COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved.
Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Byline: Sheila Weller
One summer day in 1961, three 16-year-old Beverly Hills
boys-Mike Nader, Duane King, and Larry Shaw-got up at dawn in
their separate homes and eagerly pulled on their swim trunks.
The sport that was their lifeline-surfing-had been lifted from
obscurity two years earlier by a Sandra Dee movie called Gidget,
but it still wasn't something young America was dying to do, the
way dancing to rock 'n' roll and twirling Hula Hoops had been.
That would start to change that day, though, when a
Life-magazine photographer would sight the boys riding the waves
at Malibu and make them stars of a photo spread. The seven-page
article, "The Mad, Happy Surfers: A Way of Life on the
Wavetops," published that September in an issue with Jackie
Kennedy welcoming readers to the newly redecorated White House
on the cover, would loft surfing into the national consciousness
just before the first Beach Boys song, "Surfin',"
broke into the pop charts. These were the 1961 Beach Boys, mind
you-they of the short hair, the Hawaiian shirts, and the
frat-rats-in-training voices that had yet to ascend to choirboy
eloquence-so the surfing fad would be pegged initially as the
province of bland, spoiled sons of Leave It to Beaver parents
living in the suburbs. As Tom Wolfe would soon declare of surfer
culture in "The Pump-House Gang," a signature piece of
New Journalism, "practically everybody comes from a good
family."
Well, not everybody. Something in those Life pictures-a glint of
desperation in Larry Shaw's Tom Sawyer grin, maybe, or Mike
Nader's somber glare despite his goof of surfing in a
tuxedo-betrayed a soulful undertone. Also, there was the matter
of the boys' guru, Miki Dora, who, though absent from the Life
article, was a dark prince of the beach: a great surfer and a
beguiling sociopath. The boys copied his every gesture. Who but
Miki could have taught them to glide not just over the waves but
also over their baroquely unhappy home lives? "We were a
group of lost boys," says Larry Shaw. "The mystique of
Miki, coupled with the mystery of the ocean, saved us." In
the process, an underground saga of surf culture-50s beach bum,
California girl, hip Hollywood, and noir L.A. in equal
measure-would come to be written on the salty wind of the
Pacific coastline.
As Mike Nader slid his board into his woody that morning, there
was much for the ocean to blot out. His mother, Minette, a
stunning onetime backup singer for Lena Horne who'd had Mike
when she was 17, had recently been in a scary accident. After
too many drinks, with her Yorkie on her lap, she had driven her
Jaguar off Mulholland Drive. It was her second brush with death
in two weeks. Before that, her violent young lover (for whom she
had left a perfectly nice, older sugar daddy, who was a bookie)
had hurled a hundred-pound slab of flagstone at her and barely
missed killing her. On another recent occasion, Mike came to his
mother's rescue by taking a gun from under his bed and
threatening to kill the man if he didn't stop beating her.
When Mike pulled into Duane King's driveway, he recalls,
"there was Dr. King"-a proper orthopedic
surgeon-"hidden behind the Racing Form with an ashtray
already overflowing. And there was Mrs. King, wobbling
downstairs, incoherently ranting." The nonstop fighting
between Duane's racetrack-happy, workaholic dad and Margaret
Lane King, a former New York model and artist who had once
resembled the young Marlene Dietrich but who now rarely drew a
sober breath, provided Duane with a marital template
sufficiently nightmare-inducing to keep him a bachelor until he
was nearly 60.
Next stop: Larry Shaw's. Larry lived alone, subsisting on
Swanson's TV dinners. His mother, Kathryn "Kay"
Trapheagan, a stormy fifth-generation Californian, had married
Nate Shaw (born Nate Schwartz), a rich clothing magnate who
drove a yellow Rolls-Royce with a gold-plated dashboard, after
romancing his son. (There was a lingering question as to which
man was really Larry's father.) After Larry's golden childhood
in the largest house in Malibu Colony, with a staff of six,
including Thelma, the governess, who called him "Master
Shaw," the family's fortunes plummeted. Following an angry
divorce, Larry and his mother shared a series of one-room
rentals. From the age of eight, the boy took care of the
histrionic, perpetually inebriated woman. He would grab the
steering wheel when Kay passed out while driving. He would wipe
her hair with napkins when her forehead fell onto her dinner
plate. He called an ambulance the time she slit her wrists, the
time she took too much phenobarbital, and the time she removed a
pierced earring by yanking it right through her earlobe. One
night Kay started gagging when she was eating, and Larry ran for
a doctor, who, before pronouncing her dead, opened her mouth,
removed a piece of steak from her windpipe, and told the sobbing
boy, "Just so you know, kid, for the next time: this is how
you can save someone's life."
