Gidget goes homeless after LA fires but surfing’s most famous journals have survived
When fire swept through Los Angeles last month, the home of the world’s most famous surfer was destroyed but she saved the one thing that had helped bring joy to millions.
Greenery and fine homes. ZUCKERMAN stamped on the front wall. This must be the place.
Kathy Kohner Zuckerman sang, “Come on in!” I did as I was told. I went on in. I went right on in to her kitchen bench.
Plonked myself there until she kicked me out. One of the best days I’ve had in this job.
“I’m feeling very chatty!” Kathy sang. “I’ve just had lunch. I’ll show you around the house and you can see my diaries. I love Australians, I do! I’ll be honest with you, my handsome man.
“I don’t want you to give me a bad review. You have to promise you won’t do me a bad review!”
I promised I wouldn’t do her a bad review.
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You’d know her by a different name. Gidget. Kathy was Gidget, the real Gidget, the original and best. It was the teenage Kathy’s diaries that provided the content and bitchen lingo for the novel Gidget: The Little Girl With Big Ideas, written by her father, Frederick Kohner, in the fabulous 1950s.
It was the Gidget books and movies, all based on Kathy’s experiences, that started a cultural phenomenon and introduced surfing to mainland America. Everyone wanted to go to Malibu, surf, fall in love and make out. Not necessarily in that order.
When Surfer magazine compiled its list of the 10 most influential surfers of the 20th century, Kathy, the original surfer girl, came in at No.7.
She was played in the first movie by Sandra Dee, and in the television series by Sally Field. Kathy preferred the Sandra Dee version even though in real life she was more of a tomboy than Dee’s sugary-sweet depiction.
Anyway. I was meeting/interviewing Kathy at her home at Pacific Palisades. A beautiful place she shared with her husband, Marv, the Yiddish scholar who won her heart. Gorgeous wallpaper, books everywhere, Marv’s study was packed to the rafters with notes, just the loveliest home. And a joint etched in my thoughts when the LA fires ripped the area apart. I’ve travelled the world a few times, and met a thousand people, and Kathy is one of the most generous and gorgeous souls of all, and it was frightful to think her house had been lost.
She’d always sent emails with happy faces and kind thoughts and loveheart emojis ... but they’d stopped. I missed them. You know those rare people who light up your world just by being in it? Kathy’s one of those people. Then a message. Her home was rubble and ash. Basically the only thing she saved? The most famous diaries in surfing.
“William,” she wrote. “I saved the diaries. I am happy that I did, and the old photo album of my early surfing days. And I saved three signed Gidget hardback books. Marv and I are okay. We need to find a place to live and rent. Too old to buy. We will not rebuild. The surf community has been so, so amazing.”
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Aged 84, Kathy was homeless for a while there. Now she’s shacked up with Marv in an Airbnb at Santa Monica. The day we met, she’d read out whole sections of those diaries. We chatted away for so long, and it was so much fun, I fancied asking Marv if I could move in. Those diaries are part of surfing history: funny, open, honest. While we flicked through the pages, parts of our conversation went like this.
Me: “How’d the writing process go?”
Kathy: “I’d go to my dad’s study ... He’d be sitting at his desk and I’d be standing right there next to him and I’d talk to him the way we talked to each other at the beach. I’d tell him what was in my diaries. It was bitchen, Dad! I was so jazz’d! He’d look at me and say, ‘It was bitchen’? How do I spell that? You were jazz’d?’ What does that mean? And I’d say, ‘Yeah, Dad, the surf was bitchen! Of course I was jazz’d!’ There was a whole new language for him to get his head around. He was rather brilliant to write in the voice of a teenage girl. I fed him the information and he created the character of Gidget.“
Me: “Read some passages?”
Kathy: “Only if you say please.”
Me: “Please.”
