Mike Hynson, Co-Star of 'The Endless Summer,' Resurfaces With Tales
of the Brotherhood
http://www.ocweekly.com/2009-07-09/news/mike-hynson-the-endless-summer-the-brotherhood
By NICK SCHOU
Published on July 08, 2009
The Surfer Who Came In From the Cold
Whatever happened to The Endless Summer co-star Mike Hynson? A lot,
much of it bad, starting when he got mixed up with the notorious
Laguna Beach drug-smuggling ring known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love
--
It's 2 a.m. in New Delhi, halfway through a hot night in August 1967,
and Mike Hynson is still awake and sweating in his hotel room. The
pressure is onit's a feeling of impending doom that Hynson, a
fearless surfer whose quest for the perfect wave had been captured in
the 1966 cult classic The Endless Summer, has never encountered
before, certainly never while simply working on a surfboard. But this
is no normal surfboard-repair job.
Using a spoon he borrowed from the hotel restaurant, Hynson has
carved a giant chunk of foam out of the bottom of one of the boards
he'd delivered to India a few weeks earlier. He's filled the hole
with a watertight bag of hashish oil that he and a friend from Laguna
Beach obtained in Kathmandu. He seals the compartment shut with
carefully concealed tape and resin. But time is conspiring against
Hynson. He still has two more boards to go before dawn, when he has
to catch a return flight to California. The trio of hash-laden boards
he's busy preparing are supposed to arrive on a cargo flight a few
days after him.
His brown wig and fake mustachewhich he wore for the photograph that
adorns his phony passportawait his attention. He must not forget to
wear them to the airport. As Hynson hunches over his hollowed-out
board, a thought keeps parading through his brain, over and over like
a mantra, until he feels as if every nerve in his body is about to snap.
"Uh-oh," says the voice in Hynson's ?head. "I'm really doing this.
This is really fucking real."
* * *
Stepping inside Hynson's garage at his house in Encinitas is like
entering a strange world where Southern California surfing history,
1960s counterculture and Hynson's renegade sense of humor all compete
for surface space. There's the red pirate flag hanging over the door
with the words "Prepare to be Boarded" splashed above a skull and
crossbones. Faded portraits of Hindu swamis hang above a tray of
expired incense, next to a blown-up photograph of a 24-year-old
Hynson with a bunch of his friendsRobert August, Bruce Brown, Hobie
Alter, Corky Carroll and Phil Edwardsposing in front of a Winnebago
at San Onofre State Beach with a trio of then-wives and -girlfriends.
The photo captures Hynson on the cusp of greatness, about to embark
on a nationwide tour to promote the film he'd just starred in, Bruce
Brown's The Endless Summer. On an opposite wall is a black-and-white
Warner Brothers production still from the acid-drenched 1972 Jimi
Hendrix "concert" film Rainbow Bridge, in which Hynson surfs waves in
Maui and cracks open a surfboard to reveal a bag of smuggled hashish.
Other photos of Hynson surfing in the early 1970s adorn the walls:
molten energy captured in freeze frame, gold locks flowing in the
wind, a pair of intensely focused eyes, arms spread out in a
yoga-style stretch.
What's missing from this Technicolor trip down memory lane are the
past 20 or so years of his life. It's a stretch of time Hynson
doesn't talk about much, partly because he's not proud of it, but
mostly because he doesn't remember it well, even less so than the
heady days of the late-1960s, when he was dropping acid nearly every
day with his friends in the Laguna Beach-based band of smugglers
known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (see "Lords of Acid," July
8, 2005). Those were strange times indeed, but a lot of fun compared
to what came next. In the early 1980s, life went downhill for Hynson
when John Gale, one of the Brotherhood's best surfers and Laguna
Beach's most legendary outlaws, died in a mysterious car crash, thus
ruining Hynson emotionally and financially.
Gale was Hynson's business partner in Rainbow Surfboards, which the
two founded in Laguna Beach in 1969, as well as his best friend.
Hynson's drug-addled, rebellious lifestyle had already led to a
divorce from wife Melinda Merryweather, a Ford Agency model, actress
and art designer, but Gale's death seemed to push him over the edge
from reckless to beyond help. He descended into a depression and drug
addiction that lasted decades, ruining his surfing career and
alienating him from everyone but his closest friends until only a few
years ago.
Now 67, Hynson is muscular and trim from long days spent shaping
boards for mostly Japanese customers. He still has a full head of
hair, which is pulled back over his scalp into a short Native
American-style braid. He's wearing a black T-shirt adorned with a red
Chinese dragon, dusty black jeans and rugged work boots. His face is
full of color and breaks easily into a self-deprecating grin. Gone
are the gaunt physique and haggard expression on display in
photographs taken of him just a decade ago, when People profiled him
in an embarrassing article titled "The Endless Bummer." (The story
noted that just a few weeks before Endless Summer 2 was released,
Hynson was serving jail time for drug possession.)
