Year of Da Cat
David Rensin’s Miki Dora bio captures a boy of summer
By Kirk Silsbee
An iconic photograph from the mid-1960s shows a summer scene at Malibu Beach. A crowd of surfers, boards and girls dominate the picture plane. The focal point, however, is a piece of graffiti. Scrawled onto a wall, it is literally writ large: DORA IS A STUD. Like Bird Lives! or Clapton is God, it’s a simple bit of idolatry that captures the mood of an era. Miki Dora was the king of surfing and Malibu was his kingdom.
He was a god to surfers, as much for his mysterious, morally ambiguous persona as for his legendarily smooth wave riding. Dora wasn’t necessarily interested in the biggest swells; he left those feats of balls and brawn to guys like Greg Noll. Miki just wanted decent surf in relative solitude. He could take a small, crappy wave and make it look good, just by the way he performed on it.
Why should a surfer rate a critical biography? After all, most of them just ride waves, grow up, get jobs and raise families, even if they keep surfing. In Dora’s case, he fashioned his life entirely around the water. He was the one surfer who figured out how to live the dream. If Wallace Berman showed SoCal artists that their lives could be their art (“Art is love is God”), Dora showed surfers that wave riding could be an art. He showed his intimates how life could be wired to his own convenience. Dora escalated from expert party crasher (he kept a tux in his car), to petty thief, to fraud perpetrator to convicted felon.
Then as now, surfers wanted unlimited perfect waves and the unfettered ability to ride them. The problem for surfers has always been how to finance this essentially hedonistic lifestyle. Presently, surfing is a $3 billion a year industry. With contests and merchandising, surfing can be a lucrative profession. In Dora’s prime – roughly 1955 to ’70 – competitions were just coming into vogue. Top of the line boards cost $100. But Dora had no taste for work, let alone marketing. His surfing prowess was his celebrity and he resolved that those who wanted a piece of him had to pay.
David Rensin has assembled an impressive oral mosaic from scores of participants (including surfers Corky Carroll, Mike Doyle, Phil Edwards, Mickey Muñoz, Noll, graphic designer John Van Hamersveld, rock animal Kim Fowley, artist Billy Al Bengston, and director John Milius) to separate myth from the reality in the Dora legend. Many had held their testimony for years, out of respect to Dora’s memory (he died in ’02) and his obsessive need for privacy and control.
Miki’s male template was Gardner Chapin, an abusive, sociopathic stepfather. Chapin modeled the behavior of entitlement that would make up much of Dora’s personality – and also gave Miki the gift of surfing. A remote, alcoholic mother and a frightening stepfather made the solitude of the beach attractive to the boy. In the ’50s, Malibu Beach was a pristine frontier for surfers, and Dora developed a symbiotic relationship with the place. That purity would be muddied by popular culture: first through the Gidget phenomenon, then the surf explosion, stoked by pop music and the preposterous beach movies.
Dora met the conflict between public and private, real and unreal, by becoming a chameleon. Not merely a two-faced Janus, he was a blank slate for everyone who beheld him. Darryl Stolper’s accounts of the culture and modus operandi of ’60s party crashing reveal an eerie quality in Da Cat (Miki’s moniker). He could tailor his gestalt to fit the setting and charm the locals to gain social advantage. Food, valuables, credit cards – even an Oscar statuette – could be purloined; girls and women were there for the taking. Dora shared social malleability with bebop avatar Charlie Parker, another legendary Zen trickster.
Eventually, the law caught up with him. Malibu’s Golden Boy occasionally worked – as a car parker, bartender, and wine salesman – but never for long. Employment for Miki meant just another opportunity to bleed someone or something. Theft and fraud – staging accidents on Pacific Coast Highway for insurance money and stealing credit cards – were his solutions to surviving in a corrupt system. By ’75, Dora was an international fugitive with the F.B.I. on his tail. He did hard time in France, a tremendous blow to one who did everything he could to control his life and surroundings.
Rensin expertly uses the many voices to illuminate the different facets of this unknowable enigma. His sentence served, Dora lived out his life quietly, surfing and living off of others in Europe. Never one to pick up a check, at his death, Dora’s assets amounted to nearly half a million dollars. Maybe he did it his way after all.
All For a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora David Rensin (Harper). 474 pp, $25.95
Published: 05/28/2008
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