Speaker 1: Pushkin Hey, Lost Hills listeners, it's Dana. I wanted to
Speaker 1: let you know that you can hear the entire new
Speaker 1: season of Lost Hills ad free, along with other great
Speaker 1: binge listens by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin
Speaker 1: Plus on the Lost Hills Show page in Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Not too long ago,
Speaker 1: I met a surfer named Denny Auburg. He lives in
Speaker 1: Santa Barbara now, but he learned to surf in Malibu
Speaker 1: when the sport was barely known on the mainland.
Speaker 2: I still go surfing after about sixty two years of surfing,
Speaker 2: go down to Rincon and live close by him. I
Speaker 2: still have the stoke.
Speaker 1: Denny told me a story about one of his early
Speaker 1: surf experiences, a day that made an indelible impression on him.
Speaker 1: It was nineteen fifty nine. He was twelve. The waves
Speaker 1: at Malibu were huge, but he and his friend decided
Speaker 1: to paddle out anyway. They were kooks. They didn't know
Speaker 1: what they were doing.
Speaker 2: So we were beginners. You know. We're down at Malibu
Speaker 2: and it was a big day, you know, But we
Speaker 2: went out by the pier when it gets real big.
Speaker 2: You have to go way down by the piero to
Speaker 2: paddle out, and so we jump in the water with
Speaker 2: our boards, you know, a little skinny twelve year olds
Speaker 2: and start turning out a little skinny arms, you know,
Speaker 2: doing this kook paddle trying to get out, and a
Speaker 2: big set of waves, I mean, the big waves came
Speaker 2: like a row of five or six waves. Out to
Speaker 2: see them, I never forget this, the beauty of this
Speaker 2: wave coming.
Speaker 1: As the wave approached, Denny saw there was a c
Speaker 1: on it.
Speaker 2: Just perfectly placed on this wave, just trimming at the
Speaker 2: very top of the wave. And there's a precision. When
Speaker 2: you're trim it means your board's flushed sideways to the wave,
Speaker 2: it's inside it, and you're getting speed that way because
Speaker 2: it's in the right position. The fins just hanging on
Speaker 2: at the top of the wave, and it's hand position.
Speaker 2: The way he's kind of arching in the little vales
Speaker 2: of water coming off to those. It was the most
Speaker 2: gorgeous thing, you know, the colors. He's riding this wind
Speaker 2: blowing spin drifts back and we're just watching this thing.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. But we realized he was coming right
Speaker 2: at us, you know, We were the cooks in his way,
Speaker 2: you know, coming right at us, so we had to
Speaker 2: turn sideways. You know, it's hard to explain, but when
Speaker 2: you turn broadside, you just get obliterated. It just took
Speaker 2: our board, It just took us and lasted us, churning
Speaker 2: into the white water down by the end of the
Speaker 2: pilings of the pier, I really felt like I was
Speaker 2: going to drown. My friend told me I almost drowed.
Speaker 2: I don't remember, but I remember spitting out sand, and
Speaker 2: you know, just like, oh my god, who was that guy?
Speaker 1: Who was that guy? His name was Mickey Dora, also
Speaker 1: known as the Cat, also known as the Dark Prince
Speaker 1: of Malibu. In the nineteen fifties, as surfing spread from
Speaker 1: Hawaii to California, Mickey gained a reputation as the most
Speaker 1: dynamic and watchable surfer on the mainland. He was Malibu's
Speaker 1: first homegrown celebrity and the surf world's first personality. He
Speaker 1: put Malibu on the map. Mickey Dora was beautiful and charismatic,
Speaker 1: but he was all shade. You don't earn that name
Speaker 1: the Dark Prince for nothing. He represented Malibu's dark side.
Speaker 1: What I think of as Malae's true nature. He violently
Speaker 1: opposed the happy, sun drenched Malibu that would come to
Speaker 1: dominate pop culture, starting with the Gidget movies in the
Speaker 1: late fifties, Malibu Barbie in the seventies, and everything that
Speaker 1: came after that. He hated Gidget and everything she stood
Speaker 1: for new surfers, girl surfers, surfers he thought didn't belong.
Speaker 1: He went to war for the soul of Malibu, the
Speaker 1: soul of surfing. Some days I think he won. Mickey
Speaker 1: Dora was a surfing Jesse James, an unrepentant outlaw, idolized
Speaker 1: by the so called wild kids of Malibu Beach. A
Speaker 1: scoundrel who people say would screw them over for fun,
Speaker 1: scam them, steal from them, and break their hearts. A
Speaker 1: rebel who made his own rules. The legends were endless,
Speaker 1: mostly not fact check, and Mickey was their primary author.
Speaker 1: He stole Ringo Stars snuffbox or was it John Lennon's lighter?
Speaker 1: He dated Cher before Sonny. He knew who kidnapped Frank
Speaker 1: Sinatra Junior. He was a diamond smuggler, a drug lord,
Speaker 1: a double agent, a European aristocrat, a prophet of the
Speaker 1: coming apocalypse, he was an emotionally unstable man, armed and dangerous.
