Keala Kennelly: Keala Kennelly was one of the hot surfers to come out of Kauai during the 1990s. She grew up surfing the reefs of the Garden Island, and lead the women’s push at Pipeline, Teahupoo, and other dangerous waves. She also played a key role in Blue Crush, inspiring a new generation of surfer grrls. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
Surf Queen, 1950s (Voyageur Press Archives)
Hawai’ian Surfer Girls, 1870s: “I watched the surf-swimmers for some time, charmed with the spectacle,” wrote Charles Warren Stoddard in his 1873 Summer Cruising in the South Seas. His accompanying illustration of naked surfer girls left little doubt about what so “charmed” him. (Bishop Museum)
On Oahu at Waikiki, there is a break called Ke-kai-o-Mamala, named after Mamala, a legendary Hawai’ian queen from the mists of Islander history. Mamala boasted supernatural powers. She could take the form of a beautiful woman, a gigantic lizard, or a great shark. Hawai’ian tales tell that Mamala hooked up with the shark-man Ouha, and they were a happy couple, drinking awa together and playing pebble games on the beach.
Mamala was also a supernatural surfer. She liked to paddle way outside and surf the big waves in Kou Bay. Her beauty–and her wave-riding ability–attracted Honoka’upu, a coconut grove chief who took a shine to the surfing demigoddess and stole her away from Ouha.
If you imagine a shark-man has a temper, you are correct. Ouha tried and failed to kill Honoka’upu, and the local women scorned his powers. Ouha cast off his human half and became a full shark–the great shark god of the coast between Waikiki and Koko Head.
All for the love of a beautiful surfing girl.
Surfing might be the Sport of Kings, but ladies like it, too. Traveling back in time to ancient Hawai’i and forward to 2002’s Blue Crush, women have not always been riding the waves in the same numbers as men, but always with equal fervor.
The oldest surviving surfboard in Hawai’i’s Bishop Museum is a small “floater” or paipo board that was the personal property of another, sixteenth-century Hawai’ian queen. The board was found in a burial cave at Ho’okena, and its story was told in the December 8, 1905, issue of the Hawaiian Gazette: “It is said that the oldest Kamaainas of Ho’okena have heard from their parents and grandparents that sometime in the reign of King Keawenuiaumi, about 250 or 300 years ago, a high chiefess named Kaneaumuna was then living at Ho’okena. Her principal amusement was he’e holua (coasting on a sled) and he’enalu (surfing).”
All things considered–maybe I was just a woman in love with a surfboard. It’s as simple as that.
—Gidget in Frederick Kohner’s Gidget, 1957
When Captain Cook came to the island of Owhyhee, he found men and women cavorting together in the surf, which didn’t bother him much. But in his aftermath, such naked frolicking between the sexes bothered the missionaries very much indeed. In the nineteenth century, the invading religious zealots forbid the sport of he’enalu. And as the Hawai’ians died off by the tens of thousands, so did the sport of surfing.
By the nineteenth century’s demise, women surfers were mostly the stuff of legend. Thomas Thrum wrote about surfing in the past tense in 1896’s Hawaiian Surf Riding: “Native legends abound with the exploits of those who attained distinction among their fellows by their skill and daring in this sport, indulged in alike by both sexes; and frequently too–as in these days of intellectual development–the gentler sex carried off the highest honors.”
It was a combination of modesty, morality, and the unbearable heaviness of hardwood that kept the majority of women out of the water from the 1800s into the 1900s. There were few surfers in Hawai’i and of that minority an even smaller minority were women. One exception was Princess Kaiulaini who “was an expert surfrider around 1895 to 1900,” recalls early-twentieth-century surfer Knute Cottrell: “She rode a long olo board made of wili wili.” And yet Kaiulani was the last of the legendary Hawai’ian women wave-riders of her day.
A new wave of surfing wahine arrived with the twentieth century–young women inspired by Jack London’s writings, Alexander Hume Ford’s promotion, and especially Duke Kahanamoku’s charisma and fame.