It was during one of Hynson's numerous jail stints, at some point in
the 1980she's not sure what year or why he was in jailthat somebody
suggested he use his free time to write, a suggestion that, two
decades later, led to Transcendental Memories of a Surf Rebel, an
autobiography Hynson co-wrote with Donna Klaasen that was released
this month by the Dana Point-based Endless Dreams Publishing. Among
other things, the book divulges that Hynson, who has never spoken
publicly about the Brotherhood, wasn't just pals with them, but
actually instructed them in the art of using surfboards to smuggle drugs.
"The last time I'd been in jail, I'd started reading for the first
time in my life," Hynson recalls of his autobiographical efforts.
"And on this stretch, I just got obsessed with writing." By the
mid-1990s, Hynson had cranked out hundreds of pages of handwritten
memoirs, all of it scrawled in pencil on jailhouse paper, which he
eventually shared with a few friends at the surf shop down the street
from where he now lives, a half-mile from the beach in Encinitas. "A
couple of people looked at it and said, 'Michael, I know you can
understand this, but I look at it and I can't understand a word,'" he says.
Hynson remembers glancing down at the first draft of his
autobiography. For the first time, he realized that, after the first
few pages, his magnum opus consisted of nothing but incomprehensible
chicken-scratch scrawl, less a series of words and punctuation marks
than a never-ending pattern of zigzag lines, like heart-monitor
readings. "It was just so dysfunctional," he says, chuckling.
* * *
Unlike the blurry events of the past few decades, the highlights of
Hynson's early life are still very vivid in his mind. Michael Lear
Hynson was born in the Northern California coastal town of Crescent
City in 1942, a Navy brat whose father survived kamikaze attacks as a
radioman in World War II. Mike grew up in San Diego and Hawaii, never
staying in one place long enough to make friends. His thrill-seeking
lifestyle began while living with his mother at a trailer park when
he was just 2 years old.
One morning, he crawled out the door while his mother wasn't looking
and discovered that the trailer next door had moved. He grabbed a
250-volt electrical plug that was lying on the ground and stuck it in
his mouth. According to Hynson, the shock split his tongue and made
it hard for him to learn how to speak. "I developed my own unique way
of talking, and sometimes, I mumble and stumble," he says. "Then,
when I was 5, I was climbing these stairs at Imperial Beach, and this
friend of mine had a hammer in his hand. My mother said something
behind us, and he turned, and the claw of the hammer went right into
the temple of my head."
The next thing Hynson knew, he was being flown by helicopter to San
Diego's nearby naval base. He remembers floating above himself,
looking down at his body surrounded by doctors, all of whom left the
room. "I remember being really comfortable and just tripping, you
know," he says, "and then my mother turned around to leave the room,
and I screamed into my body, 'Where are you going?' And my mother
goes, 'He's alive!' and the doctors came back in, and they got me
back." Hynson says he likes to joke that the hammer incident explains
why he often seems to lose his train of thought nowadays. "Everybody
who knows me knows that I go off on tangents," he says. "But I'm just
making an excuse for myself."
Hynson spent most of his elementary-school years in Honolulu, where,
he says, he never picked up a surfboard. It wasn't until he was in
junior-high school in San Diego that he took up surfing with some
older kids who surfed at Pacific Beach, called themselves the Sultans
and wore matching purple-nylon jackets. After watching the older kids
a few times, he borrowed a board. Hynson recalls standing up on his
first wave, not realizing how fast he was moving until he looked at
the nearby pier and saw wooden posts rushing by in a blur. "I'll
never forget it," he says. "It was so far out. I couldn't sleep, and
I just got into it, borrowing boards and stealing them and everything."
Stealing surfboards is how Hynson met the man who would give him his
first big break in the world of surfboard shaping, Hobie Alter, an
early surf pioneer and inventor of the Hobie Cat, which is now the
world's top-selling small catamaran. "I first met Mike when he stole
some of my boards," Alter says. "The cops wanted to press charges,
but Linda Benson, one of the finest surfer gals, called me and said
Mike wasn't that bad." Alter agreed to drop the charges if Hynson
would return the boards and later gave him a job as a shaper.
Hynson's first board was an 11-foot plank of balsa wood that he
spotted while collecting weeds in the front yard of a house in
Mission Beach. The board's owner told him he could have the board if
he wanted it, so Hynson and a friend lugged it to the friend's
garage, where Hynson began whittling away. "I had no idea what I was
doing, and his parents were getting angry because of all this dust
and resin and mess, but it turned out to be a 7-foot-11-inch board.