Kathy: “Here’s 1959. Let’s see how this goes. Look at that – a ticket to the Moby Dick movie. Here’s a good section: “The ‘Bu gets good once a summer. And boy it got good today. I was riding four-footers and lining all the way across the bay. Brother, was I ever stoked. I couldn’t believe it. No kooks were out in the water and it was practically open door all the way. I took gas a couple of times but otherwise I really looked good. Sets were coming in off the point, so consistent I couldn’t believe it. The sets were actually better formed than last year’s. The men really turned it on. There must have been 50 boards in the water at seven in the evening. Everyone from the whole coast ... Actually, it was pretty exciting. Those bigger waves are so easy to ride. It was unbelievable. I really had a ball. I looked better than last year. I still miss having a boyfriend but everything happens for the best. I’ll die an old maid. This is the life. I love Ted.“
Me: “What happened to Ted?”
Kathy: “Not sure.”
Me: “Poor Ted. Read a bit more?”
Kathy: “Please?”
Me: “Please.”
Kathy: “February 7, 1956. We got home at around seven-thirty and boy, was I stuffed. Sunday I was really tired from the day before. Kathy Premacher came over and in the afternoon we went to the shows and saw Rebel Without a Cause. I didn’t like it too much at all. When I was playing the piano I was thinking of Herb, when who should call? Herb! He wanted to come and see Susie on television. I told him he could come but no one would be home. So what? We watched the show and when it was over I walked out to the car with him and said goodnight. And then I don’t know how it happened, but I was found in Herb’s arms. He kept wanting to kiss me but I was afraid. He hasn’t called me again and it’s Wednesday.“
Me: “You were found in Herb’s arms?”
Kathy: “Yes, sir. I’d gone missing and that was where they found me. In Herb’s arms. Alive and well.”
Go Herb.
The Palisades fire burned for 24 days, from January 7-31, killing 12 people and destroying 6837 structures. Jeff Bridges, Billy Crystal, Mel Gibson, John Goodman, Paris Hilton and Anthony Hopkins lost their homes. So did Kathy, escaping with pretty much the shirt on her back, Marv, and the dog-eared Gidget diaries.
I’m not surprised she grabbed her journals. Tears were swimming in her eyes once, and only once, while we had a thousand cuppas in her kitchen. I suspect to keep her diaries alive is to keep Frederick’s memory alive.
“I was certainly willing to share a lot with him when I was younger,” Kathy said of her relationship with her dad. “I wanted the story to be written and I just thought it would be fun for him to do it. I wanted to help him.
“We bonded over it. I was very open with him because I knew the more I told him, the better his story would be. And when I look back, I guess I trusted him.
“I was a good talker and he was a great listener and that’s a good combination. That’s why we were always so close.”
She said: “This story of a girl going to Malibu, where these interesting guys were surfing, and where there was a guy living in a shack on the beach, and where they all had these crazy nicknames, and where I got to be Gidget – it was just such a totally different world to anything we had seen before.
“It was right there in front of us, and I was in it, and I wanted to tell him all about it. I thought it was such an interesting way of life after coming from Europe and starting at high school in America. No one at my school knew the beach scene even existed. I just liked everything about it. It was natural and healthy and energetic. It was a fantastic lifestyle and I just turned to Dad in his car one day and said, ‘I want us to write a story about this place down at Malibu’. He did such a wonderful job, don’t you think? I was proud of him because he wrote it so well and got it just right. The book has always helped keep my father alive for me.”
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The greenery’s gone at Pacific Palisades. Fine homes have been trashed. I asked Kathy during the week for a photo from Santa Monica. “I’ll try,” she replied. “It’s just so hard.” Friends had dropped off a rug, throws for the couch and $500. “We’re good,” Kathy wrote. “When you come next to beautiful California, I want a hug. Please let my surfer pals down under know about the loss of ‘stuff’ – but I did save the diaries.”
And then she sent a photo. Gidget goes back to the drawing board. Back straight, chin up. Some people.
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