Speaker 1: That one was courtesy of the FBI, who tried to
Speaker 1: catch him for seven years. Because in the early seventies,
Speaker 1: at the height of his fame, when some of his
Speaker 1: bad deeds were catching up with him, Mickey just disappeared.
Speaker 1: He went on the lamb, leading law enforcement on a
Speaker 1: goose chase that spanned the globe. But while the law
Speaker 1: was hunting him, he was hunting something else. The Perfect Wave,
Speaker 1: a once in a century event sometimes called the rogue
Speaker 1: Wave or the episodic Wave or the Ninth Wave. Does
Speaker 1: that sound familiar. If it does, that's because it's a
Speaker 1: lot like the plot of Point Break, the cult classic
Speaker 1: from nineteen ninety one. In Point Break, Patrick Swayzee plays
Speaker 1: a groovy surfer named Body who robbed banks so he
Speaker 1: could travel the world and find the Perfect Wave. Well,
Speaker 1: Mickey was a real life Body, minus the Kumbaya.
Speaker 3: He said, criminals break the laws. I live outside the law.
Speaker 4: Mickey's alias is Richard Austin, Roach Junior, micklos Dora, Mickey Dora.
Speaker 2: It was a Swiss bank, and yeah, they found four
Speaker 2: hundred thousand dollars in the bank.
Speaker 4: Alexander Dora.
Speaker 5: Nobody knows exactly where it came from.
Speaker 2: There were all sorts of theories.
Speaker 4: Miklos Dora, Cornell, Michael s Chapin.
Speaker 3: Australia, New Zealand, Bali, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and I'm probably
Speaker 3: missing a few, all of Europe.
Speaker 4: Michael spring Chapin.
Speaker 6: He went to amazing places before anybody was doing that
Speaker 6: stuff by himself.
Speaker 4: Nicol spring Chapin, Michael Stanley Chapin.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect
Speaker 1: the dots around this.
Speaker 4: Alexander Micholas and I fell in love the minute he
Speaker 4: walked out of the water, until I realized he was
Speaker 4: a scoundrel.
Speaker 3: In a road and was training me to be an accomplice.
Speaker 7: I'm going to get in big trouble for saying all this.
Speaker 7: He was narcissistic, but also incredibly intelligent and also i'd
Speaker 7: say a little bit sociopathic.
Speaker 6: It just all gets darker and darker and darker until
Speaker 6: I just want to sort of turn away from it.
Speaker 8: I don't want to know about it anymore.
Speaker 1: At its core, surfing as a counterculture, so Mickey being
Speaker 1: an anti hero that just makes some Surfings Hero, I'm
Speaker 1: Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills Season three, The
Speaker 1: Dark Prince, Episode one. The legend of Mickey Dora.
Speaker 6: Who is the best in the world, Who's the worst
Speaker 6: in the world.
Speaker 8: I don't give a fuck. I don't give a damn.
Speaker 6: Do you want to think I'm any good?
Speaker 8: Fine?
Speaker 2: If they don't think I'm any good, I don't give
Speaker 2: a shit. I have there no right ways and enjoy myself.
Speaker 1: Mickey Dora died from pancreatic cancer in two thousand and two.
Speaker 1: For reasons I'll get into later, there are very few
Speaker 1: publicly available recordings of him. What you're about to hear
Speaker 1: is probably the longest and most revealing clip that's out there.
Speaker 1: It's from a nineteen ninety documentary called Surfers the movie.
Speaker 1: In it, Mickey lays out his surfing philosophy.
Speaker 6: My whole life is this escape.
Speaker 2: My whole life is this way. If I drop into
Speaker 2: set the whole thing up, pull up a bottom troom
Speaker 2: and pull up into it and shoot for my life
Speaker 2: going in for prom and behind me all of the
Speaker 2: shit goes over my back.
Speaker 5: He had been such a big part of surf history,
Speaker 5: and as a kid, I soaked all that up. I
Speaker 5: started surfing in the mid seventies, late seventies.
Speaker 1: This is Kelly Slater, the eleven time World Surf League champion.
Speaker 1: He's regarded as the greatest surfer of all time. When
Speaker 1: he was in his twenties, Kelly had the chance to
Speaker 1: spend time with Mickey Dora.
Speaker 5: It was part of the experience, you know, it was
Speaker 5: a part of a essentially like a grassroots experience to
Speaker 5: be around Mickey Dora in the surf world because he
Speaker 5: was a legend. He was a living character to us,
Speaker 5: to people in my era and just before me. Mickey
Speaker 5: was He's one of the biggest names in surfing, and
Speaker 5: he did represent the lifestyle and the freedom that surfers
Speaker 5: have and you know, a means to an end to
Speaker 5: go travel around the world and surf.
Speaker 1: Mickey was one of the original California surfers, an innovator
Speaker 1: who was among the few standout masters, certainly the most
Speaker 1: notorious and memorable. At the moment that surfing exploded into
Speaker 1: the mainstream. Mickey had an ideology about surfing. Casual surfers
Speaker 1: they should get out of his way, or better yet,
Speaker 1: stay out of Malibu altogether. Professionals like Slater, they were
Speaker 1: defiling something sacred. Mickey's way was total commitment and total freedom,
Speaker 1: no rules.
