Frederick KohnerRezensionen

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I'm amazed at how much I liked this book. The new edition's forward by Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, who was the real-life Gidget, puts the story in perspective.

Kathy Kohner was a petite (less than 5 feet tall) perky Jewish girl who became obsessed with surfing back in the days before the Beach Boys started singing about it, before most of America had even heard of the sport. Her actual photo was used on the original book cover and again on the new edition. In the novel, Gidget remains a petite brunette, but I can't recall any mention of being Jewish. (She became a blond in the movie as played by Sandra Dee.) Gidget is not interested in dating, at least not with her high school peers, and she is something of a tomboy. But she also wishes that her "bosom" was bigger. She's on the edge of discovering her sexuality at age 15 and is attracted to the college guys who spend the summer surfing at Malibu, especially one guy named Moondoggie. She also befriends the leader of the group, an older man called the great Kahoona who is a non-collegiate full-time beach bum, and quite proud of it.

With spunk and determination, Gidget ingratiates herself into the group of surfers, who reluctantly - but protectively - accept her as something of a mascot. There's a fascinating tug-of-war between Gidget's growing attraction for Moondoggie and the surfing group's determination to keep hands off.

Gidget is a rebel of the 1950s. She lies to her parents and sneaks out of the house. And what's weird is that all this little rebel wants to do is surf (which was considered a boy's sport) and get pinned (frat pin, that is) by Moondoggie. How it all plays out is well worth the very short read.

An interesting dimension of the story is that the author, Frederick Kohner, was writing the novel about his own daughter with her cooperation - and her actual diaries. Some people will get creeped out that a father was creating a character of his own daughter and writing about her sexuality and her attraction for an older guy. As a writer and father myself, I admit to some queasiness, or at least some curiosity, about the situation. Fred Kohner was a professional writer, a good one, who recognized that the sexuality was the essential part of the story. He also had a PhD from the University of Vienna, the training ground of Sigmund Freud. Kathy Kohner in later life seems to have had no problem with what her father wrote and is in fact quite proud of her role - and interestingly, she was always attracted to professors and eventually married one. Analyze that, if you wish.

A sequel to the innocently charming original surfer-girl novel Gidget. This one's mostly about Gidget's father, who isn't as interesting or endearing as his daughter. He's a befuddled 1950s-era dad on a ski trip in Sun Valley, Idaho where his daughter Franzie (formerly known as Gidget) is a waitress. The great Kahoona, who was the elder surf-guru of Malibu in the previous novel, comes to the ski slopes as well and wins the heart of Franzie.

The original Gidget was based on true events, but this sequel is probably less so. The fictional Franzie is on leave from Oregon State College, which is where the actual Franzie started college. Beyond that, the story feels "made up" and not in a realistic way. Real life, of course, can seem utterly unrealistic; but this story involves a gangster dame with a million dollars in cash who is pursued by FBI agents while attempting to seduce both Franzie's father and the great Kahoona.

Franzie, a 17-year-old college kid, and the great Kahoona, a 30-something surf/ski bum dropout, would be an interesting love story with a commentary on 1950ish materialism and the straight culture (as in the original Gidget), but neither character is fleshed out here. Their story remains secondary to the bumbling father's desperate attempts to keep them apart.

Kohner's a likable writer, and the Gidget meme is enough to keep the reader interested. Three stars for that.

It's a memoir of Paris in the 1920's and a coming-of-age of Frederick Kohner, author of Gidget. Like all memoirs, you can't take everything as literal fact. Kohner admits: "While the events relating to Kiki are as true as memory will serve me, I have made some necessary changes in the description of persons other than Kiki and in the details of some events."

Fact or fiction, the book is a great description of bohemian Paris, and not a totally flattering one. It certainly has the ring of truth. The author is suitably self-deprecating. He was an outsider, a naive young man, a virgin, a student at the Sorbonne who says, "I was the product of a staid middle-class background, and my only claim to 'Bohemianism' was the ironic fact that Bohemia was my native land."

Kiki, otherwise known as Alice Prin, befriends him. He falls head over heels in love and follows her like a puppy through bars, cafes, bordellos and exotic parties until at last... Well, I won't spoil it.