It was a hot little board, and everyone loved it who rode it."
Hynson suddenly found his board-shaping skills very much in demand.
He became a top shaper for Gordon and Smith Surfboards in San Diego,
where he designed and produced his trademark "RedFin" boards. He also
began hanging out with all the best surfers in Southern California,
including Corky Carroll, Phil Edwards, Nat Young and Robert August.
"As a surfer, Mike was very good," recalls Carroll, now TheOrange
County Register's surfing columnist. "He was not a guy that you had
to worry about beating you in a contest, but he knew how to ride a
wave. He also had a kind of charisma about him that seemed to attract
'followers,' so to speak."
One person who began following Hynson's surf career was Bruce Brown,
a film director who, by the early 1960s, was filming all the big surf
contests in Southern California and Hawaii. According to Hynson,
Brown was getting tired of the fact that all the surf movies being
made showed the same group of surfers on the same group of waves.
"There was no story to any of these movies," Hynson says. Brown came
up with the concept of taking two surfersone blond and right-footed
(Hynson) and one dark-haired goofy-footerAugust fit the partand
following them around the world, from California to Europe and
Africa, in search of the perfect wave.
The details of their epic quest, which culminates with Hynson surfing
a beautiful right-breaking wave at Cape St. Francis in South Africa,
are familiar to anyone who has seen The Endless Summer, which remains
iconic more than 40 years later. The film not only exposed the sport
to a nationwide audience, helping export the industry beyond
California and Hawaii, but it also helped shift the sport itself from
a handful of well-known beaches to a constant quest for pristine
waves in exotic locales. Hynson recalls the trip as one of the most
fun adventures in his life, although part of the sense of adventure
was the fact that he smuggled an ounce of pot with him as he flew
around the world.
"I was young, stupid and loaded," Hynson says. "I smoked pot
everywhere. I had a roll of bennies, which I took with me also, so
when we had to drive somewhere, guess who stayed up all night?"
Before the movie was released theatrically in 1966, Hynson
accompanied Brown and August, as well as several other surf legends,
including Carroll, on a nationwide road trip to promote the film.
"We'd go into towns, and every time we'd stop for gas, Corky and I
would jump out and go skateboarding," Hynson says. "We really caused
a scene because skateboarding hadn't reached the inner part of the
States yet." As the trip wore on, the audiences were growing larger,
and before Hynson realized it, the movie had become a hit. (At latest
count, The Endless Summer has grossed $30 million.) Hynson claims
that Brown had promised him and August that if the movie did well,
everyone would share in the good fortune.
"It wasn't until I grabbed Robert and went to LA and talked to a
lawyer that I realized this guy was fucking me left and right,"
Hynson says. In fact, Hynson had only become suspicious after his
then-girlfriend Merryweather, whom he had just met at San Diego's
Windansea beach, asked him about his allowing Brown to use his
likeness on film. "He'd never signed a release," says Merryweather,
now a civic activist in La Jolla. Merryweather's father, Hubert, was
the president of Arizona's state senate; Barry Goldwater was her
godfather. "I told Mike my father knew a great lawyer up in
Hollywood, and let's go up and see him."
Hynson brought August with him to see the attorney, who insisted they
each deserved a third of the profit from The Endless Summer. Hynson
claims Brown refused to do that, instead offering each surfer $5,000,
a new car and help getting set up in business. While August accepted
the deal, Hynson says, he refused. (Neither Brown nor August
responded to written requests for comment for this story, but Alter
says Brown gave Hynson the gift of fame he still enjoys. "Nobody knew
who Mike was back then," he says. "Bruce took all the risk, and I've
never met anybody more forthright and honest.") The dispute ended
Hynson's friendships with Brown and, eventually, August. Enraged by
what he felt was Brown's betrayal, Hynson dropped out for a while,
leaving California with Merryweather to spend half a year surfing big
waves on Oahu's North Shore.
* * *
One of the surfers Hynson got to know in Hawaii was Chuck Mundell, a
high-school dropout from Huntington Beach. Mundell admired Hynson and
wanted him to meet a good friend of his named John Griggs, who was
living with a bunch of friends in a stone building in Orange County's
Modjeska Canyon. Griggs and his friends, most of whom were former
boozers, brawlers and heroin addicts from Anaheim, had begun
experimenting with a new drug that Griggs had stolen at gunpoint from
a Hollywood film producer: lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Until
October 1966, acid was legal in California, and Griggs and his group,
who called themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, believed that
just as it had cured them of their addictions and violent behavior,
it could also transform American society into a glorious utopia. They
were heavily influenced by Harvard professor Timothy Leary, he of the
famous exhortation "Turn on, tune in, drop out"and who would later
describe Griggs as the "holiest person who has ever lived in this country."
