San Onofre, 1963: After a long gestation in Hawai’ian waters, surfing’s heart moved to California and beaches such as Malibu and San Onofre. The early days in California were idyllic and uncrowded, but soon everyone was catching a wave. (Photo © LeRoy Grannis)
California Travel Decal, 1960s (Voyageur Press Archives)
Gidget Movie Poster, 1959: Blame it on Gidget: If all American literature derives from Huckleberry Finn, all American surf culture comes from Gidget. (Columbia Pictures)
Blame it on Gidget. In real life, she was just a perky and pertinacious California teen obsessed with surfing. But when her story was told by her father in the 1957 novel Gidget and then made into a 1959 movie starring Sandra Dee, the whole country went crazy for surfing.
Gidget was Kathy Kohner, a sixteen-year-old girl who learned to surf at California’s Malibu Beach under the tutelage of a gang of board bums. These surfers christened her “Gidget”—a surf slang contraction of “girl” and “midget.” Kathy came home from the beach with tales of “bitchen” wave-riding alongside sunburned gods with monikers like the great Kahoona and Moondoggie.
Gidget’s real-life dad, Hollywood screenwriter Frederick Kohner, knew a good story when he heard one. A Jewish native of what is now the Czech Republic, Kohner escaped Hitler’s rise to come to America in the 1930s. He soon was writing Broadway plays and then Hollywood scripts, earning himself a long list of writing credits including a 1938 Academy Award nomination for Mad About Music. But his teenager’s world was something completely foreign and new to him. Kohner deciphered his daughter’s slang and even listened in on her phone conversations—with her consent, or so he said—to learn more about this surfing thing. Then he sat down to write a romantic coming-of-age novel, told from Gidget’s perspective and in her charming voice. It was like The Catcher in the Rye catching a wave, California’s sunny answer to Françoise Sagan. At the time, Gidget was shocking—as was this whole, strange surf culture that was blossoming on the beaches.
Gidget was a best-selling book, and in 1959 Columbia Pictures invested some of its better talent into a movie version starring heartthrob Cliff Robertson as the great Kahoona, tall-dark-and-handsome crooner James Darren as the surf-happy Moondoggie, and blond queen Sandra Dee as “that troublesome teen” Franzie Lawrence, a.k.a. Gidget.
Gidget was an ambitious production—part romantic comedy, part action movie, part musical—that all added up to good, clean fun. The first movie was followed by two sequels: 1961’s Gidget Goes Hawaiian and 1963’s Gidget Goes to Rome, as well as a television series.
Yet Gidget did much more than just make money for Hollywood. As one critic smartly stated, if all American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn, all American surf culture comes from Gidget. Kathy Kohner’s story introduced the surfing lifestyle to the world.
“Malibu 1950”: The way it was: John Severson painted this water-colored remembrance of things past at Malibu. (Artwork © John Severson/surferart.com)
Surf-riding is not playing Monopoly and the more I got the knack of it, the more I was crazy about it and the more I was crazy about it, the harder I worked at it.
— Gidget in Frederick Kohner’s Gidget, 1957
Gidget also marked the end of an era and the start of a new one. By gazing back at the idyllic life of California surfers in the 1950s, Gidget launched a surfing craze that would ironically change that lifestyle forever.
After a long gestation in the warm waters of the Hawai’ian Islands, surfing’s heart moved to California, as the men and women who had survived the war in the Pacific came home. Materials for surfboards and wetsuits improved thanks to wartime technology, and as surfboards got lighter and wetsuits got better, more and more people were riding waves. Because humans gravitate toward places that are beautiful and have good weather, a lot of them came to Los Angeles. And as the population of Southern California boomed, little pockets of surf scene began to take root along the coast from Santa Barbara to San Diego. The surfers of the 1950s were tribal, loyal to their local beaches with language, customs, and styles unique to their turf. You’d see them surfing at Trestles, Palos Verdes, Windansea, and Rincon. There were large pockets of surfers as far north as Santa Cruz and San Francisco, but out of the 1940s and through the 1950s, the most influential surf scene in California—and indeed, the world—was Malibu Beach.
The Bomb on the Beach
World War II ended with a bang, so to speak, and then more bangs that sent shock waves to all ends of the Earth and changed the way the world did just about everything—including what we wore to the beach.