Speaker 5: The cool thing about Mickey's story is there's always been
Speaker 5: this sort of tinge of like a little bit of
Speaker 5: an outlaw lifestyle or something. An expat, a traveling person,
Speaker 5: somebody there's a little bit of mystery in their life
Speaker 5: or whatever. That was really prominent back in the fifties
Speaker 5: and sixties and seventies and surfing, and it really built
Speaker 5: up the lore of mysterious characters.
Speaker 8: Around the world.
Speaker 5: I don't know if all the stories I heard were
Speaker 5: true or not, but that was the early days of
Speaker 5: like seven. Maybe he pictured himself as like this kind
Speaker 5: of like almost like a spy in this surf world
Speaker 5: or something, and that was sort of celebrated to have
Speaker 5: this sort of life at all costs and make it
Speaker 5: fun while you're doing it.
Speaker 1: I started surfing ten years ago, and there's not another
Speaker 1: way to say it. I felt totally in love with it.
Speaker 1: The smell of the wax, the taste of salt, the
Speaker 1: squinting into the sun, the scar I'll have forever from
Speaker 1: the rock at low Tide Malibu that cut through my
Speaker 1: wetsuit and gashed my shin. I love the salty, shaggy
Speaker 1: people who seem to congregate around the southern California breaks
Speaker 1: people with stories from the not that distant past, when
Speaker 1: mainland surfing was born. I got into surfing when I
Speaker 1: had a newborn and a two year old, was writing
Speaker 1: a book and teaching at a university and writing full
Speaker 1: time for The New Yorker. I was living in a
Speaker 1: world of obligations, deadlines, bedtimes, clocks, a life measured out
Speaker 1: in teaspoons. Very unfree surfing released me temporarily from that identity.
Speaker 1: It let me drop out, It let me live life
Speaker 1: by the tides. This one day, early in my time surfing,
Speaker 1: I was in the water at Sunset, a beginner's spot
Speaker 1: between Santa Monica and Malibu where you park along Pacific
Speaker 1: Coast Highway and scramble down the rocks with your board.
Speaker 1: I was sitting there in the long lag between sets
Speaker 1: of waves, bobbing, looking up to the highway, watching all
Speaker 1: the cars streaming by. So many times I'd been in
Speaker 1: my car on that stretch of road. I glanced over
Speaker 1: at the surfers in the water below. They had seemed
Speaker 1: scenic a picturesque feature of Los Angeles. But now I
Speaker 1: was in the waves, and it was the opposite the cars,
Speaker 1: the city clustered at the ocean's edge. That was the backdrop.
Speaker 1: That world looked temporary, illusory. This here was real. To
Speaker 1: this day, Mickey Dora is held up as an idol
Speaker 1: many people's idea of a pure surfer. That was the
Speaker 1: case for Denny Auburg, for sure. He idolized Mickey as
Speaker 1: a kid on the beach in Malibu, and you can
Speaker 1: hear it in his voice. He still does.
Speaker 2: Mickey is twelve years older than me. He was a
Speaker 2: man when we were kids, you know, twenty five serious.
Speaker 1: Denny's house is a simple wooden structure on his buddy's
Speaker 1: avocado farm. The window ledges are lined with surf memorabilia,
Speaker 1: trophies and plaques and photos of Denny as a tow
Speaker 1: headed teenager.
Speaker 2: Yes, a picture of him.
Speaker 1: This is you surfing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's Mickey Dora next to me.
Speaker 1: Your style is not totally different from Mickey's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we probably all copied Mickey. You know, he was
Speaker 2: a big influence. That's another thing, you know that people
Speaker 2: copied his style and learned from him. You know, he
Speaker 2: was a teacher just by doing it, you know, taught
Speaker 2: us what to do, you know, how to ride a wave.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 2: Amazing.
Speaker 1: The way Mickey served it was poetic. No one who
Speaker 1: saw it could forget it, and no one could match him,
Speaker 1: though everyone tried.
Speaker 2: His nickname was the Cat because he had feline grace
Speaker 2: on a wave, you know, the way pussy fliped to
Speaker 2: the nose, you know, boom boom, real agile. You know.
Speaker 2: They call him the cat. That's why they made him,
Speaker 2: not because he was a cat burglar, but I guess
Speaker 2: he was that.
Speaker 1: Along with Mickey's unparalleled ability on a surfboard, his appearance
Speaker 1: was unique on the beaches of southern California in a
Speaker 1: sea of boy scout blondes. He was obsidian dark hair
Speaker 1: and eyes, and the kind of complexion people often called
Speaker 1: a swarthy.
Speaker 6: The fact that the guy who caught our attention the
Speaker 6: most is this hairy, dark haired guy who didn't look
Speaker 6: at all like the archetype. I respond to that as well.
Speaker 1: This is Matt Warshaw. He's a surf historian and the
Speaker 1: curator of an incredible online resource called The Encyclopedia of Surfing.
