Pushkin Hey, Lost Tails listeners, it's Dana. I wanted to let you know that you can hear the entire new season of Lost Hill's 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. The Gidget movie came out in the spring of nineteen fifty nine.
Gidget is the story of a young, blonde teenage Gallow spends a fabulous summer at Malibu Beach with the surfboarders. Of course, you know, Gidget was a very big best seller, and they made it into a tremendous motion picture in color and in Cinema Scope.
It starred a sixteen year old Sondra d as Gidget him it's such fun living in California and being able to pick fresh flowers for my hair. Sondra D was tiny and blonde, the Hollywood version of the all American girl in the movie. Gidget's real name was Francis Lawrence, not Kathy Khner, and she had a bland American mom and dad right out of a fifty sitcom. But the real Gidget had a family that was much more layered. They were European and Jewish, and for what it's worth,
Kathy had dark hair. In the early thirties, Kathy's father, Frederick Kohner, had been a screenwriter in Berlin. His first film premier, Justice Hitler was declaring a boycott on Jewish businesses. Here's Kathy.
They took his name off the screen credit for a movie that did not show very long by Stefan Sweike, The Burning Secret. And he had a pen name because when he died we looked, you know, they came across the name called Alex Bang. So he had a pseudonym.
Was that to disguise his Jewish?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, that was.
Difficult period in the time.
Gidget's dad, Frederick, made its way to Los Angeles and continued writing movies. In nineteen thirty nine, he was nominated for an Academy Award. Two years later, Kathy was born. The family lived in La till the mid fifties, when Frederick took a job in Berlin. When they got back, Kathy didn't know where she fit in.
We'd lived in Berlin for a year and a half when I was thirteen and fourteen.
I came home and.
I really you know, I'd missed out on the junior high school graduation and sticking with the girls, and so when I came back, I was a little bit where's my place? And then the folks, you know, you got to come to Malibu with us. You know you're not going to go to a movie theater on a Saturday afternoon, the Bruin Theater in Westwood Village. Yeah, you're gonna come. So it was sort of like, okay, but I'm going to learn how to I'm gonna do this.
Frederick saw potential in Kathy's stories of a Malibu surf scene right away.
I don't really know what he was working on, but he hit on when he decided, I'm going to take what Kathy's telling me.
I'm going to write a book. And so he wrote that book in three weeks. He wrote Gidget in three weeks.
Kathy's uncle, Frederick's older brother, Paul Kohner, was a famous Hollywood agent, so Frederick took the manuscript to him to see what he thought of it.
And I remember Uncle Paul like, well, I what is this?
You know, maybe this would be a good story for reader's ditches.
See.
You know it was so different that even though Malibu was twenty minutes from the house, it was.
A world away.
It was a world apart.
A teenage love story set among the surfing beatnicks of Malibu didn't appeal to Uncle Paul. He encouraged Frederick to shop it around.
I remember when a phone call came to my dad. It was around dinnertime, and my dad got off the phone and he said, this agent in at William Morris just thinks he said, mister Corner, you have hit the jackpot.
Soon, Hollywood scouts would show up in Malibu looking for locations to film beach movies and actual bonafide surfers to do the stunts. Mickey Dora would be right there, auditioning for roles and getting paid handsomely. Friends of his told me it was actually the only honest money he made in his whole life, and he was still getting residual checks into his old age. But he also claimed to hate Hollywood and everyone who worked in the business or
had a connection to it. About his work on the Gidget movie, he said, quote, my only regret is that I did not torch Gidget's palm Loveshack with that phony Fuffuni and all the rest of the cast and crew inside. What a glorious emu oven it would have made. We could have had a kama Aina luau with Hollywood Long
Pig as the main course. It's pretty gross, especially when you consider Kathy was from a family of Eastern European immigrants who helped create the film industry in Hollywood, and Mickey Dora while he was the son of an Eastern European immigrant who came to Hollywood to make it. The two families, the Kohners and the Doros, had both escaped the rise of fascism in Europe for a better life
in California. They shared roots, and as I discovered, they shared a specific history in Los Angeles at the Dawn of Hollywood. I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, Episode four, Gidget Goes to Hollywood, Part two. You can't tell the story of Hollywood about the story of the Khner family, especially Gidget's uncle Paul Koner, her father Frederick's older brother. He was a producer turned agent who helped
define the Golden Age of Hollywood. This is Gidget's cousin, Paul's son He's a writer, director and producer.
I'm Pancho Conor. I was born here in Los Angeles four years ago.
