Before the Beach Boys, before Frankie and Annette, there was Gidget, the spunky girl surfer who sparked a national obsession with beach culture. But Gidget was neither Sandra Dee, who played her in ...

It was an overcast morning by the Sunset Cliff stairs when Michael Curtis and I started to chat. Curtis has been surfing since 1954. “I was probably six when I started. When they came out with the ...

Deborah Walley, the perky young actress who succeeded Sandra Dee as the “girl midget” in the first “Gidget” sequel, starred in several of the 1960s beach frolic movies and became a writer and producer ...

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. — Terry Tracy, who as an easygoing, fun-loving surfer helped inspired the “Gidget” movies and television series and helped make surfing an international sport — in the process ...

In 1980, when San Pedro resident Brian Gillogly interviewed Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, he never imagined the long weekends and road trips he would spend with her 20 years later. Those subsequent hours ...

After the original “Gidget” movie, in 1959, Hollywood churned out any number of sequels. “Gidget Grows Up.” “Gidget Goes to Rome.” “Gidget Gets Married.” And so on. Half a century later, the onetime ...

James Darren, who has died aged 88, was a toothsome and tanned American actor who became a teen idol in his early twenties as singing surfer Jeff “Moondoggie” Matthews in Gidget (1959), a film that ...

The Malibu Wall dates back to 1929. It was erected on a coastal strip just north of Los Angeles as part of the perimeter of the Adamson House. The estate—built for the daughter of Malibu’s last owner, ...

LOS ANGELES – James Darren, a teen idol who helped ignite the 1960s surfing craze as a charismatic beach boy paired off with Sandra Dee in the hit film “Gidget,” died Monday at 88. Darren died in his ...

In June 1956, a Jewish 15-year-old girl named Kathy Kohner began tagging along with some of the neighborhood boys and driving out from her Brentwood home to the beach in Malibu. The sport of surfing ...

Longtime actor, singer and television director James Darren has died at 88. To movie fans, he was remembered best as Moondoggie, the surfer boy in the smash 1959 film "Gidget" and its two sequels. His ...