7. Misdirection

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. It was the nineteen sixties, the surf media was just getting started, and Mickey Dora was it's darling.

Although the phrase was not extant at the time, I think badass would do it. Yeah, not to be fucked with the reigning king as it were. I mean, he was acknowledged to be the best there was.

This is Drew Campion. He started surfing in Malibu in the early sixties. He wrote for Surfer Magazine and later became the editor.

So it was a conservative publication. And I had been living over the hill up and from Malibu in the San Fernando Valley and had been introduced to LSD and marijuana. I had tasted enough of each of them to have a bit of a wrinkle in my perception of the world, and so I brought that wrinkle to Surfer. I think and people seemed to respond to it.

Right after he got hired, Drew got a plumb assignment to interview Mickey Dora. It was the fall of nineteen sixty nine. Mickey had made his reputation as an enigmatic misanthrope, a trickster. If you asked him to zig, he would zag. He was quote the angry young Man of surfing. One of the mags had printed a photo of him flipping off the camera. He was also quote mister Malibu, a singularly good surfer, singularly identified with the most iconic surf

We're on the second floor. We could see down on the parking lot. Here comes Mickey and his van, you know, and somebody alerted everybody, Oh, Mickey's coming. So Mickey comes into the office and looks around, but there's too many people in the office, and he says, well, I don't really want to I really don't want to do an interview here. Can we go somewhere else? And I said, well, I live just down the road in San Clementy. We could meet there.

Mickey agreed, Drew told him which exit, and they got in their separate cars. Mickey followed Drew on the freeway until they reached the exit. Drew got off, but Mickey didn't what the fuck?

So I went straight ahead. At the bottom of the off, Ram got back on the freeway and basically chased him down the shore and said, Mickey, did you miss the exit? And he said, oh, yeah, well, and I had this distinct feeling that he hadn't really missed the exit, he just dodged the exit, like he dodged a lot of things.

Finally, Drew got Mickey to his house and the interview could begin, but Mickey wasn't feeling it, so.

He said, you know, whyn't you just give me the questions and I'll take him home. I'll do a proper job. I'll fill him out for you, and i'll get him right back to you. And we went back and forth in a little bit. Finally I agreed, he drove off with the questions.

Micky wasn't going to trust some magazine writer with his image. His image was his most precious asset.

So he went home and he started to riff on the answers You know, and I don't know. He could have smoked a bowl. I don't know.

Question what is your relationship with drugs? Answer? It is possible to find pleasure in hallucinatory fantasies. I'm quite sure of it, but I've made my peace with reality. Either one one way or the other is going to solve the acute overpopulation problem.

The answers were let's say, free form. They really didn't address the subjects directly. They're more like a philosophical treatise, divided up in the question and answer for him.

Question why do you think bombs were planted in your car? Answer? Probably to blow me to bits. By the way, there's no evidence that anyone ever planted bombs in Mickey's car.

One of the words that Mickey was often associated with behaviorally was something called misdirection.

Question what changes have you witnessed during the course of your surfing career? Answer? First of all, I have no career. I was here before and I'll be hereafter. We are all soon to undergo the sport's demise in the immediate future.

So he would do that in conversation. He would do that in his kind of approach to surfing and being in a crowd, how to avoid people and how to encounter them selectively, How to keep people confused and not be direct about anything.

Question why do you feel this fall is going to occur in the near future? Answer? The advent of professionalism to the sport will be the final blow. These few Wall Street flesh merchants desire to unify surfing only to extract the wealth. A surfer should think carefully before selling his being to these people. Since he's signing his own death warrant as a personal entity.

Something about the word conundrum kind of comes into my mind.

Mickey was a profit of doom, and he was especially gloomy about the idea of surfing becoming professionalized, organized, commercialized. He was against anything that took surfing away from its simple origins, from that moment when it was just him alone in a wave at Malibu.

So we ran that in Surfer magazine.

I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, Episode seven, Misdirection, nineteen sixty seven. The Malibu Invitational. A beautiful day and the waves are perfect, four to six feet and clean. It's the best day at Malibu in years. All the biggest names in surfing are there, including of course, Mickey Dora. This is from a contemporary report quote the cat crept in. Dressed in his original tattered and torn trench coat. He smiled from under a week's growth of beard. This was his Malibu unquote.

