Malibu’s queen of surf and the inspiration for the book Gidget, which kicked off the whole damn surf crazy seventy years back, is homeless after her pretty Pacific Palisades house went up in the LA inferno.
Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, eighty-three now, is the kid of Czech Jews who fled to the US before the Nazis could shovel ‘em into the ovens. Her daddy Fred, a man who held a PHD in psychology from Paris’ Sorbonne, became a screenwriter in Hollywood and was nominated for an Oscar for his 1938 movie Mad About Music before writing the zeitgeist shifting book Gidget.
Fred wrote Gidget over six weeks in 1956, retelling the stories Kathy told him over dinner about hanging out with the big dogs at Malibu. The book went wild, half-a-mill copies sold, and was turned into a raft of movies (Gidget, Gidget Goes Hawaiian, Gidget goes to Rome), a few telemovies and a TV series.
Warshaw, keeper of that barely flickering surf culture flame, says the original book was “dirtier and darker” than the sanitised film adventures of Gidget starring Sandra Dee.
Anyway, Kathy has lost the joint she’s lived in with her Yiddish scholar husband Marvin Zuckerman for the past sixty years, over there on Marquette Street in the Marquez Knolls section of the Palisades.
Kathy says said her phone has been lit up with calls from, among plenty of others, Hawaiian Randy Rarick and master surf filmmaker Jack McCoy
“With all these calls, I have reentered a world that I left a long time ago,” she said, “and that community has been just incredible to me.”
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