Pushkin Hey, Lost Hills 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.
Hi Dana, Helloha from Maui.
Hi Diane. This is Diane Ustervine. She's lived in Hawaii for decades and for years had a business selling vintage Hawaiian shirts. Among her customers Jack Nicholson and Sharon Stone, but once upon a time, Diane was one of Mickey Dora's girlfriends.
I grew up in Los Angeles, in the Valley Insino in West Hollywood.
Diane was a runaway. She'd left an abusive home and found herself in foster care.
I was raised strict Catholic, so I had that all that parochial schooling, and then went wild when I hit high school.
Diane met Mickey in nineteen sixty two. She was seventeen, a total babe. She describes herself then as a cross between Sondra Die and Pamela Anderson.
I was runner up in the MISSPKINI contest. Fall in the Springs, Blonde, blue eyed, big boobs, you know, the typical blonde valley girl, and you know, naive somewhat.
Diane was at the beach for one reason and one reason alone, the reason Mickey Dora hated. I had to admit it threw some opportunities his way. Had you seen the Gidget movie at that point?
Oh yeah, I know. I was impressed with it. I was intrigued with it. And that's why we started going to Malibu because we heard that's where the cute boys were.
Diane didn't surf or swim. She camped out on the sand watching the guys in the water. There was one surfer who stood out. He was a showman.
We were laying on the beach and everybody was attention was to the water and there seemed to be somebody performing out there, and of course that was Nky Dora. He was pushing all the boys off their boards, jumping on their board and riding it in and everybody was ooing and eyeing, and all of a sudden, I saw this amazing looking man walking out of the water. He was gorgeous. What can I say, I mean tall, dark, and handsome, every bit of the word. He was agile.
He was like a dancer on a surfboard. And I fell in love the minute he walked out of the water. And he walked out through his board next to my towel, laid down, looked at me in the eye. While I could barely talk. He said to me, do you want to go to a party? I said yes, but you'll have to pick me up. He says, where do you live? I said in the valley. He says, oh, I don't go to the valley.
Still, Mickey could work with this situation. He must have sensed right away that Diane was a lot like him, a beautiful, untethered orphan, someone who adored him at first sight, someone game, someone he could manipulate, someone who would be his partner in crime. I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, episode six. Fuck the World. At Malibu, Mickey was the king and all eyes were on him every
move he made. But his life away from the beach, that was a mystery to everyone, and that's how he liked it.
He didn't want anything to do with anybody.
With the explosion in Surfing's popularity, the Valley Cowboy, the vals invaded Malibu. He thought they were kooks. They ruined his wave, contaminated his scene. Here's Diane.
And that's what used to piss him off at Malibu because all these valley kids and kids with no talent would interfere in what he was doing. And he hated it because he used to have his peace at Malibu, you know, and that was taken away and it made him angry.
Mickey didn't pick Diana up for that party he invited her to when she first saw him on the beach. No, he made her wait two weeks, refusing her and making her crazy. Finally, she invited him to dinner at her house in the valley, and he agreed.
We had dinner, which was hysterical because I didn't know how to cook. And I took a piece of hamburger meat, rolled it up in a ball and put it in a pot and rolled it around. He was hysterical with laughter. Took me out to dinner. I think, I don't know something, some small place and we hung around and necked and didn't make love.
Mickey wanted to see Diane again. He was living with his grandmother, Madame de Sanctis, so that wasn't a good place for them to hang out, and he wasn't going to keep going to the valley. He suggested a parking lot of a twenty four hour Burger spot in.
Hollywood, and we used to meet at Tiny Naylor's parking lot, and we used to hang out in his car and talk and neck and make plans.
You know, Mickey was twenty eight, Diane was still a teenager and pretty inexperienced.
And he asked me why I wasn't in school and I said, well, I graduated, but they kicked me out and I couldn't go to the prom or any of the ceremonies. And he said, said why, And I said, well, I was bad. I had a friend steal a time clock from the school and we hooked it up in my locker, and then the kids would pay me a couple of bucks to come in and stamp their time card to go to class, slate or to cut class.