And I had to sit in the judges stand and record. The judge would count to a number, you know, black eight points, you know, and I was writing it down. When it came to the finals. Mickey was quite the young showman.

This is Linda Kai. She was a teenager, a member of the Malibu Surf Association working in the judges booth. Everyone was watching Mickey and then he did something totally unexpected.

He did a little bit of a pull my pants down and here you go, judges, what do you think of that?

Mickey was, as they called it back then, hanging ba for bare ass.

I don't know. The moon came out. I think people were shocked. You know, there wasn't like a uterrae or you wouldn't get stuff like that. Now people would go nuts. But you know, what are you gonna do? Blow the air horn or the air gun or what? Did you think you can't just qualify him? Yeah? Well, I was like everybody else. I was pretty stunned, you know, being the complex character that he was. Not me knowing this but now I do. It was probably appropriate because he

Micky didn't like surf competitions. The whole idea of surfing going professional just bugged him. It was a threat. Didn't everybody already know who the rightful king of Malibu was. He didn't need pretenders to his throne. But he didn't set the contest out. He invalidated it and burnished his legend in the process, And fifty plus years later, the only thing anyone remembers about the nineteen sixty seven Malibu Invitational is Mickey's bear butt. There were so many Mickey tricks,

And one of those people is Severson, who in nineteen fifty nine decided to create a booklet to go with his latest movie, and that booklet became Surfer Magazine, which debuted in nineteen sixty.

John Severson became a major figure in the dissemination of surf culture throughout the World surf historian Matt Warshaw that.

To me, sort of when surf media takes a big sort of step forward. By nineteen sixty, you've got the beginnings of what would become the surf industry.

Surfer magazine sold the surfing lifestyle literally with ads for boards and fins and reef booties and swim trunks. It became a vehicle for the nascent sport to present itself to the American public. The magazine loved Mickey the anti gidget. He was always good copy and in those early days there were just not that many surfers to choose from. Mickey likewise found Surfer Magazine to be a good medium for his message.

It does kind of change everything. It certainly changed things for Mickey Dora because now he had a platform. It was just something that he could have a great time with. I think he just loved being sort of a provocateur right from the beginning, and things that he had been doing in the water was just sort of being aggressive and funny and he could now do in the pages of a magazine, and you know, and he played it to the hill.

But there was an inherent conflict between Mickey Dora and the direction that surfing was going. This thing that had been in pursuit of bohemians and dropouts was being made over into a sport that was respectable and organized with rules. And it was happening right in the pages of Surfer magazine.

When John Severson and others started to push this thing called the United States Surfing Association, whose mission was to clean up the sport and have contests, and a lot of people just thought, men, get out of here, let us just surf. Dora certainly felt that way.

Mickey nominated himself to be the spokesman for surfing's rebel spirit, it's dark side. A decade after Gidget, it was clear there was money to be made in surfing, but how to do it without working too hard.

What our generation wanted to do is figure out how you could make a living at it and still keep surfing.

This is Jim Kempton, the president of the California Surf Museum.

The result of the sixties was 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. How do you do that? And the answer was, you figure out how to make the surfing industry work for you. And so for me, that was discovering that when I was going to school in Europe, I went to graduate school in England, and realizing that there was this huge market for anything related to California and surfing.

Jim remembers the exact day he figured it out. He'd taken the train into London wearing a Hawaiian shirt he bought at a thrift store back in California. After spending the day in the city, he was hurrying back to the train station to catch the last train home.

Rushing down you know, Sloan Square to get to Victoria, and this guy stops me and says, I'll give you fifty quid for that shirt. And I guess, you know, I made that look and he said, I'll give you fifty pounds sterling. I said, now, I know how much money it is, but what do you want my shirt for? He said, you're from California, aren't you, And I said yeah. I said you're a surfer, aren't you, And I said, yeah,

Jim's peers were doing the same thing, figuring out how to capitalize on the global surfing craze, how to export California surf products to the rest of the world. It was a team effort.

