3. Gidget Goes to Hollywood, Pt1

Pushkin. Hey, Lost Hills 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'm at Duke's Restaurant in Malibu. It's perched on the rocks right above

Hey, we're here to interview Kathy Kathy khonor.

She's a hostess.

Yeah, Gidget.

Cool.

Thanks. Gidget's real name is Kathy Kohener Zuckerman. The summer of nineteen fifty six, when she was fifteen, she hung out at the beach in Malibu. She befriended Mickey, Dora and Tube Steak, who was later given the name The Big Kahuna. She fell in love, but most of all, she learned to surf, and her stories became the basis for the original Gidget, a novel written by Frederick Khoner her Dad. It's hard to overstate the cultural impact of Gidget.

What in the world is a Gidget? It's a girl, a cuddling, befuddling teen who set out to find her a man of her own and found seven seven young beach combers with a single thought to enjoy life and love without working. Meet Kahuna Leaves.

Sequels follow Gidget goes to Hawaiian, Gidget goes to Rome, Gidget grows up, Gidget gets married, Gidgets Summer Reunion. It was also a TV show starring a then unknown Sally Field as Gidget. Today, Kathy works as a kind of informal celebrity host at Duke's. She seats Steiner's, chats with them, and signs copies of the Gidget novel. Around the corner from reception, there's a wall with some old photos of Kathy, including one of her with Mickey Dora.

Oh wow, look at this.

That's Kathy and Mickey.

There's sort of a pack of dudes in the background. And blurt out, Oh, here she comes. She's got a cute little flower in her hair. The person coming toward me is tiny, with a big, warm smile and a bunch of chunky necklaces around her neck. This is the person, Mickey Dora says ruined Malibu. She's eighty two and vibrant, and I'll just say she doesn't feel much like a villain to me.

I just do high finance here because somebody made me a couple of really great photos of me, went at the shack and went so I love.

Kathy, says she sometimes sells photos of herself as a teenager on the beach in Malibu to Duke's customers.

It just always hustling. No, I love mine. Yes, you know. So that's the shack. That's amazing. That's the original shock. You know, the board the big Mahuna lived. I mean that's he was called Khuna, by the way, but he lived in that shack. So that's me in front.

Of the check Kathy. Shift is over and the plan is for me to give her a ride back to her house in the Palisades. Okay, okay, let's you.

Want to go.

Yeah, so we'll let you home. Thank you. I have to clock off. Okay, bye, everybody, see you tomorrow. Bye, thank you, thank you. Why didn't you come around to the passenger side in the front.

As we head out of Malibu on Pacific Coast Highway, we start talking about what it was like for her when the Gidget movie came out in nineteen fifty nine.

When you're in.

College and the movie comes out, did people start to recognize you?

And I know you weren't and nobody recognizes me, But did they make the connection between you and this famous movie? Well, it wasn't famous when it came out. And I saw it at the White Side Theater in Corvallis, Oregon, and I wish you'd slow down a bit on and I thought it was you know, it was like, oh my god, this is a movie about my life at Malibu. You know, obviously based on the book that my dead wrote.

Surfing, Kathy says, is completely different now from when she was a kid.

When I was surfing, there were no contests, no surf music, no surf clothing. It was all That's what I loved so much about it was. It was way off dead center. I was the tomboy, you know, I was. You know, the kids would write in my annual when I graduated, good luck with your water skiing. You know, they didn't know what surfing was. You know.

With the phenomenal success at Gidget, the weird little boho scene that was happening on the beach in Malibu became instantly pop culture. Malibu got overrun. Mickey was furious and in his mind, in the minds of all those dudes who worshiped the ground, Mickey walked on. Gidget became the one who ruined everything. I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills Episode three, Gidget Goes to Hollywood, Part one.

I believe Gidget was the trailblazer.

Yes, Gidget ushered in the era of surfing as a pop culture phenomenon.

Well, the thing is.

Thrill is surfboarding.

The art of surfboarding is part of a Hawaiian culture, surf movies, and then you got beach blanket bingo, Ride the Wild surf. You know Elvis Presley movieses b a net Funicello because people say, oh, you're a net Funicello, Like, no.

Take a look at those waves out there.

Well, you know there's nothing out there, but you see the sky, you make it sound good. And I actually never watched any of those beach movies. I didn't ever watch a Frankly Avalon muscle Beach Party. I don't even know the names of them.

Ah, this is the life.

