“All
Roads Lead West”
Plying his trade at the terminus of Route 66, Jim Ganzer exhibits the breadth and depth of Los Angeles surf culture.
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| Jim Ganzer, Topanga Beach, 1965. Photo c/o the Jim Ganzer Archive. |
British architectural historian Reyner Banham loved Los Angeles because it was a city that broke all the rules and made “nonsense of history.” While he was enamored by the San Diego Freeway, the car culture, and the Southland’s beaches, he was most impressed by its “preferred form of the noble savage,” the surfer. As the Englishman explained in his seminal work, 1971’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, surfing was “a tough and restrictive sport. What has happened since is—as they say—history, but few episodes of seaside history since the Viking invasions can have been so colorful.”
In 1969, Banham had gone straight to the source, courtesy
of an invitation to the home of surfer-artist Jim Ganzer, who lived in a
Dionysian enclave of beachfront houses situated between Pacific Palisades and
Malibu. “You had the hippies, the nude beach, and even the Manson family for a
while,” says Ganzer. “You didn’t surf there unless you were invited. Banham was
struck by my hedonistic view of life. He said, ‘This is just one big amusement
park.’”
Ganzer was born in 1945 in Chicago, where his father worked
for the Pullman railroad car company. When the trains began to die and
airplanes began to fly, the elder Ganzer cashed his bonus check, bought a white
Pontiac convertible, and drove his family west on Route 66 until they hit the
Pacific Ocean. It was September 1957. Fourteen-year-old Jim arrived in Pacific
Palisades with greased-back hair, a Levi’s jacket, and horseshoe heel taps on
his loafers. He would soon swap his denim jacket for a Pendleton shirt and his
loafers for Jack Purcell tennis shoes.
On one of his first days in the Palisades, Ganzer walked to
the beach and met a group of kids his own age bodysurfing near Bel-Air Bay
Club. “I knew nothing about surfing or the ocean,” he says. “There was a big
south swell. I got thrown around and thought, ‘F**k, this is really something!
This is scary!’ Immediately, the ocean was a big deal to me.”
State and
the Pit
1955
to 1959
Ganzer’s new hometown was then ground zero for a baby-boomer-led cultural revolution. As Banham points out in his book, the “culture of the beach was a symbolic rejection of the values of the consumer society.” British writer Christopher Isherwood, who moved to Santa Monica Canyon in 1953, called it the “western Greenwich Village,” describing it as a place where “cranky, kindly people live and tolerate each other’s mild and often charming eccentricities.”
By the time Banham, Isherwood, or Ganzer arrived, Will
Rogers State Beach, Pacific Palisades above it, and Santa Monica Canyon behind
it had been home to a vibrant Southern California “waterfront culture” for
almost a century. While Gene Selznick, the first “King of the Beach,” ruled the
volleyball courts, generations of legendary watermen ruled the Santa Monica
surf: George Freeth, Duke Kahanamoku, Tom Blake, Pete Peterson, Tom Zahn, Joe
Quigg, Ricky Grigg, Peter Cole, Buzzy Trent, Mickey Munoz, and Mike Doyle all
served as Santa Monica lifeguards.
Every morning, Ganzer and his friends would follow the
smell of piss down Channel Road to the subterranean staircase and tunnel under
Pacific Coast Highway that opens up to what’s known by its inhabitants as
“State Beach.”
“It had something for everyone,” Ganzer says. “There was a
Hollywood scene, a volleyball scene, a surfing scene, a gay scene, and
nightlife in the canyon. Anything could happen down there. One day we were on
the beach and spotted a ring of guys in dark suits. Next thing we know, a
helicopter touches down in front of Peter Lawford's house, and JFK jumps out.
In 1964, Darryl Stolper and I were at State and the Rolling Stones showed up
looking for him. Darryl had been collecting blues records since he was a little
kid, and the Stones wanted to buy records from him.”
