Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman is 77, she’s beautiful and she’s the real Gidget

The real Gidget has turned 77 and her name is Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman.

Kathy ‘Gidget’ Kohner-Zuckerman at Will Rogers State Beach on Santa Monica Bay. ‘You’re Sally Field?’ people ask. ‘I’m like, no. I’m the real Gidget.’ Picture: Danny Moloshok

Gidget agrees to a chat at her home in Los Angeles. She sends an email. “Have some good questions for me!” I tell a septuagenarian Jewish surfing legend, “Have some decent answers!”

Now we’re sitting in her kitchen at Pacific Palisades. Not too far from Malibu Pier. She’s reading her childhood diaries. They’re beautifully kept. Historic. Her name is Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman, she’s 77, and these are the diaries that have basically introduced surfing to the US mainland after she became hooked on the surfing scene at Malibu, received a famous nickname (the girl midget) and wrote her diaries so feverishly that she sat on the front seat of her father’s car and said, “Dad, I’m going to write a book about all this.” He told her, “No you’re not, young lady. I am.”

It took Frederick Kohner six weeks in 1957 to write Gidget, The Little Girl with Big Ideas. It rose above Jack Kerouac’s On The Road on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. She has a copy of the list in her bedroom closet.

It spawned TV shows and Hollywood movies. She was played by Sandra Dee and Sally Field. She preferred Dee. Everyone wanted to move to California, surf, fall in love and make out.

“I did like the boys,” she grins.

When Surfer magazine listed its most influential figures of the 20th century, at No 7 was Gidget.

“It’s not really a fame,” Kathy tells The Weekend Australian. “I mean, if I tell someone, ‘I’m Gidget’, people are like, ‘You’re Sally Field?’ I’m like, ‘No. I’m the real Gidget’.”

She works at a restaurant called Dukes Malibu. She’s there for every Taco Tuesday. Her job description is Ambassador of Aloha. She walks around and chats to guests in her warm and winking manner. She’s the only member of staff who’s allowed to have a little bit of a flirt. All harmless fun.

She’s been married to Marvin Zuckerman, a retired English and Yiddish scholar, for more than 50 years. They have two sons. She hasn’t really been a surfer since she was 18 and someone stole her favourite surfboard in Hawaii.

But when professional surfing took the revolutionary step of holding a world tour event yesterday in man-made waves at Kelly Slater’s wave pool, 100km from the California coast, it seemed the most significant development for the sport in the US since Kathy’s story became a part of pop culture.

“I think it’s a very cool story,” she says. “I think it’s a clean story, a lifestyle-related story, an optimistic story. Malibu was like, yay! You go out there, you catch your wave, there’s no cell phones, no internet, you just find your ways to have fun every day.

“There’s good messages in that book. People spin the tale and say, ‘Oh, she was the prototype ­feminist!’ You know, I wasn’t really thinking about gender issues when I was a 15-year-old at Malibu. I mean, come on. I didn’t even know what the word ‘feminist’ meant. I didn’t think that I was a girl and these were guys and I was going to prove myself in a man’s world. What a load of nonsense that is. People read too much into it.”

Kathy is a sweetheart. A beautiful soul. She talks non-stop, laughs often. She mentions her ­father, who died at 80 in 1986. There’s a wonderful black-and-white photograph in her bedroom in which she’s looking over his shoulder as they read the just-completed book.

She looks emotional. Why? I think she’s about to cry. It’s heartwarming, heartbreaking.

“Put it this way,” she says. “It seemed like my dad was always the one who, when I went away to camp, he would be there to pick me up. My mom was more like, ‘I’m napping, don’t bother me, I’m going to the beach.’ ... He always seemed to be around, because he was writing. It seemed like my dad was always kind of there for me. He was quiet. He was a kinda humble guy. He’d mention writers — he’d talk about writers he knew, Hollywood stuff. But he never made a big deal of himself. I liked that and I probably didn’t appreciate it properly until I got a bit older myself.” And then she says: “The thing people forget about Gidget is that it was his story, not mine. I’ve embraced the name and the book again in recent years. It helps keep my father alive for me.”