8.27.2012

GIDGET'S BIG KAHUNA TERRY TRACY DIED



Terry Tracy, Model for the Big Kahuna, Dies at 77
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: NY TIMES August 26, 2012

Terry Tracy, who as an easygoing, fun-loving surfer inspired the “Gidget” movies and television series and helped make surfing an international sport — in the process becoming the embodiment of the cool alternative lifestyle of sunglass-wearing beach bums — died on Wednesday at his home in San Clemente, Calif. He was 77.

Mr. Tracy’s beach-bum life led to a book and to the 1959 movie “Gidget.” The cause was complications of diabetes, said his wife, Phyllis.

Uninterested in a 9-to-5 routine, Mr. Tracy quit his job at his family’s savings and loan in the mid-1950s and built himself a shack on Malibu Beach. He used discarded lumber for the frame and palm fronds for the walls and furnished it with a couch without legs. For two summers the shack became the hub for a small tribe of young men who loved surfing — and beach parties — as much as he did. They called themselves the “pit crew.”


One day a 15-year-old girl just over five feet tall named Katherine Kohner wandered up to Mr. Tracy while he was living on the beach. Soon he gave her the nickname Gidget, a hybrid of girl and midget.

Ms. Kohner began hanging out with Mr. Tracy and the beach crew and told her father, the screenwriter Frederick Kohner, all about them. Her stories inspired him to write a novel, “Gidget: The Little Girl With Big Ideas” (1957).



It was a sensation, and it led to more books, a photo spread in Life magazine, a 1959 movie starring Sandra Dee and a television series in the mid-1960s with Sally Field in the title role. In the movie, a character called the Big Kahuna, played by Cliff Robertson, was based on Mr. Tracy. (Phyllis Tracy said her husband hated Mr. Robertson’s performance because “he thought he got the California lifestyle wrong.”)



No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

addtoany