Deborah Walley

My mother watched Gidget, the Sally Field TV show, so often when I was a kid that I didn’t realize how few episodes there actually are until I was an adult. I rewatched it recently and it was great fun. (There’s even an episode that’s kind of a surfer Lysistrata where one of the surfers is played by Mako, whose character is exactly like all the others except bilingual in English and Japanese.) To this day, it’s one of the first places I think of her. And yet even I, with my Gidget childhood and fondness for movies of that era, have never seen the original Gidget movie, much less any of the sequels.

Deborah Walley was the daughter of Ice Capades stars who grew up on the road. And, yes, her father wanted her to go into the family business, as we occasionally see even in the weirder family businesses. But Walley wanted to act. As a serious actress. She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She was performing in Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Serious drama. And Joyce Selznick, niece of David O., discovered her and convinced her to be in a movie. Specifically Gidget Goes Hollywood as the title character. According to Walley, she took the Sixth Avenue bus from one end of Manhattan to another and cried.

I mean, she still took the role. She didn’t have to. Still, she disliked the idea even as she went into the film. She considered Hollywood actors to be selling out, so yeah. However, she came around. Her father in the movie is played by Carl Reiner, whom she respected quite a lot. Several of her other Gidget costars were similarly talented and similarly doing good work in the industry. There are a lot of people who act in Hollywood because it’s what they want to do, so even though she eventually mostly quit the business, at least she wasn’t so snobbish about it.

I’m always going to think of her as Julia Carey in Summer Magic. She’s so delightful in that. Her character is introduced through the song “The Pink of Perfection,” and it lets you know exactly how her cousins—one of whom is Hayley Mills—feels about her. And boy do you immediately understand why. Of course she gets a redemption arc, because of course she does—it’s a Disney movie where her cousin is Hayley Mills—but she’s the perfect ragtime snob. I adore the movie, admittedly because that’s one I saw probably dozens of times on The Lost Disney Channel Of My Childhood.

After she left Hollywood, she moved to Sedona, Arizona, to care for her family. She started a couple of children’s theatre companies, which delights me. Even better, while getting in touch with her stepfather’s Native heritage, she cowrote the short “The Legend of Seeks-to-Hunt-Great.” I don’t know if it’s based on anything in particular or not, but there it is. The best part, however, is who plays the lead role. Michael Horse. Who you might know as Deputy Hawk from Twin Peaks. And that’s how you get from Twin Peaks to the Gidget movies and Disney delights.