By the fall of 1958, Ganzer was surfing, his entry eased by
friend Denny Aaberg, the youngest of three brothers. The oldest, Kemp, was a
lifeguard at Malibu who had gained a modicum of surf stardom when a photograph
of him arching across a sparkling Rincon wall became Surfer magazine’s first
logo, as well as being featured in Bruce Brown’s 1958 film Slippery When Wet.
“We all looked up to Kemp,” says Ganzer. “He and Lance
Carson were the two best surfers in Pacific Palisades. The walls in his room
were covered with surf pictures. There was a story behind every picture and every
piece of memorabilia. Going into that room was like going into a museum, and he
was the docent. It really made me want to become a surfer.”
He did, with a little help and a lesson from the middle
Aaberg brother, Steve, who lived in the garage and had decorated its walls with
vinyl 45 records, grass mats, and neon beer signs and arranged tuck-and-roll
car seats for furniture. Ganzer told Steve that he’d tried surfing and wanted
to buy a board. Steve replied, “I just happen to have one for sale,” before
heading toward the back of the house. A few minutes later, he emerged with a
battered balsa Velzy-Jacobs with a foam nose. “He told me, ‘Forty dollars,’”
says Ganzer. “So I came back with $40 and he said, ‘Forty-five dollars!’ I got
all disgruntled, but came back with another $5. Steve said, ‘I want $50!’ I
said, ‘F**k you!’ Steve laughed and said, ‘Okay,’ and sold me the board. This
was the era of the ratf**k. I learned young to watch my back and stand my
ground.”
Ganzer, Denny, Robbie Dick, and Lanny Hoffman surfed State
Beach as much as they could and progressed quickly. They soon had knots on
their knees and crater-like open sores they called “volcanoes” on the tops of
their feet, competing to see who had the most flies around their craters.
They’d often surf in front of Doyle’s lifeguard tower just south of State.
“We knew Doyle from the Aabergs’ house,” says Ganzer. “He’d
let us sit in the tower, and would critique our surfing and give us pointers.
He eventually got all of us on the Hansen surf team.”
What Ganzer remembers most about this period were the
parties at the Aabergs’ house, immortalized in Big Wednesday. His entrance to these gatherings, as much tribal
councils as social events, began one summer night. As he approached the house,
Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” floated through the balmy air. Ganzer made his
way around Dewey Weber’s 1933 Ford panel truck on the lawn and bumped into a
guy taking a piss.
“He had one arm around a girl, a gallon jug of Red Mountain
wine in his other hand, and the girl holding his pecker,” Ganzer says. “Inside
the house, these older, stylish girls were doing ‘The Slow Wicked Stroll’ to
Bill Doggett’s song, ‘HonkyTonk.’ At some point in the night, the hodads, the
guys with their hair slicked back into ducktails, showed up to trash the party.
The surfers closed ranks and kicked their asses. The kids ran the show at the
Aabergs’ and the neighbors were aghast!” It wasn’t long until Ganzer made his
way up to Malibu. Unlike Santa Monica’s athletic waterman culture, Malibu of
the late 1950s was lawless and libertine, home to “dropouts” and “surf bums.”
“It was a frontier town back then,” Ganzer says. “There
were no cops, except for Broderick Crawford driving around drunk in his fake
police car.”
Ganzer’s first trip was made by hitchhiking up the coast.
Upon arrival, he spotted a barbed-wired area filled with discarded furniture
and a palm-frond hut. He paused, knowing it was “The Pit,” a place he had been
warned about.
“I tried to sneak by unnoticed, but was intercepted by a
sinister guy I’d once seen tip over an armoire at a party and laugh maniacally
when all the china broke,” Ganzer says. “First, the guy made me stand at
attention as he rifled through my possessions and took anything of value. Then
he called over one of his stooges, a guy I knew from the Palisades, and barked,
‘Hit him!’ I could tell the second guy didn’t want to do it, but he punched me
in the stomach.”