How did he son the serf?

This is it surf music. It's the beach boys.

Let's surfing now.

Everybody's learning now surf competitions and a good cutback that time by Donald Takeyama surf brands. There was no leashes, there was no wetsuits. There was no merchandising. I mean, who'd heard of surf clothing or Roxy or Quicksilver, rip Curler, hurlier, any of these things you know we're seeing today some of the world's finess. Serv Serving became a business.

Looking for a seven Conday.

Before Gidget, there was just the waves and the beach and the birds and a few stray humans doing something very few people would credit as worthwhile. The early California surfers were iconoclasts. Some of them were teenagers ditching school. Some of them were disillusioned veterans of the Second World War. All of them were rejecting the clean cut, dutiful stereotypes of the era.

I mean, even if you were a surfer, your parents wanted to go to school, but we would rather go surfing. So we were kind of outcast, would be the best way of putting it looked at differently.

This is Henry Ford, another early surfer who became a lifeguard at Malibu.

You probably weren't working as much as other people because you were bitten by the werewolf, as we call surfing surfing bidtis.

And it's like you, once you're bitten, you're stuck with it. You know.

Malibu has a number of surf spots, but when people say Malibu, they're usually talking about surf right or beach. It's a beautiful wave that peals slowly to the right instead of breaking all at once. Malibu is so consistent. Surfers call it the machine or the conveyor belt. That green unbroken water that was Mickey's canvas.

Malibu had a perfect right point. It's kind of like manufactured wave. If you looked at it, there were perfect and it was the right hand point break and it was put in the right place where the wind would blow down the coast, and so it just it offered everything, good waves, good conditions, and unknown at that time because there were nobody else surfing.

You'd drive by there, you'd see six people out. That would be it. That would be a big day. In those early.

Years, Malibu was secluded, a private paradise. There were movie stars living in the Malibu Movie Colony, a group of houses clustered at one end of Surf Beach.

There wasn't like a crowd that hung there every day.

Uh.

You know, there were a few movie stars that would come down there in those early days, guys like Peter Lawford, Richard Jacob.

Other than that, there were a bunch of misfits.

It was you know these characters, you know, they're they were different because they were they were like the Old West or something. There were you know, there's a freedom because they were away from any kind of society.

You know.

They once they entered the Malibu Beach, it was their domain.

Here's Denny Auburg again, the surfer who started going to Malibu in the fifties, tagging along with his older brother Kemp.

So you got down there and you saw all these different kinds of characters. They dressed like one guy just found it an old uh beaver coat that that washed up on the beach and that became his surfing coat. Full of holes. Monthy just people wore army jackets. It was kind of like improvisation. There's no technology for surfing. People roping their board on their car was rope, you know, there's no special wetsues, no wetsues. And he cut off jeans. You know, a lot of people just cut off jeans

The characters at Malibu were basically beatnicks and dropouts. Some of them were what we would now think of as homeless. At the start of the summer of nineteen fifty six, one of them, Terry Tracy aka Tube Steak aka the Big Kahuna, decided he was just going to live on

I love your house.

What year is it?

Belt?

I love my house too. It's a fifteenth. It's so great.

You don't see too many houses that our original watch us anymore in this neighborhood.

It's got a very.

Kind of like.

This is so sure, Oh my gosh.

Kathy leads me into a back bedroom, which looks like a museum of nineteen fifties girl hood. She opens a drawer and a bedside table and pulls out two old books, which she clutches to her chest.

So these are the truths, Dana, These are my diary pages. Oh okay, Oh my God. Now she's like, oh, look at those look at your sweet Oh. I had to wroke up where I wrote about Mickey Dora. Of course I wrote it down. I can't find the oh here.

Just oh my god, that's so great, amazing, amazing, amazing.

I just love the way they look. To My Wonderful Year Gidgets diaries. The covers are faded pastel, pink and green, and the spines are splitting apart with age. One of them shows a boy and a girl holding hands. My Wonderful Year is written in bubbly lowercase script. These are basically the golden tablets of the surf religion. This is where Kathy recorded everything that happened in the summer of nineteen fifty six when she learned to surf in Malibu.

