This profile on Johnny Fain, by New Yorker staff writer and novelist William Murray, ran in the 1966 Feb-March issue of Venture, a short-lived high-end travel magazine. This version has been slightly edited. Fain is described as being 21, but was either 22 or 23 when the article was published.

John Burford Fain IV wakes up in the morning to the sound of surf breaking under his windows. He has heard this sound almost every day of his life, and he knows it so well that he can tell at once, without having to look, exactly what the waves are doing out there, just beyond the sun deck of the small two-bedroom apartment he shares with his mother on the Southern California shoreline. If the omens are good, he’ll get up quickly, put on a pair of shorts, gulp down a bowl of chili, pick up his surfboard and head for the water. If the omens are poor, he may simply roll over and go back to sleep. Most of the time Fain has no place to go but the beach, and nothing to do but cultivate what he and his friends call the beach look. At the age of twenty-one, he’s a man on a permanent vacation, living to the full an existence some people dream of but seldom achieve until they’re too old to enjoy it. And in his particular world, Johnny Fain is more the rule than the exception, only one among the thousands who live the beach life all year round.

Fain has certainly achieved the beach look. He has long blond hair, almond-shaped blue eyes, a great many freckles and an impish grin that reveals even, white teeth. True, his hair is bleached and fluffy from sun and water, his eyeballs are sometimes red and his eyelids caked from too much salt, and his lips tend to swell from the sun and have to be constantly basted in protective salves. But these drawbacks, too, are all part of the look, as intrinsic to it as the small hard bumps that are visible just below his knees. The bumps are caused by the constant pressure of kneeling on a surfboard hour after hour, day after day, month after month, while paddling out to where the waves are breaking. Hawaiians and Australians, who paddle out through the breakers lying on their stomachs, don’t have these so-called surf bumps, but no one frequenting a California beach would want to be without them; the idea, after all, is to look the part as well as play it.

Actually, Johnny Fain wouldn’t have to do much of either to qualify for admiration in his set. Despite the fact that he’s only slightly over five feet six inches tall and weighs about a hundred and thirty pounds, Fain is a very big man on his home ground, which is any one of about a dozen surfing beaches in the Bay Area of greater Los Angeles. He is one of the best all-around surfers in the world, and being a good surfer is the most accepted way to belong on the beach. When he appears anywhere between Zuma and Laguna, dressed in his brightly colored bathing trunks and holding a nine-foot surfboard made of fiberglass, high-density polyurethane foam and balsa wood, people sit up and pay attention.

“Guys like Johnny Fain had the water before we even knew what it was," an awed sixteen-year-old commented one day. “You got to respect that. When I see Fain and Mike Doyle and Lance Carson and Butch Linden and these other real wave riders going out there, I sit down, man. They’re all guts up, these guys, whether they’re riding big waves or hotdogging nine-inchers, and I’m out here to learn.”

Fain’s favorite beach is Malibu, a few miles up the coast from Santa Monica. He grew up in that area, and the particular section of public beach reserved exclusively for surfers is a few minutes' drive from his house. At first look it doesn’t seem impressive—just a couple of hundred yards of sand bounded on the south by the privately-owned Malibu Pier and on the north by the Malibu Colony, a cluster of large waterfront homes that once belonged to movie celebrities but now contain families with broods of small children. But Malibu provides, with its curving shoreline and westernmost tip, where the waves start to break and roll in diagonally toward the pier, just about the finest surfing in the whole Bay Area. And while Johnny Fain has formidable rivals wherever the wave riders are, at Malibu, according to his admirers, he is hard to touch.

On a recent fine Saturday morning there, with a good four-foot swell running and no wind, leaving the sort of glassy surface all wave riders long for, Fain put in one of his typical appearances. The water was already crowded with surfers and more were arriving on the beach every minute, but he seemed in no hurry. He propped his board against the rusty wire fence that separates the public beach from private property and the coastal highway, then sat down on the sand near some friends and began rubbing cream on his face. He ignored most of the people around him, especially the kooks and ho-daddies—eager-eyed groups of young surfing neophytes who come to the beaches in packs—and the Valley Cowboys, a term broadly applied to anyone who happens not to live within five miles of the ocean. Fain and his friends feel these people have no business on a surfing beach; they are there only because surfing has become a teenage craze, and the least they could do is stay away until they’ve mastered the rudiments of the sport. “They mess it up for everybody else,” he says. “Sometimes the blood flows like wine out there. It’s a bad scene.”