And then I got caught because it kept making a ticking sound every time anybody would walk by.
What was Mickey's reaction when you told him that story?
Are you kidding? He loved it, you know, he saw a great future for us.
Before long, Mickey made a proposal. But they take their relationship to the next level.
One day, he said, you got to move out of the valley. He said about everybody in the valley were idiots, and he thought I wasn't. So I said, okay. He says, fine, the place, but it can't be in the valley. I said okay. So I found a place and we moved in together.
With Mickey, everything was mysterious.
He was famous for changing names.
You know.
We'd always have a you know, pseudo names that we'd make up for each other.
Were What were some of those names?
Oh, he was Chicky Mafe and Michelo's cyandor he was Mickey Mouse. He was many names.
She decided to change her name too.
My name was Alice Diane at birth, so I would always use the name Diane. But when I got with Mickey, I was using Alice. I wanted to be mysterious too. You see.
She found a place in Brentwood and they named it after her, Alice's little house.
It was adorable. It's a little cottage, and I kept it very neat. Micky didn't have a lot of stuff. His great joy was the fact you could go out the back door and there was a garage where he could store all the boards, and you know the vintage cars.
Mickey collected antique cars, a nineteen forty eight Jaguar, a nineteen fifty eight Porsche Spider, a nineteen thirty Rolls Royce Phantom two. He had expensive taste and somewhere off stage, a supposedly aristocratic family. Diane was impressed. He was a lot more sophisticated than she was, and it kept her from thinking too hard about where the money was coming from. For Diane, living with Mickey meant living by his routines, and they were very specific.
He'd wake up in the morning very early. He'd take vitamins, jump in the car with me. He picked me up a cup of coffee somewhere. We'd go down to either Malet, we were at Tressels, some bell place, you know, two or three beaches. He'd get out of the car and stare at the ocean, and I'd sit in the car and drink my coffee, thinking what the fuck is he doing and why does he do this every morning? Is
he nuts? And then I'd go to work because I was working in a boutique at the time, and he would go in the garage, picked his board and surf all that. I'd come home from work, he'd be there. We'd lay in bed, listen to stock reports or the news or something, make dinner, which was usually steak, potato and wine. And I wasn't drinking at that time, but
he always had good wine, and that was it. It was real simple, you know, And probably that's one of the reasons why he didn't want me to tell anybody how we lived, because it wasn't, you know, as exciting as the life that was outside of the house.
Diane became the keeper of Mickey's secrets.
And of course I was always warned never ever to let anybody know where he lived. So our whole relationship was super, super secret, and I loved it because i'd go lay on the beach with him and he'd be in the water, and of course all his buddies, you know it would all come up to me and start drilling me about Mickey. You know, they want to know where does he live, what does he do, what does he eat? And of course I adored the attention and
wouldn't tell them a thing. And of course Mickey loved the fact that I could keep my mouth shut.
What was behind all that secrecy.
Probably afraid that somebody was going to come and steal stuff that he probably already stole. And other words, a thief is always suspicious that someone's going to come and steal from them.
Playing house at Alice's Little House got Diane dreaming of a life with Mickey. To a seventeen year old runaway, the twenty eight year old seemed so worldly. Maybe he could offer her the stability that had eluded her so far.
I knew I wanted more than you know, living in a Mormon foster home. I knew I wanted to be, you know, self sufficient. And then I met Mickey and fell madly, madly in love and thought, for sure, thought for sure I could convince him to give up surfing and marry me and have children and work for his father and live happily.
Ever, but Mickey had other plans in mind. What do you think Mickey saw on you.
Innocence? Possibly someone he could manipulate in a way. I was a runaway at the time, coming from an abusive family, and he kind of took me under his wing, you know, somewhat influenced me. He was a big influencer actually, and taught me how to protect myself and to fuck the world, you know. You know. His big thing to put on his board was FTW, which makes me laugh because now it means for the win, and in those days FGW meant fuck the world, you know, question authority. Those are
the lessons he kept trying to teach me. You know, trust no one.
Fuck the world. That was Mickey's credo, the rule he lived by.