Larry slid his board into the station wagon next to Mike's and
Duane's, and off the lost boys sped to their Nirvana-Malibu.
Some older guys shooting the breeze in "the pit"-a
surfers-only wedge of sand buffered from the Pacific Coast
Highway by a cement wall against which they leaned their upended
boards-ignored Mike, Duane, and Larry, who could only hover
around the edges of that inner sanctum since they hadn't
"earned their bones" yet, but they snapped to
attention when a fourth young man drove up in his '56 Ford with
no backseat. Swarthy, splendidly built, movie-star handsome,
Miki Dora parked, pulled out his Dave Sweet surfboard, and
sauntered to the water's edge to paddle out to the point break.
"When Miki arrived, the bodies on the beach were like the
Red Sea parting," says someone who witnessed the scene
unfold many times.
Already a legend in 1961, today-four years after his 2002 death
from pancreatic cancer (which followed his stay in federal
prison for credit-card fraud, which ended years of an odyssey in
France and New Zealand)-Miki (pronounced Mickey, as he
alternatively spelled it) Dora has been canonized. "Surfing
hedonist who became a hero to a generation of beach bums ...
Dora was a Kerouac in shorts," read his London Times
obituary. "If you took James Dean's cool, Muhammad Ali's
poetics, Harry Houdini's slipperiness [and] James Bond's jet
setting ... you'd come up with ... Miki Dora, the Black Knight
of Malibu," read one review of Dora Lives, the 2005
coffee-table book which describes Miki as "everything that
a surfer ought to be: he was tanned, he was good-looking, and he
was trouble." Next spring William Morrow will publish David
Rensin's All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and
Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki "da Cat" Dora, an
exhaustive oral history in the style of Edie, Jean Stein's book
about Edie Sedgwick. Leonardo DiCaprio's film company has
acquired the movie rights.
What set Dora apart from the other top Malibu surfers (including
short, comical Johnny Fain and Lance Carson, who could
nose-ride-walk to the tip of the board while on a wave and hang
ten-like no other) was his charisma. First of all, he was
elegant. "He wasn't into survival surf," said Surfer's
Journal publisher Steve Pezman at the time of Miki's death.
"He was into the dance." His balletic, feline grace on
the waves earned him the nickname "da Cat," and he
wore ascots and checked jackets, or Lacoste shirts and black
alpaca sweaters, over his beach trunks. Mike Nader calls him
"the Cary Grant of surfers," adding, "Johnny Fain
was the Mickey Rooney." Acolytes were also struck by his
dazzle-his wildly intelligent, if disjointed, sentences,
combined with a lot of blowhard paranoia. He had his own way of
talking: edgy, staccato wiseguy ("So-so-so, what's goin'
on, ennhk?") mixed with campy Continental ("Vuht are
you doing here, dahlink?"). And he was always gesturing
with his hands, with an emotive, bent-elbowed, loose-fingered
gusto that Nader, King, and Shaw strained to emulate. Finally,
there was his provocatively unplaceable sexuality. In that
homophobic time and place, Miki was at once extremely macho and
undeniably effeminate. Many surfers thought he was not
interested in women-a result of his total focus on waves-or
struggling with suppressed gayness. "His body language was
feminine: his wrist action, his long fingers, the way he put his
hands on his hips-it was a little bit fey," says a woman
who had a two-year relationship with him in the mid-60s, and who
asks to be identified by her first name only, Jacqueline.
Speaking for the first time at length about Miki, she describes
him as having been so sexually ineffectual and disinterested as
to be "a eunuch."
Miki and the Lost Boys
Miki lived by scamming. Working as a host at Frascati restaurant
and as a parking attendant at the then brand-new Beverly Hilton
hotel in 1955 were just about the last real jobs anyone
remembers him having. To do anything more was to sell out. In a
town of creamy opportunism, the thefts by which he supported
himself were so small-time, high-risk, and potentially
humiliating that they bespoke a cockeyed integrity. He made the
patently tacky petty theft a symbol of bravado and status envy.
"Mike, Duane, and I competed with each other to be ripped
off by Miki-'Miki stole my wax!' 'Yeah? Well, Miki stole my
money!'-it was a badge of honor," says Larry Shaw, today a
psychologist who works with trauma victims. "We were a band
of brothers-vulnerable, damaged boys-and Miki was our Pied
Piper," says Mike Nader, whose long, successful TV acting
career was twice interrupted by substance abuse and who taught
acting in East Hampton, on Long Island, before his recent move
to L.A. to get back into films. Duane King, who is now a banker
in Santa Monica, sums up: "Miki had the freedom we wanted:
no school, no job, no relationships, just surf. We paid for his
food and gas because we wanted him to keep going. If he could
beat the system that was 'honest work,' then maybe we could beat
the one that was our families."
