Gidget Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  The original hardcover Gidget, published in 1957. That’s Kathy Kohner holding her board for a bitchen bestseller!

  Photo by Ernest Lenart

  A Berkley Book

  Published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  A division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are

  either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

  establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1957 by Frederick Kohner.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  www.penguinputnam.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kohner, Frederick.

  Gidget / Frederick Kohner : foreword by Kathy Kohner Zuckerman :

  introduction by Deanne Stillman.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-01043-3

  1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Malibu (Calif.)—Fiction. 3. Beaches—Fiction. 4. Surfing—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3521.O334 G5 2001

  813’.54—dc21

  2001029508

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To the Gidget

  with love

  Foreword

  I was eight or nine years old when I saw my first surfboard. My family lived in a quiet neighborhood in Brentwood, California, and my mother a would regularly give two teenage boys who lived down the street a ride to Malibu beach. They would place their giant surfboards a in the backseat (I used to call it the “rumbleseat” of our Model-A Ford). Their names to were Matt “rumbleseat” of our Model-A Ford). Their names were Matt Kivlin and Buzzy Trent, and they were the first surfers I ever met.

  While in my early teens, my folks used to take me with them to Malibu on a regular basis. My mom always insisted I come along, even though at the age of fifteen I found going to the movie theaters more appealing. But she would never allow me to sit inside a dark movie theater on a beautiful day. She always made me go to the beach on those sunny weekends. She was adamant that the beach would be more fun and entertaining, and much healthier for me. How right she was. Of course, at the time, I thought she was mean.

  Going to Malibu with my folks generally meant sitting around with them and their friends—very boring. So I would wander up the beach, taking long walks, and it was on one of those long walks, one day, that I came upon the surfers who dwelled beside Malibu Pier. Watching them ride the waves was incredible. I immediately decided to buy a surfboard and try my best to learn the art of surfing.

  I bought my first surfboard from Mike Doyle for thirty dollars and hit the water. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, but I watched the “boys” on their boards and imitated as best I could the “sport.” I also started to socialize with this small group of surfers—mostly male—and actually became rather fascinated with their way of life. It was a most alluring lifestyle, especially to a fifteen-year-old girl. They were boys who lived on the beach (literally in a shack on the sand). They all had nicknames. One day I was referred to as Gidget (girl-midget)—and just like that, I was the Gidget. I was amused and fascinated with these handsome young surfers and their love and pure devotion to riding the waves at Malibu. It seemed as if there wasn’t any other aspect to their lives except taking in the sun and sea, waxing down their boards, and paddling out looking for a great wave to catch. This was their life—nothing else. It was its own culture and we all knew one another—we knew everyone who had a surfboard, and there weren’t very many of us!! I felt like I had a new family, and I was the girl midget. I was the Gidget!

  It was the summer of 1956. I was in the tenth grade. I had fallen in love with surfboard riding. I couldn’t wait to get to Malibu every day that summer of my fifteenth year. I knew this was true fun in the sun, but also hard work, too—learning to surfboard ride, that is.

  I was totally enthralled with my new passion and my new group of friends, and I kept telling my dad and mom about the whole experience—about the waves and the “kuks” (that was what the surfers were called) at Malibu.

  One day I told my dad that I wanted to write a story about my summer days at Malibu: about my friends who lived in a shack on the beach, about the major crush I had on one of the surfers, about how I was teased, about how hard it was to catch a wave—to paddle the long board out—and how persistent I was at wanting to learn to surf and to be accepted by the “crew,” as I often referred to the boys that summer.

  My father, Frederick Kohner, was a Hollywood screenwriter at the time. He became absorbed and amused with my tales of the beach. He told me he would write the story for me. He wrote the book Gidget in six weeks. It was his first novel. It became a bestseller and the basis for subsequent popular movies and television shows.

  Though based on my personal experience, Gidget is a work of fiction. It is a wonderful story; the story of a young girl, like myself, who learns on her own the great sport of surfboard riding and the art of persistence and doing something she really wants to do even though at the time there were very few girl surfers doing it. And it was not easy. The original hardcover edition of Gidget has now become a collector’s item, and I’m really thrilled that you’ll be reading the story again, or for the first time. I’ve always loved the book. And I think you will, too.

  There’s never been a time when I haven’t loved the beach. I have always loved watching the surfers, wherever they are. I loved my days at Malibu. I surfed the summers of ’56, ’57, and ’58. In ’58 I went away to college at Oregon State, but I continued to ride the long boards through the summers of ’59 and ’60.

  Five years ago I went surfing again with Mike Doyle, from whom I bought my first surfboard over forty years ago. It was a wonderful day, though I haven’t been back in the water since. But now that Gidget is back—the real Gidget will be back, too. Who says sixty-year-old Gidgets can’t ride the waves anymore?

  I hope you love the book and go out and “hang ten” (an old surfing expression).

  Thanks for reading it. Keep paddling.

  Love,

  Kathy (Gidget) Kohner Zuckerman

  Kathy Kohner Zuckerman works as a restaurant hostess in California and lives close enough to the beach to hear the waves, if she listens closely. She turned sixty in January 2001.

