Riding That Wave Again

They called her Gidget--as in girl midget. Like Barbie, the name found its way into our vocabulary. And, in 1959, “Gidget” the movie set off a tsunami of surf-themed films with wide beaches and thin plots.

Well, she’s back. Berkley Books has reissued “Gidget” the novel, 44 years after it first inspired the movie. And, if you happen to hit the beach at Malibu on a Monday, you might run into Gidget herself sizing up the surf.

“For a long time I retreated and didn’t talk about this,” says the real Gidget, Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, an animated 60-year-old part-time restaurant hostess who grew up in Brentwood and now lives in Pacific Palisades with her husband of 36 years.

Maybe it had something to do with age. “At 60, I have a sense of nostalgia. I want to put my arms around everybody and say, ‘From now on in, we have a lot less of our future and more of our past.”’

Though some purists feel that Gidgetmania was an unfortunate, and exploitative, episode in the history of surfing--and one with continuing fallout--most praise Gidget for her part in popularizing a cult sport and as a role model for women.

Zuckerman began thinking about a reissue of the book in 1999 when Wahine, a women’s surfing magazine, did a cover story on her for the 40th anniversary of the release of the first film, which starred Sandra Dee and went on to launch two more feature films, three made-for-TV movies and a TV series starring Sally Field.

About then Zuckerman began re-reading the girlish diaries she’d kept about daily life at Malibu--”the Bu”--during the summers of 1956 and 1957, with their notes about the people her father would later fictionalize in his book.

On a recent morning at home, she brought out those five well-thumbed volumes, the secret thoughts of a teenage girl about puppy love, her fixation with being flat-chested and other weighty matters. In those days, she says, “Sex, scandal and drugs, there was none of that.” Leafing through the pages, she laughs and says, “It was a lot about the boys.”

Those boys were the surfers she hung around with, including Bill Jensen, on whom she had a “terrible, terrible crush.” In “Gidget” the book, Jensen is “Moondoggie,” a role re-created in the movie by James Darren.

In real life, almost all of the surfers, a loose-knit group of about 20 guys, had nicknames. There were Bubblehead, the Hawk (known for his prowess at spotting babes), Meatloaf, Golden Boy, Beetle. Some of the old-time surfers say there was a Moondoggie; others think that was a derivation of a surfer called Boondoggie. In any event, it wasn’t Jensen. The great Kahoona, as played in the film by Cliff Robertson, was based on Terry-Michael Tracy, called Tube-steak for the steakhouse he worked at, who did live in that shack on the beach.

Listening to his daughter’s tales about the surfers, screenwriter Frederick Kohner decided there was a book. He jazzed the story up a bit by adding a wild beach party and a fire set off by wave-riding surfers holding torches. The fictional surfers were a composite of legends of the day such as Mickey “Da Cat” Dora, Matt Kivlin and Mickey “the Mongoose” Munoz.

Those were innocent days, those days of balsa-wood longboards. Jensen says, “There weren’t any drugs around. We drank a lot of beer and wine. There were some real mavericks and characters, but nobody was doing anything that would put you in jail.”

Through the years, he says, the surfers have embellished their stories, and some memories have become hazy. But he remembers clearly that, despite Kathy Kohner’s crush on him, “we looked at her more like a little sister. She was about 15 and I was 20. There were plenty of other females on the beach who were older and more in line with what our thinking was.”

So much for the plot line of the movie, in which Gidget and Moondoggie are an item. Jensen thinks the book’s Moondoggie was actually borrowed from Boondoggie, so named because he sometimes slept in the boondocks near the beach. But Zuckerman and Tube-steak think Moondoggie was well-known Venice artist Billy Al Bengston, who used to shake the water out of his long hair and beard like a St. Bernard.

And who coined “Gidget”? Jensen thinks it was a surfer named Jerry Hurst. But Tubesteak, now 66 and living in San Clemente, says it was he who first called her that because, at 5 feet, 1 inch and 105 pounds, she reminded him of a petite girl named Gidget he’d met several years earlier. “I saw this girl skipping down the beach with this paper bag with peanut butter and radish sandwiches .... I didn’t know what to call her. I wasn’t going to call her ‘babe.”’ Zuckerman says, “The truth is, I didn’t record it in my diary, so it’s up for grabs.”

Tubesteak, who no longer surfs because “people over 40 who surf look stupid,” bristles at the very notion that, as has been written through the years, Gidget was sort of the surfers’ mascot. “A sacrilege,” he says. But “all these years, I’ve just gone along with that story she and her father contrived.”

As he sees it, the surfers were being used for the Kohners’ purposes. “We didn’t know she was taking all those photographs. She was on a covert mission at the age of 15. Then suddenly they’ve got Life magazine out there doing a promotion for the book. And then the movie comes out. Like the idiots we were, we went along with it, probably because we had nothing else to do.”

Still, he admits, “it was fun. I got in Life four times because of that.” He also had bit parts in the “Gidget” movie and in “Damn Yankees” and did quite a few commercials and print ads. Later, he sold real estate and is now retired.

Zuckerman says, “It wasn’t that way at all, and I don’t believe anybody else who was there feels it was. A covert mission at 15? I don’t think so. That seems very silly.” And, she says, she took few pictures.