Speaker 6: In the surf world, You know, he looks so perfect
Speaker 6: to be that person, the way Bowie looks so good
Speaker 6: to be the person for that period of glam rock,
Speaker 6: you know. And it's not even the handsomeess grinned by itself.
Speaker 6: It's almost like this chesture cap thing like sometimes you
Speaker 6: think of Dora. It's like the rest of him sort
Speaker 6: of fades away and it's just this dark hair and
Speaker 6: that really sort of devilish grin.
Speaker 1: But what really set Mickey apart was the persona he invented.
Speaker 1: Mickey Dora was a character, a complex self invention that
Speaker 1: was meant to draw a maximum attention and to throw
Speaker 1: people of his trail.
Speaker 6: Mickey seemed to have I guess what we would call
Speaker 6: a brand, and I got.
Speaker 8: The feeling that he dressed sort of for us.
Speaker 6: He you know, he would show up in things that
Speaker 6: you wouldn't expect a surfer to wear, you know, he
Speaker 6: would just wear a tennis sweater to the beach. I
Speaker 6: read someone said that NICKI would show up with a
Speaker 6: starlet one day, and they'd show up with two really
Speaker 6: pretty boys the next day. So I think that he
Speaker 6: was never not having fun and sort of just enjoying himself,
Speaker 6: especially in these early years, just sort of playing with
Speaker 6: the image of being a surfer before anybody else was
Speaker 6: doing it.
Speaker 1: The ocean is infinite, but waves, waves shaped for surfing
Speaker 1: with a face and room to play, are finite. The
Speaker 1: deepest joy in surfing comes from a long, uninterrupted ride.
Speaker 1: That's the whole point, to be alone on a way
Speaker 1: or so I hear. I've been surfing in Los Angeles
Speaker 1: for a decade and I've rarely had a wave to
Speaker 1: myself for more than a few seconds. There are too
Speaker 1: many surfers and not enough waves. Denny Auberg remembers the
Speaker 1: time before the early nineteen fifties when Malibu was an
Speaker 1: undiscovered wave. Most days it was only Nicki, Dora and
Speaker 1: one or two others in the water.
Speaker 2: And you had this wonderful wave to yourself, which makes
Speaker 2: a big difference, because when you have a wave to
Speaker 2: yourself and a perfect wave, you get the right of
Speaker 2: your life and nobody gets in your way, and it's
Speaker 2: just the nature all around you, and it's yours, you know,
Speaker 2: and it's a personal connection with nature that it's hard
Speaker 2: to duplicate, you know, It's just nothing like it because
Speaker 2: it's so gorgeous in the water and the wind blowing
Speaker 2: the waves back, and you're free and there's no distractions
Speaker 2: you in the ways.
Speaker 1: Malibu is a perfect long, right breaking wave that peals
Speaker 1: from way off the point to the Malibu Pier, and
Speaker 1: Mickey Dora owned it for about two decades from the
Speaker 1: early fifties to the early seventies. And because it was Malibu,
Speaker 1: that meant that Mickey Doora stood for something, an attitude
Speaker 1: that would spread through the culture. Here's how one of
Speaker 1: his admirers wrote about Mickey's influence in an authorized biography, quote,
Speaker 1: he was our Elvis. There was no one else to
Speaker 1: articulate the fundamental gestures of the sociopathic manifesto of a
Speaker 1: coalescing youth consciousness unquote. The youth were sociopaths, and Mickey
Speaker 1: was their leader up until nineteen seventy four, when he
Speaker 1: vanished from Malibu. That's when he became their god.
Speaker 2: It was a mystery. It was kind of like, where's
Speaker 2: Mickey Dora And they still had his name on the wall.
Speaker 2: Some guy spray Can Dora lives you know, on the
Speaker 2: wall and stayed there forever, you know, and it kind
Speaker 2: of left us. He left his mark in that way,
Speaker 2: you know, and people would wonder where's Mickey. Nobody knew.
Speaker 2: It was very much of a mystery for years because
Speaker 2: he was on the run, you know, and kind of
Speaker 2: like Billy the Kid, you know, he was gone. He's
Speaker 2: kind of had this reputation the bad boy on the run,
Speaker 2: the fugitive, so it added to his reputation.
Speaker 1: Mickey Dora was a born con man. He could talk
Speaker 1: his way into anything and out of almost everything, because
Speaker 1: alleged scams ranged petty and kind of ridiculous, like renting
Speaker 1: out surfboards that didn't belong to him, to blatantly criminal
Speaker 1: credit card fraud, fake plane tickets, stolen ski equipment, stolen antiques,
Speaker 1: stolen passports. Eventually, his schemes would land him in federal prison.
Speaker 1: You associated with him at your own risk. Denny Auberg
Speaker 1: has a story about this, the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: would happen on a typical day hanging out with Mickey
Speaker 1: in the early seventies, Denny was invited to Kawhai by
Speaker 1: a Hawaiian surfer named Joey Cabbell. At the time, Mickey
Speaker 1: was also in Hawaii. Cabell told Denny he'd like to
Speaker 1: see Mickey too, so.