I came to this book not out of interest in Paris or Kiki but because I'm strangely fascinated by the author Frederick Kohner, a Czechoslovakian Jew with a PhD from the University of Vienna who fled Europe before World War Two. He became a Hollywood screenwriter and the real-life father of the real-life Gidget. I'm simply drawn to the potential psychological train wreck of a father, educated in the heartland of Sigmund Freud, writing a series of novels about the blossoming sexuality of a character inspired by his own daughter. Apparently, the train never ran off the tracks.

This book of course is not about Gidget but is very much about the father's attraction to Kiki, a remarkably liberated woman who rose from poverty to relative fame on the warmth of her spirit, the beauty of her face, and the generosity of her body. I'm happy to have learned about her.

There are similarities between Kiki and Gidget. In a man's world, Kiki mastered the Parisian world of art (and certain artists) the way Gidget mastered the Malibu world of surf (and certain surfers). With 30 years separation Frederick Kohner watched them both — and wrote about their lives. Both Kiki and the fictional Gidget were prolific in their loves. Unlike Kiki, Gidget throughout the original novel and seven sequels comes close, again and again, but remains chaste.

In one of the sequels Kohler may have actually mixed Kiki and Gidget together. It's called Gidget Goes Parisienne. After the 1920's, Kiki's Paris — and Kiki's life — turned dark. I'm almost afraid to find out what happens to Gidget in the Paris of her father's imagination. But of course I'll check it out.

This is pleasant: four stories, four women remembered by Frederick Kohner from his youth in Bohemia and then in Paris. Written in the 1970s, he is recalling events of the 1920s. It is fiction, but it is told as autobiography and matches many of the details of his actual life. With modesty and without much conquest, our writer was as he describes himself a "sensual" youth but mostly a frustrated one.

The reading is easy; the tales, engaging. The women were older, or at least more worldly, than the teenage author. Fraulein Hilde was his nanny, a simple country lass. Claudia was a fellow student but also a Countess with a treacherous older brother. Resi was a prostitute struggling in poverty and mental illness. Irina was a White Russian in Paris, mysterious, passionate, and as she said, "complicated."

He's a sweet kid. And very earnest. These are tales of discovery as young Kohner (or his fictional counterpart) falls in love with each woman in succession, struggling to understand the secrets that, it seems, every woman withholds. In the arc of each love affair he finds joy, sadness, and ultimately gains wisdom. He's growing up. My only complaint is that as each story ends, I understand how Kohner feels but lack a full picture of the woman.

The book reminds me of the rowdy paperbacks my father used to buy (and I used to read) in the 1950s. If Kohner had written it then, it would have been published as a 35-cent paperback with an eye-popping cover of four half-naked dames, and it would have sold a million copies. By the early 1970s when apparently this was written, we'd been through Henry Miller and a sexual revolution that must have made these memoirs seem tame and old-fashioned. They weren't published until 2011. Now, perhaps, people can enjoy them as a bit of history and - yes - a bit of sensual pleasure.

It opens nicely in Gidget's voice:
"Just in case you care to know what I think, I think every girl out of high school should be required by law to spend at least one year of her college life in Paris. Paris, France, that is. Never mind if the cops swear at you, the waiters glare at you, and the taxi drivers try to kill you. Never mind the lousy plumbing and the cruel toilet paper and the price of tea bags."

Almost immediately Gidget runs, literally, "into something soft and smelly" — the sweatshirt of Bee Jay, her college friend from Oregon. "Her luscious boobies, always a stand-out attraction, had softened the blow of our collision." As a reader, we've just run into the fact that a male author, age 60, born in 1905 and raised in Austria, is trying to tell the story using the mind and voice of a 19-year-old American coed. In the year 1965. The tone is a bit squirmy. And false. Luscious boobies, indeed.

To make it more squirmy, both Bee Jay and Gidget remain members of what they jokingly call the United Virgins of America. Their membership will be tested, continuously, for the length of the book. At one point Gidget's frustrated boyfriend calls her "The Promiscuous Virgin," which could serve as a plot summary for the entire Gidget series.

