Help bring a cultural icon home.

Surfer, motorcycle racer, artist, hep-cat, and co-founder of The Royal Hawaiian crowd-clearing technique at Malibu, Billy al Bengston was one of the members of the Malibu pit crew in the 1950s who had all those lovely green walls to himself and friends, which included Miki “Da Cat” Dora, Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy, Kemp and Denny Aaberg and a Happy Few digging the secret thrill of surfing in the 1950s.

More importantly, Bengston was a serious player in the art world – one of the most influential California artists to move out of the 1950s into the 1960s – and is called by some “The West Coast Andy Warhol.”

On the night of November 28, surfer/ceramicist = surferamicist Cory Bluemling sent an alarming AT RISK/MISSING PERSON bulletin (by way of the California Highway Patrol and Malibu local Carla Rowland) alerting the public that an 87-year-old man named Billy Bengston was missing in the Venice area.

Cory wondered if this was the same artist/surfer whose art was so influential in the middle of the 20th Century, and whose nickname inspired the James Darren character in the 1959 movie Gidget.

Quick emails went around and there were responses from Kathy “Gidget” Kohner-Zuckerman,

“He lived on Mildred in Venice. Yes this could be a pix of Billy Al and I have not seen him in a long while. Age would be correct about… is this for real?”

And Phyllis “The Concrete Heiress” Tracy, wife of Tubesteak Tracy (RIP 1935 – 2018).

“Yes. I thought he lived in Venice.I hope he’s ok.”

So Venice and the age match up, so this missing person probably is the surfing world’s Billy Al Bengston, and that’s a worry.

“So what?” you sneer. “Who is this guy? What’s it to me? How does this affect my trip?”

According to Wikipedia,

“Billy Al Bengston (born June 7, 1934 in Dodge City, Kansas) is an American artist and sculptor who lives and works in Venice, California and Honolulu, Hawaii. Bengston is a contemporary artist probably best known for his work that he created that uses the radical Californian “Kustom Kar” and motorcycle culture. He used colors that were psychedelic and shapes that were mandala like.”

It’s all true, and the (2021 – 1934 = 87) matches up to the age of the missing Billy Bengston.

Fleshing out the Wikipedia, there is this from the Getty.edu webpage:

“Billy Al Bengston (born 1934) is a flamboyant character who, beginning in the late 1950s, combined art with professional motorcycle racing and quickly became a key player in the Ferus Gallery circle. He had five solo shows at Ferus from 1958 to 1963, as well as a major exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1968. The motorcycle imagery in several early works associated Bengston with West Coast Pop, as did his use of techniques and materials drawn from custom-car and motorcycle culture, while the polished surfaces he achieved with spray lacquer also connected him to early conceptions of Finish Fetish.”

Finish Fetish. Out of the 1950s and into the 1960s, Bengston was a sharp-looking, clean-cut dude with a moustache who – like Bruce Brown and John Severson and other surfer artists of that era – dabbled in surfing and motorcycles and brought inspiration from those pursuits to their art.

So what is the connection between this real Moondoggie and the fictitious character in the 1959 movie Gidget? 

From Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing:

The Moondoggie character was loosely based on Kansas-born Malibu surfer Billy Al Bengston, who later became an internationally recognized pop artist. Bengston is said to have taken his nickname from blind American avant-garde composer Louis “Moondog” Hardin.

In the book, Moondoggie invents the name “Gidget” (a fusion of “girl midget”), and eventually gives the chirpy teenager his class pin. Asked by Longboard Magazine in 1997 if there was in fact any romantic relationship between himself and Kathy Kohner—the real-life Gidget and daughter of author Kohner— Bengston dismissed the thought. “She brought sandwiches to the beach. We ate them.”

Billy Al Bengston is 87 years old and while surfers like to think our kind are not prone to mental disabilities because surfers spend their lives bathing their brains in adrenaline and endorphins and other such sweet liquors (See: Dick Metz, Mickey Munoz, Gidget) it is possible Bengston is suffering from some age-related mental frailty, and is wandering the streets of west Los Angeles.

Please be on the lookout and let’s get Moondoggie home.