Fain occasionally acknowledged the greetings of established veterans on their way to and from the water, but most of the time he talked only to two older men named Dino and Dolphie. They are both in their thirties, and while neither is an especially good surfer, they are accepted by Fain because they’re commendably cool and have other qualifications: Dino is a Hollywood hairdresser with access to some of the better movie parties; Dolphie, who dabbles in real estate, has lived the beach life for years and is considered a first-rate volleyball player. Both enjoy a reputation as conversationalists.

“So where have you been, John?” Dino said.

“Man, it’s been a time,” Dino said,

“Like you haven’t been in view, man,” said Dolphie.

“I just finished up another movie,” Fain said. “They had me going there for two weeks.”

“That’s a gas,” Dino said. “What do they pay you for them rotten surf movies?"

“How many you been in, man?" Dolphie asked. “Seems like every time I look up you’re bouncing around some screen behind Frankie Avalon. What’s this one all about?”

“Like the others,” Fain said. “Frankie, Annette Funicello and all the gang. They pay me three-fifty a week and expenses.”

“This one’ll gross three million,” Fain said. “They pay us the Guild minimum.”

“What do you want, man, gold?” Dino said.

"It’s better than working, man,” said Dolphie. “Like you make a few hundred bucks for doing what comes naturally, right?”

“You surf, you bounce around, you ball a few chicks, you hoot it up and they hand you a few dollars,” Dino said.

“So don’t knock it, man,” said Dolphie.

“Who’s knocking it?” Fain said. “You asked me and I told you.”

For the next half hour, as they lounged on the warm sand, the conversation ranged from the stock market to motorcycles, girls, skiing, parties, and the latest movies. After a while, Fain stood up and studied the ocean. It was evident he didn’t like what he saw. There were at least a couple of hundred people already in the water, swooping in toward the beach in clusters, bumping into each other, riding up over the backs of each other's boards, tumbling headlong into the foam or toppling backward behind the curl of the wave, thus committing the cardinal surfing sin of leaving a dangerous loose board to find its own way to shore. At the same time, other surfers were fighting their way out, kneeling on their boards and paddling through the breakers, hoping not to be run down by the mass of humanity hurtling at thirty miles an hour toward the beach. “We’d better get out there before these kooks mess it up completely," Fain said.

He and Dino tucked their boards under their arms and walked toward the tip of the crescent-shaped beach, where the breakers start to roll in toward the pier. Only the best surfers pick up the waves that far out, where the swell is bigger and harder to handle, but where there is the advantage of not having to risk your life simply to get into the water. Dolphie and a couple of envious-looking ho-daddies tagged along to watch.

Fain and Dino paddled out together on their knees, keeping the noses of their boards firmly planted into the incoming surf and riding safely through the foam. When they got out to where the waves were breaking, they swung their boards around and straddled them, waiting for the right moment to take off. Waves usually run in sets of four to nine, and between sets the surfers sit on their boards, chatting with each other and jockeying for position.

The first wave of a new set started to break, and Dino took off on it. He lay down on the board, paddled hard, then stood up just below the curl of the wave, swung his board to the right, crouched, arms outstretched, and swooped in toward shore. “That wave is tubing and he’s going to get locked in,” Dolphie said grimly. Sure enough, Dino soon disappeared in a shower of foam. “Boy, he really got blasted,” one of the ho-daddies said.

Moments later, Fain took off. He began the same way, stretched out full length on the board, arms paddling hard, then, as the waves began to form, he stood up, picked up speed, swung the board quickly to his right and began his ride. He had the wave completely in control. As he glided diagonally in toward the beach, he began performing the maneuvers known as hotdogging: climbing up to the top of the wave and dropping back down, running up to the tip of the board and dangling his toes over the nose (this is called “hanging ten”), performing the lightning-fast turns from left to right and back again that are his specialty. As he neared the shore, his freedom of action became seriously impeded by the presence of so many other surfers, but he seemed to have little trouble swooping in and out and around them, much as a weaver might thread a loom, and eventually he came to rest safely in a few inches of water at the edge of the beach.

