Gidget the All-Powerful

The Rebel Next Door

Hobie vs Velzy vs the IRS

Better Surfing Through Chemistry

Summer on the Inside

Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted

Surfing the Newsstand

Process of Elimination

Oil City Showdown

The Jazz Stylings of Phil Edwards

Technicolor Surf Boom

Heroes and Villains

Blackball Blues

Dick Dale, Destroyer of Amps

Surfing in Five-Part Harmony

Tokyo to Tel Aviv

Flight of the Larrikin

Bob Evans Means Business

Midget Wins It All

But Will it Play in New York?

Houses of the Holy

We Own the Sidewalks

Beautiful from any Angle

Duke's Big Contest

Can You Handle the Penetrator?

Girls, Don't Panic!

David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water

An Invincible Summer

Ten-Year Boom

Tubesteak Tracy was the first to notice 15-year-old Kathy Kohner as she passed by on the beach at Malibu during the summer of 1956. After a bit of obligatory heckling, Tracy shouted out, “See you around, Gidget!” Kohner was five-feet tall and weighed 95 pounds; as the better part of the Western world would soon learn, “Gidget” was a mashup of “girl” and “midget.”

Kohner learned to surf by trading peanut butter sandwiches—made herself in the kitchen of her family’s airy suburban ranch house in nearby Brentwood—for the use of whatever board was lying around Tubesteak’s palm-frond Malibu beach shack. She had schoolgirl crushes on some of the Malibu surfers, but the mostly all-male gang viewed her as a mascot, not a love interest. By the end of summer she had her own board and had developed into a competent surfer. Claire Cassidy, Robin Grigg, Vicki Flaxman, Aggie Bane, and the rest of the original postwar Malibu girls had moved on, so Kohner was often the only female in the lineup. Back home, she talked incessantly about her surfing experiences, and at one point told her father that she was going to write a book about it. Frederick Kohner smiled, heard a little bell go off in his head, and offered to write it for her.

And so it was that a gushing Malibu-obsessed tomboy escorted surfing to its permanent seat at the banquet table of American pop culture. When Gidget got her Hollywood close-up in 1959, it was the starting bell for a 10-year surf boom that took the sport from California-centric phenomenon to national craze to hot worldwide export. As the public went nuts for the surfing life, the wave-riding population would double, then double again, and again, and probably a fourth time. It wasn’t all Gidget’s doing. But this loud, young, hard-charging period in surf history would forever be linked in the popular imagination to the barefoot ingenue with the funny nickname.

Just as Kathy Koehner made herself over as a surfer at Malibu, Frederick Koehner did much the same as a writer in America. He was born in Czechoslovakia, the son of a Jewish moviehouse owner, and began to write screenplays after earning a doctorate in film from the Sorbonne. After attending a 1933 Berlin movie premier in which all the Jewish-sounding names had been removed from the credits—the work of newly-appointed Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels—Kohner wisely decided to sail for America. The transition wasn’t especially hard; Kohner was married and well-connected, moderately wealthy, and already spoke English. Five years after landing in Hollywood he received an Academy Award screenplay nomination, and by the time he sat down with his daughter to talk about her surfing life at Malibu—and listened in surreptitiously to her phone calls with Miki Dora and other male friends from the beach, for added slang and anecdotes—he had more than thirty movie and television screenwriting credits to his name.

 is a work of fiction, but just barely. It’s told in the breathless first-person voice of sixteen-year-old Frances Lawrence, who describes her previous wave- and romance-filled summer at Malibu. Kohner banged out the first draft in a hot-rush six weeks—not because the effort was gratuitous, but because in his own way he’d become as enthusiastic about surfing and beach life as Gidget herself. The language appealed to him (Kohner’s ear for the speech patterns of adolescent girls was nearly as sharp as that fellow eastern European émigré Vladimir Nabokov, whose 

), and unlike many postwar American adults, he wasn’t put off by the idea that the modern teenager had so much freedom and money and leisure time. Kohner in fact has a ball describing the Malibu surfers in full lounge mode on the beach, as they carefully explain the sexual nuances between “a good girl” and “a nice girl,” and holler their approval for Anita Ekberg’s 

 centerfold. Adults are the real troublemakers in 

, and passing reference is made to absent parents, crooked therapists, and abusive husbands. Gidget herself meanwhile races back and forth between her two new loves, Jeff “Moondoggie” Griffin and the Malibu surf, and her voice throughout the book has a humor and bite that is entirely missing in the movie version.

“Just then the bamboo curtain to the hut was drawn open and this bum came out,” Gidget says early on, trying to sound unimpressed as she gets her first look at the great Kahoona, emerging from his beach shack after a big night:

What I mean, he wasn’t a bum but then he wasn’t exactly the kind of guy that would drive a girl mad with desire either. He was on the oldish side—around the end of the twenties or so. You got the impression that he had just gotten up or something. Of course all the surfers in this enclosure wore only shorts or Hawaiian print trunks but this superannuated Huckleberry Finn had on a pair of jeans that were cut off just beneath the knees and looked more like an old rag bleached by the sun. Jeez, he was tanned. You’ve never laid your eyes on a tan like that. Like one of those suntan ads you see in magazines—only more so. He had a beard growth of at least three days and he stood there and scratched his stubbles and had this kind of empty gaze like he was full of booze.

—the subtitle was dropped for later editions—in mid-fall 1957. It earned reasonably good notices (the 

 called it “touching and entertaining”), made the West Coast best-seller lists (outperforming Jack Kerouac’s 

, which came out a few weeks earlier), and eventually sold more than a half million copies. Kathy Kohner was profiled in the 

 hit the bookstores, and two weeks later she and her father were both featured in a 

 magazine article, which announced that they had just signed a movie deal—which of course would soon become the next, and much bigger, part of the Gidget phenomenon.

Sixty years later, it’s easy to see why Kohner’s original work scored such a bullseye with its non-surfing audience. Gidget is a quick, easy, fun read, and it contains the double novelty of a surfer-populated beach setting and a female lead who’s both tough and cute. Kohner did a fine job of presenting Gidget and her surfer friends as “nice” (the 

 reviewer used the word three times in a quick three-paragraph review), but not 

 nice (all that sex talk, some drinking and smoking, a few mild swear words). This neatly split the difference between the two prevailing views of American youth: the juvenile delinquent and the bright, spirited “hi-fi citizen.”

And so it was that a gushing Malibu-obsessed tomboy escorted surfing to its permanent seat at the banquet table of American pop culture.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

Gidget the All-Powerful

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