Before Griggs invited Leary to join his group, which in early 1967
moved south to Laguna Canyon, to a neighborhood Griggs would christen
"Dodge City" because of the constant skirmishes with the local forces
of law and order, Hynson was Griggs' most famous disciple. "Griggs
had gold flashing out of his eyes and tongue, these words; he was
just a magical little guy," Hynson says. Accompanied by Merryweather,
Hynson dropped his first acid with Griggs and several other
Brotherhood members at Black's Beach near La Jolla.
The experience brought him back to the hospital room where he'd
nearly died as a child. It took Hynson a few trips to get beyond that
near-death experience, but when that happened, he felt reborn with a
new sense of spiritual purpose. "Those guys turned me on," he says.
"Things were happening. I remember Johnny and I walking down
Haight-Ashbury [in San Francisco], and he got some acid from
somebody, and the whole street was loaded with people doing their own
hippie thing. It was really going on."
Griggs had a plan: open a psychedelic spiritual and cultural center
in Laguna Beach that would turn the town into a Southern California
version of Haight-Ashbury. To finance the construction of Mystic Arts
World, the store that would serve as that center, Griggs relied on
cash from the Brotherhood's burgeoning marijuana-smuggling operation.
"One day, I walked into this warehouse with Johnny and saw 50 tons of
pot," Hynson says. "I wasn't supposed to see it, but I was there. I
remember thinking, 'It's not going to get any better than this, and
it's not going to get any worse.'"
But Hynson had another idea for how Griggs could raise money: Why not
use surfboards to smuggle hash from the Middle East or India? After
all, nobody knew anything about surfing in India, so customs wouldn't
know if, for example, a surfboard weighed 20 or 30 pounds more than
it should. Hynson suggested the idea to Griggs' friend Dave Hall, who
promptly borrowed a board and set off for Nepal, returning a few
weeks later with the boardand the best hash anyone in Laguna Beach
had ever smoked.
On his next trip, Hall invited Hynson to come along, which is how
Hynson found himself struggling to fill three surfboards with hash
oil late one night in New Delhi. The trip was a success, and the cash
raised helped make Griggs' dream a reality. "I wasn't going to sell
it or anything," Hynson says. "I just gave it to those guys, and it
bankrolled Mystic Arts. It was an honor, you know."
* * *
During the next several years, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love
established itself as both America's top hashish-smuggling ringwith
up to a dozen hash-stuffed Volkswagen buses and Land Rovers being
shipped back from Afghanistan at any given momentand the country's
top LSD-distribution ring. Leary moved to Laguna Beach and later
accompanied Griggs to a mountain commune in Idyllwild, where Griggs
died of an overdose of crystallized psilocybin in August 1969. Hynson
stayed away from Dodge City as much as possible because Leary and the
Brotherhood attracted too much heat.
He let his guard down once, however, when he and Merryweather sped
through Laguna Canyon smoking a joint. A cop pulled them over,
smelled the weed and arrested them both. At the station, the officer
rifled through Merryweather's belongings. "In my purse, I had a
little Buddha, a prayer book and beads, some patchouli oil and
incense, and a Murine bottle full of LSD," Merryweather recalls. "The
cop ingested it through his fingers and never got around to booking
us." In the morning, another officer arrived at the station,
slack-jawed at the sight of his colleague, who reeked of patchouli,
sitting with glazed eyes in front of a Buddha. "They let us the hell
out of there right away," Hynson says.
Not surprisingly, much of the late 1960s is a blur to Hynson. "It's a
fog," he says. "There are a few years when I know I was there, but I
don't know what happened." Although Griggs' untimely death saddened
Hynson, he'd already become best friends with a talented young surfer
who also happened to be Dodge City's biggest drug dealer, John Gale.
In 1969, the two opened their own company, Rainbow Surfboards. Theirs
were among the first truly shredding shortboards to hit the waves in
Southern California and Hawaii. "Mike was one of the surfboard
shapers in the 1960s who could make boards that worked," recalls
Carroll. "There were better craftsmen around, guys who could make
'perfect boards,' but Mike had the gift to make ones that just rode great.'"
