"Along with Dewey Weber, Lance Carson and Mickey Dora, Johnny Fain was definitely one of the four aces of Malibu," wrote Denny Aaberg in "Johnny Fain of Malibu." "He was one of the kings. "· Summer of '61. I was a young gremmie, peering out the window of Kemp's lifeguard tower with its epic view of the beach and the point. Johnny Fain grabbed my attention. I watched him take his nine-foot red Jacobs off the barbed wire fence, tuck it under his arm, and dart down to the water's edge, his legs churning like pistons. "Johnny was a stand out - five-five, powerfully built, with white-blonde hair and faded green surf trunks that hung low on his hips. Smeared across his tanned freckled face and cracked lips was a gob of zinc oxide. The Big Names nicknamed Johnny 'The Malibu Lizard.' He was seventeen, but his boyish face made him look even younger."

"It was disappointing," Johnny said of the massive increase in numbers of boards in the lineup following the popularity of Gidget and the popularization of the foam board, "because that ended the luaus on the sand. There went all the clams. And the whole infrastructure of highways with the teeming mass of humanity traveling on them led to only one place - Malibu."

"I was seventeen at the time," Johnny said of the Summer of 1961, when the crowds were most acutely felt, "and in the Panama hat stage. This is actually what saved me from getting lost in the shuffle. If you had a certain ranking in The Pit you were allowed to wear a Panama hat and stripes on your trunks. It was like being a commander with the bars on your shoulder. The hat and the stripes were people's way of knowing you were somebody without knowing your name. Then they got to know your name real quick. Rank and file."

"Out in the water," continued Fain, "I was into slip-slides where you trim high, release the rail, drop down around the section, then put the rail back in the wave again. Actually, Mickey Dora was the innovator of this maneuver. He was using his hips in perfect gyration with the wave, like in that song, 'Hippy Hippy Shake.'

"Surfing became second nature to me. I didn't have to think about the moves any longer. They became intuitive. That's the beauty of it; that's the real high - when surfing becomes subconscious. Malibu is such an easy wave to take for granted. To surf it well, though, you have to use a lot of thought."

"The new kids weren't fortunate enough to get the attention from the elders - the way I did," Johnny Fain recalled. "I was the last one the old guard took under their wing. They had to go on with their lives. Gasoline went from twenty-five cents a gallon up to eighty cents a gallon. Things were getting expensive. People had to leave the beach and go find a job somewhere. Even Tubesteak had to go to work, helping Mickey [Munoz] with his surfboard rentals."

The Movies

The Malibu Lizard decided to continue with the movie angle. "I knew a lot og the producers and directors. I surfed with them. I didn't have to call. They called me. I was making four-hundred dollars a week and that was a lot of money in those days."

"Mickey Dora, Mike Nader, Duane King and I were part of the gang in Muscle Beach Party, Beach Blanket Bingo, How To Stuff A Wild Bikini - twelve of the beach films that American International Pictures made. They brought in Dick Dale and the Del Tones. The surf music thing was starting to happen. We were in hog heaven, getting paid for going surfing and doing bit parts. We thought it would never end."

Dora

As far as he and his mentor Mickey Dora were concerned, "We'd hang out together - he introduced me to the Hollywood and Beverly Hills party circuit. Mickey always had some little caper going. We had some wild times. It was a lot of fun."

Johnny Fain was asked about the "feud" he and Mickey Dora had going in the middle 1960s. This antagonism was a hot topic of the surf media at the time.

"Well, you see, Dora was my mentor and he was always going to be my mentor - no matter how old we got. If I edged ahead of him, even on one wave at Malibu, and the section broke in back of me and he didn't make it - oh, I'd hear about it."

"We had a sort of showdown at the '65 Malibu Invitational Surfing Contest," Fain continued. "We were in the finals and I think Mickey figured, since there were no holds barred, he would just go for it and try to take my head off. I don't know why, but every good wave that came through, Mickey happened to be in back of me. My instincts told me to just duck. As he tried to kick out on me, I felt the air whiz past my ear, the nose of the board missing my head by inches.