I have written down in the diary the first day I went surfing, and I'm happy to read it to you. Of that June twenty fourth, nineteen fifty six, Sunday, Dear Diary, I didn't do too much but go to the beach. I didn't think i'd have fun, but I met Matt and he took me out on his surfboard. He let me catch the waves by myself and once I flew off and the board went flying in the air, I didn't get hurt at all. He also rode the waves with me. Then I rode the board in alone. The

Kathy lived about fifteen miles away in Brentwood, but her parents were out doorsy and they loved the beach, so she'd been going to Malibu since she was a baby. She was aware of surfing.

So there was a group of guys, you know, from nineteen forty eight or so that my mom used to take a couple of those guys to the beach to Malibu and took the boards in the Rumble Sea. So my earliest recollection of those boards were when you know, it was eight or nine years old. But we always went to Malibu, so I didn't stumble upon them. I saw them. I knew where they were. Usually they were in the pit. I remember them in the pit. That's when that was called the pit.

The pit was a spot in the sand along the wall by the entrance to the beach. It was where the cool kids hung out.

The pit seemed to be more hardcore surfers men's club, you know, all about testosterone. I mean a lot of them had nicknames. So there was some he called the Fencer, uh, the Kahuna, quick Higgye. Frank Higginson was called quick Kigge. Well, see Mickey was called to quet.

The scene at the pit could be intimidating. Here's Danny Auburg again. He surfed with Mickey.

Everybody would laugh and they everybody sit in the pit. You know, was this area where kind of the bigger names, you know, the n crowd would sit and surfers had to walk through that pit and be scrutinized, you know, like little beginners, and they throw pebbles at the board or yell something just to kind of asslem a little bit, you know, a.

Little farther up the beach was the shack where Terry tube Steak Tracy lived.

Tube Steak Tracy, who was the leader of the pack. But people would hang around his shack and old beat up couches.

You know.

They just dragged down an old car seat and lay it on the beach or an old chair, and it was very primitive. You know, and he had this. He would come out of his grass shack and you're spending the night, and I am the kahuna. You know.

It was funny, the big Kahuna ruled the beach.

In fact, he would say in Malibu on the beach, it's me in the water, it's Mickey Dora.

This was way before contests and rankings, but no one had to measure Mickey's dominance. It was self evident.

You know, he was king of the water, you know. And that's and surfing. It wasn't because you won something. It was nothing to win. It's a funny sport. It was just it was all by reputation.

You know.

It had a lot to do with the way your style on the water. Now you just you did something magnificent, but you didn't really win a contest, but the reputation would grow because you just looked beautiful on a wave. People would notice that you just rode that wave so well. I mean, the wave's over, is nothing left to show for it unless it's on. But people would remember. They'd be their hero, you know, like they'd idolize these people that were so good. It's a funny sport like that.

Of course, Kathy noticed Mickey. Everyone did you know?

He was dark and dark skin, dark hair, white trunks. I think I remember white trunks. 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 fantastic. He had hand gestures. I don't know if anybody's God, my name is Micky Tora. He'd go like that.

Mickey makes frequent cameos in Kathy's diaries.

Jazzed on Mickey. He didn't kiss me though. We drove into Palmdale, where Mickey went to meet these people who were going to take him to Mammoth God. I wanted to go so badly. I came home, I found a letter waiting for me from Dick. I called up Bill and he told me that he Lester and Jesse and Tube Tubs Sake, we're all going to Mammoth that night. I called up Jesse, but he had already left. Skiing was a big deal. I am completely jazzed, and I

Kathy was, in her own description, completely boy crazy and very sporty. She didn't want to spend all day at the movies like the other girl. She knew she wanted to have adventures.

So Mickey would come over to the house and play ping pong. He would take me to the ski slips and I found it where he'd have me climb up the rope toe, so he didn't want to pay for a ski whip ticket.

Mammoth Mountain was only a few hundred miles north in Mono County.

Mickey was a good skier, so Mickey would take me, and I wrote it, let's see, well, I didn't go to school today, but instead I went skiing. Mickey's friends picked me up at seven to ten on the corner of Bundy and Coin. Fantastic weather, only no snow. God. We drove to Moonridge, where we spent the day on a dripping rope toe. What a fiasco. Mickey came with us. All he did was ski up and down the rope toe. He left around four, and Mickey had some beer and

Kathy lived a safe, comfortable, conventional life, but she hadn't really found her people. Strange as it sounds, she felt more at home at the beach.

