Next stop: Larry Shaw’s. Larry lived alone, subsisting on Swanson’s TV dinners. His mother, Kathryn “Kay” Trapheagan, a stormy fifth-generation Californian, had married Nate Shaw (born Nate Schwartz), a rich clothing magnate who drove a yellow Rolls-Royce with a gold-plated dashboard, after romancing his son. (There was a lingering question as to which man was really Larry’s father.) After Larry’s golden childhood in the largest house in Malibu Colony, with a staff of six, including Thelma, the governess, who called him “Master Shaw,” the family’s fortunes plummeted. Following an angry divorce, Larry and his mother shared a series of one-room rentals. From the age of eight, the boy took care of the histrionic, perpetually inebriated woman. He would grab the steering wheel when Kay passed out while driving. He would wipe her hair with napkins when her forehead fell onto her dinner plate. He called an ambulance the time she slit her wrists, the time she took too much phenobarbital, and the time she removed a pierced earring by yanking it right through her earlobe. One night Kay started gagging when she was eating, and Larry ran for a doctor, who, before pronouncing her dead, opened her mouth, removed a piece of steak from her windpipe, and told the sobbing boy, “Just so you know, kid, for the next time: this is how you can save someone’s life.”

Larry slid his board into the station wagon next to Mike’s and Duane’s, and off the lost boys sped to their Nirvana—Malibu. Some older guys shooting the breeze in “the pit”—a surfers-only wedge of sand buffered from the Pacific Coast Highway by a cement wall against which they leaned their upended boards—ignored Mike, Duane, and Larry, who could only hover around the edges of that inner sanctum since they hadn’t “earned their bones” yet, but they snapped to attention when a fourth young man drove up in his ‘56 Ford with no backseat. Swarthy, splendidly built, movie-star handsome, Miki Dora parked, pulled out his Dave Sweet surfboard, and sauntered to the water’s edge to paddle out to the point break. “When Miki arrived, the bodies on the beach were like the Red Sea parting,” says someone who witnessed the scene unfold many times.

Already a legend in 1961, today—four years after his 2002 death from pancreatic cancer (which followed his stay in federal prison for credit-card fraud, which ended years of an odyssey in France and New Zealand)—Miki (pronounced Mickey, as he alternatively spelled it) Dora has been canonized. “Surfing hedonist who became a hero to a generation of beach bums … Dora was a Kerouac in shorts,” read his London Times obituary. “If you took James Dean’s cool, Muhammad Ali’s poetics, Harry Houdini’s slipperiness [and] James Bond’s jet setting … you’d come up with … Miki Dora, the Black Knight of Malibu,” read one review of Dora Lives, the 2005 coffee-table book which describes Miki as “everything that a surfer ought to be: he was tanned, he was good-looking, and he was trouble.” Next spring William Morrow will publish David Rensin’s All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki “da Cat” Dora, an exhaustive oral history in the style of Edie, Jean Stein’s book about Edie Sedgwick. Leonardo DiCaprio’s film company has acquired the movie rights.

What set Dora apart from the other top Malibu surfers (including short, comical Johnny Fain and Lance Carson, who could nose-ride—walk to the tip of the board while on a wave and hang ten—like no other) was his charisma. First of all, he was elegant. “He wasn’t into survival surf,” said Surfer’s Journal publisher Steve Pezman at the time of Miki’s death. “He was into the dance.” His balletic, feline grace on the waves earned him the nickname “da Cat,” and he wore ascots and checked jackets, or Lacoste shirts and black alpaca sweaters, over his beach trunks. Mike Nader calls him “the Cary Grant of surfers,” adding, “Johnny Fain was the Mickey Rooney.” Acolytes were also struck by his dazzle—his wildly intelligent, if disjointed, sentences, combined with a lot of blowhard paranoia. He had his own way of talking: edgy, staccato wiseguy (“So-so-so, what’s goin’ on, ennhk?”) mixed with campy Continental (“Vuht are you doing here, dahlink?”). And he was always gesturing with his hands, with an emotive, bent-elbowed, loose-fingered gusto that Nader, King, and Shaw strained to emulate. Finally, there was his provocatively unplaceable sexuality. In that homophobic time and place, Miki was at once extremely macho and undeniably effeminate. Many surfers thought he was not interested in women—a result of his total focus on waves—or struggling with suppressed gayness. “His body language was feminine: his wrist action, his long fingers, the way he put his hands on his hips—it was a little bit fey,” says a woman who had a two-year relationship with him in the mid-60s, and who asks to be identified by her first name only, Jacqueline. Speaking for the first time at length about Miki, she describes him as having been so sexually ineffectual and disinterested as to be “a eunuch.”