Hi thought it was perfect life, you know, until I realized he was a scoundrel at a road and was training me in too, being accountlice.
By day, Mickey and Diane were living the good life in Alice's little house, taking their vitamins and keeping up with current events. She'd go to her shop girl job, and he'd spend the day in pursuit of his bliss, riding waves. It was clean, almost wholesome. Mickey thought the best things in life were free empty waves vitamin D. But he thought the finest things in life should be free too, So at night Mickey and Diane turned into Bonnie and Clyde and they hit the town.
He had a connection at La Scala Restaurant would be like Spago today, and his friend would call him with the list of all the parties that they were catering that weekend in Beverly Hills. I mean parties that I would never imagine myself going to. I mean people dripping in diamonds, and you know, in those days, even in furs, and it was always you know, high end.
Mickey kept a champagne flute and some Buddley in his car. He'd walk into a party backwards, holding his full glass as if he fully belonged. He'd also bring a plastic bag to fill with extra food.
And we'd have a list of maybe five or six addresses, and then we'd find out from our family what kind of food did they say? Hamburgers and hotdogs, it was a pool party. If it was you know, caviare and salmon crow cats, we were going to wear the beaded dress.
They'd pull up in one of Mickey's cool cars and waltz right in, no questions asked.
And then we'd go through the shred door like we owned the place and schmooze people in the party that we didn't know.
It was a game to them. The subterfuge was thrilling, like being in a James Bond movie. Mickey loved James Bond.
Actually, at parties, it was amazing, where like people would always come up to us and start talking. Micky could talk to anybody about anything, and we'd get off on it. You know, We'd eyeball each other across the room, laughing. We were magnets. First I thought there were suspicious of us, but then in the end they were just being friendly.
At every party. Diane worried that get caught, but Mickey always felt right at home, rubbing elbows with a listers.
And we'd circulate. Then we'd talked to people all the time, thinking I hope they don't ask who we are. Vicky would go and get me a cocktail, you know, and we'd walk around the party like we belong. And then at a certain point, I'd go in the bedroom where everybody put their purses and their codes and you know, and lay on the bed and pretend I had a headache and slip my finger into some purse. Never take
the money, only the American Express credit card. And then as soon as I had the card, I'd walk out the cars. I feel so much better, but I think I better go home, And I'd say goodbye to all of the people that I've been talking to, and we'd leave the party.
Sometimes they'd go to multiple parties in one night, changing outfits along the way.
We've hit a couple, if not three. Each one was different and that's what made it fun. We maybe, you know, be dressed a real fancy for one party, and then maybe we'd run home and change for another party because it was all in the neighborhood. And then on Sunday we'd go shopping.
Here's how it worked back then. When a card was lost or stolen, the card number went on a physical list which went out to retailers.
This was, you know, early sixties. There were no computers, and they would send out a list weekly of the credit cards that were hot.
And because Diane worked at a shop, she had a copy of the hot list. She knew when they could freely spend on a stolen card and when they had to stop.
And I'd check, and then I'd call Nicky and say, don't use this, don't use that, or it's not on the list yet, you know, go buy a TV.
If they were careful, there was almost no way for them to get busted unless Diane got caught red handed at a party, which she didn't. Mickey convinced her that what they were doing wasn't all that bad in their minds. It was basically a victimless crime, and I.
Never got busted because when we'd take the American Express card or whatever card it was, we'd only use it for a couple of days and then we cut it up, and we knew that the only one that we were fucking with is the establishment, and that particular person that we had stolen it from, whoever that may be, wasn't going to get charged.
So he didn't want to make victims out of these fellow partygoers. He wanted to make a victim out of the American Express company.
Or yes it was, you know, fuck the establishment, but don't hurt the people unless somebody crossed him. And if you crossed him, he'd put sugar in your gas, stank, blow your car up, you know, or do something silly.
Why was he so anti establishment and fuck the world?
I think he was just angry and that was his outlet because I really didn't pay much attention to it all. I just knew the establishment, we're idiots and we were cool, you know. Got to remember I was seventeen eighteen. Wasn't thinking of those things. I was thinking about what bikini was going to wear the next day.