It all worked out in the end, though, as Ganzer was at
Malibu the day his tormentor got his comeuppance: “He was eating a half a
watermelon, and some guy he had obviously wronged walked up and punched him in
the mouth right through the watermelon—dropped him.”
Ganzer and his friends began spending more and more of
their time at Malibu and quickly became acquainted with locals like Ray “The
Enforcer” Kunze, “Mysto” George, and Tim “The Glider” Lyon. They also got to know
more-ominous characters, including Miki Dora, bank robber Eddie Lavo, Hawaiian
transplant “Mokey,” and Malibu’s dignified resident hobo, “Old Joe,” who’d come
to Malibu from Italy to work making tiles at Malibu Pottery and never left.
“There were some real characters at the Point who had a
very inventive attitude towards life,” says Ganzer.
After he got a job rinsing fish guts and scales off Malibu
pier, Ganzer and his friends often spent the night on the beach up by Third
Point and Malibu Colony, the movie-star enclave where many of Malibu’s best
surfers lived, including Johnny Fain.
“He was a total hustler,” Ganzer says. “At one point he was
Malibu Colony’s tennis pro. He and Miki used to play tennis. They had a
love/hate relationship. Most people just accepted the fact that Miki was going
to stooge you, but Johnny didn’t stand for it. He had a sense of
self-importance, and once Miki realized that, it was over.”
During each big south swell, a who’s who would make the
pilgrimage up to First Point—everyone from actor Peter Lawford to Joey Cabell, LA Times owner Otis Chandler to Bob
Cooper to Paul Strauch.
“These summer swells were a real gathering of the tribe,”
Ganzer says. “Photographers LeRoy Grannis, Grant Rohloff, Bud Browne, and Don
James would all have their cameras set up on the beach.”
The tribe soon got much bigger. In the spring of 1959,
Ganzer and Denny saw Gidget on
opening night at the Bay Theater in Pacific Palisades. “There was a big line
out front,” he says. “Cars were cruising by honking their horns, guys doing BAs
out the window—it was a big scene. We went to the ticket booth and a small,
cute brunette a little older than us handed us our tickets. We got out of
earshot and Denny turned to me and said, ‘That’s her, that’s the real Gidget.’ And
when the movie came out in 1959, forget it, everyone wanted to become a
surfer.”
Upside,
Downside, Inside, Outside
1960
to 1962
By 1960, Ganzer, Denny, and Robbie were members of Santa Monica’s North Bay Surf Club. “There were some remarkable guys in that club,” Ganzer says. “Tony Kronman would go on to become the dean of Yale Law School. Another member, Stuart Bailey, lived near artist and designer Ray Eames. His parents were the millers who made the wood for those beautiful chairs. Marc Neikrug’s dad, George, played the cello for the LA Philharmonic Orchestra, and Marc would go on to play with the New York Philharmonic.”
However, not all of the members of the North Bay Surf Club
would go on to teach in the Ivy League or play in an orchestra. Mike LaRae, one
of the best surfers in the club, was an angelic-looking regularfoot who rode a
double-stringer Lyman surfboard and could stand on the nose all day long. “He
was just plain bad,” Ganzer says. “His parents were full-on Nazis and
supposedly owned Hermann Göring’s yacht. LaRae would hand out racist pamphlets.
I thought they were ridiculous, so I brought one home to show my dad. He was so
f**king pissed off.”
Every fall, when State and the Jetty got really big, the
club would drive up to Rincon. “Part of the pilgrimage to Rincon was stopping
for breakfast on the way up,” says Ganzer. “Sometimes we would go to the
Colonial House in Oxnard.” Known for its “Old South ambiance,” the Colonial
House would come under fire from the NAACP in the late 60s for its marquee: a
Black man in a chef’s outfit who stood on a platform next to Highway 1 ringing
a bell and waving at passing cars.
