That Girl; 50 years later, surfing’s original icon, GIDGET is still at the beach

Fifty years later, Gidget is still at Malibu. It’s been five decades since the 1957 novella Gidget begat the 1959 movie of the same name, and that flick begat the surf culture explosion of the 1960s: Dick Dale and Miserlou, Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii, Frankie and Annette, Eric von Zipper, Jan and Dean. The irony—some say tragedy—of Gidget is that by looking back on the golden years of the 1950s, it effectively ended them. Some critics see Gidget as the Pandora’s Box that flooded Malibu, and the surfing world, with wannabes. Others say that crowds were inevitable.

But if anyone had any doubts about the sincerity of Gidget herself, Kathy Kohner, well, she’s still on the beach, at Malibu, talking to the characters who now inhabit the pit and cross-step in the wake of Kahoona, Moondoggie, Lover Boy, Lord Byron and the rest of the Malibu crew immortalized a half century ago.

Miki Dora called the 1950s The Golden Years for California surfing. As the squares were zooming past on PCH, heading for the aircraft factories and cashing in on the post-war boom, surfers didn’t seem interested in producing more than adrenaline and calcium deposits. Society didn’t pay surfers any mind, lumping them in with homosexuals, beatniks, artists, bohemians, and other nonconformists.

But surfing was fun in the 1950s, a secret thrill enjoyed by young people who had been exposed to the secrets of the sea during World War II and brought wartime technology like foam and fiberglass and planning hull theory and applied those materials and techniques to make surfboards lighter, faster, better. Back then, a small group of surfers had all the clean, classic California surf to themselves—and they were learning to ride it in ways that would change the world.

Kathy Kohner walked into the middle of all this around 1956 or 1957 and bugged the boys until they gave in and taught her to surf. At some point, Kathy got a nickname, as the clever surfers morphed together “girl” and “midget.” Having a nickname was part of being the in crowd back then: Gidget hung out with Kahoona, and Moondoggie, and Da Cat.

Kathy Kohner would come home from the beach with sand in her hair, a smile on her lips and a zillion stories about the bitchin’ time she was having at the beach. Her father was a Czech immigrant who had almost won an Oscar for Best Writing 1938. Papa Frederick turned his daughter’s stories into the novella Gidget in 1957, a very popular coming-of-age story which shed light on this new surfing phenomenon along the beaches of Los Angeles. Two years later, Columbia Pictures dedicated significant money, time and talent into making Gidget a feature film, casting Sandra Dee, James Darren, Cliff Robertson, Arthur O’Connell and the Four Preps.

On a Tuesday afternoon at the end of October, I drove up into the badlands of Pacific Palisades, to the home where Kathy lives with her husband of 44 years. She didn’t end up marrying Moondoggie as the movie would suggest. She married a decent chap named Marvin Zuckerman, and they live happily in a 1950s-era home on a street overlooking a canyon, in a neighborhood that’s warm and sunny and quiet.

Fifty years after the movie, Kathy is the subject of a documentary by Brian Gillogly called The Accidental Icon. It’s all about the Gidget phenomenon: who Kathy was, who her father was, how Kathy first started going to the beach, and how it all morphed into a cultural phenomenon. I watched the documentary sitting in Kathy’s living room, feeling transported back to the 1950s myself. Kathy was taking care of her ailing husband and flitting in and out to answer questions and ask others. At one point she chided me for taking photos in her living room. At another point she took exception to my implying she was a Valley girl: “The Valley? I didn’t know what the Valley was back then.”

The Accidental Icon covers a lot of territory, interviewing everyone from Layne Beachley to Sally Field to Allen Sarlo about how the movie affected their lives. Beachley admits that she was known as Gidget on the beach for many years, until she went out in the world and kicked ass and imprinted her name forever in the minds of the surfing world. Sarlo has been dealing with the post-Gidget crowds at First Point going back to the 1970s, but he admitted that he loved the TV show Gidget, because it came on just before Gilligan’s Island and F Troop. And Sally Field, who portrayed Gidget in the TV show, said that even after movies and Oscars and a great deal of success, she has a special place in her heart for the little surfer girl who could. Don’t we all?