Gidget: Turning on the Suburbs
Surfing is out of this world. You can't imagine the thrill of shooting the curl. It positively surpasses every living emotion I've ever had.3
Hollywood screenwriter Frederick Kohner based his novel - Gidget - The Little Girl with Big Ideas - upon stories about the Malibu surfing fraternity told to him by his fifteen-year-old daughter Kathy, the youngest of his two daughters. Kathy had started surfing the previous year. Frederick Kohner was a Holocaust refugee who had settled in Brentwood, an affluent suburb of Los Angeles. He had earned an Oscar nomination for best original story for Mad About the Music (1938). Kohner was best known for writing light comedies, some of which were adapted to musicals, such as Three Daring Daughters (1948) and Nancy Goes to Rio (1950). He was also credited as one of the writers involved in Laurel and Hardy’s last film, Atoll K (1951), which was later released in the United States as Utopia (1954).
The 156-page hardback copy of Gidget was published by New York’s George Putnam’s Sons in September 1957 and sold about half a million copies. Life magazine assisted in the publicity for the book by publishing Gidget Makes the Grade and including photos of Kathy Kohner and some of the surfers featured in the novel. Life reported that among the surfers themselves, “the novel (Gidget) made hardly a ripple. ‘If I had a couple of bucks to buy a book,’ said one ‘I wouldn’t. I’d buy some beer.’”4 Warshaw (2003: 224) claims Kohner’s 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.” May (1999) suggests that the novel expanded surfing’s fashionable influence in Los Angeles high schools. Kohner sold the rights to Gidget to Columbia Pictures for $50 000 and adapted his novel into a screenplay. The film appeared in cinemas in 1959, the same year that another enduring icon of idealised, wholesome, American teenage femininity – Barbara Millicent Roberts or Barbie - made her debut wearing a ponytail and a striped swimsuit at the American Toy Fair. But Barbie did not surf.5 Gidget would travel to Hawai'i 6 and Rome in subsequent films and the Gidget franchise would expand to three television series and a musical. Gidget - The Musical was co-written by Frances Ford Coppola and performed in California in 2007.
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Gidget, Lolita and Anxious Dads
Another novel by a European immigrant involving a young female – Nabakov’s Lolita – was published in the United States by Gidget ’s publisher in August 19588. Stillman (2002: 124) claims favourable comparisons were made, with some critics hailing Kohner’s work “for its authentic evocation of a curious subculture.” Nash (2002: 341) has argued that the overt sexuality of Lolita is “fundamentally the same sexuality which undergirds father/daughter relationships in more “wholesome entertainment”” such as Gidget. Both novels share in the creation of father-figure anxiety due to the representation of adolescent femininity as a disruptive force.
The issue of adolescent femininity framed as a sexual problem has attracted attention from a number of scholars. Whitney (2002) argues that Oedipal conflicts give Gidget its structure and keep its protagonist within the well-policed boundaries of the patriarchal realm. Scheiner’s (2000) study of the representation of girls in popular film between 1920 and 1950 found that sexuality was the dominant theme in girls’ construction on film and that this theme was most often expressed through “parental anxiety about chastity” (Nash, 2002: 343). Such readings see the longevity of the Gidget franchise as owing a good sum of its endurance to the ability to reproduce the dominant ideologies of middle-class, heterosexual adolescent femininity. Further more Gidget provides instruction on the apparent logic of the sensible repression of desire and female subordination to the authority of male and family expectation.
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| | TV's first gidget - Sally Field |
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Gidget: Surfing Around Conformity
Gidget revolves around the beachside adventures of Frances Lawrence (Sandra Dee) and her romantic interest, Moondoggie (James Darren). Frances is persuaded by her friends to attend the beach where “gorgeous hunks of male” can be found. Frances is neither as well physically developed or as interested in boys as is her friend Patty (Patti Kane). Patty points out that Gidget is “more fish than dish. To put it bluntly, the kid’s studied up on about everything but sex.” At the beach, while her friends vie for the attention of the surfer boys, Frances resolves to ride the waves. She buys a board and with the endorsement of “Kahoona” (Cliff Robertson), Frances is renamed Gidget (a cross between a girl and midget) and accepted into the surfers’ group as ‘one of the boys’.