When the homegrown Hui Nalu surfing club became official in 1911, two charter members were outstanding women surfers–Mildred “Ladybird” Turner and Josephine “Jo” Pratt. No less than Tom Blake in his 1935 book Hawaiian Surfriders recalls Pratt as “the best woman surfboard rider in the Islands.” Blake also remembers Kahanamoku as the first modern tandem surfer. “Leslie Lemon was the first to stand on Duke’s shoulders,” he writes. “Miss Marion ‘Baby’ Dowsett and Beatrice Dowsett were the two girls who first rode with Duke, three on the same board….”
In winter 1914, Duke ventured to Australia, where he found good surf going to waste. He fashioned some surfboards from Australian sugar pine and gave exhibitions at Sydney’s Freshwater Beach. Duke rode alone until the finale, when he hoisted a local girl, Isabel Letham, onto his shoulders. Miss Letham was already a hero for her swimming and bodysurfing, but after riding just four waves, she proclaimed surfing “the most thrilling sport of all.”
Letham kept on surfing while Duke toured Australia, but when he returned, they rode together on separate boards in an exhibition that became legend. Isabel Letham was later inducted into the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame for her session with Duke–and her inspiration to future generations of Australian women surfers.
In California, Mary Ann Hawkins was also inspired by Duke’s prowess. As a girl and then a teenager, Hawkins left a trench behind her as she swam to national records and championships. In 1934, Hawkins moved with her mother to Corona del Mar to be closer to the ocean so she could work on her endurance as an ocean swimmer. Here, she began surfing with the likes of Gene “Tarzan” Smith and Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison. “Tarzan was the lifeguard down there at Corona del Mar,” Hawkins remembers, “and in the course of my training and bodysurfing, he got to know me and started taking me tandem.” Board shaper Joe Quigg remembers, “There were women who could get to their feet on a board that their boyfriend built for them. But, as far as just going out and being a surfer on their own, Mary Ann stands out in my mind. She was one of the best bodysurfers, man or woman. She could get across [waves] at Malibu bodysurfing that most people couldn’t get across on a surfboard.”
In 1941, Hawkins married Los Angeles surfer and board-builder Bud Morrissey. They had a daughter the next year, Kathy Morrissey, who remembers growing up on the sand: “I used to surf with Peter Lawford, Debbie Reynolds, and Robin Grigg. They were my babysitters on the beach while my mother was working in Hollywood.” During the 1940s, there was demand in Tinseltown for talented water people in front of and behind the camera, and Mary Ann got regular work doing stunts.
By 1956, she was back in Hawai’i working on a movie–and renewing her love affair with the Waikiki surf. She headlined the water show at the Hilton Hawai’ian Village, sometimes joined by Esther Williams. She later founded a swimming school, teaching thousands of Hawai’ian visitors how to love the ocean.
When she passed away in 1992, her memorial at the Outrigger Canoe Club brought together hundreds of surfers. Mary Ann Hawkins could have gone through life with an Olympic laurel wreath around her head, but as the first great California waterwoman of the twentieth century, she chose instead a wreath of plumeria intertwined with seaweed.
Marilyn Monroe was a surfer after many a man’s heart. Back in the 1940s, when she was still Norma Jeane Baker, she was just one of many young, beautiful starlets hanging around and having fun at Malibu, where she tandem-surfed with pioneering waterman Tommy Zahn. “She was in prime condition,” Zahn remembers in Anthony Summers’s book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. “Tremendously fit. I used to take her surfing up at Malibu–tandem surfing, you know, two riders on the same surfboard. I’d take her later, in the dead of winter when it was cold, and it didn’t faze her in the least; she’d lay in the cold water, waiting for the waves. She was very good in the water, very robust, so healthy, a really fine attitude towards life.”