One of the surfers, Les Arndt, a 65-year-old retired airline executive living in Coronado, recalls Kathy as “a great, gutsy little girl who, come hell or high water, was going to learn to surf. She was very persistent. She was a very good intermediate surfer. She was pretty much adopted by the guys. We had no idea until later that she was keeping a diary, but it was a very innocent sort of thing.”

He says no one resented the attention that came her way, but “we thought the story was hokey” and the movie surfing scenes laughable. “They’d have four, five or six surfers on a wave. The idea was to be alone on the wave. And all this dancing and partying on the beach never happened, but I guess people wouldn’t have wanted to watch a bunch of guys sitting around talking.”

Another surfer, Bill Bullis, now 65 and an L.A. attorney, recalls Kathy as “kind of small and cute, kind of bubbly. She wanted to belong, and everybody accepted her. She [later] got a little carried away with the Gidget thing ... the whole thing kind of got out of control” and brought droves of surfers and wannabes to the beaches.

Brian Gillogly, 51, of San Pedro, who is making a documentary “about the real Gidget versus the fictional Gidget,” says Zuckerman was an accidental icon, good for the surfing industry but bad for Malibu because “it went from 50 people in the break on a good day to 200 people.”

Arndt says, “There are the so-called purists who believe that the invention of Gidget was a bad thing for surfing. I think that’s laughable. The hard-core surfer guy is kind of a loner, very clannish. I don’t think it’s wrong that it became an American pop film classic and started to define, rightly or wrongly, Southern California beach culture.”

Beyond that, he says, “I think Kathy put a good focus on young women and their ability to get in there and learn how to do something that was basically a male-dominated sport.”

Although she surfed seriously for only a few years, Zuckerman ranked seventh in Surfer magazine’s 1999 list of the 20th century’s most influential surfers. Editor Sam George, who thought she deserved an even higher ranking, cites her impact as an outsider infiltrating a then-small subculture, opening the door to others. The movie, he says, “marked one of the most definitive epochs in surfing history. After that, everyone suddenly was looking at surfing.”

Without the Gidget phenomenon, he says, there might have been “no surf music, no Beach Boys, no ‘Good Vibrations.’ Without Gidget there wouldn’t have been that Xanadu that we came to see as California. She had a huge affect on the cult of America, not just on surfing.”

Zuckerman says the book and film didn’t change her life, as she had moved on by then, graduating from University High and in 1958 going off to college in Oregon.

But in 1985 there was a TV movie of the week, “Gidget’s Summer Reunion,” which morphed the following year into “The New Gidget,” a syndicated TV show. In it, Gidget was a travel agent married to Moondoggie. Zuckerman says, “When I heard that, I thought, ‘I’m going to become a travel agent”’ and “jump on this fun bandwagon.” She did, and she again started calling herself Gidget.

She hadn’t ridden a surfboard for 35 years until, at a friend’s urging, she tested the waters at Malibu briefly in 1995. She took it up again last fall while her husband, Marvin, recuperated from an illness. In January, she celebrated her 60th birthday with a tandem surfboard ride with a friend at Waikiki.

Now, she’s a Monday surfer, a paddler. “I’m afraid of the white water. I have not stood up yet on my own. I don’t feel I need to prove anything anymore. What matters is that my soul is in the water, and I’m on the sand clapping.”

Her husband, a Bronx-reared dean at L.A. Valley College, was probably one of the few people in America who in the ‘60s had never heard of Gidget. He recalls, “After a couple of dates, she told me she was Gidget. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ I was out of the pop culture. My friends and I were seeing foreign movies, Ingmar Bergman.” The couple has two sons, David, a film producer and nonsurfer, and Phil, a surfer and sociology professor at Pitzer College.

Being Gidget, says Zuckerman, “was never a high priority” in her life. She was happy for her late father, a Czech-born emigre who was 60 when he wrote the book, which sold 500,000 copies. “He felt such a success.” In her introduction to the reissued book, writer Deanne Stillman suggests that “Gidget” is “a long-lost ‘Catcher in the Rye’ for girls.” Zuckerman says that, although learning to surf was for her “a rite of passage,” she doesn’t fancy herself another Holden Caulfield. “Gidget is just all about the sun and the sand and the next wave and falling in love.”

What is undeniable is that Gidget the legend has legs. Francis Ford Coppola is reworking a stage musical based on Gidget and, says his spokeswoman, he “has had many offers to do it around the country.” And out in North Strathfield, Australia, one Stephen McParland is compiling a Gidget encyclopedia.

Zuckerman did change the lives of other girls. “She’s very significant in the history of surfing,” says Elizabeth Glazner, editor of Wahine. Until the magazine’s 1995 feature, she says, “the majority of our readers didn’t know that ‘Gidget’ was inspired by a real person.”

For years, she adds, surfing “was something guys did and their girlfriends sat on the beach and watched. The fact that it was actually a girl surfer who raised surfing awareness in the mainstream back in the ‘50s and ‘60s is really ironic. She wasn’t just some girl that Hollywood created to perpetuate some silly story line. She wasn’t the only girl who surfed at Malibu, but she’s the famous one.”