On July 1, 1946—almost a year after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan—American atomic-weapon testing continued with a pair of twenty-three-kiloton explosions on Bikini Atoll, a small archipelago in the Marshall Islands. The two bombs—dubbed Able and Baker—were detonated near a collection of ninety-five surplus warships, the blast of Baker sending a water column a mile high and tossing the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga more than eight hundred yards. “As soon as the war ended,” Bob Hope joked, “we located the one spot on Earth that hadn’t been touched by the war and blew it to hell.”
The shockwaves from the Bikini Atoll tests reverberated all the way to the garment district of Paris. Five days later, French couture designers Jacques Heim and Louis Réard were nervously preparing to unveil their shocking new women’s swimsuits to the world. Both ideas were a play on the material shortages that plagued the globe during World War II, their suits using minimal material and thus offering maximum exposure.
Heim dubbed his suit “l’Atome,” and described it as “the world’s smallest bathing suit.” Réard fired back: His design was “smaller than the world’s smallest bathing suit” and he claimed it could be pulled through a wedding ring. Réard was clever—and very French. Looking for a name for his creation, he took a clue from the explosion in the tropical South Pacific and christened it “le Bikini.” Réard promised his bikini would “reveal everything about a girl except her mother’s maiden name.”
Réard hired a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris to model the suit at the public Piscine Molitor swimming pool in Paris. Her name was Michelle Bernardini and she was game. In 1946, the bikini made its debut. Réard and Bernardini started a sensation, while the half-life of the Atome was short.
The bikini was a succès de scandale; the world was just recovering from the brutality of war and wasn’t ready for any more shocks. In 1951, bikinis were banned from beauty pageants after the Miss World Contest. Spain, Italy, and Portugal outlawed the bikini in 1953, while decency leagues pressured Hollywood not to expose the suit on the silver screen. Amphibious starlet Esther Williams righteously huffed, “A bikini is a thoughtless act,” whereas Modern Girl magazine sniffed, “It is hardly necessary to waste words over the so-called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing.”
Little did they know.
In 1956, a bikini-bound Brigitte Bardot bounced across the world in a film suitably titled And God Created Woman. Perhaps she lacked decency and tact, but she had everything else. The bikini was off to the races.
The bikini was a war baby. It was something old and something new, something borrowed and, as the French would say, something bleu—as in, more than somewhat naughty. And in the history of beach fashion, the bikini was as big as a nuclear bomb.
Dale Velzy 1943 Redwood-Balsa Surfboard: Dale Velzy shaped early boards such as this on sawhorses set up in the sand at California’s Malibu, Hermosa, and Manhattan beaches. (© Malcolm Wilson)
SPECIFICATIONS: 11' LONG; 24" WIDE; 4" THICK; 80 POUNDS
A perfect little sand-and-cobblestone point facing south within easy reach of the huddled millions of the Los Angeles basin, Malibu has its face in the sun and its feet in the tingly cool waters of the Pacific Ocean. The cobblestone point was created by a clear creek where steelhead flourished while there were abalone and lobster on the rocks, fish in the surfline, and it seemed like the sun was always out, the sky always blue. The name of the spot was derived from a Native American tribe, the Chumash, who called the point Humaliwu, meaning literally, “Where the surf sounds loudly.” When the surf is sounding loudly at Malibu, it is one of the prettiest waves anywhere.
Because of its proximity to the City of Angels, Malibu was the original perfect wave, first surfed by Tom Blake and Sam Reid in 1926. They had to sneak onto the point then, because Malibu was still a part of Rancho Malibu, a giant land grant passed from the Tapia family to Boston Brahmin Charles Rindge. The Rindge clan owned a vast tract of prime Southern California land that was at one time the most valuable piece of private real estate in the United States. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the federal government and then the state of California attempted to manifest their destiny through Rancho Malibu in various forms—a lighthouse on Point Dume, a railroad along the coast, and a highway from Oxnard to Santa Monica. The Rindges loved their property and privacy, and they fought all these intrusions. They kept out the lighthouse and built their own railroad to halt any other line. But by the 1920s, the pressures of population in California overwhelmed the Rindges, and they were forced to sell parcels of the Rancho to pay off the enormous legal bills they ran up fighting the state and federal governments.