Proto-Surfer Grrl, 1940s: Synchronized swimming starlet Esther Williams styles as a surfer grrl for a Hollywood photo shoot in a time when navels were still a naughty no-no. (Surfing Heritage Foundation Archives)
Mary Ann Hawkins, 1939 and 1990: Inspired by Duke Kahanamoku, Mary Ann Hawkins became one of the first women surfers in California. Here she is in 1939 about to charge Hermosa Beach with a longboard; and in 1990, standing before one of the oldest surviving alaia boards, from 1933 (next image). (Photos © Doc Ball and Gary Lynch)
Pineapple Princess, 1950s: Riding a wave into the 1950s, surfing sold pineapples with this Hawai’ian surf diva standing tall and proud. (Voyageur Press Archives)
Marilyn and other women surfers had to be in fine shape as the heavy weight of the surfboards held back many early female wave-riders. Most women surfers didn’t have their own boards–and might have had trouble carrying them if they did. This was a time when surfing was a manly pursuit, because surfers were riding gargantuan Pacific System Homes redwood-balsa planks that were eleven feet long and weighed eighty to one hundred pounds. Or more. There were many men who couldn’t handle these boards–and few women who could muscle them around on their own. “Most of the women who got into surfing then had a boyfriend in it, and they’d come down and eventually they’d say, ‘Hey, let’s get out in the water together,’” photographer John “Doc” Ball writes. “So, they’d have a tandem ride and finally started to get in the real deal.”
Hawai’i and California Surfing Postcards, 1950s–1960s (Voyageur Press Archives)
Among Marilyn’s beach crowd was Darrylin Zanuck, daughter of powerful studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. Darrylin liked to surf Malibu, but she too struggled with those monster boards. At some point, she stole Tommy Zahn away from Marilyn, and it was their surfing relationship that accidentally lead to the creation of the modern shortboard.
In summer 1947, Joe Quigg crafted what he called a “novice girl’s board” for Darrylin. He trekked to five lumberyards searching for the lightest timber available, then fashioned a ten-foot two-inch redwood-balsa plank and sealed it with fiberglass and resin. Quigg made the board to satisfy Darrylin’s need for a shorter, lighter, more-manageable ride that was easy for her to carry. It also had to fit in the back of her glamorous Chrysler Town and Country convertible.
Darrylin barely got a chance to ride her special board. On an August 1947 surfari to San Onofre, first Tommy Zahn took it for a test. Then Dave Rochlen went out and hotdogged it. And then Pete Peterson banked and swooped it, doing things atop waves that were impossible on their longer, heavier boards. The new plank was voted the Loosest Board on the West Coast.
The Calhoun Clan, 1960s: The grrls get ready to charge Makaha: Marge is in the center, surrounded by daughters Robin and Candy. One of the coolest things a woman can do is surf. The second coolest is to produce hot daughters who also surf. (Photo © LeRoy Grannis)
Quigg christened his creation the Easy Rider, but history knows it as the Darrilyn Board. It was the first Malibu board, it was inspired by a surfing girl, and it changed the world.
In many ways, Darrylin Zanuck was the original Gidget. As Quigg remembers, “She was at Malibu, really the first girl to buy a surfboard and buy a convertible and stick the surfboard in the back and drive up to Malibu and drive up and down the coast and learn to surf. She was the first Malibu girl to really do it.”
By the 1950s, there still weren’t a lot of women surfing because there just weren’t all that many surfers. In California, surfers who passed each other on the road would wave, stop, and chat; they were members of an elite tribe, sharing a secret thrill.
Among the women surfers in the 1950s, Marge Calhoun stood tall. You can see her in Bud Browne’s surf movies like Gun Ho! and Locked In; Marge appears here and there, and then gets a moment of glory, standing next to Peter Cole holding onto the women’s Makaha Championship plaque. She had been surfing only three years and went to Hawai’i on a lark with friend Eve Fletcher. They had a Thelma and Louise thing going: Two women on the run from conventional lives, sleeping oceanside in a dilapidated panel van, and just surfing, surfing, surfing. They went places few surfers dared go–and almost no women.
Born in 1926 in Hollywood, Calhoun was one of those lucky few to grow up in Los Angeles when it was one of the best places in the world: “My parents would drive from Hollywood to the beach every weekend, even in winter,” Calhoun said. “As soon as they showed me the ocean, I was a goner.” Married in 1946, she was soon tending a home with two infants. Then, when she was thirty, she first saw someone on a surfboard, and her life was forever altered. “Once I saw that, I had to do it,” she states simply.