Paul Koner, Poncho's father, had first come to Los Angeles in the nineteen twenties to work for Carl Lemley, the founder of Universal Studios.
My dad was the eldest of three brothers from Czechoslovakia, small town in Bohemia, which was German speaking Czechoslovakia.
After Paul, there was Frederick Gidget's father. Their youngest brother was Walter.
My grandfather Julius Khoner and templets. He had a cinema theater and he also published monthly Film Journal magazine.
When Paul was eighteen, Julius asked him to do an interview with Carl Lemley, who was visiting.
The area, and Lemley took a liking to him and hired him to come to America.
Your Coner grandfather had a nickname. That is it Kainokoner.
Corner Quino is a movie theater. People were nicknamed by what their profession was. My father here was nicknamed Phoner Coner because he was always on the phone.
In Los Angeles, Paul met the Mexican actress Lupeita Tavar.
My mother was Mexican. She was born in Wahaca, in the southern part of the state, outdoor plumbing dirt floores. The eldest of nine children.
Lupita was discovered in Mexico by an American director, Robert Flaherty, the inventor of the feature length documentary film. Lupita was given a contract at Fox Studios in Hollywood and became a silent movie star. But soon the silent era was over, and that was problematic for a Spanish speaking actress, and.
They weren't going to renew her contract. But the people at Fox sent her over to Universal where they were pictures into Spanish, and that's where she met my father, and it was sort of love at first sight. She did three nights dubbing and didn't know what to do and was going to go back to Mexico, but first she wisely went back to say goodbye to that nice man, Paul Corner, who said, give me twenty four hours. And he went to Lemley and said, we're wasting half the
studio here. At six o'clock he turned off the lights till six in the morning. We should bring in another crew. Spanish speaking actors and shoot the same film in Spanish. It'll cost peanuts because we use all the same everything, And Lemley said, fantastic, do it. And my father said, there's an actress here thinking of going back to Mexico, and Lemley said, well, sign her two a year's contract right away.
One of the first big talkies at Universal was a horror film that became iconic, I Am Not Cumor. During the day they shot Bela Lugosi. At night they filmed the Spanish version of Dracula, with Ponto's mother, Lupita, playing the female lead. Paul supervised the film, and two.
Years later they got married in Czechoslovakia.
Paul and his new bride decided to stay in Europe and make films. They moved to Berlin, where the political situation was taking a dark turn in the early thirties. When Paul and Lupita were living there, Hitler was consolidating power, ultimately declaring himself Furor of the German Reich in nineteen thirty four.
My mother was Catholic and my father was Jewish, but he had an American passports, so he was fairly safe. But they were not allowed to live together a gentile and a Jew, so they had to move constantly. I have a letter from authorizing the accounting department to pay my father a bonus for living in Berlin in hazardous times. As they said, danger pay yes. They used to travel to Paris and to London for the opening of the films they were making.
Because of their work and Paul's American passport, Paul and Lupita could travel freely, so they became smugglers, helping friends and family move money to the West.
My mother describes how she used to carry jewelry in jars of cold cream or in her knitting in a role of knitting. She would hide cash and valuables to smuggle this stuff out for friends.
It seemed to work until one day Paul and Lupita were stopped at the German Czech border. They were taken off the train and were about to be strip searched. Paul ran back on the train and saying he had forgotten his suitcase and got rid of a wad of cash he was carrying, so he threw.
That bot of cash under an empty seat somewhere. Looked like he was going to be a problem, except my father loved to be photographed with personalities, with important people, and in his briefcase he had a photograph of himself with the Heish Marshal, the air Minister, shaking hands. And when they saw that, he said, ah, why didn't you tell us? And he said, we can call him at his home if you'd like il vouch for me. They said no, it's all right. So they let them go, but.
Clearly someone had reported them for smuggling. It wasn't safe to go back to Berlin. They had to escape, so.
Through Switzerland they went to Paris for six months. The news was worse and worse from what they heard from refugees in Paris, and so they finally took a book and came back to America.
After Paul and Lupita returned to Los Angeles in nineteen thirty five, Paul changed course and became a talent agent.
It was a very successful agent of what they called a boutique agency. Didn't have a lot of clients. It was one big family. All of these clients were over at the house all the time, Sunday's dinner parties. These are it was a family affair.
His clients were some of the biggest movie stars of the time, John Houston, Henry Fonda, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner.
My sister and I used to put on puppet shows for Lana's daughter's birthday.