The first surfers had to sneak in by sea in 1926, paddling down the coast to get past gunslinging cowboys who rode the fences and kept everyone out. Blake and Reid were the vanguard of many surfers, as the Malibu Colony was one of the first public habitations within Rancho Malibu, and the surf that broke there just to the east would start attracting more devotees out of the 1920s and into the 1930s. The Roosevelt Highway was officially dedicated in 1929, and as surfing became more popular in the 1940s, the waves at Malibu were perfectly located to provide the alchemy of surfing, from secret thrill to something much bigger.
In the late 1940s, Malibu was the beach of the gods. Marilyn Monroe tandem-surfed the breaks with Tommy Zahn. Peter Lawford was riding the waves there, too. Gary Cooper’s wife, Rocky, persuaded her husband to take up surfing, and she took lessons from one of the top beach boys of the time. Child actor Jackie Coogan lived at the Colony and surfed every day. In those years, many actors shuttled back and forth from Malibu to Hollywood between shoots. Surfing kept them young, kept their skin clear, kept them trim.
These surfers needed a new type of board for Malibu. In 1947, Malibu wave-riders were going very straight and very fast on eleven-foot-long Pacific System Homes redwood-balsa planks that weighed a whopping eighty pounds. Those guys were having a ball, but those mean, green, humping walls inspired the likes of Bob Simmons, Joe Quigg, and Matt Kivlin to shave down the eleven-foot hardwood planks of their forefathers into something smaller, lighter, better. Within five years, “Malibu Chips” were as short as eight feet, twenty pounds lighter, made mostly of balsa, and some even boasted channels and twin fins. That fast transition in length, weight, materials, and design was inspired by Malibu and the surfers’ desire to do justice to those sparkling walls, to do more than just go straight. What Simmons, Quigg, and Kivlin began in the 1940s was taken to the next level by the likes of Greg Noll, Dale Velzy, Hap Jacobs, Hobie Alter, and Dewey Weber. It was these surfers/shapers who combined with test pilots like Mickey Dora, Lance Carson, and Tom Morey to take the Hawai’ian concept of hotdogging and make it something California-grown.
Still Life with Mickey Dora and Friend 1960s: Mickey Dora and friend get the tandem thing wired on land before taking it to the waves, sometime during the Roaring Sixties. (Surfing Heritage Foundation Archives)
Malibu was the right wave at the right time in the 1950s. Those great green waves became the melting pot where a new generation of athletes and designers came together, continuing to make surfboards lighter, faster, and better—and ride them lighter, faster, and better. The Malibu Crew of the 1950s was a loose affiliation of geniuses and rogues, rich kids and poor, Lancelots and Merlins—men and women who shared their love of surfing and had a profound effect on the sport and the culture as they shaped it into the sensation that would sweep the nation in the 1960s.
Mickey Dora ruled Malibu. A truly beautiful surfer, Dora was the Sovereign of Style and he laid down aesthetic rules during the 1950s that are still being followed today—grace, speed, and lack of body movement. Surfing had its Duke; now it had a King.
Dora loved to ride waves and he broadcast that love with his body English. Fast and fluid, he complimented every wave he rode by riding it well. He called attention to himself by not calling attention to himself, keeping his arms below his waist and steady. There was no excess movement in his turns and cutbacks, and every cell of his body was concentrated on speed and grace and riding beautiful waves as beautifully as possible. His nickname was Da Cat because that was how he moved. He was truly a great surfer.
Hotdogging, California Style, 1959: Los Angeles County lifeguard and ace waterman Kemp Aaberg pulling a stylish turn at Rincon. (Photo © John Severson/surferart.com)
Quasimodo: Mickey Muñoz at Secos break, pulling a move known as the “Quasimodo.” (Photo © John Severson/surferart.com)
He was also a sociopath.
A native of Budapest, Hungary, by birth, Dora was a native son of the Golden West by nurture. He grew up in Los Angeles in the 1940s when the city had all the advantages of location and weather but few of the frustrations of overcrowding and traffic. “The ’50s were the best times to be a surfer in California,” claims Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy. “You could buy a bitchin’ car for $200. Gas was like two cents a gallon, or something. A bottle of beer was like four cents, or something. We had the roads to ourselves, the beaches to ourselves. The squares all thought surfboards were airplane wings, or something. Malibu was our oyster.” The ascent of surfing paralleled the ascent of rock’n’roll, and it’s fun to imagine someone like Dale Velzy, flush with cash from his surfboard business, driving his rodded ’56 Ford F-100 pickup down the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu, listening to Elvis howling “Hound Dog” on the radio, checking out the surf at Topanga, and angling for The Malibu, where he might find a handful of guys in the water—all friends, all some of the Happy Few who were tuned in to surfing. If that sounds good, it’s because it was good, and Dora lived that time as well as anyone.
