Miki Dora

By: David Rensin | Chris Rohloff and Pat Darrin | April 01, 2009 | Non Fiction

In 1960, we lived in a long, narrow hallway of a house with no beach access. Just to the east was the old Los Angeles Athletic Club House. It had a weird pedestrian tunnel under the highway. People stored stuff and even slept there occasionally.

At the bottom of our house’s side stairs was the hot-water shower. No one could use the shower unless you were a Cleary or a Fitzpatrick. It was this stairwell that Miki Dora — Da Cat — used, slipping very quietly along the side of the house, over the bulkhead, onto the sand and into the water. He moved like a cat. He was all stealth and style and slinking around. He wasn’t flamboyant. He didn’t want to bring attention to himself. He just didn’t want to be hassled.

Eventually, our entire family moved from 18664 Pacific Coast Highway to 18658. We lived upstairs. Cleary lived downstairs in the “artist’s area.”  Willie Hunter Jr., a naturalist whose father was the pro at Riviera, had the other half of the downstairs. Miki would arrive without any schedule. My mother, Dodie, was one of the few housewives who were home all day. After school one day she said, “Some jerk came through the house today. He was really rude to me and wouldn’t respond.” I didn’t know who she meant. On the weekend the swell was up—and here comes Miki. She says, “There’s that jerk that ignored me.” I said, “That’s not a jerk, that’s Miki,” and told my Mom that if anyone would have the privilege to come through the house, it was Miki.

In the wake of surfing’s post-Gidget popularity, others arrived as well. My father, Ed — who in 1963 published the Surfing Guide to Southern California written by Cleary and David H. Stern - it was indispensable to a generation — began to come home and not be able to park in front of our house. This really pissed him off. So he started the Topanga Beach Homeowners Association, which you could join for a whopping $5. All the dads got together, printed up parking passes and financed a fence that sealed off the highway between the houses.

Now if a surfer wanted to get to the beach, he had to either climb down underneath the overpass that went over Topanga Creek, which was sort of perilous, or he had to have access through somebody’s house or yard.

We stopped virtually everybody. But if we saw someone in the water who seemed to merit the privilege of access — if they approached it with the right attitude and deference — we’d let them in. Miki never got stopped. By the time the homeowner’s association started, he had already established himself.

RICK HODGSON: I grew up at Topanga, and all the young surfers idolized Miki. He made every wave. He was a real technician, perfection flowing. We all ended up standing on our boards like he did just to emulate him. But we quickly discovered his style was the most functional way to ride. There was dynamic tension in his wrist English, and the way he cocked his elbow. He felt the energy of the wave with this hand, as if it was a sensor. He knew exactly where the energy was on the face of the wave. He would analyze things to the nth degree. He was a connoisseur of waves, as he was a connoisseur of everything.

We also knew from the beginning that he was nefarious and wasn’t really a role model. We liked him because he was a classic, the Artful Dodger. He just floated and skimmed across the top of everything.

There was a big tree and bamboo bush in front of Wheeler Cobberly’s house. And we — the younger guys — used to sit under the tree while Cleary and Bob Feigel and Bob Beadle and the “older” generation of surfers, including Miki, would talk to us about their travels. They’d tell us about girls and surf spots and food and architecture. That left amazing pictures in our heads, and we couldn’t wait to graduate from high school and travel.

GEORGE VAN NOY: In 1962, Cleary and I took a trip together to the Canary Islands. It was legendary because we took the first boards to this great surf beach called Las Palomas. We built a shack, sort of a half-teepee, half-geodesic dome. By the time we left three and a half months later, there were about 30 shacks and people from as far away as Paris were showing up because it was such a scene. There were giant sand dunes like out of Lawrence of Arabia, right down to the ocean. It had a Rincon-ish sort of a break. I was young and foolish, and I thought I’d never want to come home.

JIM FITZPATRICK: With Dora hanging out in the yard, he and I started having long conversations about waves, people, about Santa Monica and Malibu. What a joke they had become. One early conversation had to do with the “Golden Ticket,” the golden opportunity. He would often show up and surf on days when I wasn’t surfing. One day he said, “You do realize how unique this opportunity is?” I didn’t quite follow him at first, but the message turned out to be that because I was lucky enough to live at Topanga, I should surf at all times. It didn’t matter if the surf was blown out or not; there was surf in my front yard and I should be surfing it. In this weird way, he reminded me of how special my life was — and how to revere it.

Sometimes our conversations went on for months. The whole Topanga Beach scene in the early 1960s was this seething, artistic, alternative locale, and he was a mentor in many ways. Topanga was sort of a retreat for him, for all of us. It was always relaxed. The crowd control was pretty tight. He could always look forward to surfing waves by himself.

But there were other sides to Miki.