Speaker 2: I called up Mickey and told him, Joey invited you
Speaker 2: to come, and he came right over. He shut up.
Speaker 2: It was amazing.
Speaker 1: Coabell, who was in peak physical shape, proposed the hike
Speaker 1: to a beach to spend the night. It was an
Speaker 1: eleven mile hike and not an easy one.
Speaker 2: So I'm trudging along with Mickey on this really tough hike,
Speaker 2: you know, for us, and we're like city slickers. Dora
Speaker 2: had these leather boots on, really the wrong equipment, you know,
Speaker 2: and I was kind of feeling a little sick myself,
Speaker 2: and it got dark on us, and we're going through
Speaker 2: these canyons and pushing branches away. Micky was tortured.
Speaker 1: Finally they arrived at the beach. They were exhausted and
Speaker 1: Denny was starting to feel really bad.
Speaker 2: He passed out in some cave, you know. He woke
Speaker 2: up in the morning and Micky could see that I
Speaker 2: was a little sick, so he is mine started working like,
Speaker 2: I can't hike back. I got to figure something out.
Speaker 2: He saw this helicopter go by, you know, and it
Speaker 2: was they had a tourist, So Micky had an idea.
Speaker 1: Mickey slipped away and went down to the shoreline, where
Speaker 1: he gathered up some rocks and used them to write
Speaker 1: S O S in big letters.
Speaker 2: The next day, I know, the helicopter lands on this
Speaker 2: path down the beach and Mickey goes up. He talks
Speaker 2: to the guy. I don't know what he was saying,
Speaker 2: but apparently he was telling the guy that my friend's
Speaker 2: dying on the beach. We need help. And the guy said,
Speaker 2: I can't come back right now, but you know soon
Speaker 2: did I take these people? And right before dark, this
Speaker 2: guy came back and Micky says, come on, that's it,
Speaker 2: let's go what oh okay, start start doing the fifty
Speaker 2: yard dash toward this helicopter down the beach, and Mickey says,
Speaker 2: slow down. You got to act a little sicker, you know.
Speaker 2: We walk up to the helicopter pilot and he kind
Speaker 2: of looks at me and I was trying to stick her,
Speaker 2: and he opens the door. He let me in to
Speaker 2: the helicopter and Mickey starts to get in behind him
Speaker 2: and the guy goes, oh, no, it's not you. It's
Speaker 2: just a sick guy, you know, you know, no make
Speaker 2: Mickey pulls out this little bottle. He said, I'm having
Speaker 2: an asthma attack. I can't breathe. You know, my feeter bleeding.
Speaker 2: I can't walk, you know, you just started crying the guy.
Speaker 2: You could tell the guy wasn't buying it, but he
Speaker 2: let him in, so we got lifted off the pad.
Speaker 2: It was the most beautiful majestic thing. I mean, the
Speaker 2: serrated mountains is colors, you know, and running this little
Speaker 2: bubble up in the sky. And Mickey turns, he says,
Speaker 2: our magic carpet.
Speaker 1: Right when the helicopter landed in town, there were news
Speaker 1: reporters and cameras everywhere.
Speaker 2: They thought somewhere they were bringing the dead guy. You know,
Speaker 2: we land and all these people kind of crowded around me,
Speaker 2: you know. And as soon as I get out and
Speaker 2: they go, where's the sick guy? Oh that was me?
Speaker 2: And they're all disappointed, you know, and they leave. Mickey
Speaker 2: was disappeared. He's nowhere, tom around. He disappeared on me.
Speaker 2: He left me holding the bag. So he pulled this
Speaker 2: whole thing off, and I went through and got checked out.
Speaker 2: I did have some little dysentery thing. The cops had
Speaker 2: gone looking for Mickey and they found him trying to
Speaker 2: rent a car at the airport and they dragged him back.
Speaker 2: You know, they were trying to interview the guy, and
Speaker 2: he's showing him all these fake ideas, and one said
Speaker 2: Chapin and the other one said Dora, who are you?
Speaker 2: Are you Chapin our Dora? And he's laughing, I'm chaping Dora,
Speaker 2: you know. And I don't know how it happened, but
Speaker 2: he got out of the whole thing, and I was
Speaker 2: the fall guy.
Speaker 1: To Mickey, Dora, the highest value was freedom, and that
Speaker 1: to him meant doing whatever served him best in any situation.
Speaker 1: For Mickey, freedom took priority over any other moral or
Speaker 1: ethical consideration, and he would do or say almost anything
Speaker 1: to get what he wanted. In nineteen seventy four, Mickey
Speaker 1: left Malibu and set out on an adventure that took
Speaker 1: him all over the world searching for the perfect empty wave.
Speaker 1: He didn't have the money to travel like this, but
Speaker 1: he did it anyway, using blank airline tickets that he
Speaker 1: filled out for whatever destination he wanted.
Speaker 3: Mickey had a whole bunch from a woman who worked
Speaker 3: at the Pan American office.