I flew down the face, past the lip of the wave, and when I got to the bottom, which is where I wanted to be, I looked ahead and saw that sonofabitch starting to break in a section that stretched a block and a half in front of me. I started to lay back, thinking I could dig a hole and escape through the backside of the wave. The wave threw out a sheet of water over my head and engulfed me. Then for a split second the whole scene froze forever in my mind. There I was, in that liquid green room…
— Greg Noll on surfing Makaha in 1969, Da Bull: Life Over the Edge, with Andrea Gabbard, 1989
Dale Velzy 1950 “Balsa Chip”: Seeking better performance, Dale Velzy re-shaped his redwood-balsa longboards: “I tried to get as much curve into the planshape as possible, but it was still too parallel. I’ve always tried for as much curve as I could get. They just work better.” (© Malcolm Wilson)
SPECIFICATIONS: 10' 6" LONG; 23 1/2" WIDE; 3 1/2" THICK; 65 POUNDS
Mickey Dora was the Wild One of surfing. He was Marlon Brando’s leather-jacketed antihero Johnny Strabler, but instead of a Triumph motorcycle, he rode a board. He was an outsider and a nonconformist and a rebel without a cause when that little part of mainstream society that paid any attention at all to surfers wrote them off as beach bums. Dora lived the life immortalized in Gidget.
In later years, Dora was appalled by the commercialization of surfing and what it did to those Golden Years of the 1950s—and yet he was also in part responsible for it. Dora, Mickey Muñoz, and others of Malibu’s finest were all involved in the production of the film version of Gidget. That’s Dora surfing as a stand-in for James Darren’s Moondoggie as he brings a half-drowned Gidget into the beach on the nose of his board. Dora can be seen surfing throughout the movie, recognizable for his “nose tweaks” and other nervous tics as well as for his sheer speed and class on the board. He is easy to spot because he stands out from every other surfer.
Gidget caused the explosion that blew the cover on the surfing lifestyle, and Dora lit the fuse. It’s tragically ironic that Dora was a part of the movie that immortalized his 1950s lifestyle and then effectively ended it. Where Malibu and all of those Southern California breaks had been the Private Idaho of Mickey Dora and those Happy Few throughout the 1950s, suddenly the beaches were crowded with Moondoggie wannabes modeling their moves on those of Dora. If he had only known he was opening a Pandora’s box by riding a board through Gidget, he might have stayed home that day.
Within just a few years after Gidget, a long string of waxploitation flicks clogged the silver screen—Elvis’s Blue Hawaii, Ride the Wild Surf featuring Fabian, Bobby Vinton in Surf Party, and the whole Beach Party series starring Frankie and Annette. Mickey Dora and others from the Malibu crew worked on these movies as stunt doubles and actors and made easy money that allowed them to finance their low-cost beach life for months, if not years. But the repercussions from those first movies are still reverberating, and Dora and Muñoz must have felt like the first mountain men in the Wild West watching the last lonely swarms of buffalo killed off by all who followed. In the 1960s, Malibu became a free-for-all as Valley cowboys, gremmies, kuks, Barneys, and hodads bumped rails with the pioneers.
Perhaps this is what drove Mickey Dora around the bend and into a life of crime.
Shakespeare would have had a field day with Dora. He was equal parts Richard III, Hamlet, and Macbeth, and if Dora became a misanthrope, no wonder. Perchance it was the fall of Malibu that made him a man not too keen on his fellow man. Dora witnessed, played a hand in, and suffered from Malibu’s transition from undiscovered country to a troubled sea without any more secrets. Anyone with imagination who has surfed and suffered the sometimes outrageous frustrations of battling the masses for a few yards of empty, green wall, can only wonder what it was like for Dora and the crew who once had Malibu to themselves. To sit in the lineup at Malibu now and imagine it all in the 1950s—few houses in the hills, no traffic roar or Code Three sirens on PCH, no lifeguards on the beach, almost no human flotsam or jetsam clogging the lanes from the pier to the colony—is to suffer ancestor worship. Those who have struggled with the calamities and thousand shocks of modern Malibu can only wonder how it would have been to be bobbing around out there with just a few friends, letting the less-than-perfect six-footers go through, and paddling into the pick of the litter. Malibu before the deluge meant not constantly looking over your shoulder to see if anyone was behind you, or dropping in afraid of the wolf pack waiting to pounce on the inside. Back then, it was one man, one wave, and Dora was the Man.