Rainbow Surfboards got an unexpected publicity boost from Jimi
Hendrix and Chuck Wein, a member of Andy Warhol's so-called Factory
whom Merryweather had befriended while working as a model in New
York. In 1972, while Hynson and Merryweather were living in
Mauiwhere most of the Brotherhood had relocated after Laguna Beach
became too hotMerryweather suggested to Wein that he direct a Jimi
Hendrix concert movie in Maui and even introduced him to Hendrix's
manager, Michael Jefferey.
"Chuck wanted to make a movie that was going to have surfing,
healers, vegetarians, New Age people, even a space woman,"
Merryweather says. "Jimi was going to play the music because he was
at the top of his game, and Michael was going to surf because he was
at the top of his game." The result, 1972's Rainbow Bridge, was
billed as a Hendrix concert film because the concert Hendrix played
in Maui provides the ending of the movie, much of which actually
features surfing by Hynson and his friends, goofy-foot hotshot Dave
Nuuhiwa and Leslie Potts. "Gale refused to be in the movie, because
he didn't want to have his face on camera," Hynson recalls.
The film's most notorious scene features Hynson and Potts ripping
open a Rainbow Surfboard to reveal a stash of hash, a stunt that
takes place under a Richard Nixon poster that reads, "Would You Buy a
Used Car From This Man?" When the film opened in Laguna Beach, Hynson
gave Gale all the tickets as a birthday present. Half of the audience
was rumored to be narcs. "The room smoked up so much you couldn't see
the stage," Hynson says. "We had all these Rainbow Surfboards up on
the stage, and when the movie showed the board being opened up, it
got the police crazy. They were constantly on our ass. Anybody who
had a Rainbow Surfboard got pulled over."
* * *
A few months after Rainbow Bridge came out, a multi-agency task force
arrested dozens of members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in
California, Oregon and Maui, including Gale, who spent the next
several months in prison. "He wasn't in for long," Hynson says. "He
was like a rabbit." But thanks in part to the Brotherhood's legendary
secrecy, the police never knew Hynson's role in the group. Once Gale
got out of prison, the two continued to sell surfboards and market
the Rainbow brand by opening a Rainbow Juice bar in La Jolla with
help from Merryweather. But the business folded after just a few
years. "We didn't shortchange anything," Merryweather says. "We got
an accounting firm and figured out we were paying people 25 cents to
eat the avocado sandwiches."
Meanwhile, Gale had become the biggest cocaine broker in California.
Hynson says he didn't know the full extent of Gale's business
dealings, but he does recall visiting his friend's house one time
when Gale suddenly remembered that a truck full of Colombian
marijuana was on its way from Florida. He also recalls that whenever
he rode in Gale's car, someone always seemed to be following them.
"Not for long, though," Hynson says. "Gale didn't stick around long
enough for anyone to chase him."
On June 2, 1982, Gale perished when the car he was driving, Hynson's
Mercedes, went off the road in Dana Point. Hynson remains convinced
someoneeither the cops or rival criminalswas chasing his friend.
The tragedy ended Rainbow Surfboards (it's recently been reincarnated
under new ownership) and left Hynson financially strapped. "If you
ever had a business project and you're wondering whatever happened to
it, it's probably because the other guy is dead," Hynson jokes.
Gale's death devastated Hynson, says Merryweather. "I wasn't with him
at the time, but people told me they'd never seen Michael take
anything so bad. He just really went sideways."
Hynson spent the next two decades broke, strung out on coke and
crystal methamphetamine, bouncing between jail and sleeping in alleys
and garages in San Diego. "I got tripped up on my probation, you
see," he says, his voice trailing off as it often does when he
attempts to make sense out of what happened to his life. "You know,
it just snowballed. I hit rock-bottom, and then stayed there for a while."
Hynson isn't exactly sure how he finally managed to pull himself out
of the downward spiral, although he credits ex-wife Merryweather and
current girlfriend Carol Hannigan with being "angels" in his life.
"It's just been a gradual process of coming back to reality, and I
haven't stopped since," he says. "One day, I realized I had a
driver's license with my own address and a telephone number. I even
had a bank account. That's when I realized I was back in society again."
Thanks to the booming market for American-designed surfboards in
Japan, Hynson is doing brisk business there. "There's really no money
in surfboards," he says. "But thank God for the Japanese." Meanwhile,
Hynson hopes to sell the first 1,000 signed copies of his book for
$350 each, which would raise enough cash to print many thousands of
additional copies. Eventually, he wants to help publish art books by
local artists such as Lance Jost and Bill Ogden, whom he's known
since his Laguna Beach days. "The more books we sell, the more the
price goes down," he says. "I don't have any money right now, but I'm
taking every cent I have, and we are just going to snowball this
thing. If I can just get some juice, I'm going to have some fun."
--
Nick Schou's book Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, is
scheduled for release in March 2010 by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press.
.