Speaker 1: This is Linda Kai, Mickey's girlfriend, an accomplice for much
Speaker 1: of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3: You could actually write your own tickets back in those days,
Speaker 3: they were paper tickets written on and all you needed
Speaker 3: to know was the mile age, and he had all
Speaker 3: the paraphernalia to work her out. Now, I don't know
Speaker 3: who the girl was and gave him the stuff. He
Speaker 3: must have made a sweet you know. But you're flying
Speaker 3: on these sort of forged Everything was fake.
Speaker 1: They shopped and dined and stayed in nice hotels, all
Speaker 1: of it, according to Linda on forged credit cards, and
Speaker 1: all while being tracked from surf spot to surf spot
Speaker 1: by baffled agents of the FBI and Interpol.
Speaker 3: Back in the day, credit cards were plastic, of course,
Speaker 3: but they didn't have the strips on the back like
Speaker 3: they do nail the manuscrip. They had numbers and dates.
Speaker 3: I was assigned to take a little razor blade and
Speaker 3: change some numbers, and we did and make it good
Speaker 3: for another month.
Speaker 1: Mickey had a way of justifying all this theft and deception.
Speaker 3: Mickey described at once as he says, I'm not a criminal.
Speaker 3: He says, I don't commit crimes. He says, I'm an outlaw.
Speaker 3: He says, and there's a difference.
Speaker 4: Did you buy it?
Speaker 3: Yes, I still do.
Speaker 7: One of the great accomplishments that Mickey set out and
Speaker 7: probably was successful at was never working a day in
Speaker 7: his life. That was his real goal, and he accomplished it.
Speaker 7: I don't know if he ever actually had a job.
Speaker 1: Jim Kempton used to be the editor of Surfer magazine,
Speaker 1: and these days he runs the California Surf Museum. He
Speaker 1: knew Mickey pretty well in the seven when they were
Speaker 1: both living in a surf town in the south of France.
Speaker 1: In fact, Mickey crashed at his place a lot, used
Speaker 1: his shower and his kitchen. One day, Jim noticed his
Speaker 1: passport was missing.
Speaker 7: And then sitting on the beach, you know, maybe two
Speaker 7: weeks later, I see this South African guy look sort
Speaker 7: of like me, and there's my passport.
Speaker 1: Micky sold it to him.
Speaker 7: I'm sure he did. I don't have I mean, how
Speaker 7: would you ever prove that right unless you arrested them both,
Speaker 7: which I was not going to do in any event.
Speaker 1: Did you ever say anything to Mickey about it? In
Speaker 1: the surf world, it was almost currency to be scammed
Speaker 1: by Mickey. You'd come away from the experience with a
Speaker 1: story to dine out on for years. Mickey's appeal was
Speaker 1: not in spite of his criminality.
Speaker 4: But because of it, there's a.
Speaker 7: Lot of people who love the outlaw, who loved getting
Speaker 7: away with it is something that for many people is
Speaker 7: a great satisfaction to them to see people be able
Speaker 7: to accomplish that, and Mickey for a long time was
Speaker 7: able to do that without payment. We tend to idolize
Speaker 7: our outlaws. Jesse James, pretty Boy Floyd. You know, you
Speaker 7: hear those stories about them, you'd think that those guys
Speaker 7: were somehow like heroic. They are sociopathic killers, every one
Speaker 7: of them, you know, that murdered people in cold blood
Speaker 7: and yet did they give to the poor. Yeah, they did,
Speaker 7: mostly though, to say, to make sure that they didn't
Speaker 7: tell the cops where they were. We definitely idolize our outlaws.
Speaker 7: That's just something that is I think baked into the
Speaker 7: American psyche.
Speaker 1: And it's very prominent in surf culture.
Speaker 7: Very few nice guys are as idolized as the bad
Speaker 7: boys are, and.
Speaker 1: As Mickey Dora the most idolized of the bad boys.
Speaker 7: He's not one of the most idolized the bad boys,
Speaker 7: who's also the most bad guys of the bad guys.
Speaker 1: The darkest parts of Mickey Dora, though, don't have anything
Speaker 1: to do with his hustles and his cons or even
Speaker 1: with the more serious fraud for which he eventually served time.
Speaker 1: The darkest parts of Mickey have to do with his
Speaker 1: soul and the attitudes he harbored there of exclusion, racism,
Speaker 1: and xenophobia, a pattern of hate that maps onto the white,
Speaker 1: white world of mainland surfing, where he was Malibu's superstar,
Speaker 1: in his sunglasses, with his cheshire Cat smile, showing all
Speaker 1: the little sociopaths how it was done.
Speaker 9: Mickey Dora was a secret key to California culture, and
Speaker 9: an invisible thread that wound up running through much of
Speaker 9: what we know is modern California culture. You look at
Speaker 9: how California culture has affected America's culture and how America's
Speaker 9: culture has gone on to affect the world, and you
Speaker 9: can kind of draw a line back to Dora on
Speaker 9: a number of different things.
Speaker 8: D V.
Speaker 1: Divisentis is a film and television writer who, back in
Speaker 1: two thousand and four, was hired to write a movie
Speaker 1: about Mickey.
Speaker 9: I was approached by Appian Way, which is Leonardo DiCaprio's company.
Speaker 1: The movie never happened, but it was supposed to start.