“Steve was driving me, Denny, and LaRae up to Rincon. As we
passed the Colonial House, LaRae stuck his head out the car’s window and
screamed [a racial slur], Steve slammed on the brakes and said, ‘What the f**k
did you just say?’ Steve backed up all the way and stopped the car and asked,
‘Mike, do you have something to say to this gentleman?’ LaRae was so humiliated
that he tried crawling under the seat. It was wonderful to see that little
bastard squirm. When you got sounded by one of the older guys, you shut up and
took your bitter medicine.”
Each summer, the club made an annual trek south to San
Diego, where they’d camp in a friend’s yard and surf Solana Beach, Seaside
Reef, and Swami’s. The highlight of these trips, though, were the nighttime
excursions across the border to Tijuana’s Zona Norte.
“Tijuana back then was kind of like the Wild West,” Ganzer
savs. “Drunk Marines were staggering down the street, there were fights, and a
Mexican barker stood outside the Blue Fox to invite you to ‘come inside and eat
the furburger.’ One night we went to the Blue Fox and it was quiet and
empty—totally dead. We heard someone playing the piano, looked up on the stage,
and there was Marc Neikrug, the composer, banging out a Ray Charles song.
Suddenly, people came in off the street; strippers and pimps came pouring out
from these catacombs behind the club. Everyone started dancing. In a few
minutes, the club was packed! It was magical, the way Neikrug breathed life
into the place. The Mexican hookers mobbed him. He was lucky to get out of
there with his clothes on.”
During this period, Ganzer’s status in the surfing world
was elevated significantly when Carson got him on the Jacobs surf team
alongside Donald Takayama, Dora, Doyle, Robert August, Strauch, Fain, Ford,
Kemp, and many other greats. Soon, Jacobs hired Ganzer as a salesman to replace
August, who’d left to film The Endless
Summer.
“Having that diamond logo on the back of your jacket was a
big deal back then,” says Ganzer. “Like Velzy, Hap was an excellent carpenter
and craftsman who taught a whole generation how to shape. He always took time
to show me how to do things.”
As Ganzer began to come into his own as a surfer, he drew
Dora’s attention. However, it wasn’t due to Ganzer’s skill in the water. When
Dora learned that Ganzer worked as a parking valet and had a line on the
Hollywood parties, he began to ply him for intelligence. While the 1950s were
the era of “the ratf**k”—elaborate, often mean-spirited, practical jokes—the
1960s were the era of “the caper” and “the scam.” “Surfers were looking for
ways to work as little as possible to keep their days free for surfing,” Ganzer
says. “Miki was the guy who influenced all the beach people on that caper
mentality of ‘What can I get away with?’ I remember when To Catch a Thief came out and Miki started wearing turtlenecks.
Dora definitely thought he was Cary Grant. Miki would show up at some of the
parties where I was working—in a tux, wearing a Beatles wig. He would
infiltrate, mingle long enough to find out where the coats and purses were,
rifle through them for valuables, then make his exit.”
Goodbye,
Camelot
1963
to 1976
After graduating from Palisades High School in 1963, Ganzer went to work for Surf Guide magazine. Bill Cleary, a former Marine from San Marino who was one of the first people to surf in France and the Canary Islands, had moved to Topanga and started the magazine with Larry Stevenson, a lifeguard, All-American swimmer, and founder of Makaha Skateboards.
“Surfer wouldn’t
run Makaha’s ads, so he started Surf
Guide,” says Ganzer. “It had an amazing staff: Ron Stoner, LeRoy Grannis,
John Van Hamersveld, Kemp, the Calhouns, Peter Cole, Corky Carroll, Bob Cooper,
Peter Dixon, Buzzy Trent, and many others. I’d worked on the high school
yearbook, so I helped out with layout and design. Then they had me manage their
skateboard team. Cleary was a great mentor who helped me navigate life as it
was getting much more complex.”