Admired by all the college boys who are on the beach for summer vacation, Kahoona proclaims that surfing is his full-time passion, “not a summer romance.” When Gidget realises Kahoona does not have a goal in life other than to surf, she confronts his lack of ambition with the question: “doesn't everyone need a goal?” Although unconvinced by “The Gidge” as he calls her, the seeds of doubt regarding the worthiness of his ‘surfbum’ lifestyle are planted and Kahoona will return to the ambition once apparent during his Air Force training as a pilot for the Korean War.
Within the affectionate confines of the middle-class-cum-nuclear home, Gidget is provided with ‘womanly’ advice from her mother. Mrs. Lawrence (Mary Laroche) points to a tapestry handcrafted by Gidget's grandmother, that states: “To be a real woman is to bring out the best in a man.” McParland (2001: 7) claims the tapestry hangs on the bedroom wall of the film’s heroine “like a life buoy on an ocean liner.” There is no mistaking that this tapestry signifies both ideology and purpose – taming and controlling Moondoggie and Kahoona. Upon learning that Kahoona has taken a job with Trans-State Airlines and that Moondoggie wants her to wear his pin, Gidget subtly acknowledges her grandmother’s sage advice, exultant that she was the reasoning force behind encouraging Kahoona and Moondoggie to make responsible choices. In reverence to his parents’ authority, Moondoggie will return to law school after giving Gidget his promise pin. Gidget triumphantly wears Moondoggie's pin knowing that her grandmother’s motto turned out to be right. While she breathlessly declared her surfing exploits as ‘the ultimate’ she later declares that her feelings for Moondoggie were ‘the absolute ultimate.’ Surfing was no more than a casual, youthful summer expedition before the real business of lifelong commitment through marriage, domestic tranquillity, conformity and middle-class aspiration. Indeed, surfing was a summer romance.
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In Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, Douglas (1994: 4) writes that “one of my highest ambitions was to be just like Gidget, popular, cute and perky.” Nash (2002: 345) views ‘perky’ as an idealised trait of femininity that “bridged the polarities of sanctioned masculinity and femininity”. Douglas (1994: 108) also argues that ‘perky’ was “assertiveness masquerading as cuteness” and that it provided “fabulous camouflage” for a female to achieve aspirations without having to abandon the conventional characteristics of submissive and subordinate feminity that remain obligatory to accumulate and preserve approval from patriarchal culture. Gidget’s ‘perkiness’ was never threatening and never sought to contest Cold War patriarchal authority.
| | Screengrab from 'Gidget goes Hawaiian' |
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Gidget forever altered surfing’s image, as screenwriters carved out a “highly romanticised beach atmosphere replete with tribal overtones: bonfires, ukulele sounds, flames from tiki lamps danced on the beach, all backed by the rolling beat of bongo drums” (Crawford, no date). These depictions assisted in the popular imagination positioning sensual images of the beach and surfing lifestyle in opposition to a dominant Cold War culture of conformity.
In Gidget, as Crawford (no date) points out, “questions about sexuality, careers and leisure are raised and answered” so as to infuse the symbolic world of surf culture in post-World War II California with a lesson in morality. Sandra Dee emerged as a sweet, old-fashioned, virginal throwback to more conservative values. The all-American girl showed that teen rebellion did not have to be angry and angst-ridden but could be frivolous and fun - providing it was merely a temporary diversion from middle-class obligation. Gidget ushered in the morality of the “clean teen” picture which appealed to young women filmgoers in the late Eisenhower-era, while offering attractive young women in bikinis and the thrill of surfing to young men. Surfing did not really matter in Gidget as much as a well-defined value system that acknowledged patriarchal power through privileging heterosexual femininity, middle-class responsibility and commitment to conformity.
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