Perhaps the three boys sensed another commonality: like all of
them, Miki Dora had a beautiful, restless, painfully
non-maternal mother. Ramona Stancliff Dora Chapin had parked him
first in a military school and then with her mother-in-law, a
Hungarian pianist and vocal coach. (Miki's father was Hungarian,
and Miki had been born in Hungary, coming to America as a
child.) He lived with his grandmother well into his 20s. During
the height of his mystique, Miki would break character to muse
hurtfully about Ramona to his girlfriend. "Miki felt his
birth had been an accident, that his beautiful, exotic,
unattainable mother hadn't wanted him, and he was in deep pain
about it," says Jacqueline, whose rapier cheekbones and
upturned eyes, even today, suggest what drove the sullen surfer
to make a beeline for her when he saw her on the beach 40 years
ago. "He was deeply drawn to his mother and he was always
trying to get her to recognize and love him."
Was California surfer culture really animated by men looking for
good-mother substitutes? It's possible, says Phyllis Tracy, the
wife of Tubesteak, Dora's oldest pal. "One thing Miki and
Tube had in common is that they were both raised not by their
mothers, who were busy doing other things, but by their
grandmothers." A sunny Paul McCartney to Miki's cool John
Lennon, Tubesteak, who is now 71, was born Terry-Michael Tracy
but has answered only to Tubesteak-surfer-ese for hot dog and
slang for show-off (as well as penis)-since the day in 1952 when
Miki called him that.
Tubesteak met Miki Dora on the beach at San Onofre, the midpoint
in Southern California's great-wave trifecta, between Malibu and
La Jolla's Windansea, when they were both 15. "There were
all these World War II vets sitting around getting drunk on the
beach, and only this one other guy my age with a surfboard:
Miki." He sometimes called himself Mickey Chapin then,
taking the name of Gardner Chapin, a cabinetmaker and surfboard
designer whom Ramona had married after her divorce from Miki's
natural father, Miklos Dora, with whom Miki would remain in
contact all his life. The name Chapin gave Miki rare status in
the sport: it made him second-generation. The Polynesian art of
surfboard riding was still largely foreign to California, which
was then 13 plane hours away from the territory of Hawaii. Don
Edmonds, who is now 70 and has been surfing most of his life,
remembers the day in 1950 when he and some teenage friends,
bellyboarding off Seal Beach, first saw somebody surfing.
"We couldn't believe our eyes when this guy paddles out in
the water on this long board he'd brought in from Hawaii, and he
suddenly turns around and catches a wave, and he stands up! He's
standing up on this board! On top of the wave, floating in! Our
jaws hit the sand! We knocked him off the board so we could try
it."
Gard Chapin was not only one of the elite pre-1950s surfers but
also, through his tutelage of a young cancer survivor named Bob
Simmons, a participant in the making of a surfing martyr. Chapin
got Simmons surfing to build up his atrophied arm. One day in
1954, Simmons-whose flat, long-voweled elocution is said to have
been the forerunner of "duuude"-speak-took on a high
wave at Windansea and got knocked off. His body washed up
several days later.
"Gard Chapin was a notorious drunk," says Tubesteak.
"Miki seemed afraid of him. One day Miki and I drove to
Gard's house; Miki wanted money. I'm sitting in the car. I hear
yelling, screaming, banging. Miki comes running out and Gard's
chasing him, throwing something at him. I think Gard's violence
had a big effect on him."
Tubesteak and Miki lived the square life for about 15 minutes.
They had girlfriends; Miki's was Virginia "Deetsy"
Barnett, a "drop-dead gorgeous" blonde, according to
Tubesteak. They got clerical jobs at Home Insurance Company,
downtown on Spring Street, where trolleys teetered to City Hall
and men wore hats: it was all very early-Eisenhower-era L.A.,
very Jack Webb's Dragnet. After getting fired for repeatedly
coming in late, with sand and salt water dripping off them onto
the actuarial tables, they decamped to Malibu. Tubesteak built a
shack on the sand from telephone poles and palm fronds, and Miki
commuted from his grandmother's house on Larrabee Street.
With a few others-including Matt Kivlin, a suave, tall,
wavy-haired master surfer and, at 27, an elder statesman; Billy
Al Bengston, a bearded, antic motorcycle rider and future
renowned artist; Bill Jensen, a blue-eyed babe magnet in blue
trunks with a blue car with blue upholstery; and Jerry Hurst, a
blond, tanned hotshot-they transformed surf culture from "a
bunch of guys sitting around strumming their ukuleles and
singing Hawaiian music," as Tubesteak puts it, to surfers
as rock 'n' rollers.
"We listened to the Olympics, the Coasters, and Hank
Ballard and the Midnighters," Tubesteak recalls. "We'd
burn tires on the beach for warmth, and no one cared," says
Bill Jensen. "We'd knock on doors and ask people to let us
surf their private beaches, and they'd let us. With 18-cent
cheeseburgers, cheap gasoline, and $3-an-hour jobs at Safeway
loading fruit from four to seven a.m., you could be a surf bum.
We had our own language. If you were really jazzed on surfing,
you were 'stoked.' Surfers were 'doggies in the water.' A great
day: 'You had the place wired.'_" Once, when Mexican
workers cleaning walls with garden hoes called them
"Daddy-o!," Tubesteak called back,
"Hoe-dad!," and later the term "hodad" came
to mean a disruptive Valley biker.
Tubesteak coined many other words in the growing surfer lexicon.
Over one of those burnt-tire campfires, he happened to tell
Jerry Hurst how a friend of his had introduced his short
Christmas-party date as "Gidget: girl plus midget."
One day in June 1956 the petite 15-year-old daughter of a
European émigré screenwriter strode into a circle of the 'Bu
guys, as the Malibu surfers were known, and said she wanted to
learn to surf. They rebuffed her. Undaunted, she returned with
peanut-butter-and-radish sandwiches. Biting into the free food,
Jerry Hurst cried, "Thanks, Gidget," and sent Kathy
Kohner straight to heaven.
Gidget Goes to Hollywood
"Gidget will be 50 years old next year," says Kathy
Kohner Zuckerman, 65, over lunch at a Malibu cafe that sells
surfboard-logo T-shirts, surf-themed sandwiches, and surf-hero
bubble gum, none of which (or much else of the $4-billion-a-
year U.S. commercial surf industry) might exist had she not
embraced that nickname, bought a $35 surfboard from one of the
guys, and caught her first wave during the summer when everyone
in Malibu was listening to "Heartbreak Hotel." She got
hazed by the guys, she recalls: "They'd throw my board over
the fence, throw pineapple at me. But I learned how to surf. I
got my legs dinged, my knees dinged, my board dinged, but I
learned. And I was always in love." Not with Miki Dora,
though he'd often come over to her house to play Ping-Pong.
"And when we'd go to movies together, he'd sneak in at
intermission without paying, and when we went skiing at Mount
Baldy, he'd walk up the mountain rather than pay for a
chairlift." The guy she was smitten with was Bill Jensen.
"She was a nice kid, but she was 15, and I was 20. That's
jailbait!" says Jensen.
Repairing to the Pacific Palisades home where she has lived for
decades with her husband of more than 40 years, Yiddish scholar
and former dean of Los Angeles Valley College Marvin Zuckerman,
Kathy cracks open the lock of her old diary, which has a
comic-book teenage girl on the cover, and reads the words
"Boy, the surf was bitchen today," a sentiment she
conveyed to her father years ago.
Frederick Kohner had fled Germany in 1933. Because Kohner was a
Jew, his name had been removed from the credits of a film he had
written, by order of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
Much later, in California, Kohner began imbibing his daughter's
breezy new patois and hammering out a novel about a teenage girl
who hangs around with surf bums. He showed his manuscript to his
brother, the distinguished agent Paul Kohner, who represented
Ernest Hemingway and Ingmar Bergman. Paul passed, but the
William Morris Agency took the book on and sold it to G. P.
Putnam's Sons. Frederick Kohner's Gidget was published in the
fall of 1957, the same year as Kerouac's On the Road, and went
on to sell more than a half-million copies. It was re-issued in
2001.
In 1958 the film version went into production. The Bill
Jensen-based character, played by James Darren, was given Billy
Al Bengston's nickname, "Moondoggie," and Miki was
chosen as his stunt double. Tubesteak was turned into the
character Kahoona (which had been Matt Kivlin's nickname) and
was played by Cliff Robertson, who'd grown up in La Jolla. An
achingly winsome Sandra Dee played Kathy, renamed Francie.
"But I wasn't that character," Kathy says. "I was
tougher." (Subsequent Gidgets in movie sequels were played
by Deborah Walley and Cindy Carol, and in 1965 an unknown named
Sally Field got her break by playing the role on the TV series.)
Acting as a double for a teen idol who was not much of an
athlete rubbed Hollywood High graduate Miki Dora's ego the wrong
way. "Miki was as good-looking as any actor, but he didn't
have the personality, and he was incapable of diplomacy,"
says Jacqueline. Gidget publicized surfing, which meant that
more people started crowding the waves, and that made him angry.
Once, he used the skeg, or fin, of his board as a knife to carve
a surgical swath down the back of one interloper and send him
screaming to Malibu General. As surf culture was puffballed into
a popular girlish love story, Miki Dora began living out a
brazen, swashbuckling counter-narrative.
Among the half-dozen or so females on surfboards in Malibu was a
dignified Beverly Hills divorced mother of three sons, Eugenia
Wilson. "Mrs. Wilson had Connecticut Yankee airs and a
Modigliani face," Mike Nader recalls of the mother of his
friend Brian Wilson (not the Beach Boy, but one of the three
heirs to Wilson's House of Suede and Leather, a large store
across from the Beverly Hilton). "Eugenia was the only mom
in the ocean-and she was good," Kathy Kohner remembers.
Moreover, Eugenia's society-matron aplomb was a novel advantage
in the grubby surf world, and she used it to befriend Rabbit
Kekai, the most famous surfer on the sport's home turf, Hawaii,
and the principal protégé of Duke Kahanamoku, the father of
modern surfing, who also won swimming medals in the Olympics in
1912, 1920, and 1924.
One summer day in 1960-a year before the Life photographer
spotted them-Mike Nader and Duane King left their troubled homes
and flew to Hawaii with their friend Brian. "Rabbit met us
at the airport, and we went to the beach and learned the magic
of surfing," says Mike. "We fell in love with it. You
have this constantly moving force you have to catch and interact
and become one with: the ocean."
Meanwhile, Larry Shaw was escaping the stress of babysitting his
volatile mother by wave-riding in Hermosa. After he saw her
choke to death, surfing became his only solace. Refusing to move
to his father's house in Palm Springs, Larry squatted in an
apartment from which he could hitchhike to the ocean.
The first time newcomer Larry went to Malibu with the
Rabbit-anointed Mike, Duane, and Brian, they made him lie under
their surfboards in the back of Mike's woody. "Miki's here!
Don't embarrass us, Shaw!" they ordered. Larry was blown
away. "Malibu was a counterculture before the
counterculture," he says. "Those Beatnik athletes! And
there was Miki, this man who'd mastered the sport, who'd
mastered the ocean, this Fagin-like character who was 10 years
older than us but was just as adolescent as we were." Miki
was living in a small apartment in Brentwood, and these boys
from the rich kids' school were in awe that he'd turned his
anger into a quixotic sword. Only Brian Wilson-whose household,
while broken, was stable-saw him as a cheesy scammer. The other
three became his Sancho Panzas.
Every weekend the boys would get the addresses of Beverly Hills
parents' parties, and off they'd drive from the beach.
"Miki would get in his car in his surf trunks-he didn't
even shower," Larry recalls. "He'd park on the street
in front of the party. He'd look at the people going in and
figure out the dress code. He'd reach into the back of his car
for the right outfit-maybe a stolen tuxedo, maybe a sports
jacket. He'd change ... not in the back of the car, but right
there on the sidewalk! He could get away with it because he was
so good-looking and his stance was so regal." Once inside a
party, Larry says, "Miki might do his 'And who are you, my
lovely dahlink?' routine with the women before heading for the
loot," but that ruse quickly bored him. More often, Duane
says, "women would come on to him, but his attitude was:
Get away from me! I've got stuff to do here." He'd head for
the bedroom where the women had tossed their purses. "Miki
was a cat burglar," Mike says bluntly. "He'd go
through every purse, take every wallet. His rules were: Sneak
in, never dig for anything, go for the first thing you see, flip
it, open it, take out the money, and ditch it."
"After the parties," Duane says, "we'd be driving
off and he'd have a shit-eating grin on his face ... and pull
out a piece of jewelry. He knew that we were living vicariously
through him. The more people loved how he got away with things,
the more things he tried to get away with." Dora probably
burglarized dozens of parties over a number of years, with
scarcely a police report. He liked to cut it close. According to
Tubesteak, "At a party we crashed in Rustic Canyon, the
host had an Academy Award on his mantel. As we were leaving, the
cops were called. They asked to look in Miki's car-fine with
him. After they left, Miki has a sly look on his face ... and he
pulls the Oscar out from under his car seat. They missed
it!" Jacqueline adds, "Whenever I see Hitchcock's To
Catch a Thief replayed on TV, I look at Cary Grant and think, If
Miki had more savvy, that's what he would have been. He would
have fenced jewelry, he would have wooed rich women, he would
have been a gigolo. But that would have been like pulling
Jackson Pollock away from his alcohol and his shack in the
country. Miki did it the Miki way, with his band of boys."
Miki's apprentices learned from him how to search canyon
crevices for where surfers hid their wallets. Miki taught one of
them how to steal a car, and he used their parents' charge
accounts. He showed up at Larry's father's Palm Springs house
just in time to "borrow" the hotel keys of Beverly
High teenagers arriving for spring break with their parents and
charge expensive meals for himself to their rooms. Sometimes
when he went to kids' houses, he'd unload all the food from the
family freezer. "He did it all for a simple reason:
freedom," says Duane. "Every guy on that beach wanted
to do nothing but surf all day, but only Miki had found a way to
do it."
The Surfer Girls
Malibu in the early 60s, Duane King writes in an e-mail, was a
"special, probably never to be repeated place and time Most
of us were really regular normal kids searching desperately for
a way out of tough family settings. It was this dark side to all
of our backgrounds that generated a unique culture/era. In our
search to extricate ourselves we formed a perfect storm of
ordinary people, set in an extraordinary time and
location."
It was about cutting sixth period so that you could drive down
Wilshire to the beach, honking and waving at other surfers,
claiming as your own the beach with the best waves in
California, those four-foot arcs of spray and wonder. It was
about mastering the most exhilarating sport-"All of us have
excelled at 10 other sports since that time, but nothing matches
surfing," Duane says-and wrapping that obsession in a world
of its own. It was about going to the Rendezvous Ballroom and
doing your own dance, the Surfers' Stomp ("It was a goofy
dance, with lots of stomping," Larry recalls). And,
finally, it was about going to the beach to find your girls, who
were as perfect as the waves.
Surfer girls. They materialized through the ocean glare like
Valkyries rising from fjords. "They were all
gorgeous," says Mike Nader, and they were squeezed into the
same three categories that girls everywhere were squeezed into
during that era known as Camelot, which was the last to be both
very glamorous and very conventional: (1) the aloof and
intimidating, (2) the sweet and wholesome, and (3) the
dangerously hungry.
The queen of the first group was University High's Mary Hughes,
who, at five feet nine, with pouffy, piled-up blonde hair and a
George Hamilton tan, strode the 'Bu as if it were a Paris
catwalk. Duane King remembers, "When Mary Hughes walked
down the beach, every guy would turn his head and stare. Not
most of the guys, but every guy. She would appear on the
sand-this striking, statuesque girl with dark skin and a tiny
bikini and an incredibly elongated body, very long legs, tiny
waist, and broad shoulders ... and she would be flanked by these
younger twin guys who were like her bodyguards. She was almost
an artist at presenting herself!"
"Did Duane say that? That was sweet!" says Mary
Hughes, who today is married to a wealthy owner of a packaging
company, and who still has a killer bod (she's been a personal
trainer for 30 years), still owns a Boogie Board and has surfing
sons, still is in the Malibu "in" crowd-the
middle-aged chapter-and still is Duane King's beachfront
neighbor. Mary took a 25-year detour from Malibu, including a
late-60s period in London, during which, she says, she had
romances with the rock stars Jeff Beck, Roger Daltrey, and Eric
Clapton, and a period in Mill Valley, in Northern California,
when she was married for 18 years to musician-singer Lee
Michaels ("Do You Know What I Mean," "Heighty
Hi"), with whom she raised 14 cheetahs and two tigers.
("We gave them away to Lion Country Safari when I got
pregnant.")
In sharp contrast to Mary Hughes was an equally beautiful surfer
girl, Kathy Kessler. "If Mary was the Brigitte Bardot of
Malibu, then Kathy Kessler was the Edie Sedgwick," says
Jacqueline. (The guys, to a man, liken Kathy to Marilyn Monroe.)
A Beverly High student like the boys, the horse-riding daughter
of wealthy parents, "Kathy was a beautiful, sweet girl-I
really liked her," remembers Mary Hughes, adding sadly that
"she would be our group's one tragedy." Mike says,
"Kathy was a vibrant, big-breasted, wholesome-looking,
classically American blonde with freckles and a heart of gold
... which we abused." Duane, who was infatuated with her
for years, adds, "Kathy was very vulnerable. She needed
love-and from more than one guy-and she couldn't get it."
Though Kathy and Duane were a teenage item, sometimes she'd
trade off with, or be traded off to, others. "She had
standards," Duane insists. "Only the guys she wanted,
only guys she thought were cool surfers."
Six years later, the ethos of free love would probably have
normalized and ballasted a girl like Kathy; by then, all good
girls were cheerfully turning themselves into bad girls, as fast
as possible. Kathy was just ahead of her time, a troubled
pioneer at a naive moment.
Spurred by the Life spread and the songs of the Beach Boys (only
one of whom surfed), American International Pictures (A.I.P.)
started cranking out teen-market surfer movies, starring Frankie
Avalon and Annette Funicello. Shot partly in Malibu, back to
back, and released mainly from 1963 to 1966, there were more
than 20 of them. Kathy Kessler, Mary Hughes, Mike, Duane, and
Larry-even Miki Dora (who, on location, ordered the most
expensive dinners and hustled extra orders of cherries flambé)
and Johnny Fain-had bit roles in these gems of kitsch, with such
titles as Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Beach Blanket Bingo,
and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. They tossed beach balls near
antennaed transistors, paddled out and rode the waves in when
"Surf's up!" tolled, and obligingly took to the dance
floor in the robotic, hyper-animated twist-era dance types that
would soon be mercy-killed by psychedelia. For these budget
nuggets of box-office gold, there was always a call out for more
surfer girls.
Patti Lauderback, a Culver City High School homecoming queen who
had spent two years on Waikiki Beach, won A.I.P.'s
win-a-role-in-a-beach-movie contest and took the screen name
Patti Chandler. Pert and adorable, Patti was more Sandra Dee
than Dee herself, especially after Dee lost her dewiness during
her angst-ridden marriage to Bobby Darin. In Waikiki, Patti
says, "I was the nice girl, the good girl. People protected
me." Her decency and cheerfulness managed to keep even Miki
on his toes during the several months he dated her. "He was
nice, and introverted, and health-conscious; he taught me to
make crab salads." He continued to burgle parties, though.
Of all the surfer-girl starlets, Patti got the biggest career
push. She was featured in beach spreads in Look, which also gave
her a solo feature, headlined success overtakes patti chandler.
But her career never rose above the B level, even though she was
absorbed into the young-Hollywood scene. After dating Dean
Martin's son Craig and tutoring his son Dino in chemistry,
hanging out with the Bob Evans crowd when the cocky producer was
romancing Ali McGraw and getting her to move into his opulent
Beverly Hills digs, and having a six-year relationship with a
besotted Lee Majors-after they split, he moved on to Farrah
Fawcett-Patti made a refreshingly normal career choice: she
became a flight attendant, a job she still loves 30 years later.
Today, after two divorces, she is married to a Phoenix
businessman.
End of an Era
"I just realized we're coming up on the 40th
anniversary," Linda Opie tells her old friend Salli Sachse.
They are in Salli's oceanfront cottage in La Jolla, just down
the road from Windansea, where, 45 years ago, they were the most
beautiful surfer girls on that perfect beach, and where the
surfers, for the girls' money, were far more likable and
regular-Joe than the preeners up in Malibu. Windansea could
claim, for example, Butch Van Artsdalen and Mike Diffenderfer,
who had surfed the notorious Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii.
Linda and Salli were almost clones back then, crowned Miss La
Jolla one year apart. They married the two most eligible guys in
town, who had been friends at San Diego State: restaurateur P.
G. Bent and psychologist-in-training and folksinger Peter
Sachse. When the girls went to L.A. to be in the surf movies,
their strikingly similar facial features and identical topknots
led director Bill Asher to thunder "Bookends!" at them
through his megaphone, which meant they were to scurry to the
opposite ends of the crowd of surf kids. During the week, they
stayed at the Hollywood Studio Club, where, a few years earlier,
Warren Beatty had been a big attraction with the young women
residents. On weekends they drove home to their husbands.
In the mid-60s, as drugs came in and surfing merged with
Hollywood, the beach scene grew more sophisticated. A gay
interior designer had parties featuring LSD in his beachfront
bungalow, which Mike Nader sometimes attended while he was
working on a movie career. At these bashes he often had to dodge
his mother, Minette, who was going for increasingly voguish
drugs and would eventually shoot heroin. She also later shacked
up with a Beverly High alum only four years older than Mike. The
interior designer's parties were considered edgy. "One
afternoon it was all gorgeous women," Mike says. "Then
I realized they were lesbians."
Soon the aroma of pot started wafting through the air at State
Beach, where all the surfers and surfer girls went to chill to
the strains of folk-rock coming from dozens of portable radios.
Miki's pot consumption on that beach was limited, because his
paranoia had mushroomed. According to Jacqueline, he was
obsessed with the belief that the government had killed J.F.K.;
he became friends with the lawyer Mark Lane, one of the most
outspoken of the conspiracy theorists, and even traveled to New
Orleans to meet with Jim Garrison, the district attorney who
believed he had uncovered a government plot to murder Kennedy.
Jane Fonda and her husband, Roger Vadim, would sometimes have
the new group the Byrds-the State Beach kids' band of
choice-perform at their posh beach parties. The surfers liked to
go to Ciro's, the club on the Sunset Strip-which had been
completely made over, from swank Old Guard to
anti-Establishment, cutting-edge hip-and dance in the
free-floating style pioneered by a dancer and sculptor named
Vito Paulekas. The new dancing was as sensual as the waves.
There was a new guy at State Beach that summer of '65, a
U.C.L.A. film-school student named Jim Morrison. "He was
always there, almost every day," remembers his then best
friend, Robbie Freeman, a pal of Larry Shaw's. Freeman and
Morrison were going to be in a band together, but Morrison
couldn't play a single instrument, so by default he became lead
singer, in spite of his unsteady and unproven voice. "Jim
believed he was a poet," Freeman remembers. "He wanted
to reach people. He thought he had a profound message to
communicate." Miki Dora and Jim Morrison were like rival
messianic ships passing each other in the surf-sparked night.
During one party at the designer's house, Morrison, on acid,
started to gleefully, methodically tattoo his girlfriend's bare
skin with a lit cigarette, but Nader confronted him and tried to
talk him out of it. Another night, there was a head-on collision
on Pacific Coast Highway right outside the house, and surfers in
woodies were killed and injured. During one live performance,
Morrison would use his acid-enhanced witnessing of that accident
in an improvised lyric for his hoary "The End."
There were other changes that year. Kathy Kessler, who had
fallen in with a rough beach crowd, changed her name to Rainy
Storm and later died of a heroin overdose. Duane King went to
U.S.C., and Larry Shaw became a Buddhist. Larry eventually got a
Ph.D. in psychology, and his patients now include some of the
top names in the movie business, as well as survivors of
Hurricane Katrina. Mike Nader made his way to New York and, like
his mother, dabbled in heroin. His good friend Joe Zimmelman,
another Beverly High surfer, had a hard-core habit back then-now
long since vanquished-and from their Barrow Street apartment
Zimmelman often did heroin with another close friend, a
vulnerable, hungry, un-pretty singer who would share the same
fate as Morrison: Janis Joplin.
Mike cleaned up nicely; from 1983 to 1989 he played Farnsworth
Dexter on the series Dynasty, and through the 90s he played
Dimitri Marick on the soap All My Children. Then, five years
ago, he began a relationship with a much younger woman who led
him back to partying, and he was arrested for selling cocaine to
an undercover New York City policeman, a charge that was later
dismissed. After a successful rehabilitation, he went on Larry
King Live and discussed his failed lawsuit to force ABC to
reinstate him on the series.
A tragedy at Windansea in July 1966 probably spelled the end of
the era. Salli Sachse was in Hong Kong, filming The Million Eyes
of Sumuru. She had recently finished what would be-the name says
it all-the bottom-feeding last of the beach-party movies: The
Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. Linda Opie was home in La Jolla.
Their husbands had obtained pilot's licenses and taken up stunt
flying. As Linda was walking to Windansea, she saw the old army
trainer plane that her husband owned coming in too low over the
water after a stunt maneuver. "Pull up! Pull up!" she
cried. But the plane, lacking speed, crashed into the surf, and
both men in it died, Linda's husband from a blow to the head,
Salli's by drowning. Those were just two of nine deaths that
would occur during and after the filming of that movie. It was a
tragedy from which both women found it difficult to recover.
Salli says she went on to have a romance with the singer Jackson
Browne and live the hip life in Laurel Canyon and Northern
California, in ex-Byrd David Crosby's inner circle. She
eventually became an amateur artist and studied to be a
psychologist. She never remarried. Linda did, to a man who would
turn out to be violently abusive. After the end of that
marriage, which produced a son, "bookend" Linda
re-ignited a friendship with surf-movie director Bill Asher,
following his divorce from the actress Elizabeth Montgomery.
As for Miki Dora, the scams he had so gloriously gotten away
with began to close in on him in the mid-70s, but he continued
to outrun them. He fled the U.S. in 1974, after violating his
parole in a non-jail-time guilty plea for writing bad checks.
While on an overseas whirl of capers and surfing, he doctored a
credit card and went on a two-year spending spree. Caught
re-entering the country in 1981, he was convicted and did three
months in federal prison. When he died-at 67, in January 2002-of
cancer discovered in a late stage, the Los Angeles Times gave
him a longer obituary than it grants many famous solid citizens,
two-thirds of a page.
Coming upon news of their guru's death while visiting Brian
Wilson in Aspen, Duane King called the other two lost boys. No
one was surprised. They knew Miki would get off the wave just
before he got old. The man knew about youth. After all, he had
snatched the three of them from the jaws of family pain and
helped them live a Technicolor dream of wet and wild and
rebellious adventure.
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