But Paul specialized in the European emigres. Billy Wilder, Marlena dietrich ingmar Bergmann.
Any with an accent was a client of the Koner Agency. They understood each other. They were a tight knit group.
The late thirties brought a flood of Europeans into Hollywood, many of them refugees from Nazi oppression. They flocked to the Coner Agency.
When anyone who came to Hollywood would go straight to nine point sixty nine Sunset Boulevard because that was a European refuge My father spoke their languages and got them jobs.
The Coner Agency became a salon for the Emigray film community.
His office on Sunset Boulevard is an Art Deco small building with large offices, and there's an Oval office in the Oval entry room with couches, and that's where these Europeans actors out of work would hang out would be And then the afternoon, my father's right hand as secretary also grown up in Berlin, there would be a coffee clutch. She would have pastries from poopies and coffee, and that was the meeting place for many of these European actors, writers.
Direct They discussed the news from Europe endlessly and it was always horrible.
Through the snow, the legions of occupation march into Czechoslovakia. This rapid stroke, which has outraged all freedom loving nations of the world, is carried out with military executitue.
In nineteen thirty eight, the Nazis took over the part of Czechoslovakia that included Tapletz, the Koner's hometown.
My grandmother Helena didn't want to leave because they were still uncles Nansen, until finally the situation became untenable and the Nazis were in tablets and she made a phone call saying get me out.
Paul Koner was exceptionally well connected. One of his friends was the eldest son of President Franklin D. And Eleanor Roosevelt. With his help, they were able to get Helena out of Europe.
The rest of the family parish were sent to Terrasine Camp and other camps.
Back in Los Angeles. The emigreve film community realized that the situation was dire and the US government was making it harder for refugees to immigrate. Paul and Frederick Kohner, along with Billy Wilder and Marlena Dietrich, decided they needed to do something to help their friends who were trapped in Europe.
In order to get here, they had to have the visas, they had to have proof of financial support that they wouldn't be a burden on the United States. So my father had to get to Affi. David's offers of work are from the various studios of various employers round town and so financially my father was part of the group that started the European Film Fund.
The Khoner saved some sixty people Jews from Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in La The new refugees joined the tight knit Emigree community, and when they weren't hanging out at the Koner Agency eating pastries, they were at the restaurant down the street. That's where some of the best and most authentic European food in Los Angeles was served and where the European movie stars and directors hung out. At Little Hungary, the restaurant owned by Mickey Dora's dad.
Mickey Dora and Kathy Kohner Gidget met on the beach in Malibu in nineteen fifty six, but their families have been deeply intertwined for decades through Mickey's dad's restaurant, Little Hungary. Miklos, with his young American wife and Little Mickey, had emigrated to America in nineteen thirty five. Little Hungary was a swanky place on Sunset Boulevard. The waiters wore bow ties and traditional Hungarian outfits, and a sign outside advertised Gypsy music,
but it was also cozy. You could get Transylvanian gulash with an apple strudel for dessert. For the many many European emigrets living and working in Hollywood at that time, Little Hungary was a reminder of home. That was absolutely true for Gidget's family. The Kohners, Paul and Frederick, Gidget's uncle and her dad, were regulars, and when their youngest brother, Walter arrived in Los Angeles, he started working there. He was a pianist, playing Viennese waltzes for the after theater crowd.
He'd later write that he played for quote ten dollars a week and all the gulash I could eat. Here's cousin Ponto again.
It was marvelous when I was growing up.
What do you remember that?
Remember my uncle playing the piano there, my uncle Walter.
Late one night in the spring of nineteen forty, Walter was at Little Hungary. Miklosch, Dora, mister Dora to Walter, was there too. Mieklosch came and sat next to Walter at the piano and delivered terrible news. The Nazis, Miklosch said, had invaded Holland. It was a solemn moment between boss and employee, two Europeans in grim solidarity. But to Walter the news was excruciatingly personal. His childhood sweetheart, Hannah, who
like him was Jewish, was stuck in Amsterdam. Later, their dramatic reunion would be the subject of an episode of This Is Your Life.
This Is Your Life television was most talked about program and our host, Ralph Edward Hey.
On the show, which was wildly popular and ran for more than a decade, the host would surprise an unsuspecting member of the audience, filling the stage with the most important people in the subject's life.
This is Your Life Hannah Blackconer, Oh No, Yes.