Speaker 1: DiCaprio as Decat just two years after he played the
Speaker 1: con artist Frank Abagnail Junior and Catch Me if you can.
Speaker 1: Dev ended up spending a lot of time thinking about
Speaker 1: Mickey Dora.
Speaker 9: He embodied, in both his thinking and his actions, the
Speaker 9: contradiction between not being a native to somewhere and somehow
Speaker 9: feeling proprietary about that place.
Speaker 1: Surfing is supposed to be a feel good sport, right wrong.
Speaker 1: Surfing is a club and the membership is capped.
Speaker 9: Everybody's getting pissed off about being displaced, and everybody's getting
Speaker 9: pissed off about being commodified, and everybody's being pissed off
Speaker 9: about sharing resources and sharing territory, and it just never ends.
Speaker 9: And it still it just goes on to today. So
Speaker 9: you have people like Mickey who have picked a spot
Speaker 9: where it's supposed to be and nobody else is supposed
Speaker 9: to show up. I think that Mickey himself was very
Speaker 9: aware of the fact that he was excusing himself from
Speaker 9: any prosecution for being an invader, and it's just like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 9: I know, I am too, but we're done now. No
Speaker 9: more after me.
Speaker 1: The way Mickey Dora saw the world, I have no
Speaker 1: business surfing, and neither do you not at Malibu? Not anywhere?
Speaker 1: Knowing of my interest in the dark side of Malibu,
Speaker 1: a friend of mine, a fifth generation Californian who grew
Speaker 1: up surfing in Santa Monica and Venice, turned me on
Speaker 1: to an essay that ran in the June July nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six issue of Surfer Magazine. It was called the
Speaker 1: Curse of the Shumash subtitle Malibu is a land of
Speaker 1: strange occurrences and contrast. This was right up my street.
Speaker 1: I bought a copy of the magazine on eBay. It
Speaker 1: turned out to be an odd piece of work, a
Speaker 1: pseudohistory of Malibu told through the vibrant surf culture that
Speaker 1: flourished there and apparently guyed circa nineteen seventy six with
Speaker 1: the introduction of Malibu Barbie. The piece was peppered with
Speaker 1: arcane references to Mickey Dora, his antics, and his self
Speaker 1: imposed exile. He was obviously the star of the article,
Speaker 1: of the place and of the time. Flipped through it,
Speaker 1: studying the grainy photographs. On one page there were several
Speaker 1: pictures of Mickey going down the line at Malibu, and
Speaker 1: on the facing page there was a picture of Mickey
Speaker 1: in a dinner jacket, sunglasses, and maybe a wig, holding
Speaker 1: a surf contest trophy in one hand and a baby
Speaker 1: doll in the other. He's standing in front of a
Speaker 1: sign for Camario State Hospital, a mental institution that some
Speaker 1: say was the Hotel California the Eagles sang about the
Speaker 1: one you could check out from but never leave. In
Speaker 1: the image, Mickey also has a surfboard with him angled
Speaker 1: away from the camera so it dominates the lower half
Speaker 1: of the frame, and on the bottom of the board
Speaker 1: is an enormous swastika. Who wrote this thing? I flipped
Speaker 1: back to the byline, Carlos Eizan Iszan is an unusual name.
Speaker 1: It took me a second to realie that it was
Speaker 1: a pseudonym. Aizan is Nazi spelled backwards. My friend who'd
Speaker 1: recommended this essays Jewish and not in any way sympathetic
Speaker 1: to this kind of stuff. He's just into the Malibu
Speaker 1: lore like I am, and probably hadn't read the piece
Speaker 1: since it came out in nineteen seventy six. But looking
Speaker 1: at it now I felt a kind of uncomfortable recognition. Something,
Speaker 1: unfortunately was starting to make sense. Much as I love surfing,
Speaker 1: there are things about it I have to suppress in
Speaker 1: order to keep enjoying it. Signals that there is something
Speaker 1: rotten there. There's the sign at my local break that
Speaker 1: warns koochs to stay off the main takeoff spot. There's
Speaker 1: the scarcity of black surfers in the water. There are
Speaker 1: the reports year after year of swastikas and Hyle Hitler's
Speaker 1: and antisemitic flyers in beachtowns across southern California. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, in Manhattan Beach, a coastal city in La County,
Speaker 1: an older white surfer was filmed yelling the N word
Speaker 1: at two young black men in the water. A nearby
Speaker 1: teenager told them, this is a locals beach.
Speaker 7: Hateful, racist and anti Semitic messages spray painted all over
Speaker 7: the playground of a South Bay elementary school.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this is not the first time or even
Speaker 4: the second time.
Speaker 1: And this was just in twenty twenty two, within a
Speaker 1: couple miles of that same beach.
Speaker 7: A photo of a giant swastika which we've blurred, spray
Speaker 7: painted in the middle of the playground and you could
Speaker 7: see some kids playing nearby.