So everyone wanted everyone else to be successful. I mean, that's kind of how the surf industry evolved in the surf world was all about cooperation. It was all about rooting for the other guys because if they could make it admant there was a market out there for you

If you've ever gone anywhere in the world and seen people's eyes light up when they hear the word California, this is why. This is when the world became obsessed with California youth culture. Specifically the surfers. Mickey he started hawking boards branded with his nickname the Cat.

Hey, there another California Gold sneak peek. You are bidding on one of the most collected surfboards of its era, of any era.

This clip is from a vintage surfboard auction that was held in twenty twenty.

Every serious collector has at least one of these beauties for you. This year we offer a rare to cat color workup all original nine foot eight inches nineteen sixty six to Cat model Greg Nole Mickeydora slot bottom with green and orange mind melt splash on bottom and deck. The sport has the original slip.

The Cat boards, which were manufactured by Mickey's friend Greg Knowle, are still very coveted. That nineteen sixty six board sold for seventeen thousand dollars.

You have to ride the wave and the way it's breaking. You know, you can't go left on a right in a way that goes to the right. And so he could make a rep by bitching about Paradise lost, but it's not as if he didn't at times profit from it.

This is journalist David Renson again. He wrote the Mickey Dora biography all for a few perfect waves.

I mean, it's very complex and how he was trapped by his own celebrity in his own story, and he couldn't appear to be selling out, so when he did sell out, he mocked people. Look at all the ads for the Cat surfboard with Greg Knowle. It's a classic.

Ads for the Cat boards appeared all over the surf magazines. There's one where a square jawed cartoon American pilot says Da Cat is the greatest threat to our pure white, virgin sport. Now it's up to the CIA to crush him. There's a black puma wearing a crown and the promise that quote de cat will have its revenge someday. There's another one where Mickey says, quote, as you are obviously aware, most all of my ads are being constantly sabotaged, twisted, censored,

To understand and why this is one of the most collected sixties era longboard models, complete with stinging, sarcastic ad campaigns.

In that twenty twenty Surfboard auction, Mickey's ad campaign is one of the board's biggest selling points.

He also promoted his signature Greg Nole surfboards to cat model with full page Surf magazine ads in sixty six and sixty seven, including one with Dora crucified on a cross made of two surfboards. Dora's acts struck a nerve with magazine readers, many writing letters to the editor in praise, while others described him as a sick and ignorant person who should be banned from the beach.

Apparently, the ad that showed Mickey wearing a Nazi iron cross was not as offensive as his joke that he was the Martyred Savior of surfing. But the ads worked, and.

They're so good and so funny and so kind of, you know, middle finger to the surf establishment that you forget he's trying to sell surfboards, writer Matt If you just know him from that and from watching him in a few clips at Malibu or Sunset Beach, it's hard not to say this was the greatest surfer of all time, not just for the way he rode ways, but for the way he represents the sport. The rebelliousness and the anti establishment vibe he's putting out seems deserved. It's going

Micky wasn't going to stop at selling a few thousand surfboards, though his sense of the possible was expanding. This was a man with expensive taste. Mickey's girlfriend Diane talked about how they used to dress up and crash Hollywood parties, then steal the credit cards of unsuspecting guests, but then Micky asked her to steal airline tickets. That was a line she wouldn't cross. Author David Renson.

Again, if you don't want to work, and you don't have any money, and you want to put food on the table, and you can't steal from the supermarket too many times, or can't go to a Hollywood party and have your girlfriend Diane, you know, rifle through the pocketbooks and the the you know. Eventually you got to do stuff to make money. And I think as time went on, the scams got worse because you want to travel, so there somebody steals a ticket in printing machine, you know,

Specifically, he wanted a zebra rug, a new haircut, some items from Bullock's department store. Those checks bounced at PC lou An Antique store at the Mandarin Hotel on Connaught Road in Hong Kong. Mickey wanted a carved gilt panel from the Qing dynasty and an embroidered tiger scroll. But when the manager at PC Lou wrote to ask why he had stopped payment on the check, he responded on Quantas Air stationery that PanAm had lost his luggage. It will take a few weeks to straighten out my claim,

Okay, well, I started in North Hollywood, California, and my neighbor across the street was twelve years old. And every morning I'd see him drive away and his Cadillac convertible with this huge thing sticking out of the back. I thought it was some kind of a ski, a water ski, you know, I didn't know what surfing was. He showed it to me and he says, next weekend, I'm going

Linda started surfing in nineteen sixty two, and she was hooked.