The program told an extraordinary story how Hannah had defied the odds, enduring a series of concentration camps and escaping with her life. It was the first time the show was devoted to a survivor of the Holocaust. People from different parts of Hannah's wartime odyssey, people she had not seen in years and she thought she'd never see again, appeared on stage for Tearful Reunions. Hannah and Walter had met in Teplets when they were young, but when the war broke out in your they were separated.
They were sweethearts in high school, and then Walter came to America and Hannah is sweet artist girlfriend. He was going to arrange try to arrange a visa for herticum, but that was delayed.
Hannah fled home for the relative safety of Prague. When Prague became too dangerous, she went to Amsterdam.
And she first as a housekeeper. Then the war started and she worked as a typist in the German Nazi offices, and she had access to all the lists of who they were going to round up.
Once the Nazis invaded Holland, it became basically impossible for Hannah to get a visa to come to the United States. Then Hannah sent a letter that broke Walter's heart. She had fallen in love with someone else.
She had a suitor, Carl was his name, and she hadn't heard from Walter in a long time, and her chances of getting a visa were slimmed to none. It was a five year waiting list. And then I think the American embassy there in Amsterdam was bombed or blew up and all the paper was gone. So she and Carl got married. They were rounded up and taken to a camp and released several times.
Eventually they were sent to Auschwitz. Carl died there, Hannah miraculously did not.
Her brother, who was a medical student, also was in the camps, and they actually saw each other through a fence once.
Meanwhile, Walter had left his job playing piano for mister Dora. He'd been drafted into the US Army. Walter was in Europe, but he had no idea where Hannah was or if she was alive. Then one day, not long after the war was over, Walter got a letter. It was addressed simply to Walter Kohner. Sunset Boulevard. The letter had made it to his brother's talent agency and they had sent it to Walter, who was then in Luxembourg. The letter
was from two American soldiers. They'd liberated a concentration camp and had found Hannah alive.
So he borrowed a jeep and was racing from camp to camp trying to find her. At one point he i demolished the jeep common neared another vehicle. He got to Prague and by chance, in the streets of Prague he found freedol Hannah's brother and told him that his sister was alive, but they didn't know where, and so they thought, well, maybe she went back to Amsterdam. Yeah, so Walter went to Amstam. He knew the house how she had worked as a maid, and rang the doorbell and there she was.
Hannah and Walter married in the fall of nineteen forty five. They decided to return to Los Angeles, where Walter went back to playing piano at Mister Dora's restaurant, which he had renamed Little Gypsy. Hungary had joined the Axis during the war, and Mi Klose didn't want to be associated with the Nazis. Gidget's family knew first hand the evils of anti Semitism. They knew what a swastika meant. A swastikament you don't belong here. It meant you're not safe,
it meant leave. All this made what happened at Malibu, what Kathy's so called friends did, even uglier and more personal, really unforgivable. When Kathy Koher returned to Malibu after college, the scene on the beach was unrecognizable and something else have changed. Kathy wasn't surfing anymore. She'd quit.
So when I came home in nineteen sixty, I don't even remember having my own surfboard anymore, but I do remember it being pretty crowded. So the movie came out in nineteen fifty nine, and that Gidget, the movie I think is the start of the billion dollar surf industry. I mean, you know, like, oh my gosh, I want to go to Malibu, I want to surf.
I want to meet Moondoggie.
Pretty dramatic change, actually, And the fellas that I had surfed with they were older than me always, so that when I came home they had sort of dispersed. They were in the military. Uh, maybe they went away to college. So it wasn't kind of the same crew, the same grouping of surfers that I had known in fifty six fifty seven and fifty eight fifty nine.
But that's not really the whole story. The vibe at Malibu had turned toxic long before all those teeny boppers came looking for their Moondoggie. When Kathy was still surfing at Malibu. It would be whitewashed out of the movie and the TV show. The Gidget character played by Sandra d never had to deal with it. Here's what happened
the second summer. Kathy Kohner, the real Gidget, surfed at Malibu the summer of nineteen fifty seven, when her father's novel was published and knew was already out that it would soon be a feature film. A symbol appeared on the side of tube steak shack. It was a swastika. Kathy told me about this reluctantly, and she got really uncomfortable when I asked her about another swastika i'd heard about.
It's an incident Kathy doesn't like to discuss, because this time it was drawn in the gravel of the driveway at her family's home. This is something Kathy puts in the category of prank, like disconnecting the distributor on her car. She never found out who did it, but she refused to let it get to her.
And had there been a swastika 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 when I could surf too, I'm going to surf.