Calhoun benefited from the Darrylin Board revolution. Her first ride was also crafted by Quigg–ten-feet two-inches long and made of balsa, weighing in at just twenty-seven pounds. When she got her hands on the board she went “berserk,” as she put it. She took it down to Malibu where she found another surfer girl on the beach–Darrylin herself. “She was this tiny little blond girl, but Darrylin was very nice. She showed me which way to point the board and when to take off and, man, I was gone,” Calhoun says. “I had never fallen in love with a sport like I had with surfing.”
As a female I’ve ridden the biggest wave in the world, which stood at about 30 feet, which is about 55 feet high, so for a little 5-foot person like me, going down a wave that big was an extraordinary amount of adrenaline. God, it was like, ‘Ohhhhhh! Do it again! Let’s do it again!’ I mean, it was incredible. Oh, I’m an adrenaline junkie, yeah, definitely.
—Layne Beachley, 2003
Marge Calhoun became part of the stellar Santa Monica crew of the 1950s that included Peter Cole, Ricky Grigg, and Buzzy Trent. These men all helped Calhoun with her surfing, and in three years she felt she was ready to take it all to Hawai’i and challenge the heavies. “Eve Fletcher was going for a one-month vacation, and I told Buzzy Trent I wanted to go with her. He told me I had to surf Ventura Overhead because that wave casts out like Hawai’i, and he also told me to surf Windansea because it breaks like an Island wave. Buzzy was a great mentor and taught me a lot in Hawai’i and California, although he would try to scare me at times. He was a tough guy with an iron body, but he had a great sense of humor.”
Surf “Literature,” 1960s–1970s (Voyageur Press Archives)
Layne Beachley: Australian Layne Beachley took charge of women’s pro surfing from the 1990s into the twenty-first century–and boldly went places on waves where no woman had gone before. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
Marge and Eve took what was known as the “rubber band shot” to the far-off Hawai’ian Islands–a grueling, twelve-hour flight out of Burbank operated by an outfit nicknamed “Wing and a Prayer Airlines.” They arrived in a Hawai’i that was still small, quiet, romantic. Each got a lei around her neck, a hula greeting, and then went searching for surf. “We would spend days at Makaha with only a couple of people in the water,” Marge recalls. “At first, Eve and I lived in Waikiki, but there wasn’t much surf there so we rented Peter Cole’s panel truck for $80 a month. Eve and I lived in that truck and followed every swell. We would sleep wherever we wanted and eat at all the hole in the wall places and it was just fantastic. I consider myself very lucky to have experienced Hawai’i at that time.”
Rochelle Ballard: Rochelle Ballard pushed the limits of where women could go in big, gnarly Hawaiian surf. She took her lickings and kept on ticking. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
As everybody went surfing across the USA in the 1960s, a young athlete from Southern California was in the right place at the right time to become the first female surf star. Joyce Hoffman was the stepdaughter of surfing fanatic Walter Hoffman, scion of the prosperous LA family who owned Hoffman Fabrics and helped popularize the aloha shirt around the globe. Under Walter’s influence, Joyce developed a keen interest in surfing. She learned at Poche and fondly remembers surfing Killer Dana with Walter before Orange County paved paradise and put up a yacht harbor. Joyce entered her first contest at Doheny when she was thirteen. She won, and en route to victory discovered she had an intense appetite for competition. As Matt Warshaw described her in his Encyclopedia of Surfing: “She later acknowledged that ‘soulfulness’ wasn’t part of her surfing experience, and that her satisfaction came from being ‘the best prepared,’ which lead to winning contests.”
Joyce began competing all around San Clemente, then California, then the world. Her connections combined with her ability shot her up the ladder fast. She became part of the Hobie Surf Team, won the Makaha International in 1964 and 1966, the U.S. Championships in 1965, 1966, and 1967, and the Laguna Masters in 1965 and 1967. When she won the 1965 World Championships in Peru, the globe took notice. Sports Illustrated profiled her under the title, “An Odd Sport, and an Unusual Champion.”
The 1966 World Championships in San Diego changed the world of surfing when Nat Young cut high-performance turns on a short board to defeat David Nuuhiwa riding the nose on a traditional long board. Joyce won the women’s division, launching her ever higher–the cover of Life magazine and features in Seventeen, Look, Teen, and Vogue. She was a competitive dynamo when everyone across the United States was wishing they had an ocean.