I saw Hollywood Miki in a bit part in Muscle Beach Party, which filmed at Topanga. He’s being paid to be at the beach, wearing makeup, slicking back his eyebrows, getting pampered by the studio people. Meanwhile, my teenaged crowd is stealing all their surfboards. We stole 80 one night and stashed them around at all the houses. Miki had nothing to do with that. But the next day, when they couldn’t film because they had no surfboards, he figured out who did it and he was laughing, glad to see that the local crew could be larcenous!

He was also the party-crashing Miki, able to get into any Beverly Hills event. But those weren’t my Mikis. To me he was a very personable and caring sort of guy. He looked out for me. I was like a little brother.

Sure, Miki had a public persona in the surfing world. There were times when he did want to make a statement. But the Topanga Miki was him in stealth mode. Initially, what he wanted was not to be hassled when he came through our house to get to the waves. We got through that right away, so he didn’t need anything else from us. So, he could just relax. I always felt that was the real Miki.

According to Cleary’s third wife, Barbara, her husband wanted to be “the behind -the-scenes guy,” leaving Miki to be famous. “He also had a great writing style. He was the master of metaphor. He could pull ideas and images from opposite sides of the universe and put them together in a little sentence spontaneously while talking, and you’d feel like you’d had an epiphany.”

According to John Van Hamersveld, who art directed Surf Guide magazine and went on to create the iconic Endless Summer poster, as well as the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street album covers, and much more, “Bill was almost like this Hemingway guy, with his black Underwood typewriter, a pair of scissors and tape. He’d type stuff, then cut it up and paste it down. Cleary was this bohemian character, with his boots off and his toes in the sand, smoking grass and eating the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, which were his compulsion. “

JIM FITZPATRICK: Cleary began to nurture his relationship with Miki, so that when he got to a certain point, he could write it down and it would be an interview — Miki’s story. I don’t know if Miki was aware of this. Cleary wasn’t taking notes, but his intellect was sharp and keen, so he could certainly remember what people told him. Bill recognized early on that Miki had something no one else in the surf community had: that attitude.

BOB BEADLE: Cleary revered male figures in a literary fashion. His father died young and he had a very harsh mother, so he gravitated toward men friends who he sensed had a certain power. They also needed to be people who wouldn’t threaten him. He had a little-man complex because he was short, and that’s probably one of the reasons why he joined the Marines right out of high school.

Cleary and Miki had a lot in common. They were both pack rats; they were both paranoid control freaks. Cleary saw himself as a four-foot-wave-and-under man, and that’s pretty much what Miki was. Cleary was ebullient, but he had a dark side to him; he had a set of neuroses pretty much like Miki, who was a very neurotic person. Cleary was also very charming and wonderful. Miki was charming. Cleary was more formally educated than Miki, but both were articulate, and both were able to insinuate themselves, in the best sense of the word, with all kinds of people. In the end, they had so many things in common that the differences didn’t stand out. I don’t know if Miki recognized the commonality. And I don’t know what each thought of the other, but knowing Cleary, I know that Miki was a perfect subject for Cleary’s book. What I mean by Cleary’s “book” is that he was the sort of person who goes through life writing a novel; he’s the protagonist and all those around him are the supporting cast. Some of the supporting cast are more highlighted than others. Cleary clearly saw Miki as someone noteworthy.

RICK HODGSON: The legend of Miki was in part created and fostered by Bill Cleary in Surf Guide magazine. You can’t talk about Miki without talking about Bill. He was the hero-maker, a great writer.

      A careful reading of Cleary’s observations about Dora reveals that they form the root-concepts that have long-informed the Dora legend, words that quickly became memes and infiltrated into almost every recollection of experiencing Dora to follow. Some even credit Cleary with naming Dora “Da Cat.” Greg Noll, who made Dora’s “Da Cat” surfboard model would probably disagree, and rightly so, but Cleary does deserve credit for perhaps the earliest public exaltations of Dora’s “feline” style.

Cleary also thought Dora was “a genius who didn’t suffer fools, whose personality is too complicated and wound with contradiction and paradox. Even those close to him cannot claim to understand him.”

“Dora is wild, feral, feline,” he wrote in this brief excerpt from his unpublished manifesto, Nine Lives of Da Cat. “He is not savage. The savage is marked by innocence, and Dora doesn’t have a shard of innocence left in him anywhere.

“Dora is afloat in a sea of hostile elements. Rage is always lurking beneath his surface.

“As complex as Da Cat may seem, much of it is camouflage.

“Conversation with Mickey Dora is never dull. His wit is as lightening quick as it is acerbic. There is more than a little gypsy to him with the dark, feral cast to those eyes of his, which are always roving, reflecting a mind that is never still. When he is in one of his moods, conversation is a good deal like having your
pocket picked.

 

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