Talking to me, she didn't want to dwell on swastika's it's the gidget in me, she explained. She got over it. She learned to surf. Isn't that the story at Duke's Restaurant. It's literally Kathy's job to live in the past, to be that piece of living history talking about Moondoggie and tube Steak and the shack and the bitch in summer of nineteen fifty six. She loves it.
Hemingway wrote that story A clean, well lighted place, which I loved because you know, I kind of feel like the barefoot bar at Duke's somewhat like a clean, well lighted place.
You go there, you can.
See the people, They're regulars, they're welcoming you.
I can go around and.
Gets I got elevated to excellence. I have to thank the Duke's Corporation. The title now is Ambassador of Aloha, which means that I greet the guests when the doors are open. I'm pretty much walking around. I'm allowed to offer the free.
Hula pi, which is our signature dessert.
I sometimes help seat, but usually I just I dress up, which is fun for me, and I walk around and I smile, and if somebody smiles.
Back, I'm like, have you been here before?
Where are you visiting from? Oh? If I'll take them to a table where I'm happening to walk by photos that are of me on the wall, I'll say that's.
Me when I was a kid.
Sixty five years after her dad's book came out, people still care about Gidget.
This little girl said, I'm Angelie and Devin from Nando Beach, I wrote a paper report about you in high school. We met you years ago here at Duke's We love you, And when she came in last Sunday, the face was familiar.
But oh, I'm so.
Glad you're here. I'm so glad you're here. Speak hug. I met you several years ago. You were going to Hawaii. You remember me? Do you remember me? I don't remember, my guess I've been there twenty years. But there's that feeling of warmth that may generate to me or just to the type of climate that Gidget represents to people today.
And what is that?
What is that climate?
Well, that climate is this was fun, This was clean, you know, not it was.
There weren't any you know, I didn't. I wasn't aware of drugs.
I wasn't aware of homelessness, you know, I mean except Toobsteak lived in the shack. So I thought, you have a path to follow, and that path in like the Judy Garland movie, you know, to the Yellow Rick Road.
So it's two innocent times.
An innocent time, I think, so an innocent time.
But what really endures about Gidget and why the story inspires women and girls today, has to do with Kathy's incredible spirit. She was determined to surf, and she did it. She carved out a place for herself.
The Gidget story may have an element of, you know, it does have an element of don't drop in on me. That's a cerfect expression. So you know, the book has an element of nobody's going to take this spirit away of the young girl, and nobody's going to drop in on her. She's going to, you know, in the last line of the book, maybe I'm just a woman in love with a surfboard.
Kathy moved on from Malibu, and.
In college, I had discovered, you know that, Hey, I'm Jewish and I'm in Corvallis, Oregon. I better join the Hillel Club or I wanted to. I wanted some identification. And I came home I thought, oh wow, I'm going to join the Peace Corps.
She met her husband, Marv. He's a retired professor of Yiddish. They have two sons and three granddaughters. From about nineteen sixty to about two thousand and one, when Gidget the Book was reissued, she pretty much disappeared from surf culture. While surfing was ballooning into the gigantic industry it is today. I asked Matt Warshaw, the surf historian, what Gidget meant for surfing.
Kathy was the beginning of selling surfing to everybody. It was going from Hollywood across the country and then across the world. Literally see Gidget posters in all these different languages. So I mean it really went around the world and it's just this call to come to the beach.
Mickey, he had a different message.
I think Mickey was the one who was going to originate surfers, you know, sort of telling everybody. Then the rest of the surf world and a lot of surfers as well, you know, stay away from this break. You know that Mickey was the one who brought sort of theater to surfing, being a nonconformist, anti establishment thing. Came in and trolled the people that didn't surf or you railed against those who had sold out. So he invented that sort of rebellious version of the surfer.
So it's also you could say that Gidget's contribution was surfing is for everyone.
Right, and Mickey's in a way was to try to with as much flair as possible, push everyone away.
You know.
It was it was him and a few other hardcore surfers against everyone. Mickey was just as angry and sort of performative against other surfers as he was against nonsurfers. More so in fact, you know, he there was no you know, it was a real purity test that you had to pass with him to be okay.
With Next time, I'm Lostel's Mickey Police's Malibu Beach.
So now we've got like a rich kid in fancy sunglasses and fancy clothes in a fancy sports car, passing bad checks and putting swastikas on his board and being a jerk to outsiders because they don't know how to surf, and spewing all this vile stuff. I don't know, it just kind of started to turn, you know, green and gross inside and feel to me like there's something wrong with this.
That's next in episode five. Surf Nazi 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 Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm. Slash plus