Dolphie turned to look at him contemptuously. “That’s what it’s all about, man,” he said coldly. “Like what else is there?"

Johnny Fain has been in the water since, at the age of four, he first began to lug a canvas surf mat into the waves; he can’t remember a time when the ocean did not play a part in his life. He was born in Malibu and brought up in the Colony, where the houses squat only a few feet from the water’s edge; when he came home from school, more often than not he dashed right out into the surf. He loved all kinds of sports, but the water was the only place where his size did not put him at a disadvantage. And he was fearless.

One day when he was ten years old, he walked down to the surfing beach to see what was going on. “It was nothing like today,” he recalls. “Only a few people anywhere went in for it, but I saw a man that afternoon jump from his own board to the back of another man’s board, and then I watched them ride tandem all the way into shore together. The excitement and the freedom of it hit me right away. It was a drama and I couldn’t wait to get into it.”

Fain went at it more frantically than he should have. “I had a six-and-a-half-foot board made for me by Dale Velzy, one of the real oldtimers and a great surfer himself," he remembers. "I weighed about ninety-eight pounds. I had no idea what the ocean could do to me, and it almost cost me my life several times.”

He earned himself the usual surfer’s wounds, a few broken bones and lots of stitches, but it never occurred to him to give up surfing. Then one gloomy afternoon he missed the first wave of a huge set of rollers, lost his board and, gasping for air, found himself trapped between the breakers and a strong undertow. “I saw the horizon move like mountains,” he recalls. “I kept diving under waves and coming up to find bigger ones. I got panicky and began swallowing water. Four people had to come out to rescue me, and that’s when I learned the fear of the ocean.”

Fain had additional fears to master, mostly the result of others’ carelessness. Once a loose board cracked his forehead open and almost cost him an eye. The progress he made was slow, the frustrations many. For a year he quit entirely and took up tennis. “But the pounding of the surf was too much for me,” he recalls. “I could hear it, no matter whose court I was playing on. I had to get back to it.”

Finally, it all began to come more easily; what had once seemed impossible became attainable. Soon he was doing things on his board that attracted attention. When surfing began to be really popular, in the late fifties, he was already established and had begun earning laurels in local contests. Then, in 1959, while still a junior in high school, he went to Hawaii for the International Surfing Championships, the Wimbledon of surfing, and reached the finals. He has six Oscar-like gold figurines, all surfing trophies, that attest to his standing.

“My turns are supposed to be the fastest in surfing,” Fain says of his technique. "I have the most radical style, but it's in proportion, always in adjustment to the wave. My left-go-rights are sometimes so critical that people are sure I’m going into the soup, but I always come out and ride the face of the wave with the soup breaking in back of me. Once in a while, for movies or a photo layout, I’ll do a handstand, which nobody else can do. And my nose-riding is compared with the best.”

Surfing has opened all the doors to the good life for Johnny Fain, but keeping them open hasn’t been easy. This is because the sport is and always has been tremendously competitive. During all the years it took to master his skills, Fain was always conscious of who was ahead or behind or even with him. The king of the waves at Malibu at that time was a lean, hard, fast talker named Mickey Dora, whom a contemporary has described this way: “Mickey is one of the best. He lives a unique, nonconforming life, and people follow him like sheep. But there’s no one around like him. He’s the one.”

Dora is a few years older than Fain, but, since he was “the one,” Fain eventually had to compete with him. They competed in everything, from croquet to Ping-Pong, and Fain, much to Dora’s annoyance, won his share of victories. The day finally came when Fain could take waves away from Dora, and the competition has not diminished with the years; Dora, with his more nonchalant, graceful style on a board, remains Fain’s most formidable local rival. But there are many others; and now that surfing has become a craze, leading inevitably to the creation of a multimillion-dollar industry to feed it, it seems more than likely that Fain, Dora and the other established stars are going to have to struggle to maintain their present pecking order on the beach.

But Fain puts on a cool front. “Look, the main thing is not to get captured by brown shoes and white collars,” he says. “There has to be more to life than that, right? And who’s to say we haven’t found it?”

