Brand Bethany

This girl, the publicist says, “is the most difficult interview to get besides Kobe Bryant after a bad game.”

“She’s more famous than Hilary Duff.”

“She’s the first girl to cross that 15 minutes of fame.”

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On the surf radar, she was just a perky blond blip with potential.

Months before the media swarmed her island of coconut palms and broadcast her tragedy to the mainland, she won a surf competition. The local paper’s overview of the event buried the then 13-year-old’s thoughts: “This was my first time doing this contest, but I wasn’t that nervous.”

The corporate scouts who chase action-sports talent asterisked her as one to follow, but the Hanalei, Hawaii, girl was hardly on the same star track as 11-year-old Carissa Moore, already known for beating boys in contests, or Peru’s 20-year-old Sofia Mulanovich.

At most, she was the equivalent of a high school football standout. Even if the elfin, sun-bleached surfer had eventually pulled off a long-shot triumph as women’s world champion, kudos would have come from her peers, with little money compared with men’s contest purses. If she had strolled down the street in a state where surfing means searching the Net, no one would have stopped, stared, whispered, “Is that her?”

A morning session last autumn changed the trajectory of her quasi-career as abruptly as a hard-cranked bottom turn.

On Oct. 31, the Honolulu Advertiser ran this headline: “Shark Severs Arm of Kaua’I Girl.”

Now another species began circling.

Bethany Hamilton was a Survivor.

And Survivors sell.

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Book her

It’s May now, and Cheri Hamilton is on the line, explaining why her daughter could not be (and, indeed wasn’t) interviewed for this story. Cheri’s speech is slack, like an overheated beachgoer’s. She is patient, and firm: If the family agreed to an interview now, it might jeopardize their deal with Simon & Schuster for a book, still untitled.

“They want people hungry,” she says, cheerily. To talk to anyone now “would be giving away what they’re trying to sell. Call us at the end of October and we’ll do all the media you want.”

She has to go. Bethany -- who turned 14 in February -- is meeting with her co-author. There’s homework to catch up on. Goodbye. Click.

Bethany is one in a long line of anonymous outdoors enthusiasts thrust into the limelight by a brush with nature’s temper. Members of this insta-celeb subset endure peril and become famous telling everyone how they soldiered through. The motivational speaking circuit buttresses their financial security. Their legacy is a title: “that guy who ... “

Bethany -- that girl whose arm was snapped off by a shark -- just happens to be a younger, spunkier version of Beck Weathers (that guy who survived Everest), Aron Ralston (that guy who hacked off his own arm) and, most recently, Anne Hjelle (that gal who was mauled by a mountain lion in Orange County).

They join a club inhabited by adventurers whose tales enthralled audiences a century ago. Lectures to explorers’ clubs around the country were the forebears of the morning news show circuit.

In 1891, a Times story brimming with hyperbole described Henry M. Stanley as a man who seduced danger “from savage, reptile, beast and swamp.” A trek through African forest had killed his companion. Survival transformed Stanley into “the world’s greatest explorer.”

The primal pull of such tales stems from hunter-gatherer times, when the way to conquer the wilderness was to mimic those best at navigating it, says evolutionary anthropologist Francisco Gil-White. To find a hunter worth emulating, men sometimes relied on others’ reactions -- if everyone is fawning, the thinking went, the object of admiration had something worth copying.

Channel that philosophy into an Internet-scanning, channel-flipping, multi-tasking world. If one face dominates all outlets, “you think this person deserves to be watched,” Gil-White says.

So picture Bethany Hamilton: thin, tan, long blond hair wetted by the ocean, a sunset shadowing her innocent smile. She is aspiration personified. She stared down Jaws and she’s still beaming. Maybe she’ll tell us how she persevered.

“She is an attractive person and articulate,” says Irving Rein, who co-wrote a book about crafting celebrity. “She has an archetypical look that people could relate to. She seems real, authentic.” The inevitable result: “She could be manufactured and marketed.”

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The package

Rick Bundschuh, a Kauai pastor the family handpicked to help write the Bethany book, wants to get off the line. He rambles about North Shore water babies, a subject he explored in a story for the Christian magazine Breakaway about Hawaiian bodyboarder Mike Coots, who lost his right leg at mid-calf to a tiger shark in 1997 after pummeling its head to free himself. The incident got some press. The kid’s reaction to the fanfare: Whatever; let’s surf.

Bethany’s reaction?

“I really have to go,” the author says. “I’m running out the door.”

Dial tone.

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Locals describe the Hanalei Bay area as a string of pearls, each white-sand beach community an orb of tranquillity. They describe Bethany’s father, Tom -- a waiter at a hotel -- and her mother -- a banquet waitress when she works -- as blue-collar Christians, the heads of a tightknit family.

