The Absolute Ultimate

The Real-Life Gidget Looks Back From 80: “I Lived It All”

Kathy Zuckerman inspired the iconic surfer girl, and more than 60 years later, she’s still making waves.
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Gidget in her early years.Ken Hively/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.

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Groucho Marx: Kathy, I’ll start with you. How old are you?
Kathy Kohner: I’m 17. I’m a senior at University High School.
Groucho: I used to go to University high, but they made me stop drinking. Kathy, every teenager always has two big problems; their mother and their father. How about you?
Kathy: They’re very broad-minded people, and I love them very much and we get along very well together.
Groucho: What kind of work does your father do?
Kathy: My father’s a script writer… His latest, which I’m most proud of, is his best-selling novel, Gidget.
Groucho: He wrote Gidget, huh? I read that book. Are you Gidget?
Kathy: I’m Gidget.
—You Bet Your Life, April 24, 1958

Gidget, the real Gidget, just turned 80. We’ll let that sink in.

Kathy Zuckerman no longer surfs, but she includes the beach on her daily two-hour walk. Recently, she strolled Will Rogers State Beach in Los Angeles County, near her home. “There is a surf spot there called the Jetty,” Zuckerman told Vanity Fair in a recent phone call. “I enjoy seeing the surfers. I said to some young gentleman, ‘Oh, I love your surfboard. There’s a lot of rocker in that board.’ He looked at me like, ‘Did you used to surf?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I surfed in the ’50s.’”

Not a lot of girls did at the time, but she did. Not professionally; there weren’t surfing contests back then, she says. She surfed because she was 15 and surfing was, in Gidget’s words, “the absolute ultimate.”

16-year-old surfer Kathy (Gidget) Korner. Left, by Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; right, By Warren Miller/Courtesy of Kris Miller.

For more than 60 years Gidget has endured as a sunny spirit of endless summers and girl can-doism. Frederick Kohner, a screenwriter writing his first novel, was inspired by his own daughter Kathy, who to this day enjoys an odd sort of celebrity. You would not recognize her face or her name. Think Gidget and you think of the actors who portrayed her on the big and small screen, beginning with Sandra Dee in the 1959 film. Dee was so indelible in the role that, according to Zuckerman, somebody called Kathy’s husband, Marvin, when Dee died and said, “I’m so sorry to hear about your wife.”

Others in the Gidget sorority include Deborah Walley (Gidget Goes Hawaiian), Cindy Carol (Gidget Goes to Rome), future Oscar winner Sally Field on the 1965 TV series, Karen Valentine (Gidget Grows Up, a 1969 TV movie), Monie Ellis (Gidget Gets Married, a 1972 TV movie) and Caryn Richman (Gidget’s Summer Reunion, a 1985 TV movie, and The New Gidget, the series reboot that ran from 1986–88).

“But I’m the real Gidget,” Zuckerman proudly proclaims.

Sandra Dee in Gidget in 1959.From Everett Collection.

Until the pandemic, Kathy had a twice-a-week gig at Duke’s Malibu, a bar and restaurant, as the designated Ambassador of Aloha, offering hugs to patrons, posing for pictures and selling Gidget books. She worked the Sunday brunch and Taco Tuesdays. While Duke’s is currently open for outdoor dining, she has not been back to her favorite place in almost a year. “It’s scary, this COVID thing,” Zuckerman said. “The outdoor patio isn’t large enough for me to social distance and with a mask on, they couldn’t see that I’m a very attractive 80-year-old woman.”

There is more to the Gidget phenomenon than nostalgia for endless summers past. The life Zuckerman lived and the character her father created continue to inspire writers to reflect on the importance of being Gidget. Published this past year alone were John Engle’s Mademoiselle from Malibu: Eighteenth-Century Pastoral Romance, H-Bombs, and the Collaborative, Intertextual Gidget, an article he wrote for Twentieth-Century Literature, and Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last August, Jamie Brisick profiled the Malibu Wall, a surfer hangout made iconic in the Gidget books and films.

At the core of why she believes that the character endures is Gidget’s positive attitude. “That’s a message for people,” she said. “This little girl can do it…. Go for it; have fun and you can do it.”

For Zuckerman, it was love at first surf. She reads to me from the diaries she kept during her surfing years. On June 24, 1956, she wrote: “Dear Diary: I didn’t do too much but go to the beach. I didn’t think I’d have fun, but I met Matt and he took me out on his surfboard. He let me catch the waves by myself and once I fell off and the board went flying in the air. I didn’t get hurt at all. He also rode the waves with me. Then I rode the board in alone. The surf wasn’t high at all. I hope Matt will take me surfing again.”

She bought her first surfboard for $35 from future surfing champion Mike Doyle. “It had a totem pole on it,” she says.

Kathy Kohner with her father Frederick, in his office, Malibu, California, October 1957.by Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

As her interest, prowess, and immersion in the mostly male surfing community grew, she told her father that she wanted to write a story about it. A professional writer, he offered to write it himself. “I told my dad pretty much everything,” she says. “I don’t think he read my diary pages…. He created a work of fiction based on things that happened to me.”

She vividly recalls the phone call her father received from his agent after he read the manuscript. “He said, ‘Mr. Kohner, you’ve hit the jackpot,’” she recalls. Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1957, Gidget reportedly outsold On the Road at the time.

When she started at Oregon State College in 1958, she did not advertise around campus that she was the model for Gidget, but she did embody a Gidget state of mind, greeting other students with “Aloha” and carrying a straw basket. When the movie came out in 1959 it earned good reviews, although according to her diary, Zuckerman herself found the experience of watching a movie about herself “the weirdest thing” and expressed disappointment that it strayed from her father’s book.

She met her future husband at a party. “I had no knowledge of Gidget,” he said in an email. “I was only watching foreign films like Bicycle Thief, Knife in the Water, and Bergman films. I wouldn’t be caught dead watching a phony, silly Hollywood movie. One night in her living room, Kathy pulled out a Life magazine with her story in it and said, ‘I’m Gidget.’ I went to see a Gidget movie that happened to be playing in Santa Monica, not the first one with the wonderful Sandra Dee, but some other one. It did not change my opinion of such movies, but I certainly now understood (all the fuss).”

Sally Field in Gidget the television show from the ’60s.From Everett Collection.

Her son, David, a film producer and founder of the website Virtual Pitch Fest, which affords screenwriters the opportunity to pitch their screenplays to producers and studio executives, said that despite her petite size, Kathy has always been a towering presence (Her other son, Philip, is an associate dean at Pitzer College).

“I was always struck by my mom’s natural athleticism,” he said in an email. “This was most apparent to me on the ski slopes. She was so good, it was almost intimidating. She seemed to have little fear, whereas I was always slow to warm up.”

It could be disconcerting when as a teenager his friends would tell him that his mother was “hot,” but he loves the Gidget connections. “People associate the character, the TV series, and the films with an innocence of a certain time and place in American history. What’s always been interesting to me is that my grandfather’s novel was much more centered and nuanced than the TV shows and films. It was not Disney-fied. It was relatable and original. At the time nobody knew much about these surfers at the beach. They had a subculture, which in some ways was an offshoot of the Beat Generation.”

Which is how Zuckerman has come to add feminist surfer icon to her pop-culture cachet. Brian Gillogly’s 2010 documentary, Accidental Icon: The Real Gidget Story, features contemporary women surfers who got into the sport because of her.

Kohner at a ‘Heal the Bay’ Celebrity Surf Bout in Malibu, 2004.by Karen Wilson/World Surf League/Getty Images.

This despite the fact that she never capitalized on Gidget’s fame. She was a substitute teacher. “I didn’t surf that much and I didn’t surf in contests,” she says. “I didn’t advertise Gidget clothes. I wasn’t a brand. But the surfing community is really kind to me and I like to give back.”

She was inducted into the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame in 2011. “I consider Kathy the ‘Fairy Godmother’ of surf culture,” world surfing champion and Surfing Hall of Fame Board of Directors cochairman Peter “PT” Townend said in an email. “Her father’s novel followed by a Hollywood movie exposed the world to surfing and ignited the explosion of surfing in the ’60s.”

Referencing the title of a favorite book, Zuckerman proclaims that it’s not the end of the road for Gidget. She is working with Buzzie and the Bull author Ken LaZebnik on prepping her diaries to shop to publishers. She jokingly hopes that if there ever is another TV reboot, she will be asked to cameo not as a dowager, but as a surfing queen.

She and Marvin have been married 56 years. He is a Yiddishist (he translated Bernard Goldstein’s Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund: A Memoir of Interwar Poland, which was published in 2016).

Kohner on the beach in a recent photo.Courtesy of Kathy Kohner.

“I’m a firm believer in exercise and diet,” she says. “There is always something wrong with somebody. I have a stomach that won’t take anything fried or desserts or roughage. It’s avocado and tomato sandwiches for me. I found a Christmas ornament that is a piece of toast with an avocado with a tomato on it.”

When it is mentioned that she has a fantastic memory, she responds brightly, “Gidget at 80; spunky and punky.”

Her life force has seen her through the pandemic. “To put it bluntly,” she says, “I’m not at Auschwitz. There is food at the grocery store, the car runs, there’s the beautiful, great outdoors, and now there’s a vaccine.” (Yes, Gidget has gotten the vaccine.)

“I am the girl that surfed,” she said. “I am the daughter of Frederick Kohner, who wrote a wonderful story. I am not a movie actress, I am not an influencer. I’m a pretty private person…. There’s Gidget and there’s Kathy Zuckerman. I enjoy it. I’m pretty amazed; I lived it all.”

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