No one, evidently. The problem of money is minimal on the beach and, in any case, surfing itself now provides Fain, Dora and a few others with a precarious though glamorous living. Movies with a beach background have become popular with teenagers (they cost two or three hundred thousand dollars apiece to make and generally gross several million). During the past year Fain has appeared in seven of them, all with titles like “Muscle Beach Party,” or “Beach Blanket Bingo”; his most recent one is “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.” He rarely has more than one or two lines to speak, but he is much in evidence, usually doing his stuff in the surf or cavorting on the sand. “I get billed,” he explains, “and anyway, I always try to work in improvised scenes. I’m very hungry for publicity.”

This hunger is caused by the birth of a new ambition; Fain wants to become a movie star. He has been interested in the possibility ever since he saw Burt Lancaster grappling in the surf with Deborah Kerr in “From Here to Eternity,” and he recalls with pride that he once played the lead in a college production of Saroyan’s “Hello, Out There!" He doesn’t think very highly of the movies he has appeared in, but he has a feeling that they at least convey some sense of “the fast motion that’s going on today.” In any case, he is prepared to bide his time, and he keeps closely in touch with his agent. “If they won’t let me have any lines," he says, “I still can't complain too much. I’ve got to be a whimpering little dog now, until I get big.” Meanwhile, he basks in the new American 

 “My life is surfing, beach people and movies,” he explains. “That’s what it’s all about.”

On this particular Saturday, Fain surfed for several hours, until the early afternoon. When the tide began to ebb and a fresh breeze came up, making the waves less manageable, he came out of the water and said goodbye to his friends.

“Where you going, man?” Dino wanted to know. “What’s on tonight?”

“Yeah, like what’s doing?” Dolphie asked.

“I don’t know,” Fain said. “I may catch the Byrds at Ciro’s later.”

“Yeah, we may see you there,” Dolphie added. “There’s not much action elsewhere.”

Dressed only in wet trunks, Fain walked to the highway and gently slid his board into the back of his station wagon, propping the nose of the board against the front seat and allowing the tail, with its tiny, lethal keel, to protrude from the rear window. He used rolled-up towels and blankets to cushion the board against damage from jolting, packing it as lovingly as if it were a Ming porcelain. (Surfboards can cost as much as $175.) When he was fully satisfied that only a head-on collision could crack the board, Fain drove off toward Santa Monica. He stopped about a mile down the road, dashed across the highway to gulp down a fresh-fruit salad at a local health food emporium, then drove on to a private beach club. Fain is not a member of this club but he and his friends are admitted without question, possibly because they are all well known and lend the beach an air of professional distinction. The club has a volleyball court much frequented by the beach people, especially on weekends and on days when the surfing is poor.

When Fain arrived, he found a friend of his named Doug Dragon playing on the court with three other muscular types while a few watchers lounged on the warm sand, their backs against a concrete wall. Dragon is a jazz pianist who heads his own four-piece combo, and he is anxious to work, but in this era of rock ’n’ roll his services are not greatly in demand. Consequently he spends a lot of time on the beach, and though not much of a surfer, he has become a masterful volleyballer. As Fain appeared on the scene from the clubhouse, Dragon shouted, “You’re up next, John!” and bounded into the air to put away an overhand smash.

By the time the sun had begun to go down and the air had acquired a slight chill, Fain and Dragon had played nine hard-fought matches with various partners. Fain finally headed for his towel, but Dragon remained on the court, cradling the ball in his arms and bouncing lightly on the soles of his feet. “How about one last one?” he pleaded.

“I don’t want to overdo it,” Fain said, and proceeded to explain that he wanted to get up early the following morning to beat the Sunday mob to the waves. “Besides, I’m going to catch the Byrds tonight at Ciro’s,” he added. “It’s going to be the rock-out of the year.”

“What about the party?” Dragon asked.

“Man, they’re throwing a monster blast over on West Lafayette Street,” Dragon said. “There’s going to be three bands, I hear.”

“No,” Dragon said. “I want to get up early and get some volleyball in. Why don’t you come over after dinner and we’ll play a couple of games of Monopoly?”

“No, I don’t think so, Doug,” Fain said. “I’ll see you.”

