Gidget is the girl who changed surfing forever

Have you ever seen the movie Gidget? There’s a good chance you haven’t. And that you won’t. So let us tell you about it—because without Gidget, surfing wouldn’t be what it is today.

Oh Gidget. There’s surf culture pre-Gidget, and post-Gidget. According to Los Angeles Magazine:

“It was Gidget, along with the Beach Boys, who gave surfing its most memorable turn in the great American youth culture parade.”

The girl who inspired Gidget used to babysit my neighbor. That was Kathy Kohner, who grew up in Brentwood, L.A., and learned to surf in Malibu in the 1950s. Imagine—one day you’re a five-foot, 95-pound teenager; the next, a surfing icon with a book, a movie, a TV series, even a comic dedicated to your adventures.

How did this even happen?

Kathy was the daughter of Frederick Kohner, a screenwriter and playwright who, along with his wife, fled the Second World War and settled in L.A., where Kathy was born in 1941. When she was 15, she started learning to surf in Malibu during the summer of 1956. She’d hang out with local surfers like Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy—Malibu’s royal clown who lived on the beach and inspired the character of the Big Kahuna.

That summer, Kathy spent her days learning to surf, delivering homemade sandwiches to the Malibu ‘pit crew,’ and being the group’s mascot, nicknamed “Gidget”—a mashup of girl and midget, because she was so small. Then she’d run home and tell her parents all the surf stories, eventually deciding there should be a book about them. So her dad wrote it in 1957—in just six weeks. Wow. What a parent.

From book to big screen

In the book, Kathy becomes Francine, who loves surfing and a surfer boy named Moondoggie. According to the Encyclopedia of Surfing—because we haven’t read it ourselves—the book is:

“Both funnier and darker than the like-titled movies and television shows that followed. The surfers talk dirtier, and the tedium and peril of ’50s suburban living are rendered as vividly as the easygoing good times.”

Pretty incredible, considering Kathy’s dad was a 51-year-old non-surfer who only learned English in his twenties.

Here’s what you can expect from the book:

“Every day, someone else let me have a board to practice. On Don Pepe’s board I learned how to keep in the center and paddle evenly—on Hot Shot Harrison’s how to control the direction you’re taking with your feet—on Malibu Mac’s how to get out of a ‘boneyard’ when you’re caught in the middle of a set of breakers—and on Scooterboy Miller’s hot rod I learned how to avoid a pearl dive. The great Kahoona showed me how to push the shoulders up and slide the body back—to spring to your feet quickly, putting them under you in one motion. That’s quite tricky. But then, surf-riding is not playing Monopoly and the more I got the knack of it, the more I was crazy about it, and the more I was crazy about it, the harder I worked at it.”

The book was a bestseller, with half a million copies sold—so no wonder a movie followed.

Kathy’s dad was hired by Columbia Pictures to write the script. The first-ever Hollywood surf movie, Gidget, starring Sandra Dee, James Darren, and Cliff Robertson, came out in 1959 and started the craze for so-called “beach movies.”

The story follows 16-year-old Francie “Gidget” Lawrence (Sandra Dee), spending her summer at the beach, feeling a bit out of place among her girlfriends who are “man-hunting” and living the typical teenage scene.

She becomes fascinated by a group of male surfers, particularly Moondoggie. Encouraged (and somewhat teased) by them, she buys a surfboard, learns to paddle, learns to surf, and eventually becomes part of the surf crew—gaining the nickname “Gidget” (girl + midget).

Along the way, there are romantic triangles, a slightly older surf-mentor figure (“The Big Kahuna”), questions of identity, family expectations, and teenage rebellion—though in a lighter, 1950s-style teen comedy-romance mode.

Fun.

️ The Gidget legacy

The movie wasn’t filmed in Malibu (which was overrun by surfers), but at Leo Carrillo Beach—and it featured Micky Muñoz in a blonde wig and bikini doubling for Sandra Dee.

Reviews were mixed-to-positive, but audiences loved it. Then came Beach Party, the first in a series of Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach movies, the Gidget Goes Hawaiian book, another movie, and a slew of other Gidget adventures: she goes to Rome, Paris, and New York. Finally, Gidget, the TV show starring young Sally Field. You can watch it on Tubi.

Needless to say, Gidget’s story resonated. It had a huge impact on surf culture, women’s surfing, and the surf industry in general (surfboard sales skyrocketed, obviously). We’ll do another episode on the Malibu crew of the 1950s soon, because their story is extremely rich.

For now, if you want to read Gidget, you can get it on Kindle for $4.99—it’s a 2001 edition with a foreword by Kathy. Or you can stream the movie for $3.99.