.

There's a picture I've seen of Mickey with Ramona. He's about two years old and is wearing a little military type suit. She's ravishing, head tilted back, eyes closed like a starlet on a movie poster. He's kissing her cheek intently, holding onto her chin as if for dear life, and she looks like she's a million miles away.

So, you know, micklas was working all the time and Ramona was sleeping until the afternoon. I don't know if she was drinking. I mean, that's what happened to her later in life. She drank and ended up just tithing money to an I'm a TV evangelist, Mickey. I think it was a complex relationship for Mickey, you know, and carried on through all of his relationships with women, they want to nest, but he didn't want to nest.

Ramona definitely wasn't the nesting type. In nineteen thirty nine, she went to Las Vegas and filed for divorce from Miklosch.

Mickey.

Dora was definitely, unquestionably robbed of having a secure, comfortable childhood. There's a zero question about that.

This is the surf historian Matt Warshaw.

Mickey was born to this gorgeous alcoholic mother who married a Hungarian sort of gentleman, and the marriage I think was unhappy almost from the jump.

Mickey's parents just basically had nothing in common. Ramona was on a path to self destruction. Miklosch was an old world athlete, a wine connoisseur, an art lover, the epitome of the European gentleman. After the divorce, Ramona moved on quickly, and the person she found, Guard Chapin, was nothing like Miklosch. Guard was six foot one, buff a carpenter. People who knew him described him as a quote aryan blonde.

And Ramona almost right away started dating the hottest, the best surfer in California and possibly the world. Which didn't mean a whole lot in the nineteen forties because there weren't a whole.

Lot of us.

The problem with Guard Chapin was that he was a bully. According to his contemporaries, he was aggressive and narrow minded and always going on about who was or was not a jew. Miklos Senior thought he was a disaster. Miklos said. Guard thought laws were for his own protection, but didn't believe he had to abide by them as a grown man. Guard would steal from the ice cream vendor at the beach and think it funny. He was that guy. Guard took to fathering Mickey in an erratic, eccentric way. Mickey

Before the war, surfboards were mostly all wood. They were either hollow or solid wood, and they were mostly finless, and so there.

Wasn't much control.

Most of the early surfers didn't move around on the wave. They just went straight locked into a rigid statuesque stance.

A lot of it was.

Just standing up and looking good, just sort of holding your arms or your shoulders a certain way and just trying to look like you were in control.

Guard didn't do that. Guard was a charger. You do this move where he would drop to one knee and cut back toward the breaking part of the wave to pick up speed and momentum, then turn back toward the unbroken wave and fly.

If you're riding the right kind of wave and you're coming in at an angle and the wave's barely breaking, and you do a big swooping turn kind of back towards breaking a little bit more.

It's a cutback.

Ving to Matt, Guard invented the cutback. That's like in skiing being the person who invented the pole plant, and.

The surfers who were all around in the forties, there were the surfers that everyone sort of heard of, much more famous than Guard to a man, and it's all men say that Guard was the guy.

He was the high performance guy.

Guard surfed just like he lived on the edge of aggression, spoiling for a fight.

Guard Chapin knew how to turn his board ride high. He could literally surf past surfers, and as he was doing that, he'd beat, you know, yelling.

Abuse at everybody.

He just get out of here, coop coming through. And that was Guard Chapin.

He was.

He was the best surfer. He was the most aggressive surfer.

Guard was a regular at Santa Nofre, a long stretch of beach in Orange County where the waves are soft and crumbly and roll in one after the next. It was a community. The surfers made big bonfires and brought their ukuleles and slept on the beach. After Guard got together with Mickey's mom, Ramona, he started taking Mickey there and sometimes he just left him there to fend for himself. Mickey's nickname at Sano was Meatball. He was a sandy,

Just this, I mean, middle school age kid hanging around these older guys and going up the point to go serve a place called Trestles and stealing food to sort of he was hungry, and he was just sort of semi abandoned, having a great time, I think, having a huge adventure. But you know, then Guard would show up later on and say where's Mickey, and somebody would find him and off they'd go back up to La.