Joyce was defeated in 1968 by a tinsel-toothed fifteen-year-old from La Jolla named Margo Godfrey. Hoffman once told Sports Illustrated, “If I didn’t think I was considered the best, I would quit,” and she was as good as her word. She competed for another three years, but her results began to descend–except for winning the 1971 U.S. Championships. Then she dropped out. A decade later, she admitted to Longboard Magazine that her ambition to be number one was “horrible…the bane of my life.”
Joyce Hoffman was one of many surfers who didn’t survive the transition from the nose-riding longboards to the high-performance shortboard style. Now, Margo Godfrey took over.
As a child, Margo was skinny and awkward on land, but in the water she caught fire, beating all the boys to win the twelve-and-under division of the Windansea Surf Club menehune contest. Her drive and talent attracted the attention of surfers Corky Carroll and Mike Doyle, who coached her into the final of the 1965 Makaha Championships and second at the U.S. Championships.
As a ninth-grader in 1968, Margo took the world by storm, winning three of the seven AAAA-rated events on the California amateur circuit and placing first in the Makaha Championships and the East Coast Surfing Championships. The next year, she became the first woman to earn a competitive paycheck, taking home $150 for winning the Santa Cruz Pro-Am.
By 1975, it was finally time for women to form a league of their own. On March 8–International Women’s Day–Jericho Poppler and Mary Setterholm launched the Women’s International Surfing Association (WISA). “Surfing does not demand aggressive strength,” Setterholm explained. “Waves treat everyone equally; men and women are on the same terms as far as nature is concerned.” Now married, Margo Oberg was living on Kaua’i and running her own surfing school, but she was lured back into competing by a lucrative performance contract from Lightning Bolt. WISA ran amateur events at San Onofre, Huntington, and Newport Beach capped by the $8,000 Hang Ten Women’s International Professional Surfing Championships at Malibu. Some men refused to clear the water, forcing the women to surf around them, but Margo took home the $1,500 first prize.
I think if you fall in love with something, like surfing, and you find that’s what you want to do, then go for your dreams. For me, I went for it, and luckily I met the right people and fell in love with the wrong people, and just lived my life the way I wanted to. I experienced the best times of my life through surfing. I would advise anybody to just follow your dreams.
—Lisa Andersen, 2004
WISA had a short run usurped by the 1976 formation of International Professional Surfers (IPS), which sparked a women’s division in 1977. Margo quickly won two of the four women’s events and became the 1977 IPS women’s champion. She lost the 1978 pro title to another intense competitor, Lynn Boyer, by the slimmest margin in history, but won the championship again in 1980 and 1981 just as a new generation was taking over.
Jodie Cooper: Australia’s Jodie Cooper stunt-doubled the surfing for Lori Petty in Point Break. She had a great run as a pro surfer through the 1980s and into the 1990s, excelling in Hawai’ian surf and becoming almost unbeatable on the North Shore. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
Margo Godfrey-Oberg had a great competitive run in surfing. But perhaps her greatest accomplishment was validating the idea that women could not only ride big surf, but do it with style.
Lisa Andersen was the surfing girl for the 1990s. She learned from all the women who had come before–Kim Mearig, Debbie Beacham, Frieda Zamba, Jodie Cooper, Pam Burridge, Wendy Botha, Pauline Menczer. Andersen learned, then turned herself into perhaps the biggest woman surf star of all time.
At fifteen, Lisa Andersen saved up summer-job money to buy a one-way plane ticket from Florida to California, leaving a note for her mom saying she was going to become a surfing champion. “I didn’t even know if such a thing really existed,” Andersen explained later. “But I went to California on my own to find out.”
And then, by God, she did exactly that. California for Lisa Andersen was Huntington Beach, where she worked as a waitress and slept on the beach. At seventeen, she won the girl’s division of the U.S. Championships, took third in the World Championships, and then turned pro. As Matt Warshaw aptly summed up her style, “Andersen often said she wanted to ‘surf like a guy,’ and to a degree she did. She directed and focused her speed better than any woman before her and was therefore able to put maximum power into her turns; she also maintained a balletic line through her head and body.”