I did not like going to school, so I didn't really enjoy high school. Girly girly things. Had a couple of great English teachers that I remembered liking, but I didn't have a boyfriend in high school. I just always liked boys. Most of them were from the beach. I found the place that I always wanted to go to was Malibu because I felt that I had a little community there, like cheers. You know, everybody knows my name. Well,

Kathy was inspired by what she saw going on around her, inspired to serve but also to document it.

I think that the pinnacle was the guy that lived in a shack at the beach. I thought, whoa, this is kind of interesting, so I thought, yeah, I thought, wow, I'd like to write a story about this guy who lives in a shack all summer. You know, doesn't he have a mummy and daddy? You know, doesn't he have a car.

Kathy's father, Frederick Kohner, was a screenwriter.

So I remember my dad would pick me up in the dino ful buick and I sat next to him in the car, and I said, I'd like to write a story about what's going on in Malibu. You tell me, I'll write the story for you. And he did. He wrote Kitchen.

Kathy's memories of those days in Malibu are now part of the collective unconscious. But there's another story one she does not like to tell about a side of Mickey, Dora and her surf friends. She'd probably rather she did not know.

Please, no tourist, Kahuna, Hey Francis, no tour She's got a real yend to pick up on servant.

That gidget.

Gidget. Oh wait, wait a minute, fellas, look look me on the gag too.

Huh, Well, you see it's right there through osmos.

Yeah, girl, and midget a Gidget.

That's a scene from the original nineteen fifty nine Gidget movie. It captures the teasing Kathy endured, the playful side of it anyway. Kathy Kohner's diaries are like Kathy, full of sunshine and optimism. She loves that she was she is Gidget. Through Gidget, she gets to relive the thrills of her adolescence every single day.

One entry captures the language and the world of Malibu. This is from Gidget's diary the Boo Malibu gets good once a summer, and it got good. It got bitchin. Brother, Was I ever jazzed? I was riding four footers and lining all the way across into the bay. Brother, was I ever stoked? It was so bitchin I couldn't believe it. No kooks were out in the water, and it was practically open door all the way. I took gas a

The Gidget story is one of triumph. A bubbly tomboy stumbles on a scene full of quirky surfer guys, falls in love, gets her heartbroken, and learns to surf. It's a classic teen coming of age story with a refreshingly feminist take. It's a winning narrative so powerful that it's taken Kathy most of her lifetime to awaken to some of the other dynamics that were at play in Malibu.

Well, it wasn't welcoming for me all the time. It wasn't right away. Oh she's so cute, you know, she can serve. No, I had to surf. I had to prove. And I and one of those photo that I think you saw me surfing, a really good one where I'm wearing trunks. Now those trunks, I'm aware that I wanted to look like a boy. I wanted surf trunks. You couldn't find surf trunks at Henshe's department store, Pennies Departments, or Miss California or whoever made bathing suits at the time.

The guys did not accept her right away.

Well, they did haze me a bit. You know, they gave me a rough time. You know. Sometimes they disconnected the distributor to my car so I couldn't go home. You know, they threw a pineapple in my face. Said, you know, you're bothering me. You're still breathing.

As she revisits the diaries, she's confronted with the harshness of this treatment. Her collaborator, Ken, who's helping her transcribe the pages, is sometimes shocked by what he reads.

Ken would look at the diary pages and said, oh my god, they threw a pineapple in your face and you just like, h you know whatever.

Mickey Dora deeply resented Gidget, Gidget the book, Gidget, the movie franchise, Gidget, the TV show, Gidget, the cultural juggernaut. He referred to the period around when the first movie came out in nineteen fifty nine as the dry Rot Era. He was not too charitable about Gidget the person either, never mind that he took her to Mammoth or played ping pong at her house. This is what he wrote to a journalist who was working on a story about Kathy. Quote.

I've never even saw that saw.

Did it?

Yeah?

Is it bad shit?

Is it disaster? It's a new erything.

And everyone holds me responsible when people will connect me somehow, So all lies. I had nothing to do with these people. They all hated me. Unbelievable. I only rode waves. And now that's the longing you did. It's hard hard to believe. So I get all this propaganda, bad press.

And Jesus Christ.

Do you remember some of your friends, including Mickey and some others, being there and working as extras.

Mickey was the extra. He served for James darn He had great hand gestures. People mimicked him. People mimicked him a lot. And I didn't know much about what happened to Mickey after I left Malibu, because you know, we got it. He's a bad boy.

Kathy remembers one thing Mickey used to say to her all the time, the classic warning from a local to a kook to stay off his wave.

Don't drop in on me, Gidget.