For the coup de grace of squirm, the character Gidget is a fictional extension of the author's own daughter Kathy, though with each sequel in the Gidget series (this is the fifth), the character Gidget becomes more and more separate from the real-life daughter. In this particular adventure, Gidget nearly succumbs to the charms of a man the age of her father. Since I've already read Frederick Kohner's memoirs of his own sexual initiation in Paris in the 1920's (in Kiki of Montparnasse and Early Pleasures), the squirm-o-meter was at the max.

No doubt Kohner was squirming, too. That’s why he wrote his fictional Gidget as something of an obsessive virgin expert. Unfortunately, beyond the scope of her virginity, Gidget is not a deep thinker. Admittedly she's only 19, but there's not much there there.

The book was published in 1966 for an intended audience of American teenage girls, but culturally it was already out of touch. As it happens, in 1966 I was an American teenage boy with an American teenage girlfriend. If I or my girlfriend had read this book back then, it would have seemed like a laughable holdover of how American parents (including Frederick Kohner) wished their American teenagers would behave. And how we were not behaving.

I won't divulge the ultimate outcome of Gidget's struggle and whether she remained, as she described herself, "firm as the Plymouth Rock." Long before this book had ended, I was ready to shout: "WOULD YOU JUST LOSE IT ALREADY?"

"Gidget", written in the 1st person, tells about the summer 15 year old Franzie discovers boys and surfing. Though the book is fiction, the idea came from Frederick Kohner's 15 y.o. daughter, Kathy, who wanted to write about her summer of surfing and boys in Malibu. Frederick Kohner, a Hollywood screenwriter, decided to write it himself and finished the book in 6 weeks according to the preface written by Kathy Kohner. This launched the "Gidget" franchise: movies, the original starring Sandra Dee, and TV show starring a very young Sally Fields. I remember the TV show fondly. What I didn't know is that Frederick Kohner wrote a bunch of sequels to "Gidget." A very easy book to read, it is, overall, fun and light. Two things bothered me about the book. First, the surf slang used by Gidget is over the top. After a while, Gidget's "voice" sounds very forced and artificial. Secondly, the paperback is filled with pictures of Kathy Kohner at the beach with a surfboard, and publicity shots of Kathy and her father (at a book signing and in front of a bookstore window filled with "Gidget" books.) Obviously, the novel is fiction, but because of all the pictures, and the foreword, and knowledge that Kohner based his tale on his daughter's own experiences, reading in the first person about Gidget's clumsy attempts at sex and her overall horniness, written by the father of the original Gidget (Gidget was Kathy's nickname among the surfing crowd) is a little disturbing.

A silly beach-blanket read starring Gidget and Moondoggie. You dig?

The Little Bookworm

Franzie is a typical 16 year old girl. When she is one day rescued by a handsome surfer, Moondoggie, she decides she wants to learn how to surf. Made one of the gang by the local surfer boys who nickname her Gidget (girl-midget), she falls in love with Moondoggie and, most of all, with surfing.

Written in 1957, Gidget was written by Frederick Kohner for his daughter, Kathy. Based on her adventures with surfing, Gidget was the first book to deal with a girl learning to surf which was almost unheard of at that time. It was followed by five sequels and two novelizations of the subsequent movies. I knew of Gidget from the Sandra Dee movie which I love a lot and had no idea it was based on a book until recently. The movie follows the basic plot of the book, but cleaned up since there is more talk of sex and drinking and smoking in the book. And while it's not on the Gossip Girl level, there is certain more sex talk than I expected in a 1957 book. But then when you are dealing with college age boys, what else would you expect.

Gidget and Moondoggie (Jeff)'s relationship is odd. She doesn't pay much attention to him at first, thinking he is handsome but very focused on surfing. But after a dream about kissing him, she begins to fall in love. He, on the other hand, doesn't know what to do since she is so young (he thinks she is 17, she is really 15). But they work it at in the end. The ending is very empowering for Gidget as she defies the boys and learns to surf.

top teenage book of all time for me. this book is so much deeper and darker than you can ever imagine. it's not prime time sunny beachy peachy stuff at all. it's the true story of teenagerhood and unrequited love and the pain of growing up. i can't recommend it highly enough.