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.”
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.
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.