Bethany was by all accounts a bright, happy-go-lucky teen, a little shy, with a hint of a lisp and a haughty command of a surfboard.

Then, on this last day of October, she and her best friend, Alana Blanchard, head to the beach as usual and paddle out in the early morning light. Bethany’s loosely cupped left hand is digging into the warm water and she is “making a dolphin noise,” a surfer sitting on his board nearby later reports. “Then all of a sudden it turned into a scream.”

According to Alana, Bethany coolly relays that a shark has nailed her and calmly heads for shore.

Either way, her left arm has vanished. The tiger shark tears off a mouthful of her pink, white and blue short board too, before slipping back under the water.

Alana’s dad, Holt, helps her to shore, grabs a surf leash and fashions a tourniquet. Bethany prays.

Three days later, on Nov. 3, Bethany’s big brothers, Tim and Noah, appear on “Today.” Matt Lauer listens to their account of the attack and Bethany’s resilience. His “little surf rat” sister is already back to watching “The Outsiders,” a Christian surfing video, Tim says.

Her courage captures people’s attention. That same day, CNN’s Anderson Cooper mentions Bethany after segments about Iraq and California’s wildfires. “Good Morning America” scores her doctor, David Rovinsky. Wolf Blitzer quizzes Scott “Pod” Banuelos of Rip Curl, one of the girl’s sponsors, and her brothers plug her website, bethanyhamilton.com, where visitors can donate to her fund.

The next day Bethany makes the New York Times’ front page.

“Everybody thought it was a big story.” says Charlie Cowden, an owner of Hanalei Surf Backdoor, which sponsors the local girls surf team. “It was a bit overwhelming for people around here.”

By now, dozens of papers worldwide have told Bethany’s tale. Requests for information clog Rip Curl phone lines. The hospital where Bethany is recuperating creates a publicity form. Only Hurricane Iniki has lured so many reporters to Kauai, says a family friend.

The Hamiltons hire a “kind of Hollywood” publicist who had discussed managing Bethany’s career before the accident. They figure, says oldest son Noah, 22, that retelling the story will fuel donations for a prosthetic arm -- these go for at least $45,000.

Media coverage typically sputters at this point. It did for Coots and fellow Hawaiian Hokuanu Aki, who lost his left leg to a shark in 2002.

But Bethany’s tale now takes some twists that re-energize interest.

Revelation: Tom Hamilton gives up his spot for minor surgery when doctors decide to leapfrog Bethany into the operating room.

News flash: Bethany leaves the hospital and, with her family, escapes for a week to a friend’s Anahola beach house -- an undisclosed location!

And then: Bethany reappears! Everywhere.

“Good Morning America,” “Inside Edition,” “20/20,” all on Nov. 21. “The Early Show” too, in a segment that runs before one on the 40th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

During the tumult, Matt George, a screenwriter and contributing editor for Surfer magazine, is crashing with the family to write about Bethany’s tale.

A Kauai family, he says, lent its swank estate to the Hamiltons to use when facing the media throng. Men in ties squeeze into the kitchen and nibble on catered Hawaiian pu-pus, waiting for their allotted three minutes in the living room with Bethany. TV trucks and satellite dishes swarm. George -- who is angling to write the Bethany screenplay -- describes the scene as “dispatches from Mogadishu.”

“In this living room, like a Barbara Walters set, is this little 13-year-old flaxen-haired girl playing jacks with her friend Alana -- until fingers are snapped for her to get in front of the TV,” he says. “Her purity of spirit was some sort of gem in the middle of this feeding frenzy.”

Days later, Bethany surfs again, says Noah Hamilton. Bethany, he says, asks beachgoers to put away their point-and-shoot cameras. Noah’s a photographer. Money paid to him could fund her prosthetic arm.

Thus ends month one.

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The prospects

The publicist is bellyaching, sprawled on the black couch in his Beverly Hills pad, replete with white columns, glistening pool and a ukulele. The book people “have this paranoia that Bethany is overexposed,” Roy Hofstetter says. Nearby rests a sampling of her newspaper and magazine appearances, in a stack a half-inch thick. In Hawaii, his youngest daughter, an aspiring singer, had hung out with Bethany. The overwhelmed Hamiltons asked him to intervene. So Hofstetter navigates the avalanche of offers. But all verdicts are made at Hamilton family meetings, he says. His job, he says, is to extend beyond 15 minutes the measure of fame accorded “Brand Bethany.”

If the Bethany Hamilton story sounds like an overplayed pop song, well, blame the formula.