Malibu, 1960s: Longboards, Woodies, and surfer vans—the symbols of California surfing in the Roaring Sixties. (Photo © LeRoy Grannis)
California Travel Brochures (Voyageur Press Archives)
Malibu was paradise lost for Dora, and to lose something like that is more than enough to make a chap snap. And, like Hamlet, it might make him wonder if there wasn’t better surf in the “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns….”
Riding the Nose, 1960s: Mickey Dora hangs ten, walking the tip and showing what “style” is all about. (Photo © LeRoy Grannis)
Dora spent most of his later life on the run, always on the lookout for an experience as pure and as great as Malibu in his golden youth. From the mid-1960s, he was an incessant wanderer, a criminal, a scammer who lived by the motto, “A dollar scammed is better than ten dollars earned.” Suddenly, he was a rebel in this new being called the “surf industry,” and while he was flipping off the surfing industrial complex with one hand, he was accepting money with the other. It is sad to read Dora revile the Hollywoodizing and commercialization of surfing, then see him in the background of the Frankie and Annette movies, pulling faces and dancing the Frug.
During the 1960s, Dora used the newborn surf media mostly to his advantage. Accused of being ruthless in the waves of Malibu, Dora turned up the heat in an interview with Surfer magazine: “It’s a lie. I’m vicious. We’re all pushing and shoving, jockeying for position, and if I get the wave first—if I’m in the best position—then I feel I deserve it.”
In 1967, Mickey Dora made his parting statement while competing at the Malibu Invitational Surf Classic. For a couple of years he had been calling contest judges “senile surf freaks” and at that contest, he made his ultimate statement. He took off on a wave, trimmed along a beautiful wall, and then dropped trou and bare-assed the judges.
And that was that. Like the Cheshire cat, that image of Dora’s grinning butt hung in the air, while Dora himself disappeared. He traveled the world during the 1970s, a vagabond and desperado, scamming his way from one surf spot to the next, living the life of a surfisticate. Australia, New Zealand, Hawai’i, South Africa, France. Occasionally he would write angry, eloquent articles for the surf magazines, cynically writing off the media while using their money to finance his adventures.
In the 1980s, Dora’s lifestyle caught up with him when he was arrested for making illegal international telephone calls in France. He was deported to the United States, where he faced the music for traveling the world on a Diner’s Club card that did not belong to him. The judge was not sympathetic, and Dora did more than a year of federal time—some of it at Lompoc Prison, within smelling distance of the ocean.
Mickey Dora’s existential dilemma came to an end on July 1, 2004, after a six-month battle with pancreatic cancer. This wasn’t a scam, and Dora is now exploring that “undiscover’d country” that Hamlet pondered. Hopefully, he’s scoring some surf, with his faithful dog Scooter Boy alongside him on the beach.
The Malibu Dora left behind is as complicated as the man, but less tragic. Malibu is gorgeous and frustrating, entertaining and maddening. Nature is beautiful, while sometimes human nature is not so. The sky is blue about 360 days a year and the water at Malibu is cool and clear, if not always clean.
All in all, Malibu is doing a surprisingly good job of fighting off the slings and arrows of the twenty-first century. A trip to Malibu is a trip back to the source, back to one of the crucibles of surfing. Paddle out and maybe you will get lucky. Maybe you will slide into one of those uncrowded slots, when the surf is good and for one reason or another, everyone is somewhere else. On these days, it is just possible to imagine Malibu as it was and appreciate it as it is: There are almost always dolphins and seals frolicking in the surf line, whales passing offshore. There is that million-dollar view across the Santa Monica Bay to Palos Verdes and Redondo Beach. The Malibu Pier is there, looking as it has for the last four decades. There are houses in the hills—but not too many—and if the surf is sounding loudly, it drowns out the sound of the traffic.
On days like this, it’s possible to imagine it all as it once was.
Wally Froiseth 1950s “Hot Curl”: Wally Froiseth was a pioneer big-wave rider, winning the 1957 Makaha contest. This streamlined hot curl was made of solid koa. (© Malcolm Wilson)
SPECIFICATIONS: 11' 4" LONG; 20" WIDE; 100 POUNDS