"Dora shoved me off waves, dropped down on top of me. My board and I were like scrambled eggs in the soup. I threw a few rocks at him from the beach. But we had the right to do this. There were no rules. We were like gladiators - the more people strewn over the rocks, the more the crowd loved it."

"The only time I really thought Mickey was serious was when he came in third in that contest and I came in second. He was furious. He hurled his trophy into a trash can and left the beach. What did these senile surf freak judges know? He figured they swindled him out of the first place. Just because he tried to decapitate Johnny Fain, they shouldn't hold it against him. It was merely a self-styled execution on his part. It really didn't matter who should have won that contest - Mickey was still the best surfer at Malibu."

Contests, Yes -- Commercialism, No

"Well, yeah," Johnny answered, when asked about his doing well in contests of the time. "-I liked contests. I just didn't like the commercialism. It was so much fun when Hoppy Swarts was running things. Kanvas by Katin was okay as a sponsor, but when you got some really big commercial people into it, like Pepsi, every wave had a dollar sign on it.

"You were out there throwing your whole being into fifteen minutes of fury. All that mattered was winning your heat and getting into the finals. It took its toll after a while. I did make it to two world contests - the one in '68 in Puerto Rico that Hemmings won and the big wave contest in Peru at Puntas Rocas."

"The most bizarre surfing contest I was ever in," Fain recalled, "was the one down in Baja at the San Miguel trailer park, during the love-in, hippy days. The contest was a combination of flower power, incense, snake charmer music and free love.

"Upon arriving at San Miguel in the back of a pickup truck, with my two mad-dog cohorts, Steve and Bob Baker, just back from Viet Nam, we came to an abrupt halt in the gravel parking lot. We were stunned by the sight of this massive circus tent pitched on the beach and the thousands of young, drug-crazed hedonists, swarming in and out of it. The event was a Mexican tourist fandango, sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of Ensenada. These well-meaning people had no idea what they were getting into."

"That night," Fain continued, "all hell broke loose. The famous Latin rock band, Santana, was jamming in the circus tent. The noise was so loud you could hear it all the way to Hussongs Bar. The beach was packed. Finally, I found a patch of sand where I could pitch my pup tent and crash. I was sunburned and exhausted from making it through the preliminary heats and into the finals to be held the next day.

"At first, I had a little problem sleeping. The cherry bombs were raining down, the circus tent was undulating to Carlos Santana's blistering guitar solos. All around me, the nude bodies of flower children were writhing in the sand. About two in the morning my body went numb. I fell asleep, only to be awakened a couple of hours later by a loud crash. I popped open my eyes. Sparks were flying, flames were leaping - a Roman candle had been launched into my tent. It was a direct hit.

"My sleeping bag was on fire and my clothes were ablaze. I was burning alive. My only chance was to get to the ocean. The air was thick with pot smoke. In the darkness, I could only feel the naked bodies beneath my bare feet. The groans and the sighs became louder with each step I took. After tripping over the last couples' heads, I rolled down the berm into the waves, sizzling like an extinguished sparkler."

"The next morning," Fain continued, "I woke to the sound of mariachi music and clawed my way into my final heat. The competition was as savage as my surroundings - Jeff Hakman, Mike Purpose, Corky Carroll. Skip Frye and I were locked in mortal combat.

"Halfway though the heat, I picked up a big set wave which tubed over me and exploded, catapulting me directly into the breakwater as I tried to shoot it past the end. The crowd was screaming. I found myself in the rocks being dashed around like an olive in a martini glass. I grabbed for my board and paddled back out - the whole nose was missing."

"Stoking for the horizon," Johnny Fain went on, "with everybody caught inside, I saw Jeff Hakman roar by me on a ten-foot wave. I went over the top of the six-wave set, swung around on the second wave, and took it. Skittering down the face, I somehow survived the steep take off and rode all the way to the beach where my friends were waiting with the other half of the board.