It was easy money, which Mickey collected with a sneer. He had nothing but disdain for his victims, though we'd liked their caviar just fine. Hollywood types were an easy mark for him. He had already figured that out on the beach in Malibu when the Hollywood producers first showed up to film the Gidget movie. Micky hated the whole Gidget phenomenon, but that did not stop him from working as a stunt double for Moondoggie in the original Gidget movie in nineteen fifty nine.
Why don't you go.
Back to your playmates? Oh I haven't even said you for saving my life. Okay, so now you have go on back to Mama and run, don't walk.
He hated it, but he liked the money, you know. He hated that they were ruining the beaches, but he liked the excitement of being in the movies.
For the next decade, Mickey worked in the Gidget sequels and any other teeny bopper beach movie he could get himself hired on. He was a stuntman in Gidget Goes Hawaiian in nineteen sixty one. Since for Gidget Jane Tachiki.
Was opportunity for him, and he always wanted to be a movie star. I mean, that's why he was the King Malibu.
He went to Hawaii and served twenty foot Waves with Greg Knowle for Ride the Wild Surf In nineteen sixty four. He was credited as a beach boy in Beach Blanket Bingo, the nineteen sixty five Classics starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funacello. That same year, Mickey also appeared in How To Stuff a Wild Bikini Wild? It ain't nothing without the stepping. How do we stuffing? Easy?
Man?
You're just.
And when Gidget became a TV show, he taught Sally Field to surf.
You see before you meet Gidget for fifteen and a half years.
Mickey may have had strong feelings about the exploitation of Malibu and surf culture, but he didn't mind doing a little exploiting of his own.
He was making Boku bucks because he was doing a lot of stunt work, and that's what messed us up, because he started flirting with either the producer's daughter or somebody's daughter that had the power to give him more work.
But even off the film sets on the beach in Malibu, Mickey always seemed to be in character. Here's Diane.
He was a much genter, quieter or simple person at home, and we had a lot of fun and tried to have a healthy, wonderful life. And then when he hit Malibu, it was a different story. He was on.
Was his persona a kind of performance art?
Yeah, when you say it that way, I would think that every time he got on a board in Malibu it was performance art.
And maybe also every time he showed up at the beach in a leather trench coat.
Of course, he was always doing something for effect, you know, I mean for reaction.
And he was playing Mickey Dora.
Exactly, or Chicky Mafin or Big Close sondor you know, whatever persona or name he wanted to come up with at that time to fit his mood or his protest.
In the era of the beach blanket bingo type of movies, Malibu was basically an open cast and call Mickey made sure he was highly visible.
He got picked to do a surfing double. I guess they were producers went on the beach in Malibu and picked people to be extras and dancers and stuff like that. In these films. He was, you know, a stand in surfer for all the big guys in all those movies. It was Mickey that was doing the survey. And he wanted to be an actor. He would have loved to have been an actor, and he probably would have been a good one, except he'd always mess up.
What do you mean by he'd always mess up?
Oh, he'd pulled some chican again that would piss somebody off, and then they'd throw him off the set. There'd be a scene of a two spot of people talking and Nicky p in the background dancing like a fool, and you know, and all the energy went to him. He would find a way to steal the spotlight. Should we say? He's you know, he's like a child that needed attention all the time. And I didn't mind it, you know, I was madly in love. He was my mentor, you know,
my savior. You know. He took care of me, you know, and I shaved his back so he could be faster than the water.
Things were not perfect between Diane and Mickey. The power differential was enormous. Did he act jealous over you?
Absolutely. I couldn't talk to other boys. If I went somewhere that was party with like his friends, he'd tell me to wear my glasses so I wouldn't look so good.
Uh. They lived together secretly in Alice's little house, but Mickey had a whole life outside of Diane. Did he have other girlfriends at the same time that you were together.
I think so. And he was seeing a woman, Cynthia. Married women, of.
Course when you said that he liked to date married women because it was a way of kind of you know, having a sit.