Think Aron Ralston. For five days, his right arm was pinned under an 800-pound boulder in Utah’s Blue John Canyon. Finally he hacked off the limb below the elbow, shimmied down a cliff and wandered five miles before stumbling upon help. Now he commands $15,000 to $25,000 a speech. His upcoming “Between a Rock and a Hard Place” follows the path chiseled by other hardcover adventures, the rights to which can sell for $50,000 to $150,000 up front, publishing experts say.

Think Beck Weathers, the Dallas pathologist who was plucked off Mt. Everest by a helicopter during a vicious blizzard in 1996 that slaughtered eight other climbers. Frostbite claimed his nose, right hand and part of his left -- as he recounts in the book: “Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest.” Speaker’s fee: $20,000 to $30,000.

With the story of her shark attack gaining momentum, Bethany’s handlers renegotiate her contract with Rip Curl. Other offers blossom.

“I’m sure,” says P.J. Connell, a Rip Curl spokesman, “people were talking in her ear left and right: ‘Oh, we can do this for you.’ ... When people hear movie and book, they come running.”

Bethany’s book is scheduled to debut before the anniversary of her accident. In the works is a movie -- now of the made-for-television variety, though her publicist would like to see it on the big screen.

“Maybe a clothing line is going too far,” Noah Hamilton says. Then again, he says, maybe girls inspired by Bethany want to cop her style.

And what’s wrong with that, he wonders. As much as anything, he says, his family sees the retelling of Bethany’s inspiring tale of faith and courage as a form of missionary work.

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The backlash

The publicist is gloating. He runs his hands through his sandy mop of hair and rests them behind his head. He says Bethany has signed with World Vision International, a Christian relief and development organization that would like her to visit kids who have lost limbs to land mines in Kosovo. “They’re probably the only children in the world who don’t know who she is,” he says.

Plotlines can’t run forever.

“If you exploit a story too much, I think there’s backlash,” says Greg Rose, who teaches sports marketing at the University of Washington, Tacoma.

At the end of the year, website Beliefnet.com puts Bethany in the running with Pope John Paul II for its most inspiring person award.

“You are kidding me,” writes one respondent. “You guys glorify the wrong people. Do you know how many people there are in America who are physically challenged?”

In early January, Bethany surfs in a contest, placing fifth in her age group. Another round of interviews: Ellen DeGeneres, MTV, Oprah Winfrey -- show title: “I Survived!”

Bethany gets a prosthetic arm, but doesn’t like to wear it.

Bethany goes snowboarding.

Bethany throws out the opening day pitch for the Oakland A’s. All story catalysts.

In the midst of it all, a blog page insists: “Enough of Bethany Hamilton Already!”

Votes inch upward on a site dedicated to determining whether those in the public eye are annoying: 42% of 350-plus voters say she is.

Her surfing coach, Joi Bonaparte, says some parents on the island who had angled to promote their children grumble that Bethany’s recent accolades stem solely from the attack.

Many of those who know her say that if it were left up to Bethany she would dodge all the attention and just go surfing -- in June she’ll compete in the National Scholastic Surfing Assn. championships in San Clemente -- or stroll the beach collecting seashells.

“She’s such a nice girl,” says Rip Curl’s Banuelos. “She didn’t want to say no to anything. I don’t think her parents did either.”

Cowden, of Hanalei Surf, spotted Bethany at a surf team member’s birthday party in late May. She blended in with the other young surfers so completely that it jarred Cowden to see her stump.

“Wow,” he thought. “No paparazzi.” How ordinary. How perfect.

The Hollywood people arrive. They stand near the publicist’s black couch. He encourages them to relax and, walking to a DVD player, slips in a blue disk imprinted with the words “Bethany Hamilton.”

“I don’t want you to see this,” he tells a reporter. He ushers her out the door as an announcer’s baritone voice declares: “Her story shocked everyone. A 13-year-old girl on a surfboard ... “

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Times staff writer Ashley Powers can be reached at ashley.powers@latimes.com.

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On the Web: Find more photos of Bethany Hamilton and others who have triumphed over violent confrontations with nature and gone on to sell their tales to an eager public at latimes.com/hamilton.

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Resilience Inc.

SURVIVORS

People have always been drawn to those who overcome adversity. We hope their tales will show us how to stay alive if we’re ever shipwrecked or surrounded by corporate cutthroats.

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BECK WEATHERS: He was nearly blinded when trapped in a storm while trying to climb Everest.

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ERNEST SHACKLETON: He was stranded on Antarctica’s ice in 1915, then launched a speaking career.

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ARON RALSTON: He amputated his own arm with a pocketknife to free himself from a fallen boulder.

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ANNE HJELLE: She was attacked by a mountain lion while bicycling on a wilderness trail in Orange County.