The first of these complexities occurred on November 22, 1963:
“It was a regular Friday. I was packing boxes at the shop when the radio
announced that President Kennedy, whose youthful energy I’d witnessed and
admired at State Beach just a few years earlier, had been shot and killed in
Dallas. As I made my way home, I noticed that a deafening silence had come over
the entire town. For many of us, it wasn’t just Kennedy who had been killed. It
was our innocence. It was the beginning of my disillusionment with America.”
The next interruption in Ganzer’s idyllic life came in
1964, when his draft notice arrived and he went to his pre-induction physical
exam in Los Angeles: “Fain was there wearing a ballerina’s tutu, pretending to
be gay. I took speed to get my heart rate up, and then intentionally failed the
hearing test. It wasn’t enough. The draft boards in LA were on to all the
tricks.” Although he was drafted, a friend of Ganzer’s father was a high-ranking
officer and got him transferred to the Naval Reserve.
This close call made Ganzer think seriously about his
future. There were other signs too. By 1965, the scene at Malibu was out of
control. “It was really aggro—the Vals against the coastal guys,” Ganzer says.
“It went from everybody being friends to something more territorial. There was
a fight every hour, on the hour. Somebody was always getting whomped and
walking away with a black eye or a bloody nose. I just thought, ‘F**k this!’”
After his experience at Surf
Guide, Ganzer decided to go to art school. Like the previous generation of
Southern California surfer-artists before him—Bob Irwin, Ken Price, and Billy
Al Bengston—Ganzer had been making sophisticated aesthetic decisions about
automobiles and surfboards since he was a teenager. He enrolled at Chouinard
Art Institute in 1965. At that time, the school’s recent alumni, including
Irwin, Larry Bell, and John Altoon, were an important part of the core of
Irving Blum’s now-mythic Ferus Gallery. At Chouinard, Ganzer met classmates
Chuck Arnoldi, Laddie Dill, Ron Cooper, and Tom Wudl, and once again found the
camaraderie that he felt had gone missing from surfing.
Soon, Ganzer, Guy Dill, Allen Ruppersberg, and Cooper built
studios at the abandoned Pacific Ocean Park (POP) amusement park and pier.
Between making art, Ganzer preferred fishing for perch from the pier to surfing
there.
“Miki used to surf there,” he says. “So did [Allen] Sarlo
and all the Dogtown kids. But there was too much shit in the water.”
What Ganzer did like about POP were the free materials
lying around. Banham visited Ganzer’s studio and, says Ganzer, “he thought that
it was a metaphor for the way we lived our lives and made our art. Banham told
me that I had ‘an amusement-park attitude towards art.’ I loved the process of
making art. It wasn’t so much about the object as the experience. At one point
I was painting balloons that would wither and die in a month. They were my
version of the sand drawing.”
Ganzer’s ideas about surfing were redefined by Patrick
McNulty’s 1966 Surfer article “Down
Ocean Way,” about a now-famous trip Billy Fury, Ron Stoner, and Chouinard alum
Rick Griffin took to San Bias, Mexico. Griffin’s drawings of the Indigenous
Huichol people, peyote buttons, and surfing were “like an ad” to Ganzer: “Go to
Mexico! Get good waves! Bring back a kilo of weed and you will be a hero in
your town!”
In 1970, Ganzer, Dick, and Cooper drove a VW bus down the
Pan-American Highway from Southern California to Panama. More than a surf trip,
they visited museums in Mexico City, drank tequila, and entered an entirely new
world beyond the beach. While they got great waves in Mexico and Panama, it was
a remote peninsula near Quepos, Costa Rica, that captured their hearts. Dick
and Ganzer returned the next year, bought 14 acres and built minimalist grass
shacks, and discovered a variety of breaks that they surfed by themselves.
