How a 5'1" teenager accidentally sold Malibu to the world

In the summer of 1956, a fifteen-year-old from Brentwood started showing up at a stretch of sand north of Malibu Pier. Her name was Kathy Kohner. She was five foot one, curly-haired, Jewish, and not a stereotypical California blonde. Terry Tracy — everyone called him Tubesteak — looked at her the first afternoon she paddled out and nicknamed her Gidget, a portmanteau of girl and midget. She liked the name. She kept coming back.

Kathy was a diarist the way some fifteen-year-olds are diarists: compulsively, in looping handwriting, in notebooks she left on the kitchen table. She wrote down what Tubesteak said. She wrote down what Moondoggie said. She wrote down who rode what wave and who was dating whom and which of the older boys was too full of himself and which was actually nice. She wrote down the slang. She did not imagine anyone reading it.

Her father was Frederick Kohner. He was an Austrian-Jewish screenwriter who had fled the Nazis in 1938, landed in Hollywood, earned an Oscar nomination for Mad About Music that same year, and by the summer of 1956 was a working professional in his early fifties looking for the next project. He picked up one of the notebooks. He read it. Then he read the rest.

What he did next changed surfing forever, and changed Malibu immediately and permanently. This is the story of how a mile of California sand became a global brand, told by way of a teenage girl who did not know she was being turned into a novel.

Frederick Kohner’s biography matters to this story because the book he wrote could not have been written by a Californian. He was born in 1905 in Teplitz, in what is now the Czech Republic, into a Jewish family. He got a doctorate in philology from the University of Vienna. He worked as a film critic and screenwriter in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, and in 1938, with the world closing, he and his brother Paul got out to Hollywood. The family that did not get out did not survive. By 1938 he had an Oscar nomination in his first American year, for Mad About Music. He spent the next two decades as a working studio screenwriter, the kind whose credits are real but whose name is not a household one.

By 1957 he was looking for a novel idea. He picked up Kathy’s notebook. He read the slang. He read the scenes — Tubesteak at the shack, Moondoggie on a wave, the Kahuna dispensing wisdom, Gidget between them trying to keep up. He sat down and wrote “Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas” in a blur that various accounts put at six weeks. Putnam published it in 1957. It sold two million copies almost immediately and was eventually translated into something like forty languages.

The tone of the book is the thing that matters. Kohner wrote it in the first person, in Kathy’s voice, using the slang he had mined from her notebooks. A fifty-two-year-old European immigrant, a survivor of the Nazi catastrophe, ventriloquizing a California teenage girl’s voice by reading her summer diaries is, to put it plainly, one of the stranger literary arrangements of the twentieth century. It shouldn’t have worked. It worked completely.

What Kohner heard in the notebooks, and what he rendered in the novel, was an argument dressed as a story: that surfing was not just what the men were doing. It was also what the girl watching them was doing.It was a teenage girl’s coming-of-age story as much as a surfer’s story, and that frame — the girl on the beach, wanting in — was the frame that detonated the culture. Every surfer his age saw the wave. Kohner saw the whole beach, including the kid on it. That was the insight. That was what he put in the book. That was what sold two million copies.

The music track was running in parallel. In 1961, in a garage in Hawthorne — fifteen miles inland, worth stating — Brian Wilson and his brothers and a cousin and a friend recorded a song called “Surfin’.” Not one of them surfed.Dennis Wilson, the drummer, would eventually learn; the rest of them didn’t bother. “Surfin’” was followed in 1962 by “Surfin’ Safari,” which name-checked Malibu in the lyrics. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” arrived in 1963 and was essentially a rhymed inventory of California breaks, with Malibu at the top of the list.

Jan and Dean— Jan Berry and Dean Torrence, also non-surfers, also from the Los Angeles inland suburbs — picked up the thread. “Surf City” in 1963, “Ride the Wild Surf” in 1964. The two defining surf-vocal acts of the early sixties were both Southern California garage products who did not surf, selling the idea of surf culture back to a country that had no way of checking whether the idea was accurate. It was, as commercial packaging, a triumph. It was also, as reportage, a fabrication. A benign one, but a fabrication.

The corrective was happening in a different medium. Bruce Brown, who actually did surf, was making films — Slippery When Wet in 1958, Barefoot Adventure in 1960, a string of rented-hall travelogues that screened in high school auditoriums for audiences of a few hundred at a time. In 1966 he finished The Endless Summer, expanded it, four-walled it into a theatrical run, and watched it become a genuine crossover hit. It made real money. Critics took it seriously. For most non-surfers it was the first film about surfing they had ever seen that was actually about surfing.

The Endless Summer footage kept coming back to Malibu. First Point was the home wave against which every foreign break in the film — Cape St. Francis, Pipeline, Mozambique — was implicitly measured. The pipeline was now complete. Gidget had given Malibu a story. The Beach Boys had given Malibu a song. The Endless Summer had given Malibu a documentary. By 1966, First Point was the reference point. If you surfed anywhere on earth and wanted to describe a long right-hander peeling off a cobblestone point, the shorthand was Malibu, and everyone knew what you meant, because they had all been watching the same film.

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