At home, Fain found his mother waiting for him with a hot supper. The most important thing in her life is that she and Johnny are very close; they share everything. Johnny’s mother believes in him and is fiercely proud of his achievements. “Surfing is the sport of kings, you know,” she has been heard to say. “It began in Hawaii, and there only royalty was allowed to practice it. It wasn’t for the peasants."

After eating his only real meal of the day, Johnny took a nap. He was a little restless, so his mother came in and massaged his back until he fell asleep. An hour or so later, he got up, showered, shaved, and carefully combed his hair. He put on tennis sneakers, skintight corduroy slacks, a red-striped sports shirt and a brown leather jerkin. His mother kissed him goodnight, but she did not ask him what time he would be home. By ten o’clock he was sitting at a ringside table at Ciro’s, awash in the noise of the Byrds.

Ciro’s, located in the heart of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, used to be a gaudy, red-plush bistro, much like the Latin Quarter in New York and catering to the same touristy clientele. Today, in the year of our Lord-a-Go-Go, it has been intermittently taken over by various teenage idols. The place was full of people attired in neo-Edwardian court dress, black leather Gestapo suits and lounging pajamas, and no one in the room appeared over thirty-five.

The beach people greeted each other casually, came and went with the utmost nonchalance, sipped from each other’s drinks, sat in each other’s chairs and laps and departed frequently to bounce and jiggle opposite each other on the crowded dance floor. Conversation was out of the question whenever the Byrds were in full-throated cry, and it was only during the intermissions that anyone even attempted to socialize.

The room was full of many of the same bronzed faces seen on the beaches, and one had the distinct impression that everyone knew everyone else, an odd feeling to have in a nightclub of that size located in an urban area of some nine million souls. Dino and Dolphie, trailed by two willowy, abstracted-looking girls with pink hair, were among the first to sit down at Fain’s table.

“Man, it’s wild, isn’t it?” Dino said, picking up the nearest glass and sipping from it.

“What a sound!” said Dolphie. “They’re wild!"

“You making the blast later?” Dino asked. “I hear the Byrds are going over, too. Right from here.”

“I guess so,” Fain said, getting up to dance again. “If somebody knows where it is.”

Fain returned from the dance floor twenty minutes later with a diminutive actress in tow named Maxine Morrow, a gamine who wore her blond hair so far down over her eyes that she sometimes seemed to be peeking out at the world through a wheat field. She was dressed in a tight skirt not more than three inches above her knees and a shortened middy blouse. Max has been on the beach scene for four years—ever since, at the age of seventeen, she came West from the family home in Forest Hills, New York, to crash the movies—and is a well-known figure on the main surfing beaches, which she graces in a variety of eye-popping bikinis. She hasn’t had much luck in the movies or on television (“I’ve done a lot of independent garbage—like kooky teenagers, you know—but none of them has ever been released”), but she is absolutely certain that her break will come. Meanwhile, she has earned the respect of the many surfers she has dated, primarily because she has an aficionado’s appreciation of the beach look. “I like it here a lot better than New York,” she has said. “In New York it’s so impure; everybody’s gray and flabby. Nobody ever picks up a tennis racket or a volleyball. I mean, they’re not tan or boyish.”

Fain, naturally, is also fond of Max. “There are beach girls and town girls, and Max is definitely a beach girl," he says of her. “I mean, all these girls go to the beach, but only the beach girls are hip. They know what the wave is doing and who’s on it. The town girls go for show.” This enthusiasm for Max’s qualifications doesn’t mean that Fain considers her anything more than a casual date. “It must be nice to have a regular girl, someone you can come home to when you get put down,” he says. “But I like to flash around and play the field.” Anyway, he and Max found themselves, by pure coincidence, jerking opposite each other that night and evidently decided to allow this stroke of fate to dominate events.

Shortly after midnight the crowd began to thin out; the blast on West Lafayette Street had begun to take its toll and, like compulsive lemmings, the beach people were on the move again. The word was brought to Fain’s table by a tall, pale, emaciated young man dressed entirely in leather and with a silver pendant dangling from a chain around his neck. For the purposes of this report he will be called Pippo Festering. Pippo is twenty-three years old and earns several hundred dollars a week (which his parents invest for him) arranging and orchestrating music for various rock ’n’ roll groups. He talks incessantly and is incapable of speaking a single sentence clean enough to appear in a family magazine.