Ganzer drove 4,000 miles back to California to participate
in a show called New Painting in Los Angeles
at the Newport Art Museum. “I got on a skateboard and dragged a piece of wood
from the recent Malibu fire down the 40-foot-long white wall like you would
drag your hand in the face of a wave.” He also made a smaller charcoal drawing
of a 90-degree arc one critic described as “directionally forceful” and “subtly
topographical.”
After his POP studio was condemned and torn down, Ganzer
rode his bike down Venice’s dirty streets looking for a new studio space. Many
of the buildings had fallen into disrepair and were virtually abandoned. He
found a large building on Westminster Boulevard and Main Street and knocked on
the door.
“Venice in the 1970s was a very rough place,” says Ganzer.
“A touch of evil was upon it. A strung-out lady opened the door. The sash of
her dress was tied off around her arm; she’d just shot heroin.” She took Ganzer
to a parapet on the top floor and pointed to a hole in the floor. “A 20-foot
ladder went down to a 33,000-square-foot building. It was full of old Jaguars
that junkies were living in.”
The junkies rented Ganzer the garage, and he transformed it
into his studio. One morning, however, an old man who turned out to be the
building’s true owner showed up and informed Ganzer that he’d been paying rent
to squatters. Ganzer asked the man if he’d be interested in selling the garage.
The man replied, “Sharpen your pencil.”
In order to evict the junkies, the artist had to homestead
the property. When Cooper arrived to check out the building for the first time,
Ganzer opened the sliding door with a baseball bat in his hands. Ganzer got
Cooper and Peter Alexander to pool their money, and with Cooper’s buffed-out
4x4 as a down payment, they bought the building for $60,000.
After the artists got rid of the cars and degreased the
floors, they transformed the space into three gigantic studios. Suddenly,
Venice was at the forefront of American contemporary art. Irwin, Bell, and
DeWain Valentine lived there for stretches, as did Bengston, pop artist Ed
Ruscha, and others. Ganzer’s studio became a hive of creative activity. In
addition to making art, he also rented his studio to artists like Lynda
Bengalis and Bryan Hunt to work in. Ruscha shot his art film Miracle there, with Ganzer starring
opposite Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas. The revenue Ganzer
generated from the studio enabled him to travel to the property he owned in
Costa Rica, stay for a month, surf, and make art.
“It wasn’t just surfing,” he says. “The jungle environment
was totally foreign to me. It fascinated, inspired, and energized me for
decades.”
In California, he surfed Topanga and First Point with his
old friends Robbie Dick and George Trafton. Although the scene had changed,
when Ganzer paddled out at Malibu for the first time in many years, he says, “I
was filled with waves of well-being by the connection I felt. Malibu was home.”
Mating Call
1976
to Present
During his art period, Ganzer met Susie Boykin—a beautiful, strong-willed Texan. They married in 1976. A daughter, Sandy, and son, Beaux, soon followed. With a family to support, he and his friends sold their studio to Jack Nicholson, and Ganzer, while continuing to make art, began to make tables and work in Bell’s studio.
“I liked to do it all! I considered every part of
everything I did art. But showing art, storing art, seducing patrons and
gallery owners, listening to pretentious critics...” says Ganzer. “I’d much
rather go surfing.”
In the late 1970s, after sliding into third base during a
Malibu softball game, Ganzer noticed that the built-in belt in his baseball
pants magically held them in place. Then an internal voice asked, “Why didn’t
some surfer think of this?”
Ganzer had never liked the way laces and buttons felt when
he was lying on his surfboard. “I’d always wanted trunks with a side Velcro
closure,” he says. “I mentioned this to my art dealer’s husband, who was in the
garment industry. He said, ‘Do a drawing.’ He liked the drawing and then said,
‘Get someone to make them.’” Ganzer found a seamstress in Boyle Heights, who
began sewing men’s and women’s shorts out of different sample fabrics he
brought her.