Andersen ran away from home, yet she did not run away with the world surfing title–at least not right away. Up until 1992, she struggled with self-doubt and inconsistent performances, her head getting in the way of her talent. And then motherhood turned it all around. In 1993, she married Brazilian surfing judge Renato Hickel. She competed while pregnant, and missed only the last event of the year. Five weeks after giving birth she made a final and went on to win three of eleven events in 1994 to take her first world title. As she explained afterward: “[Childbirth] was the worst, most painful thing ever. Everything’s easy after having a baby.”
Andersen was the first woman featured on the cover of Surfer magazine, her image was accompanied by the teasing tagline, “Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You.” And, man or woman, it was most likely true.
In 1992, she signed a lucrative contract with Roxy, an offshoot of Quiksilver that was mining a huge market in the fast-growing world of women’s surfing. Three years later, Andersen designed a new kind of women’s surf trunk that stressed function over form, and it took off. Through the 1990s, she was women’s surfing’s “It Girl”–blond, fit, tan, pretty. She was hot–and a hot surfer. She was also a mom who challenged the men–the complete surfer for women. As former world champion Pauline Menczer complained in 1996: “Women’s surfing right now is Lisa Andersen. The rest of us might as well not even be here.”
Andersen won the women’s world title again in 1995, 1996, and 1997. Then it all came to a painful halt when her back failed on her and she missed the second half of the 1998 season. She was back in 2000, but finished fifth, then skipped the tour in 2001 to give birth to a son. She is now mostly retired from competitive surfing, but keeps running as a mother.
It is not known if Lisa Andersen’s own mother kept that original runaway note, but the teenage prophecy about the women’s world surfing title was a fairy tale come true.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, women surfers were proving they had the guts and skill on a level approaching the men. At places like Pipeline and Backdoor Pipeline, Sunset Beach and Todos Santos, Layne Beachley, Rochelle Ballard, and Keala Kennelly were pushing the limits of surfing. And it was that reality that lead to the fiction of Blue Crush.
This 2002 movie did for women’s surfing what 1959’s Gidget did for surfing in general. Blue Crush was produced by Hollywood super-mogul Brian Grazer, and did a better-than-expected job of telling the tale of Anne Marie Chadwick, a young blond surfer girl who faces her fears at the Pipe Masters. Blue Crush cost thirty million dollars to make and was helped along by a massive advertising campaign to gross fourteen million dollars on the opening weekend, continuing on to earn a nice dollar. The movie propelled Kate Bosworth to stardom, and best yet, inspired millions of women to catch a wave.
Guy surfers are awestruck by her. On the beach, the most amazing thing happens. You see all these guys hanging around, staring at her. They’re afraid to come up and talk. She’s really beautiful and she really loves to surf. And so when she paddles out, they’re looking at her with a funny variety of feelings–appreciation mixed with respect. She’s the ultimate surf chick.
—Surfer editor Steve Hawk on Lisa Andersen, 1996
Lisa Andersen: Florida native Lisa Andersen ran away from home as a teenager, determined to become the women’s surfing champion–if there was such a thing. There was, and she achieved her dream. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
After Blue Crush, there were many more female surfers in the water, buying clothes, and going to surf schools. By 2002, the female surfwear line Roxy had been in business for just over ten years; propelled by the charisma and talent of Lisa Andersen, Roxy sales skyrocketed from $1.1 million in 1990 into the hundreds of millions by 2002. By 2005, women surfers had several magazines–Surfer Girl, Foam, Surf Life for Women. And there were several surf camps set up especially for women, including Surf Diva in San Diego County and Las Olas in Mexico.
Now when you look out at the ocean in California or Hawai’i, Australia or Indonesia, there are women surfers everywhere, on longboards, shortboards, in the tube and off the lip, girls in the curl or hanging ten on a wall. And in all of them, whether they know it or not, you can find the legacy of Joyce Hoffman, Margo Godfrey-Oberg, Marge Calhoun, Mary Ann Hawkins, and the other pioneering women of surfing, traveling back in time to the Hawai’ian surfriding queens of legend.