It was safe. Yeah, And it was also safe, you know, he didn't have much commitment, you know, he didn't have to worry about it. And the only I think the only married woman that I remember was probably Cynthia, and he used to just tell me they used to be surfers together.
You didn't believe that was the extent of it.
Well, actually I did. For a while. I thought I had the perfect romance and that you know, he's going to eventually give up surfing and get a job that his dad would give him. And he didn't hear it. The family business and we'd marry and everything was honky Dory. And then when I realized everything was just a scam and he had all these girlfriends, I said, pass I left him. I was too jealous. I mean, I was insanely jealous of him. You remember, he's the first one.
The breakup was vicious.
I had my car packed with everything that I owned and he came home and he said, what are you doing? And I'm leaving and he says, you can't leave. What are you talking about? You know? And I said I don't want to do this, and I'm out of here. And I remember driving away, bawling my eyes out, and then him checking with me, I don't know about a week later, to make sure I was all right, and what are you doing? Where are you living? And I wouldn't tell him, you know. And then he was worried
that I would tell people where he lives. And I could care less because I was working on a new movie and I thought I was going to be a big movie star and went to Rome, and oh, you know, my whole life changed after that, needless to say, And yeah, thank god.
Diane left Los Angeles and went to Rome to act in Felini's Satiricon and a Bunch of spaghetti Westerns. She got married happily, and it was a few years before she crossed paths with Mickey Dora again. It seemed like he was up to his same old tricks.
When I came back to America, Mickey had contacted me for something. I don't know what he wanted. He wanted us to go live with him in New Zealand, you know, if you wanted to start a commune or some sort of life style there, and we'd all, you know, plant vegetables.
And did you think he was trying to scam you guys?
Oh, immediately, you know, immediately when he started in talking about New Zealand, I thought, uh huh uh huh, No, I didn't buy it.
Toward the end of their relationship, Mickey started to talk about leaving Malibu. He was looking for a new wave, a perfect, clean wave with nobody else on it, far away from Malibu. But to travel he'd need money.
He wanted to start taking it a step further and try and steal airline tickets so you could travel the world search of the perfect wave.
He had tried to enroll Diane.
I remember going to the airport. I forget like it was Burbank or some little airport, and Micky would say, now you talk to the guy for a minute and see if you can get him to turn away. And I'd say, okay, and I talk to the guy about you know, there's this flight going blah blah here blah blah. And then Nicky had the sleight of hand when it came to stealing, and he would reach over the desk and take a stack of airline tickets and this is
again pre computer. Then he would fill them out and sell them to Frint, saying, you want to go to New Zealand, I can get you a ticket free. You want to go to Paris, let me get you a ticket, and he would just fill out the tickets, give them to the person. The person would give them honey, a few hundred dollars and they would go to Paris. It would work. And I thought, this doesn't look good. This looks like a lot of trouble if we get god. You know, this isn't a beaded dress. It was escalating
and I didn't want to go there. That's when I decided I'm not interested in this game anymore. Looked pretty heavy.
Mickey was expanding his horizons looking to the world beyond Malibu was over, he proclaimed. He wrote, quote the thousands of other plebeian fruitflies that composed the alleged surfing sub subculture are forcing me to seek greener pastures unquote. Soon he promised he'd be going into exile. He made a
huge show of complaining about the rape of Malibu. But this was Mickey's upclose magic, a big distraction because even as he burnished his reputation as the loan holdout, the last purest, he was busily picking the pocket of whoever might be listening next time. On Lost Hills, everyone's rustling.
Everyone wanted everyone else to be successful. Some people were showing movies. Some people were selling Hawaiian shirts, some people were selling surfboards, some people were selling dope. Nobody wanted to work nine to five. Nobody wanted to wear a suit and tie. Everybody wanted to live their own life and be cool. And at the same time, nobody wanted to be poor. And so you know, the trick was how do you do that? And the answer was you figure out how to make the surfing industry work for you.
That's next. In episode seven, Misdirection, Lost Hills is written and reported by me Dana Goodyear. It's created by me and then Adare and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin plus US and you can binge the entire season right now. Ad great find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hill Show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkins dot fm slash plus