I got involved in the Malibu Surfing Association, and then I was also reading a lot of surfer magazines, and I was noticing that there were characters in these things, you know, and some of them were like famous for I mean famous, like there it was at Malibu, you know, there was characters that I knew.

And is that how you found out about Mickey with the magazine?

Yes, well that was kind of a start. I've seen him on the beach, but I didn't put two and two together until we start talking at the meetings in Malibu meetings, and then there was contests, and then you start to see more of the guys.

Linda was pretty hardcore. After high school, she got a VW van and lived out of it at the beach. She surfed all the time. In the winter of nineteen seventy one, she was surfing at State Beach in Santa Monica when she met Mickey Dora for real for the first time.

I happened to come out of the ocean after a surf, and he happened to be out there too, and I was getting in my van sitting watching and he comes out of the water and he walked up to my van and you know, kind of pulls his wetsuit down over his shoulders, you know, and all this tan and this beauty and glistening and goes. Oh, he says, so should go out sometimes, have something to eat, have to dinner. Oh. I almost fell off the seat.

Linda was starstruck. She's been fascinated with Mickey for years, nursing a crush that was fueled by everything she read about him in the surf magazines and frequent sightings at the beach. She was twenty two, he was thirty seven. She was totally smitten. So your relationship starts and you're living in your van at the beach and he's living.

In this little apartment in Brentwood.

And you're kind of stopping by and parking your van out front.

Sometimes gives me the key, and what are you seeing there? It was like the Cosba in Morocco. There was stuff from everywhere. There was tiger skins on the floor, there was big kind of bells, and he had tapestries hanging from the ceilings and bear skin rugs on the bed and everything was just like from somewhere else. And he didn't go to Pier one.

It was a display of worldliness, and Linda was impressed.

In his bedroom clicked across the top of the ceiling where all these little white things dangling, and he said, Linda, do you know what those are? And I said, I have no idea. They were tickets. Now, back in those days, airline tickets came in like a carbon copied layer of maybe before pieces, depending on where you went. So he had probably thirty of them taped up going up to one of his lamps in the ceiling, and I was like, wow, this is interesting. You know, everything in there was interesting.

Did he seem like a wealthy guy to you?

After I saw the tickets and the way he was living, and I thought there must be some way to do this because he wasn't working, you know. I mean he was at the beach all the time and not working and be able to travel. And I was like, okay, you know, must have some money to do all this.

Mickey implied that he was independently wealthy with investments to look after. He was always talking about the price of gold and.

Everything had to stop because he had to listen to reports when the stock market came on the radio, and he used to get the Myers Letter all the time. The Myers was like he was a financial genius of what to do with stocks and things like that. But there everything went on hold. When when when the financial market came on the radio?

When did you have your first inkling that he was running some scams in California.

I don't know about if he was running them or not, but he was quite interested. He had a book called Credit Cardsmanship, and I had to flick through that. And then he had one called Fake, which was a Hungarian artist who did perfect replicas of the great artists and sold the mess the deal. And Mickey was quite interested in this, you know, he liked the way there was a twist, you know of things.

Linda was skinny, and Mickey taught her how to collect benefits. From this date, she went to the welfare office with dirt smudged on her face and pretended to be strung out on LSD. She came away with food stamps and a check for twenty five dollars. She liked a twist too. Linda and Mickey had a connection. They both lived to surf, and they both had an appetite for risk. What was your love for Mickey?

Like deep big. You said to look at him, and we were.

Like, oh, so it's chemical.

It was just like a yeah, it's pretty heavy and dumb. It was scary too, you know. It was like jumping off of a mountain and not knowing what's underneath.

Next time on Lost Hills.

Well, we're gonna knock on the door. I see this car drive up and I'm like, who the hell's up? You know, and I see this blonde comountains dawn. I said, Mickey, don's here. He goes what he had a rifle, of course, and he had it behind the door. He picks it up and just get rid of them, he said, get them out of here.

That's next in episode eight aka Fugitive. Lost Hills 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