The first Jimmy’z trunks were a cross, as Ganzer says,
“between the shorts the British military wore in India and the really long
shorts that Duke and the old Hawaiian beach boys wore to prevent rashes.”
Ganzer distributed the first pairs to prominent friends in the Malibu surfing
hierarchy, including J. Riddle, Trafton, Jeff Higginbotham, Skip Engblom, and
Dick. Next, the Paskowitz family helped to expand the brand down to the South
Bay. “It all happened very organically,” remembers Ganzer. “In the beginning, I
sold them out of my station wagon in the parking lots at Topanga and Malibu.
They were functional, each batch was different, and people liked them.”
Jimmy’z took a much more serious and lucrative turn in
1983, when Ganzer showed them to Sepp Donahower, whose company, Pacific
Productions, was at one time one of the biggest concert promoters in America.
“Sepp touched his nose and said, ‘I smell a hit.’ He really understood
marketing,” Ganzer says.
One of their first successful ads was a photo of surfer
Randy Carranza taken at Los Flores beach. “Higgy was working for photographer
Phillip Dixon, who shot the Guess jeans ad campaign,” says Ganzer. “Dixon had a
beautiful young model pull the Velcro tab of Randy’s pants as if she was taking
them off.”
These ads first appeared on the inside cover of the Los Angeles Free Press. Soon, ads for
Jimmy’z featured wild men surfing and skating—Christian Hosoi, Steve Olson,
David Hackett, Vince Klyn, and others. “Jimmy’z was much more of a scene than a
clothing company,” Ganzer says. “We were having fun and doing what came
naturally to us.”
The brand really took off after NBC News filmed Ganzer at
Surfrider Beach holding a pair of Jimmy’z. He turned to the camera, ripped open
the Velcro, and said, “The mating call of the 80s.” By the end of their first
weekend trade show, Ganzer and Donahower had sold $300,000 worth of
merchandise. Over the next five years, Jimmy’z rose like a meteor, and their
headquarters expanded from a garage to a 55,000-square-foot building in Los
Angeles. Ry Cooder and Stevie Ray Vaughan modeled their clothes in ads that
appeared in Rolling Stone. At a trade
show in New York City, Ganzer hired a dancer from the Wayans Brothers
television show In Living Color named
Jennifer Lopez to dance to the music of a reggae musician he met playing on the
street in Times Square. “I have always enjoyed doing unpredictable, spontaneous
things,” Ganzer says. “We outraged some people and inspired others.”
After a while, supply, demand, and the day-to-day pushing
and shoving of the garment industry stopped being fun, and Ganzer and Donahower
sold Jimmy’z to Op. “Could I have made more money and maximized my profits?
Sure!” says Ganzer. “Could I have had more fun? I doubt it.”
It was around this time, the late 90s, that Ganzer got a
call from his old friend John Milius. “John was from Beverly Hills and used to
come to Malibu. He knew a lot about history and was always pontificating,” says
Ganzer. “Milius calls and says, ‘Your name is on everyone’s lips! You’re the
Big Lebowski!’ There’s a couple guys that want to meet you.’ So I picked up the
Coen brothers and we talked. I had an errand to run, so I left them in the
parking lot of the bowling alley on Venice Boulevard. Then they met my partner,
Sepp, who drank White Russians. So Lebowski wasn’t just me. The Coens used
parts of our characters and made a composite.”
When asked about his life today, the 77-year-old Ganzer’s eyes twinkle as he shrugs and says with the smile of a Cheshire cat: “I never set out to become a business tycoon or the Big Lebowski. I was just living my life the only way I knew how to. Wealth and fame were much less important to me than fun and creative satisfaction. Surfing shaped the way I approached life. I remember Kemp used to tell us to ‘keep it sano.’ This meant keep it sanitary, keep your shit together, stay within the lines. That was what I meant by ‘the Dude abides.’ I might have stepped over the lines of society’s rules, but I always abided by my own natural law, my own sense of right and wrong.”
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