Over time, miklosch Mickey's father began to lose influence over his son. Miklos was busy at his restaurant Little Hungary, a reality that Guard seemed to make a mockery of. He would come into the restaurant, hot off the beach, Mickey in toe, shouting that his wife owned the place. Guard and his sidekick Mickey would storm into the kitchen and grab whatever food they wanted.

You know.

For his part, Miklos, who I get the feeling, was just sort of in over his head because again he's the one coming over from far away, and he was very handsome, sophisticated. He also loved the beach. But with Guard and with Ramona, Miklos still had the thick accent.

He can only be so sort of so cool.

Guard seemed determined to turn Mickey into an American boy. Over Miklos's objections, he forced Micky to get circumcised at the age of twelve. I wonder what kind of mockery Guard, a quote unquote arian and a xenophobe, subjected Mickey too. This dark, complexed child from Budapest whose father spoke heavily accented English. God was a carpenter and worked with a

Every now and then Micky would get in sort of a confessional mode and say, yeah, you know. Guard used to come home drunk, wake me up, and beat the shit out of me. There was a lot of famous surfers from that period in the forties and fifties who said all seemed to say the same thing, which was that they thought he was, you know, in their words, the living in when it came to surfing. But he was just someone that you want to do keep a distance from at a party, you know, especially as it

Was a monster.

Miklos Senior grew concerned that Mickey might be in danger and did the best thing he could think of at the time.

At one point, when Guard and Ramona were both being you know, sort of particularly bad parents, Miklos sent Mickey to a boarding school, and Mickey hated.

That Mickey was sent to Saint John's Military Academy, which was run by the Sisters of Mercy Nuns.

I do think that Miklos did that not as punishment. I think that he felt that Mickey, living with Guard and Ramona was in a situation that Mickey needed to be removed from.

Mickey wasn't cut out for military boarding school if a domineering, unpredictable stepfather had given him an uneasy relationship to authority a bunch of drill sergeants and nuns only intensive. Mickey was not a good boy at school. There's even a story of him putting fiberglass shavings from shaping a surfboard in the head nuns Cotex. Micky was about fourteen when

Guard was rear ended while waiting in a traffic light and broke his neck and he couldn't work and he couldn't surf for something like a year. He was in a lot of pain for the rest of his life, and that didn't help with his drinking, so he became a worse drunk and he would dry out and then go back to drinking.

Ramona and Guard broke up, and Ramona became a secretary downtown, living in hotels with various boyfriends. According to Mickey's half brother God and Ramona's son, Guard got addicted to codine, an absinthe that he smuggled in from Mexico. He was already a liability. Now he came fully unglued.

At some point he was down in Mexico, I think, fishing and trying to not drink, and then he was going to row a dinghy out to a friend's boat. And the dingy turned up the next day, and Guard's body turned up five days later. And it looks like he just had been drinking or something and fell off the boat or some kind of late night one man accident. Micky talked about it as if Guard knew too much about too many people and he was killed, you know,

True, but Mickey believed it, or said he did. He hinted at dark conspiracies. Micky told his friends that Guard knew too much about what he said. The state was somehow after him. It was all very mysterious. What's clear is that Mickey was not the same after Guard's death. He became more enigmatic, more paranoid, but he also started to seem much less like a California kid and more like a European dandy. Mickey was back in touch with his birth father, Miklosch, who had returned from South America

Dora did have this way of talking that apparently everybody at maliveryone else where would started emulating where you know, a lot of sort of hand gestures and a lot of there was sort of a pause in the way, and it wasn't He didn't talk like other surfers at all. There was none of that kind of California nasally thing that surfers do. You know. He talked in a sort of a precise way. Or if you see people in conversation, you'd see people doing these kind of gestures that Mickey did,

He was this really uneasy split between two very different fathers.

DV.

Divasentis, the film writer was fascinated by Mickey's two dads and how they shaped him.