Speaker 1: Whatever's going on here? Call it surfing's Nazi problem. It
Speaker 1: goes back decades. Mickey didn't invent this, but he played
Speaker 1: the supremacist to the hilt. Malibu belonged to him. Some
Speaker 1: called him the dark Prince. He called himself Malibu's quote
Speaker 1: rightful king. He believed himself to be superior, and everyone
Speaker 1: around him told him he was right. As surfing was
Speaker 1: discovered and began to be widely popular in the sixties,
Speaker 1: he railed that Malibu was being overrun with quote kooks
Speaker 1: of all colors, fags and finks, and a thousand other
Speaker 1: social deviations unquote. He railed against the gidget movies that
Speaker 1: had exposed Malibu to the masses. He let it be
Speaker 1: known that this was why he had to leave. Too
Speaker 1: many people who didn't belong were ruining his wave and
Speaker 1: everywhere he went. Mickey's stoked conflict, feeding surfing's rebellious young
Speaker 1: with stories of his exile and all those who'd done
Speaker 1: him wrong.
Speaker 6: There's a lot of faults I can find with this
Speaker 6: culture that I was in the middle of for forty
Speaker 6: something years. Arguably still am, but I no longer sort
Speaker 6: of here to defend it. So putting Dora into all that,
Speaker 6: you know, there's just a lot about it that isn't great,
Speaker 6: and Mickey on his bad days is right at the
Speaker 6: center of all that.
Speaker 1: Matt Warshaw, the surf historian, remembers being a kid and
Speaker 1: seeing this famous photoshoot of Mickey Dora that was printed
Speaker 1: in Surfer Magazine in nineteen sixty nine, and there was a.
Speaker 6: Three shot sequence of him surfing where he comes down
Speaker 6: the way.
Speaker 8: It's Malibu.
Speaker 6: He's dropping in you can see a surfer in front
Speaker 6: of him, and the next picture Mickey's doing a turn
Speaker 6: off the bottom and the surfer in front of him
Speaker 6: is kind of looking back. And the third shot is
Speaker 6: Mickey's just shot his board right at the guy and
Speaker 6: it's gone right across his chest and knocked him off.
Speaker 8: His feet right.
Speaker 6: And at nine because I surfed Malibu where I was
Speaker 6: going to surf Malibu, and I just it's so bought
Speaker 6: into Kook's go home kind of thing. This was Dora regulating.
Speaker 6: Look what he's doing. You know, he's doing what needs
Speaker 6: to be done to get rid of the Koks. That
Speaker 6: guy dropped in on front of Mickey Dora, you know,
Speaker 6: get out of here, Kook and Da Da Da, and
Speaker 6: so as a kid. I thought that was kind of cool,
Speaker 6: and now I look at that now and I put
Speaker 6: that point right through that guy's back.
Speaker 8: And it was terrible to me.
Speaker 1: Mickey Dora presents a conundrum for surfers and anyone brought
Speaker 1: up on the California youth culture. He's so heavily influenced.
Speaker 6: If I see a clip of Mickey surfing for a
Speaker 6: few seconds at Malibu, my heart as a surfer just
Speaker 6: it just melts, you know. If I just see a
Speaker 6: picture of him with that grin, there's something about that
Speaker 6: that speaks to my depths as a surfer. He's unresolved
Speaker 6: for me almost on a weekly basis. Like it's some
Speaker 6: days I'm very much on team Mickey, and some days
Speaker 6: I go, this guy's a really terrible human being. We
Speaker 6: need to put attention on and think about and talk
Speaker 6: about somebody else. Anytime I sort of spend enough time
Speaker 6: in his life looking at how he treated people and
Speaker 6: things that he said, I just start pulling away. How
Speaker 6: do I feel about Mickey Dora? You know, it depends
Speaker 6: on what day you ask me.
Speaker 1: It seems like the surfing world is still not ready
Speaker 1: to have the Mickey Dora conversation.
Speaker 8: Part of me is just saying, God, stay away from this.
Speaker 1: But it seems to me that if I can make
Speaker 1: sense of Mickey Dora, who he was and what he did,
Speaker 1: what he means to people still, I'll get closer to
Speaker 1: the heart of this strange place Malibu, where the central
Speaker 1: question is about belonging insiders versus outsiders. Mickey was both.
Speaker 1: He was a shape shifter and a con man with
Speaker 1: a cruel and narcissistic streak entitled Charming and living entirely
Speaker 1: for himself? Is Mickey the secret key to California? If
Speaker 1: he is? It all begins in Malibu, on the beach
Speaker 1: where Mickey became famous. On the next episode of Lost Hills,
Speaker 1: a suspicious death sets Mickey on a strange new path.
Speaker 6: At some point he was down in Mexico, I think,
Speaker 6: fishing and trying to not drink. He was going to
Speaker 6: row a dinghy out to a friend's boat, and the
Speaker 6: body turned up five days later.
Speaker 1: That's next in episode two, Death in Mexico. Lost Hills
Speaker 1: is written and reported by Me Dana Goodyear. It's created
Speaker 1: by Me and Benadere and produced by Western Sound and
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and You can binge
Speaker 1: the entire season right now ad free. Find Pushkin Plus
Speaker 1: on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: at pushkin dot fm, slash plus