  Introduction

  by Deanne Stillman

  When Kathy Kohner Zuckerman talks about Malibu, California, she is referring to life at Malibu Point from 1956 to 1959, a hallowed surf-warp when legendary figures such as the Beetle, the Bucker, the Jaw, Quik, Golden Boy, Turtle, Moondoggie, Mysto, Steak, Scooter, Fencer, and the Cat adopted Kathy, a precocious teenager, into the tribe and named her as they did the others, for her most notable characteristics. She was a girl, one of the few who surfed at the time, and at five feet tall and ninety-five pounds, she was a midget. Unto us, the sea nymph, Gidget, was born. r />
  In surfing parlance, the wave at Malibu—twenty miles from downtown Los Angeles—is as good as it gets. It runs for about four hundred yards, from the pier where the old, abandoned hulk of Alice’s Restaurant sits, northward to the mouth of Malibu Lagoon, which is just south of Malibu Colony, now a private celebrity enclave. There are actually three surf breaks here—First Point, Second Point, and Third Point. A south-facing beach, Malibu is situated and configured in a way that causes the New Zealand storm swells of summer to break in waves that are consistent, perfectly formed, gentle, and, on the outside points, fast. Extensive kelp beds keep the surface glassy and smooth. The surf is rarely above eight feet, most often from two to four. Sometimes a ride can last as long as two minutes. Malibu was named by the Chumash Indians ten thousand years ago; the original hu-mal-iwu translates as “it makes a loud noise all the time over there.”

  Some time ago, I had heard from friends in the surf community that there was an actual person named Gidget—not the character who appeared in the many movies and television series whose titles bore her name, often in conjunction with the phrase “. . . Goes to . . . ” or “The New . . . ” and always set on the beach in the most goofy and innocent of ways. In an age of few surprises, the fact that Gidget really existed was indeed news, and I wanted to meet the person whose name was forever associated with riding waves. After several telephone calls, I located Gidget and asked for an interview. I did not have to chart my way through handlers, publicists, or agents. Kathy Kohner Zuckerman invited me to meet her in her home.

  “We were living in Brentwood,” Kathy recalled one day on her patio near the sea. “My mother used to drive some of the neighborhood guys down to the beach. They would put their boards in her Model-A. I tagged along. I wanted to surf. It looked like so much fun. I remember asking one of the surfers if I was bothering him. He said, ‘You’re breathing, aren’t you?’ There was this guy named Steak living in a shack. A few other surfers were always hanging around. They were always hungry. I think some of them lived there too.” The shack that Gidget referred to is legendary: although long-gone, like its fellow sacred Malibu spot known as “the pit,” its very mention among surfers, especially those who surfed Malibu in the fifties, conjures a mythology that forever binds the tribe.

  Kathy continued. Every day, she said, she would bring a paper sack of homemade sandwiches and trade them for the use of someone’s surfboard. Soon, she bought her own board from a fifteen-year-old named Mike Doyle, later a well-known shaper, for thirty dollars. “It was blue and had a totempole on it,” she said. “I wish I still had it.”

  It was perhaps inevitable that Kathy’s father, Frederick Kohner, became fascinated with the stories that his daughter would tell him about the beach. He and his two brothers grew up in the Czechoslovakian spa town of Teplitz-Schonau (whose tainted waters Ibsen wrote about in his famous play about a corrupt spa called Enemy of the People). Their father, Julius, was the proprietor of the local movie house. In 1921, Paul, the eldest son, joined the early wave of Jewish emigrés and left for Hollywood where he became an agent. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, Frederick, the middle son, embarked on a career as a screenwriter in Berlin. In 1936, to escape Hitler, he left Germany with his wife, Fritzie, first for London and then, after Paul got him a writing deal at Columbia, for Hollywood.

  Within a few years, Frederick Kohner established himself as a well-respected screenwriter, working at all the major studios, writing and selling more than twenty screenplays, one of which, Mad About Music, was nominated for an Academy Award. In addition, he penned two Broadway plays, The Bees and the Flowers and Stalin Allee and, after the success of Gidget, fifteen other books, including Cher Papa and Kiki of Montparnasse.

  The family settled in Brentwood, a twenty-minute ride from the beach. In 1956, at the age of fifteen, Gidget began spending all of her free time at Malibu—after school, after work, on weekends, or when her family was visiting friends in the Malibu Colony. “My father and I would walk down,” she said, “and I would tell him about all of the surfers. I told him I wanted to write a book. He said, ‘Why don’t you tell me your stories and I’ll write it?’ I said ‘Okay.’”

  And thus Gidget became her father’s muse, recounting tales of “bitchen surf” and giant “combers” that rolled in from Japan.