"Finally, during the closing ceremony, I was able to quench my surging adrenaline with a shot of tequila and a second place trophy."

Island Fain

"In the late sixties," Johnny recalled with a faraway look, "I went to Hawaii to be in the Duke Classic. I didn't do very well because I got to the North Shore only one day before the contest. You try going out your first day at Sunset when it's twelve feet and the peak is shifting. It's coming in one way, and all of a sudden it's formed the other way and you have to go underneath. By then, guys like Billy Hamilton had dropped in on you and you're staring at the reef on the inside - the one that has a giant scalpel on it.

"Mike Doyle won the Duke that year. Jeff Hakman was impressive. Reno Abellira, for his size, did incredible. He's the smallest guy I ever saw at Waimea."

"I tried to ride my Jacobs at Pipeline," Fain remembered, "but I kept spinning out on the take off. I broke a lot of boards. It got to be expensive. Surfline Hawaii didn't want to give me any more free boards. Then Takayama came out with this amazing pintail. It had all the strength of a three-stringer board - plus it had the rocker, the thinness, and the foil in the tail that allowed you to make a solid presence at Pipeline."

"The Islands were okay as long as I minded my P's and Q's," Fain said, "but sometimes I got a little excitable. I tried to be Johnny Carson on the North Shore and crack jokes that nobody understood. Bla James, Buddy Boy - they'd give me a hard time. The local boys thought I was insulting them when actually I was trying to be humorous. I was invited to all the parties - the problem was getting out alive.

"But for the most part, I had a great time on the North Shore. It wasn't crowded in those days. The locals took pretty good care of you. They knew that when they came to the mainland, we'd take care of them. Everybody reciprocated with one another."

From Surfer to Actor to Realtor

In 1997, Johnny Fain was asked by Denny Aaberg why it was he seemed to drop out of surfing after the late 1960s.

"Every year I thought the crowd at Malibu couldn't get any worse than the year before - but it did," Fain replied. "And then the sewer treatment plant in Tapia came and completely polluted the water. I didn't like surfing there anymore.

"Around '72, when I got the part of 'Shorty Shane' in Helter Skelter, I decided I wanted to become a serious actor· I got a lot of TV parts and was gaining ground. I wasn't surfing much then because most of the time I was in acting class, studying.

"I was playing a lot of tennis, too, which fit in with the movie acting. It helped to open doors. It gave me another dimension in life. I was meeting a new set of people·"

"Everything was going quite well," Fain recalled, "then something had happened that deterred my career. First of all, I thought I was going [to] get a bigger part in Big Wednesday and do a lot more of the surfing stunts than I did. Luckily, there was another opportunity coming up for me on the horizon - a movie called California Dreamin'. They gave me the lead role· I was to play a surf star· But halfway through the film, while we were on location in Pismo Beach, I had a serious accident.

"We were in the shore break, filming the climax to the movie. My co-star lost his balance, fell backwards off the tail block, and shot his board out with his foot right into my face. I was about two feet away from him. The nose got me in the cheekbone and opened me up for fifty-five stitches."

The producers tried to find another actor to take Fain's place, even while he pleaded for them to somehow keep his footage in there. "I told them they could shoot just one side of my face," explained Fain. "They said it wouldn't work because I was supposed to get the girl at the end of the movie - and the phantom of the morgue is not going to get the girl· California Dreamin' was going to be my showcase, but instead it was the end of my acting career. After that, I went into real estate and did very well."

Johnny Fain got involved in the ecological preservation of Malibu through the Surfrider Malibu Chapter. In 1992, he had a hip replacement and then fell into depression aided by drugs and alcohol. Friends helped him get out of the worst of it and, today, he's surfing again and philosophical about his history in surf:

"My surfing career has been a blessing and a curse. Unfortunately, the [prototypical Malibu] surfing lifestyle can give you a false set of values - because you think it's never going to end. You develop tunnel vision. You lose your perspective of what life's all about. Why should you care about anything else? Earthquakes - who cares? It'll cause a giant tidal wave - you're hoping for an earthquake."