Don't drop in on me.

I won't make it. I won't, I promise.

Kathy went to college in Oregon, and when she came back to Malibu a year after the movie came out, it was a different place when you.

Came back here. Had Malibu already changed? Yes, when I came back, Malibu had changed. Malibu was crowded.

At Malibu, the Gidget effect was palpable. All of a sudden, there were hundreds of non surfers in the water trying to surf, oblivious of what they were jumping into. Gidget had definitely dropped in on Mickey metaphorically, and an army of wannabe gidgets were doing it literally. To Malibu locals, surfing was a rite of passage, not a fad you picked up from watching a movie. Henry Ford, the early Malibu lifeguard.

You had to kind of fit into that waterman mentality. You had to be able to swim, dive, how to read the water, read the ocean. Watermen were very important, and that's I think the early surfers would be termed watermen.

There was a culture clash, Henry says, between those he calls the pure surfers and the cum latelies who had essentially been inspired by Gidget.

What's the pure surfer?

The guy who's committed to it. Whether he works or not, is not that important. It's just the fact the commitment to it, commitment to it being a discipline, something that you believe in, something that you love, and you've got to figure that on some days, you're paddling out the water's fifty five degrees, maybe fifty eight degrees. You don't have a wet suit, you don't have a leash, you have one hundred and twenty pound board, and you love it and you cannot get enough of it.

Malibu was being invaded by outsiders.

When these other kids came over that just showed up in were in everybody's way. That made it difficult.

Henry was hired to work at Malibu right when the crowds were getting out of control. Because the crowds were getting out of control.

You had to have somebody there to help control it.

Because now what was happening where people who were trying to learn how to surf join into these people who have made this.

Their lifestyle or developed their own culture.

So these people that were coming in after seeing each Bingo party, Gidget the.

Movie, these people are what surfers call kooks. We've talked about this word. I asked Henry to give me his definition.

It would be someone who just learning how to surf.

And they called them cowboys from the other side over there on the inland side. The valley group Malibu belonged to those locals.

That's pretty much the name of the game.

So you can imagine what it'd be like if you were down there, and you were at that beach every day, then all of a sudden, there's fifty to one hundred guys there with new boards.

And really kind of rubbing.

The nose of the guy who's been there for years.

So were there actual physical fights? Was it name calling?

Was there just Oh, there was everything you could imagine. Flattened tires. If you went to the surf break and nobody knew who you were, they flat in your tires. I mean, there was all kinds of crazy stuff that went on in the water. Was dangerous because the guys that were learning how to surf had no concept, they had no I guess manners. They had not been taught the culture, they had not been taught what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. And there were a lot of injuries.

No one was more pissed off by all these kooks than Mickey Dora.

His area was invaded, that was his spot. I mean it became a little bit more contentious. Its separated the guys that could serve, who have spent their lives surfing, who invested their soul into surfing, and all of a sudden you got people coming over there and driving around with boards on their car, saying their surfers when they're really not. So it was hard for all of us, not just for Mickey. It was for all of us, but Mickey was probably the most outspoken.

Do you think Mickey successfully scared some of them off?

Oh yeah, I guarantee you. I guarantee you.

Once upon a time, Mickey and Gidget had been friendly, but he turned her into a scapegoat for everything he hated about what Malibu became.

He would have been, gosh, ten or fifteen years older than her. She was really young when she was down there.

Matt Warshaw, surf historian.

You see photos of them when Kathy was still on the beach at Malibu, and they're standing sort of next to each other, sort of like a brother sister thing almost, So there are pictures of the two of them, and there's no beef at that point. I think the beef comes later after everybody has decided collectively that Gidget room and surfing. And when I say Gidget, I mean the movie in the book, and then you follow the trail

But because Kathy was Kathy and her family was who they were, that anger took a particularly vile form. Next time on Lost Hills.

And had there been a swastik on the driveway or no swastik on the driver, we just kind of like it was not a big We kind of didn't want to deal with something like that, so we just kind of like, who cares, you know, you want to throw my board over the fence. So I had a drive, I mean I had a drive to want to learn how to surf, to prove it to you know, maybe to myself, but to the guys that I could be just one. I could surf too. I'm gonna surf.

That's next in episode four, Gidget Goes to Hollywood, Part two. Lost Hills is written and reported by Me Dana Goodyear. It's created by me and Ben Adair and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can hear the whole season ad free. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus