7. Misdirection | Lost Hills

0:15Speaker 1:Pushkin. Hey Lost Hills listeners, it's Dana. I wanted to let you know that you can hear the entire new season of Lost Hills ad-free along with other great binge listens by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. It was the 1960s. The surf media was just getting started. And Mickey Dora was its darling.

0:52Speaker 2:Although the phrase was not extant at the time, I think badass would do it. Yeah, not to be fucked with. The reigning king, as it were. I mean, he was acknowledged to be the best there was.

1:05Speaker 1:This is Drew Campion. He started surfing in Malibu in the early 60s. He wrote for Surfer magazine and later became the editor.

1:14Speaker 2:So it was a conservative publication. And I'd been living over the hill up from Malibu in the San Fernando Valley and had been introduced to LSD and marijuana. I had tasted enough of each of them to have a bit of a wrinkle in my perception of the world. And so I brought that wrinkle to Surfer, I think. And people seemed to respond to it.

1:43Speaker 1:Right after he got hired, Drew got a plum assignment. To interview Mickey Dora. It was the fall of 1969. Mickey had made his reputation as an enigmatic misanthrope, a trickster. If you asked him to zig, he would zag. He was, quote, the angry young man of surfing. One of the mags had printed a photo of him flipping off the camera. But Mickey was also, quote, Mr. Malibu. A singularly good surfer, singularly identified with the most iconic surf spot in the country.

2:19Speaker 1:Mickey was hard to pin down. He rarely gave interviews. This would be a big get for the magazine.

2:26Speaker 2:We're on the second floor. We could see down on the parking lot. Here comes Mickey and his van, you know, and somebody alerted everybody, oh, Mickey's coming. So Mickey comes into the office and looks around, but there's too many people in the office and He says, well, I really don't want to do an interview here. Can we go somewhere else? And I said, well, I live just down the road in San Clemente. We could meet there.

2:53Speaker 1:Mickey agreed, Drew told him which exit, and they got in their separate cars. Mickey followed Drew on the freeway until they reached the exit. Drew got off, but Mickey didn't.

3:04Speaker 2:What the fuck? So I went straight ahead at the bottom of the off-ramp, got back on the freeway, and basically chased him down the shore and said, Mickey, you missed the exit. And he said, oh, yeah, well, right. And I had this distinct feeling that he hadn't really missed the exit. He just dodged the exit like he dodged a lot of things.

3:24Speaker 1:Finally, Drew got Mickey to his house, and the interview could begin. But Mickey wasn't feeling it.

3:31Speaker 2:And so he said, you know, why don't you just give me the questions, and I'll take them home. I'll do a proper job. I'll fill them out for you, and I'll get them right back to you. And we went back and forth on that a little bit. Finally, I agreed. He drove off with the questions.

3:48Speaker 1:Mickey wasn't going to trust some magazine writer with his image. His image was his most precious asset.

3:56Speaker 2:So he went home, and he started to riff on the answers, you know. And I don't know. He could have smoked a bowl. I don't know. Question. Question.

4:06Speaker 1:What is your relationship with drugs? Answer. It is possible to find pleasure in hallucinatory fantasies, I'm quite sure of it. But I've made my peace with reality. Either one, one way or the other, is going to solve the acute overpopulation problem.

4:23Speaker 2:The answers were, let's say, freeform. They really didn't address the subjects directly. They're more like a philosophical treatise. divide it up into question and answer form.

4:38Speaker 1:Question. Why do you think bombs were planted in your car?

4:42Speaker 2:Answer.

4:43Speaker 1:Probably to blow me to bits. By the way, there's no evidence that anyone ever planted bombs in Mickey's car.

4:50Speaker 2:One of the words that Mickey was often associated with behaviorally was something called misdirection.

4:57Speaker 1:Question. What changes have you witnessed during the course of your surfing career? Answer. First of all, I have no career. I was here before and I'll be here after. We are all soon to undergo the sports demise in the immediate future.

5:15Speaker 2:So he would do that in conversation. He would do that in his kind of approach to surfing and being in a crowd. How to avoid people and how to encounter them selectively. How to keep people confused and not be direct about anything.

5:30Speaker 3:Question.

5:33Speaker 1:Why do you feel this fall is going to occur in the near future? Answer. The advent of professionalism to the sport will be the final blow. These few Wall Street flesh merchants desire to unify surfing only to extract the wealth. A surfer should think carefully before selling his being to these people, since he's signing his own death warrant as a personal entity.

5:58Speaker 2:Something about the word conundrum kind of comes into my mind.

6:03Speaker 1:Mickey was a prophet of doom, and he was especially gloomy about the idea of surfing becoming professionalized, organized, commercialized. He was against anything that took surfing away from its simple origins, from that moment when it was just him, alone on a wave at Malibu.

6:25Speaker 2:So we ran that in Surfer Magazine.

6:30Speaker 1:I'm Dana Goodyear, and this is Lost Hills.

6:35Speaker 5:Episode 7, Misdirection.

6:40Speaker 1:1967, the Malibu Invitational, a beautiful day and the waves are perfect, four to six feet and clean. It's the best day at Malibu in years. All the biggest names in surfing are there, including, of course, Mickey Dora. This is from a contemporary report, quote, The cat crept in, dressed in his original tattered and torn trench coat. He smiled from under a week's growth of beard. This was his Malibu.

7:41Speaker 2:Unquote.

7:43Speaker 4:And I had to sit in the judge's stand and record. The judge would count to a number, you know, black, eight points, you know, and I was writing it down. When it came to the finals, Mickey was quite the showman.

8:00Speaker 1:This is Linda Kai. She was a teenager, a member of the Malibu Surf Association, working in the judges' booth. Everyone was watching Mickey. And then he did something totally unexpected.

8:13Speaker 4:He did a little bit of a pull my pants down and here you go, judges. What do you think of that?

8:18Speaker 1:Mickey was, as they called it back then, hanging B.A. for bare ass.

8:25Speaker 4:I don't know. The moon came out. I think people were shocked, you know. There wasn't like a utero or you wouldn't get stuff like that now. People would go nuts. But, you know, what are you going to do? Blow the air horn or the air gun?

8:42Speaker 1:What did you think about it?

8:43Speaker 4:Disqualify him?

8:44Speaker 2:Yeah.

8:44Speaker 4:Well, I was like everybody else. I was pretty stunned, you know. Being the complex character that he was, not me knowing this, but now I.

8:54Speaker 6:Do, it.

8:56Speaker 4:Was probably appropriate because he hated commercialism. although he wanted to be seen.

9:02Speaker 1:Mickey didn't like surf competitions. The whole idea of surfing going professional just bugged him. It was a threat. Didn't everybody already know who the rightful king of Malibu was? He didn't need pretenders to his throne. But he didn't sit the contest out. He invalidated it and burnished his legend in the process. And 50-plus years later, The only thing anyone remembers about the 1967 Malibu Invitational is Mickey's bare butt. There were so many Mickey tricks. So many things he's rumored to have done. Rumors he may well have started himself. Stealing surfboards from the sets of the movies he worked on and reselling them. Setting up an anti-civil rights group at a UCLA protest in 1965. calling up Surfer magazine, pretending to be a rabbi. Releasing 3,000 moths into the projector at a screening of a Greg Knoll surf movie while wearing a Groucho Marx disguise. throwing his surf contest trophy in the trash at the Malibu Pit because he got third place when he thought he should have won. People say Gidget started the commercialization of surfing when the movie came out in 1959, and there's

10:25Speaker 1:some truth to that. But ironically, the roots of the modern surf industry lie in the reaction to Gidget by surfers who are trying to counter the phony image of surfing portrayed in the Hollywood beach movies. These guys, these pure surfers, wanted to show the world that surfing was not some saccharine teeny-bopper romance that climaxes in a luau, but an epic male adventure around the world in search of waves. So they made documentary-style surf movies and showed them in school gyms around the country.

11:08Speaker 6:And one of those people was John Severson, who in 1959 decided to create a booklet to go with his latest movie. And that booklet became Surfer Magazine, which debuted in 1960.

11:24Speaker 1:John Severson became a major figure in the dissemination of surf culture throughout the world. Surf historian Matt Warshaw.

11:32Speaker 6:That to me is sort of the, when surf media takes a big sort of step forward. By 1960, you've got the beginnings of what would become.

11:41Speaker 2:The surf industry.

11:43Speaker 1:Surfer magazine sold the surfing lifestyle, literally, with ads for boards and fins and reef booties and swim trunks. It became a vehicle for the nascent sport to present itself to the American public. The magazine loved Mickey, the anti-gidget. he was always good copy. And in those early days, there were just not that many surfers to choose from. Mickey, likewise, found Surfer Magazine to be a good medium for his message.

12:13Speaker 6:It does kind of change everything. It certainly changed things for Mickey Dora because now he had a platform. It was just something that he could have a great time with. I think he just loved being sort of a provocateur right from the beginning. And things that he had been doing in the water was just sort of being aggressive and funny, and he could now do in the pages of a magazine. And, you know, and he played it to the hilt.

12:38Speaker 1:But there was an inherent conflict between Mickey Dora and the direction that surfing was going. This thing that had been the pursuit of bohemians and dropouts was being made over into a sport that was respectable and organized with rules. And it was happening right in the pages of Surfer Magazine.

12:59Speaker 6:When John Severson and others started to push this thing called the United States Surfing Association, whose mission was to clean up the sport and have contests, and a lot of people just thought, man, get out of here. Let us just surf. Dora certainly felt that way.

13:17Speaker 1:Mickey nominated himself to be the spokesman for surfing's rebel spirit. It's Darkseid. A decade after Gidget, it was clear. There was money to be made in surfing. But how to do it without working too hard?

13:43Speaker 5:What our generation wanted to do was figure out how you could make a living at it and.

13:47Speaker 2:Still keep surfing.

13:50Speaker 1:This is Jim Kempton, the president of the California Surf Museum.

13:54Speaker 5:The result of the 60s was nobody wanted to work 9 to 5, nobody wanted to wear a suit and tie, everybody wanted to live their own life and be cool and at the same time nobody wanted to be poor and so you know the trick was how do you do that and the answer was you figure out how to make the surfing industry work for you and so for me that was discovering that when I was going to school in Europe I went to graduate school in England and realizing that there was this huge market for anything related to California and surfing.

14:30Speaker 1:Jim remembers the exact day he figured it out He'd taken the train into London wearing a Hawaiian shirt he'd bought at a thrift store back in California. After spending the day in the city, he was hurrying back to the train station to catch the last train home.

14:44Speaker 5:I'm rushing down Sloan Square to get to Victoria, and this guy stops me and says, I'll give you 50 quid for that shirt. And I guess I made that look, and he said, I'll give you 50 pounds sterling. I said, I know how much money it is, but what do you want my shirt for? He said, you're from California, aren't you?

15:01Speaker 2:I said, yeah.

15:01Speaker 5:He said, you're a surfer, aren't you? I said, yeah. I want that shirt. So, you know, I'm calculating, God, that's like three months in beer. It's, you know, for the shirt. But I'm thinking, God, I got to catch the train. I haven't got time to go find, try to find a shirt. So I said, I got to go. And the guy took the 50 pound note out of his wallet and he held it up and he said, I want that shirt. Take it off right now. And I rode home on that train for three and a half hours with no shirt on. And a couple of things became really clear to me at that stage. This thing about surfing is way bigger than I realized, right?

15:40Speaker 5:This wasn't just this little band of us that were living in France and living in Hawaii and living at Noose Ahead in Australia. This was something everybody knew about. They knew about us. They liked it. They were dying for it, all right? And then I went back after I graduated and went to every thrift store from Santa Barbara to San Diego and bought every single Hawaiian shirt for 50 cents apiece, put them in a giant container and shipped them to Europe. And for the next five years, that's what I did. That's all I had to do to make a living.

16:12Speaker 1:Jim's peers were doing the same thing, figuring out how to capitalize on the global surfing craze, how to export California surf products to the rest of the world. It was a team effort.

16:25Speaker 5:So everyone wanted everyone else to be successful. I mean, that's kind of how the surf industry evolved. In the surf world, it was all about cooperation. It was all about rooting for the other guys because if they could make it, it meant there was a market out there for you to exploit as well. Some people were showing movies. Some people were selling Hawaiian shirts. Some people were selling dope. Some people were selling surfboards. Some people were trying to figure out how to make clothes or wetsuits or whatever.

16:55Speaker 2:Whatever it might be.

16:56Speaker 5:So everybody at that time, we were kind of willing that industry into existence so that we could continue to do what we love doing and make a living in the real world.

17:09Speaker 1:If you've ever gone anywhere in the world and seen people's eyes light up when they hear the word California, this is why. This is when the world became obsessed with California youth culture. Specifically, the surfers. Mickey, he started hawking boards branded with his nickname, Da Cat.

17:33Speaker 7:Hey there, another California Gold sneak peek. You are bidding on one of the most collected surfboards of its era, of any era.

17:41Speaker 1:This clip is from a vintage surfboard auction that was held in 2020.

17:46Speaker 7:Every serious collector has at least one of these beauties for you. This year, we offer a rare Da Cat color workup. All original 9'8, 1966 DeKalb model Greg Knoll Mickey Dora slot bottom with green and orange mind melt splash on bottom and deck.

18:05Speaker 1:DeKalb boards, which were manufactured by Mickey's friend Greg Knoll, are still very coveted. That 1966 board sold for $ 17, 000. You have to ride the wave in the way it's breaking.

18:22Speaker 3:You know, you can't go left on a wave that goes to the right. And so he could make a rep by bitching about Paradise Lost, but it's not as if he didn't, at times, profit from it.

18:37Speaker 1:This is journalist David Renson again. He wrote the Mickey Dora biography, all for a few perfect waves.

18:44Speaker 3:I mean, it's very complex in how he was trapped by his own celebrity and his own story. And he couldn't appear to be selling out. So when he did sell out, he mocked people. Look at all the ads for the Cat surfboard with Greg Knoll. It's a classic.

19:04Speaker 1:Ads for the Cat boards appeared all over the surf magazines. There's one where a square-jawed cartoon American pilot says, The Cat is the greatest threat to our pure white virgin sport. Now it's up to the CIA to crush him. There's a black puma wearing a crown and the promise that, quote, Da Cat will have its revenge someday. There's another one where Mickey says, quote, As you are obviously aware, most all of my ads are being constantly sabotaged, twisted, censored, and the dialogue rearranged. Da Cat has barely five lives left.

19:43Speaker 1:The power mafia that is now controlling the sport is on my back as never before. this possibly could be the end. In one of the most famous and controversial ads, he creates a Descartes theory of evolution. It starts with a knuckled kook and culminates with the, quote, peak of perfection, Homo sapiens, Mickey Dora.

20:08Speaker 7:It's easy to understand why this is one of the most collected 60s-era longboard models, complete with stinging, sarcastic ad campaigns.

20:18Speaker 1:In that 2020 surfboard auction, Mickey's ad campaign is one of the board's biggest selling points.

20:25Speaker 7:He also promoted his signature Greg Knoll surfboards to cat model with full-page surf magazine ads in 66 and 67, including one with Dora crucified on a cross made of two surfboards. Dora's act struck a nerve with magazine readers, many writing letters to the editor in praise, while others described him as a sick and ignorant person. who should be banned from the beach.

20:50Speaker 1:Apparently, the ad that showed Mickey wearing a Nazi iron cross was not as offensive as his joke that he was the martyred savior of surfing. But the ads worked.

21:01Speaker 6:And they're so good and so funny and so kind of, you know, middle finger to the surf establishment that you forget he's trying to sell surfboards. If you just know him from that and from watching him in a few clips at Malibu or Sunset Beach... It's hard not to say this was the greatest surfer of all time, not just for the way he rode waves, but for the way he represents the sport. The rebelliousness and the anti-establishment vibe he's putting out seems deserved. It's going toward non-surfers and it's going to the surf establishment. It's funny.

21:35Speaker 2:He's really bright.

21:36Speaker 6:And he's just putting the best possible face on kind of trolling all these people that you would want to troll in the world. All of us do as surfers, even if we don't act out on it. He did it.

21:48Speaker 1:Mickey wasn't going to stop at selling a few thousand surfboards, though. His sense of the possible was expanding. This was a man with expensive taste. Mickey's girlfriend Diane talked about how they used to dress up in crash Hollywood parties, then steal the credit cards of unsuspecting guests. But then Mickey asked her to steal airline tickets. That was a line she wouldn't cross. Author David Renson again.

22:17Speaker 3:If you don't want to work and you don't have any money and you want to put food on the table and you can't steal from the supermarket too many times or can't go to a Hollywood party and have your girlfriend Diane, you know, rifle through the pocketbooks and the, you know, eventually you got to do stuff to make money. And I think as time went on, the scams got worse because he wanted to travel. So somebody steals a ticket imprinting machine, and then they make some phony airline tickets.

22:55Speaker 3:There's a prevailing ethos in the surf world and other worlds where artists feel they're getting ripped off by the man. Mickey wanted to be who he wanted to be. And he was willing to pay the price. But in order to be who he wanted to be, he had to be able to slip in and out of society. He had to put on a tuxedo, go to a party, rip some money off. He wanted the finer things.

23:23Speaker 1:Specifically, he wanted a zebra rug, a new haircut, some items from Bullock's department store. Those checks bounced. At PC Lu, an antique store at the Mandarin Hotel on Connott Road in Hong Kong, Mickey wanted a carved gilt panel from the Qing Dynasty and an embroidered tiger scroll. But when the manager at P.C. Liu wrote to ask why he had stopped payment on the check, he responded, on Qantas Air stationary, that Pan Am had lost his luggage. It will take a few weeks to straighten out my claim, he wrote to the manager. You must understand that I not only lost the wood carvings, but a great deal of expensive jewelry. So sorry for the embarrassments. Some of these things would come back to haunt Mickey. But for now, he seemed able to sideslip any serious trouble. That's not to say the cops weren't getting suspicious. In the fall of 1966, Mickey was arrested and taken to the Malibu station of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. The charge against him, grand theft, was dismissed. But he was definitely on the cops' radar.

24:38Speaker 1:At the station, Mickey had been booked under the name Meikle Spring Chapin. He gave his occupation as occasional salesman for Greg Knoll Surfboards. The answer to who to notify in case of illness was no one. But that was about to change. Linda Kai, who witnessed Mickey Dora's iconic mooning of the judges at Malibu, was, and is, a surfer girl.

25:18Speaker 4:Okay, well, I started in North Hollywood, California, and my neighbor across the street, I was 12 years old, and every morning I'd see him drive away in his Cadillac convertible with this huge thing sticking out of the back. I thought it was some kind of a ski, a water ski, you know. I didn't know what surfing was. He showed it to me, and he says, next weekend I'm going to bring you down. And I said, okay. And this was in February, the wintertime. And in February, Malibu's, back then, there was nothing. You know, there was no waves.

25:50Speaker 4:It was cold. You know, we don't have wetsuits then. And I went with him, and he put me out on a 12-foot long board and pushed me into a very tiny one-foot wave, and I loved it. I said, this is the greatest thing ever.

26:06Speaker 1:Linda started surfing in 1962, and she was hooked.

26:11Speaker 4:I got involved in the Malibu Surfing Association, and then I was also reading a lot of surfer magazines, and I was noticing that there were characters in these things, you know, and some of them were, like, famous for, I mean, famous, like, there was at Malibu, you know, there was characters that I knew.

26:31Speaker 1:Is that how you found out about Mickey?

26:34Speaker 2:Yes. Yes, well.

26:36Speaker 4:That was kind of a start. I've seen them on the beach, but I didn't put two and two together until we started talking at the meetings, in Malibu meetings, and then there was contests, and then you start to see more of the guys.

26:52Speaker 1:Linda was pretty hardcore. After high school, she got a VW van and lived out of it at the beach. She surfed all the time. In the winter of 1971, she was surfing at State Beach in Santa Monica, California. when she met Mickey Dora for real for the first time.

27:10Speaker 4:I happened to come out of the ocean after a surf, and he happened to be out there too. And I was getting in my van, sitting, watching, and he comes out of the water, and he walked up to my van and, you know, kind of pulls his wetsuit down over his shoulders, you know, and all this tan and this beauty and glistening, and he goes, he says, we should go out sometime. have something to eat, have to dinner. Oh, I almost fell off the seat.

27:39Speaker 1:Linda was starstruck. She'd been fascinated with Mickey for years, nursing a crush that was fueled by everything she read about him in the surf magazines and frequent sightings at the beach. She was 22. He was 37. She was totally smitten. So your relationship starts and you're living in your van at the beach and you're He's living in.

28:05Speaker 4:This little apartment in Brentwood.

28:09Speaker 1:And you're kind of stopping by and parking your van out front sometimes.

28:13Speaker 4:He gives me the key.

28:15Speaker 1:And what do you see in there?

28:17Speaker 4:It was like the Cosbah in Morocco. There was stuff from everywhere. There was tiger skins on the floor. There was big kind of bells. And he had tapestries hanging from the ceilings. and bearskin rugs on the bed, and everything was just like from somewhere else, and he didn't go to Pier 1.

28:43Speaker 1:It was a display of worldliness, and Linda was impressed.

28:48Speaker 4:In his bedroom, clicked across the top of the ceiling were all these little white things dangling, and he said, Linda, do you know what those are? And I said, I have no idea. They were tickets. Now back in those days, airline tickets came in like a carbon copied layer of maybe four pieces, depending on where you went. So he had probably 30 of them taped up, going up to one of his lamps in the ceiling. And I was like, wow, this is interesting, you know. Everything in there was interesting.

29:23Speaker 1:Did he seem like a wealthy guy to you?

29:30Speaker 4:After I saw the tickets and the way he was living, and I thought there must be some way to do this because he wasn't working, you know. I mean, he's at the beach all the time and not working and be able to travel. And I was like, okay, you know. must have some money to do all this.

29:53Speaker 1:Mickey implied that he was independently wealthy with investments to look after. He was always talking about the price of gold.

30:02Speaker 4:Everything had to stop because he had to listen to reports when the stock market came on the radio. And he used to get the Myers letter all the time. The Myers was like, he was a financial genius of what to do with stocks and things like that. But everything went on hold when the financial market came on the radio.

30:25Speaker 1:When did you have your first inkling that he was running some scams in California?

30:30Speaker 2:Yeah.

30:33Speaker 4:I don't know about if he was running them or not, but he was quite interested. He had a book called Credit Cardsmanship, and I had a flick through that. And then he had one called Fake, which was a Hungarian artist who did perfect replicas of the great artists and sold them as the deal. And Mickey was quite interested in this. He liked the way there was a twist. you know, of things.

31:05Speaker 1:Linda was skinny, and Mickey taught her how to collect benefits from the state. She went to the welfare office with dirt smudged on her face and pretended to be strung out on LSD. She came away with food stamps and a check for $ 25. She liked a twist, too. Linda and Mickey had a connection. They both lived to surf, and they both had an appetite for risk. What was your love for Mickey like? Deep, big.

31:36Speaker 4:You just had to look at him, and we were.

31:39Speaker 3:Like, ugh.

31:40Speaker 1:So it was chemical. It was just like a.

31:42Speaker 4:Yeah, it's pretty heavy, and it was scary, too. It was like jumping off of a mountain and not knowing what's underneath.

32:08Speaker 1:Next time on Lost Hills.

32:11Speaker 4:Well, we get a knock on the door. I see this car drive up, and I'm like, who the hell's that, you know? I see this blonde come out.

32:19Speaker 1:It's Don.

32:20Speaker 4:I said, Mickey, Don's here.

32:22Speaker 5:He goes, what?

32:24Speaker 4:He had a rifle, of course. He had it behind the door. He picks it up. He says, get rid of him. He said, get them out of here.

32:34Speaker 1:That's next in Episode 8, a.k.a. Fugitive. Lost Hills is written and reported by me, Dana Goodyear. It's created by me and Ben Adair and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can binge the entire season right now ad-free. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.