He had Michlas as his birth father, who was this erudite, aristocratic, accomplished businessman, lover of the arts, expert of fine wine, and by all accounts, a real gentleman and a lovely man. And then you had Guard his stepfather, who is, you know, widely recognized to be a very very difficult, problematic person, and he was paranoid, He fought a lot, loved guns. He was a very angry man by all accounts. And

As a child, Mickey had been more or less abandoned. Ramona hadn't taken care of him, Miklosch hadn't either. Guard seemed to mostly nurture Mickey's weaknesses. I get the sense that Mickey grew up with this feeling of having been denied his birthright, the elegance and sophistication and air of wealth that clung to his father, and he was pissed. He used to doodle the word retribution on his drawings.

I think when it came to the criminal stuff, it's a synthesis.

Of the two.

It's the willingness to take a sucker from Guard, and it's the sophisticated way of doing it is for Michlas.

A few years before Gard's death, Mickey had stopped going down to Santa No Frey. He'd found a new spot, Malibu, a long right breaking wave that ran from the Malibu movie colony or the movie stores had their hideaways to Malibu pier a wave with no one on it. This is almost incomprehensible today when there can be fifty people in the water even on a mediocre day. Malibu is the most discovered of the discovered waves.

It was a wild beach. It was like actually out in the country. It was kind of like going to the outskirts, out into the country. You know, you go up and there's empty lots where the beach houses are now, and you wind up this road. It was just like an adventure. You know, you're going way out to Malibu.

You know, this is Danny Auburg again in the early fifties. He said, almost no one knew what surfing even was. He was just there to go fishing.

I had to sit there with a drop line and look across the cove and see these strange long things leaning against this fence, you know, this old bombed wire fence. I thought there are some kind of boats. I had no idea what they were. I wondered, what is that? And later I found out there were surf boards. By fifty six, it was a relatively unknown sport that came from Hawaii and people did it, but it wasn't generally non surfing.

What is that?

See people bobbing around out at see? Why are they doing that? And what are they waiting out there?

Here? At Malibu? Mickey would perfect what came to be known as the Malibu style, a laid backstance with knees slightly bent and shoulders loose. The graceful, and Mickey was the most graceful, could keep foot to the front of the board and ride the nose. It was the golden era of Malibu, a period Mickey would call the Vintage years or the Genesis period.

There was two guys that were sort of the kings of Malibu in this one really golden sort of period that Mickey thought of as the sort of the golden period in the nineteen.

Fifties, Matt Warshaw again and.

Mickey, the guy that kind of ruled in the water. And then Terry Tracy, who everyone knew was Tubesteak, ruled the beach. The two of them got along, okay, because they've each had their own little sort of fiefdom. But Tubesteak built this shack on the beach and he loved entertaining people. He was himself could be kind of cruel, but in general seemed to have a pretty big heart, and he was funny, and he liked a sort of old court and just sort.

Of keep everybody laughing.

And Nicky would sort of say hid everybody on his way out to go surf, and then usually Micky would just leave.

This was a scene Mickey in the water tubesteak in a shack on the beach, that a skinny, short teenager named Kathy Kohner discovered in the summer of nineteen fifty six.

He was a great surfer. He was a great surfer. I mean you could pick him if you looked outside, you could pick him up in a lineup. He was span he had hand gestures. I don't know if anybody's gold us, Ah, my name is Miki Dora. He'd go like that.

Kathy's arrival herald at the end of the Golden Era. In Mickey's view, it ushered in a period of dry rot. You may have heard about Kathy. She became the world's most famous surfer. To nonsurfers, she's probably still the world's most famous surfer. But you don't know her as Kathy. You'd know her by the nickname the guys on the beach gave her. It's a little offensive, but it was the fifties.

Girl and midget a kitchen.

Mickey's world. The surf world would never be the same. Next time on Lost Hills, the guys at Malibu are in for a surprise.

The boo Malibu gets good once a summer, and it got good. It got bitchen brother. Was I ever Jazz? I was writing four footers and lining all the way across into the bay. I really had a ball and looked better. I still miss having a boyfriend, but everything happens for the best, and I'll die being an old maid. But it's a grand life. And I think that's a really good, a really good piece of writing from my diary.

That's next in episode three, Gidget goes to Hollywood, Part one. Lost Tails is written and reported by Me Dana Goodyear. It's created by me and Benadere and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can binge the entire season right now ad free. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Tail show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus