gidget goes yiddish
by Douglas Messerli
Frederick
Kohner Gidget (New York: Berkeley
Books, 1957)
Gabrielle
Upton (writer, based on the novel by Frederick Kohner), Paul Wendkos (director)
Gidget / 1959
My
editorial assistant, Pablo, grew up in Malibu near Topanga Canyon, so it
might have been natural for him, I imagine, to grow up as a surfer; in truth,
he tells me, he discovered one of his passions only at the age of 20, after
he had returned to the U.S. from a lengthy stay in Austria, the homeland of his
father. His small press, Brass Tacks, primarily publishes works about and by
Malibu figures, and one of his best-selling titles is a book on the surfing
culture. It figured, accordingly, that among his friends was the model for the
popular book and movie Gidget and all
the Gidget Goes—fill in the blanks—that followed. Pablo often encounters her
when he attends surfing events.
For several years now, I have been aware
of the fact without thinking much of it. But just recently he mentioned to me
something that took me a bit aback. Having read my piece about my early
friendship with Isaac B. Singer, Pablo casually mentioned one day that
Gidget—whose real name is Kathy—had also met Singer and cooked him a vegetarian
meal. Her husband, Marvin Zuckerman, so Pablo told me, was a professor, a
scholar of Yiddish, and had translated, with a friend, an older collection of
somewhat raunchy Yiddish sayings, which they titled Yiddish Sayings Mamma Never Taught You. They’d already gotten a
quote for the book’s cover by Henry Miller, and wanted one, as well, from
Singer, since he was one of most well-known and last of the great Yiddish
writers. Seeing that Singer had been invited to speak at a Ojai summer camp for
Conservative Jewish college-age women, Zuckerman went to the leaders of the
camp and got himself invited to the weekend events, where he chaired a panel on
Yiddish poetry.
In Ojai he met Singer, gave him a copy of
his Yiddish Sayings, and offered to
drive the writer back to Los Angeles to the airport, on the way inviting him to
lunch at the Zuckermans’ Pacific Palisades home. He called his wife, Kathy, who
invited her own and Marvin’s parents to join them as well.
The event, so I have since read, was a
joyful one, if not terribly eventful; but it did lead to Singer composing a
short comment for the cover of their book and resulted in the elderly author
reading the Gidget novel, writing
back that he thought it was a far better novel than Nabokov’s Lolita.
But before I even read about their
encounter in an article by Zuckerman, I was astounded by the very idea of
Singer meeting the original Gidget, a kind of absurdist collision, it appeared
to me, of high and low culture, of old world wisdom crashing against the rocks
of American pop. Of course, I had not really bothered to reckon with the fact
that Gidget was no longer a boy-loving teenager but was now a handsome woman, a
few years older than me. Amused by my reaction, Pablo brought me a copy of the
original novel, signed “Surf On! Love Kathy Gidget Kohner,” the cover
announcing not only that the book was written by Kathy’s father, Frederick
Kohner, but that it now contained a forward by Kathy Kohner Zuckerman. The back
cover described the story as being about “a girl’s coming-of-age in the summer
of 1957” (one of my very favorite childhood years) and suggested that Gidget
(named Franzie in the novel) was “part Holden Caulfield, part Lolita.” I now
had to read it.
So between studying the two tomes on the
monstrous Holocaust murderer, Adolf Eichmann, discussed in “Opposing Banality”
in this year’s volume, I quickly devoured the rather charming,
semi-biographical story of young Kathy falling in love with surfing and the
boys who somewhat reluctantly taught her. Frederick Kohner, a screenwriter, is
no J. D. Salinger, just as his Gidget is no Holden Caulfield. Although told in
a vernacular first person, Gidget’s tale reveals that as much as she may have
felt like an outsider, she nevertheless wanted very much to be part of the
culture around her, one slightly less worldly than the life of her own parents,
Jewish Czech émigrés, represented. Even less happens in the novel—at least
until the last scene—than in the movie, perhaps, in part, because her father
wasn’t able to successfully describe the process of learning how to surf, a
central feature of the Gidget franchise. Franzie tells terrible whoppers to her
parents in order to sneak out each day to the beach, gets “lousy
tonsillitis,” falls “desperately” in
love with Moondoggie (who in real life, it turns out, was our artist friend,
Billy Al Bengston), and, in an attempt to make Moondoggie jealous, hangs out in
the older “great Kahoona’s” hut. Uninvited, Gidget nonetheless attends an
evening celebration described by some of her friends as an “orgy”—a word she
doesn’t know the meaning of—which goes awry when several of the celebrants take
torches in hand for a midnight surf and accidently start a canyon fire that
threatens disaster akin to the Malibu fires of 1956 and 1958 (there were also
big fires in 1970 and 1982, and in the worst fire of 1993, my friend Jerome
Lawrence, who lived a short distance from the beach on Las Flores canyon, lost
his beautiful canyon home and all his theatrical memorabilia). The day is saved
in the fiction by a miraculous downpour of rain that immediately puts out the
flames! The novel ends, accordingly, with Gidget almost becoming involved in a
calamity and, later, being the cause of an intense fight between the great Kahoona
and Moondoggie. Either event might have landed her and others in jail. 1957,
however, was a far different time than the one in which we now exist. Despite
her scrapes with danger, Gidget remains as virtuous and innocent as the “nice”
tom-girl portrayed by Sandra Dee a short while later.
The movie script by Gabrielle Upton
(Gillian Houghton) understandably ditches the heavy drama of the fire, focusing
instead on Francie’s (the name the movie gives to Sandra Dee) attempts to make
Moondoggie (James Darren) jealous, with the younger surfer fighting the Kahoona,
while simultaneously becoming aware that his hero is not someone who truly
deserves to be admired. Ironically, the two teenagers later meet up through
parental connections, and fall in love all over again, while discovering that
Kahoona is a kind of fraud, who now will work in the off-season as a pilot
instead of traveling off to Hawaii or Peru as his legend has it. Cliff
Robertson as the Kahoona, in fact, saves this film from its juvenile
sentimentality by hinting at far darker aspects of life. A loner who parades as
a hero before teenage boys, the “big” Kahoona (he is no longer referred to as
“great” in the film version) obviously gets his kicks out of serving as
friend-cum-father to these surfers who obviously feel out-of-sync with the rest
of their lives.
The
movie, moreover, unlike the book, actually attempts to explain surfing by
showing the rush Gidget gets from the sport. The long shots (with veteran surfers
such as Miki Dora and Mickey Munoz) of the surfers against the waves—as opposed
to the cheesy closeups in which the cast is required to pose in silly grins
with arms spread out pretending to balance against a backscreen—truly do reveal
the art of the sport played out in the natural beauty of its arena. There are
moments when the ocean of Southern California really does look like the
paradise it always promised visitors to become.
In the novel, the fire required the Kahoona
to forever abandon his hut; and in real life, the publication of the novel and
opening of the motion picture made the sport so popular that today, so I am
told by Pablo, surfers openly resent the hundreds of their
fellow kind, somewhat nostalgically imagining the pre-Gidget days. By the time
you read this, I will have likely lived up to my promise to spend a few hours
at the same beach to watch Pablo “shoot the curl.”
As I read this short novel, moreover, I
also quickly began to perceive that Kathy Kohner, growing up as the “girl
midget,” was also a member of Hollywood royalty. Her father had received an
Oscar nomination for his 1938 screenplay of Mad
About Music, and wrote several other screenplays, including an adaptation
of Knut Hamsun’s fiction Victoria
(which would surely have interested Singer). Her uncle, Paul, worked in the
1930s as head of the Universal Studios European division, and in 1938 founded
one of the most important Hollywood agencies, representing figures such as
Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder, Greta Garbo, David Niven, Ingmar Bergman,
Maurice Chevalier, and Lana Turner. My dear friend, Ken Sherman, worked for
Kohner until the great man’s death in 1988, when Sherman founded his own
organization, representing Woody Allen and others. Paul Kohner’s daughter,
Kathy’s cousin Susan, acted—preposterously as a light-skinned Black girl—in Douglas
Sirk’s famed Lana Turner vehicle Imitation
of Life. Susan’s sons, Chris and Paul Weitz, in turn, produced American Pie and About a Boy, and acted together in one of my favorites, Chuck & Buck. Paul also wrote and
directed In Good Company, American Dreamz, and other works. I write of Imitation of Life and Paul Weitz’s
interview of his mother at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’
Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in My Year 2009.
It gradually became clear that it wasn’t
at all so strange that Singer and Gidget had met. My own friendship with him,
as the result of a course at the University of Wisconsin, was far more odd,
even though I had read most of his writing at the time of the course and we
shared a deep admiration for the writing of Knut Hamsun (despite the abhorrence
of his political views).
On the evening of March 3, 2015, Pablo and
I spoke with Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, the original Gidget, at the well-known
Malibu eatery, Duke’s, which at the intersection of the Pacific Coast Highway
and Las Flores canyon, is devoted to the surf culture, which spread from 
Hawaii
throughout the world. Zuckerman is described as “Ambassador of Aloha” at the
restaurant, and spent much of our conversation darting in and out of our
company as she greeted guests and engagingly spoke with the various diners. At
the age of 74, Kathy is perhaps more involved with her childhood namesake than
she has been for her 50 years of marriage to Marvin. As she noted in a recent
interview, “With the reissue of the book, I immersed myself in reliving the
past. I have become an honorary member of the Malibu Surfing Association.” And my first
reaction was that, despite her definitely “perky” personality, there might be
something a bit sad about such a re-immersion in the past, emblematized, in my
imagination, by a grandmother desperately attempting to find balance on a Hobie
vintage longboard.
It turned out, however, that Kathy was not
as heavily engaged with her youth as she might first appear. When Pablo, who
was raised in an émigré Austrian family, asked whether it was true or not that
her family were originally Czech, “Gidget” deflected his question with a shrug:
“I don’t know. I’m not Austrian. I’m not Czech. I’m Jewish, that’s all I know.”
“So, do you recall your afternoon with
Isaac Singer? What did you serve him?” I dived in.
“Well, he was a vegetarian!”
“Yeh. But did you cook him a special
vegetarian dish?”
“Oh, I don’t remember. I do recall that
that was the day I discovered that all our silver had been stolen. I opened the
drawer to set the table and found all the knives, spoons, and forks were
missing!”
“That must have been a shock.”
“It was. So I hardly remember much about
Singer now. I don’t think I knew much about his writing. I mean, I knew was a
famous writer, but I hadn’t really read his work. My husband, Marvin, had. He
particularly liked The Magician of Lublin.”
She jumped up to greet a newcomer,
returning a short while later. I asked: “I know that in your own life there was
no beach luau, no fight between the Kahoona and Moondoggie, and in fact, no
Moondoggie (the real Moondoggie, Billy Al Bengston today claims he hardly knew
Gidget). But how did your father come to invent the somewhat dark apocalyptic
ending with the surfer’s torches setting the canyon on fire?"
“Was there a canyon fire? I don’t remember
that.”
“Which ended, miraculously, with a heavy
rainfall. Hardly likely given the Santa Ana winds the book hinted at. The event
didn’t show up in the movie. Do you remember why Frederick might have imagined
such an event?"
“They used to have torches in the
night-time ski events at Sun Valley. I’m sure that’s where he must have gotten
it. Sun Valley.”
“I know that originally you had wanted to
write the story. But your father, who after all worked as a writer, said that
he’d write it for you. But it might have been interesting to read your version.
Had you ever thought of rewriting it?”
“Well I did write lots of diaries during
those days.”
“Yes, I’ve seen a video where you read
from them. They were quite straight-forward about sexual matters, particularly
for the time.”
“Well we ‘made out’ a lot, but nothing serious ever happened!”
“Yes, I remember 1957 very well. Those
were more innocent times.”
“Well, I don’t know how innocent I was!”
she openly laughed.
“I certainly was! Maybe it was different
in California.”
“Where did you grow up?”
I slightly grimaced. “Iowa.
“Oh, Iowa. I went to Iowa once with an
actress friend of mine who grew up there. We went to Mason City.
“The town where my brother was born; it’s
the original ‘River City’ of The Music
Man!”
“And she took me to Clear
Lake.”
“Really? That was the town in which I lived
as a very young child, on one of the few naturally-formed lakes in the state.”
“I loved it. Iowa. It was pretty.”
Strange, I thought to myself, that Gidget
had visited only cities noted for their water views in a state that is
remembered mostly for its good soil and crops.
After another few minutes’ absence, she
returned. “In some senses you and your family were part of Hollywood royalty.”
I continued. “Your uncle Paul was one of the most famous agents in the city.
Did you ever meet any of his famous clients?”
“Nope. I never met any of them. But my
aunt, Lupita, believe it or not, is still living! She’s 104.”
“Really. Wasn’t she a dancer? I know your
mother was a dancer?
“Well, my mother did some dancing before
my time. But no, Lupita Tovar, Paul’s wife, was a Mexican movie star.”
“Oh yes, now I remember reading that. She
was in the Spanish version of Dracula.”
“She was in lots of films. But no, I never
knew much about my uncle’s business dealings.”
When Pablo left for a few minutes, Gidget
suddenly became the motherly figure she had obviously been for so many years.
“He’s such a sweet boy, isn’t he?”
“Yes, Pablo is very special,” I agreed.
“And he’s a wonderful designer.”
“I like him a lot. I feel he needs someone
to look after him.”
“Well, I can’t exactly play his father; he
has one. But I do care about him. And try to help him the best I can. But he’s
so talented and bright. And morally grounded. He’ll do well.”
The growing waves outside the window
roiled in heavily. A high tide was expected for the next few days. Pablo
returned.
“You have sons. Two?”
“Yes two.”
“What do they do?”
“Well, David has a computer site. He
calls himself a “handler.” People write him with their ideas and needs, and he
connects them with others we can help them attain them.”
“So he’s a kind of agent too?”
She paused. “Yes I guess he is. I never
thought about it that way.”
“And your other son?”
“Phillip. He’s a sociologist.”
“Well, that’s interesting.”
“He’s a professor at Pitzer College.
Actually he writes about religion. Only he’s a secularist. You should look him
up on the computer. He’s really quite famous. He’s got a new book out from
Penguin.”
I did “look him up,” and found an
impressive list of publications, including Faith
No More and Society without God.
“Well, I’m on the move again,” she
laughed, standing and returning to the surrounding crowds of the popular
restaurant.
About a half hour later, Kathy circled
back our way. “How long are you guys hanging around?”
“Well, I think we’ll soon be going.”
“Too bad. I always try to catch a ride
home. I hate driving.”
It’s kind of funny, I later commented to
Pablo, Gidget always had a car with surfboards stuffed into it. And here she is
today, an old woman, hitch-hiking her way home.
“Does your husband Marvin ever join you
at the restaurant?”
“No, he stays at home and watches
television,” she giggled.
I realized, suddenly, that Kathy Kohner
Zuckerman wasn’t living in the past. She simply enjoyed the company of others,
just as she had as a young Gidget hanging on the beach so long ago.
Los Angeles and
Malibu, February 23, March 1, March 4, 2015