  Frederick was the best of students, fascinated, paying careful attention to his daughter’s language (German was his first), and even—with her permission—listening in on her telephone conversations. Enchanted by the surf that was breaking at his doorstep, he wrote the novel in six weeks, weaving Gidget’s accounts and conversation into a charming fiction which reflected the concerns of the day. The narrative explores the perennial American theme—whether to drop out of society’s mainstream or live the expected life—through Gidget’s enchantment with two male characters, the Kahoona and Moondoggie. But another theme resounds above all others in the novel—Kathy’s passion for wave-riding. “The great Kahoona,”says the fictional Gidget, “showed me the first time how to get on my knees, to push the shoulders up and slide the body back—to spring to your feet quickly, putting them a foot apart and under you in one motion. That’s quite tricky. But then, 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.” This is as concise a description of how to surf that I have come across, serving me well in my own surf endeavors over the years.

  At the end of this sweet summer’s tale, as Moondoggie confronts the Kahoona over what appears to be a scene of consummated passion, Gidget takes off on her board. It’s a classic day with bitchen surf. In fact, some very big waves are rolling in. In an epic moment that has been lost in the countless Gidget remakes and retellings, in a moment that makes this novel a long-lost Catcher in the Rye for girls, Gidget ignores the warnings of her men and continues paddling out to sea, defying social convention—not heading back to the sanctuary of land and the expected middle-class life that it promised, not interested in whether she can hook up with a beach bum or a fraternity boy, just wanting to surf, confident that she can ride with the best of ’em. “Shoot the curl,” the boys call, once she’s up and cruising. “Shoot it, Gidget.” And shoot it she does.

  The little surf saga was now complete, and a deal was instantly hatched. The book hit the racks and critics hailed Kohner’s work for its authentic evocation of a curious subculture, and some marvelled at how a foreign writer became so facile with American slang. Within several years, surfing exploded; who better to spread the word than the father of the water sprite Kathy/Gidget, a man who had fled central Europe, charmed by waves and those who found freedom by riding them?

  As Gidget recalled the story, she unveiled a treasure: old scrapbooks and diaries—documents that have become the holy grail of contemporary surf culture, rumored by certain surfers to exist, and said to be the very visual and written proof that the voice which spoke through Frederick Kohner’s engaging hand was indeed his daughter’s. Here was news of a sweeter time, here was the gee-whiz and goofy voice of Gidget that through her father had memorialized Malibu forever and propelled the culture on a never-ending ride:

  “July twenty-second, 1956. I went to the beach again today . . . I just love it down there . . . I went out surfing about three times but only caught one wave.

  “June sixteenth, 1957. Boy was it a fabulous day today. Everyone was at the beach. I rode a wave today and everybody saw me.

  “August third, 1957. Boy the surf was so bitchen today I couldn’t believe it . . . I got some real good rides from inside.”

  By 1958, all things Malibu had changed—the secret was out. The waves once surfed by a few locals were now the destination for all who would be tan and cool. Southern California was transformed forever and so, in turn, was the rest of the country as an endless summer of surf music and culture would begin to defy the course of the sun and sweep eastward across the mountains and prairies an
d waters, eastward as far as the opposite coast and then around the world until soon, as the Beach Boys would sing, everybody had “gone surfin’, surfin’ USA.” In her entry of June thirtieth of that year, Gidget, innocent of the great social change to come, entered a notation in her diary that, like the others, was a simple observation of a day at the beach: “Went and saw them film the [Gidget] movie,” she wrote, “ . . . It’s really funny.”

  Some time later, I accompanied Gidget on a return to Malibu. It was a perfect day, not too crowded. “Good waves,” Gidget said. “Jeeze, did you see that?” She took off her sandals as we walked past the pit and toward the now-vacant site of the shack, her old haunts, sandy repositories of powerful tribal crosscurrents not detectable by outsiders. “Oh, my God,” Gidget said. “There’s Mysto.” Mysto had been surfing Malibu since 1954, never missing a good day, long after many of Kathy’s contemporaries had drifted away. In full wetsuit and neoprene cap, Mysto with the blazing, sea-blue eyes that only certain surfers seem to have, was carrying his dinged-up longboard, ready to paddle back out. “Looks bitchen,” Kathy said. “Yeah,” he said. “You wanna surf?” Kathy said that for the first time in years, she was thinking about it. Later that day, she took her board to the shop for repairs. A few days after that, a special commemorative issue of Surfer Magazine hit the stands. Kathy was listed as number seven of the twenty-five most important surfers of the century, one of two women to make the cut, ranking high in the surf community’s “Book of Numbers,” not too far below Duke Kahanomoku, adored Hawaiian father of modern surfing.

  Some say it was Hollywood that lured certain emigres from afar. Perhaps. I like to think it was the waves. Were it not for Frederick Kohner and the settling of his family near the Southern California coast, the secrets of Malibu would have been lost to memory, to the endless surf, to the ancient Chumash whose spirits are said to patrol the waters, whose counsel and appeasement is sought by those who yearn for a return to the era when it was just a small band of compadres who surfed here by day and made bonfires at night, talking in hushed tones of bitchen surf and all the waves that were sure to come, all the briny wonders that would unveil themselves in their own sweet time to those who wanted to see, and to see again. And so, here, in a brand-new century and era, is the charming novel known as Gidget—the first, and last, word on a mythological figure who eagerly paddled these magic waters and shared the joy with her father, who in turn chronicled the tale for posterity, and all the girls who might someday hop on a wave and ride it.