Fain, Max, Pippo, Dino and Dolphie now piled into Fain’s station wagon and headed for downtown Los Angeles. No one was quite sure exactly where the party was (or who was giving it), but from time to time, above the blasting radio, from which more rode ’n’ roll music poured forth into the night, Pippo would scream instructions.

West Lafayette Street turned out to be situated in what was once an elegant section of residential Los Angeles. It is still lined by a number of handsome old mansions, a few of which even now are inhabited. Many of them, however, have been demolished to make way for more functional buildings, and most of those that remain have been condemned. It was in one of these abandoned mansions that the party was being given, and it turned out to be easy to find because the air was alive to the throb of what Johnny Fain called “the big beat.” There were also rows of cars parked bumper to bumper up and down the street and for blocks around.

As Fain and his group approached the house on foot, the night air became alive with the muddled sounds of electric guitars, laughter, some sort of steady pounding, and a constant humming undertone, as of a massive swarm of agitated bees. Pippo skipped on ahead. “Oh, you delicious people, here I am!" he screamed and, before reaching the house, disappeared into the shrubbery. Fain and the others followed him. The idea was to avoid paying the entrance fee of two dollars, and this circuitous approach through the jungle of an adjacent lot brought the group to a lawn where a jazz combo was in full swing. A side door led into the house itself, a solid three-story Tudor structure.

Elaborate arrangements had been made to handle a good-sized crowd, and it was clear that the overall topography had been laid out by some unsung expert in party logistics. The only trouble was that it would have taken a house twice the size to accommodate comfortably the mob that now swarmed through it. The bar was so jammed that it was impossible to get a drink or even approach it; the porches were stacked three deep with nuzzlers; the social rooms resembled loaded cattle cars; two lines of distressed looking people stretched down the corridors from the restrooms; the temperature in the dancing areas had soared well into the nineties, and the only practical movement was to writhe and stomp in place. There was no possibility of sitting down, hardly room to stand, and nowhere to go, because the halls and staircases were also packed with revelers—a great sea of blank, brown, vaguely contented faces that reminded one of an emotionally spent football crowd on its way home from the big game. All the beach people were here, in the motley costumes of their particular ingroups.

“Crazy! Everybody’s here!” Max said. “Drop a bomb and you wipe out the beach scene!”

Nobody took her advice. She and Johnny Fain found a niche in a stairwell and hung on and on until shortly after 3 a.m., when two police cars, answering the telephoned complaints of residents from as far as six blocks away, disgorged four unsympathetic uniformed squares who turned off the music and broke it all up.

Fain and Max left Pippo and the others to make their own travel arrangements and drove to Max’s place. Fain had wanted to take her back with him to Malibu, but she had forgotten to feed her three miniature poodles and insisted on being delivered to the small furnished house she rents in Laurel Canyon on money from home. At 4:30 a.m. she and Johnny, having mixed cornflakes and hamburger for the dogs, were sitting side by side on her back porch, shooting at the limes on a neighbor’s tree with the .25-caliber revolver Max keeps to ward off prowlers. The pistol shots cracked over the sleeping countryside, limes spattered to the ground, and behind the young couple the sky lightened to a dull, smoggy gray.

Four hours later Johnny Fain was back in the water, bobbing out beyond the point at Malibu, straddling his board and waiting for the swell to rise. He felt clean and alert and ready for anything. By noon the sun would have burned away the early mist and the beach would again be crowded with ho-daddies and kooks and Valley Cowboys. Fain didn’t know what the day might bring, but he knew it would be something pleasant, something sweet. That’s the way it had always been and would always be. Nothing mattered but the next wave, the one that would soon be sweeping him in toward the beach, allowing him to do supremely well the one thing he had trained himself to do. In those few moments it would take him to master that wave and reach the shore, Johnny Fain would be, if not a king, at least something a good deal more than a peasant.

[Photos: Brad Barrett, Dick Graham, Ron Stoner]

"MAN ON A PERMANENT VACATION," JOHNNY FAIN PROFILE IN VENTURE MAGAZINE (1966)

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