Ben Marcus Rules

After 85 surf and sun and travel and ski and success and hard-working, family-filled, successful-single-mother, Bedouin-bon-vivant adventurous years on earth, Janet Macpherson has moved on to the Surfer Stomp in the sky.

Raised a Catholic, exposed to other spiritualities from Agnosticism to Zoroastrianism and nurtured under Tom Blake’s “Open Church of the Sky,” it’s hard to know what Janet’s afterlife will be like. But if eternity is half as good as her 85 years on earth, then in the words of her Australian husband Steven: “Half her luck, mate.”

Born in San Francisco on March 24, 1937 Janet grew up in the kinder, gentler, mid-century San Francisco you will see in movies like The Maltese Falcon and Pal Joey. A classic 20th Century Californio, like the Hawaiian surfing princess Ka’iulani, Janet was “the daughter of a double race.” Janet’s mother came from a prominent family in Mazatlan, Mexico - Paredes is the family name.  Her father Kenneth was originally from Canada but started Macpherson Leather Company in Montana - and with his brothers stitched and sewed that business into one of the largest saddle makers on the west coast. MacPherson Leather is a going concern in Burbank, Seattle and Montana.

Janet’s father died when she was 12, and she was raised by her mother. Janet swam in high school, loved the beach and was introduced to surfing by a boyfriend in the middle 1950s - a very fun time to be a surfer in California, when a Happy Few young men and women enjoyed their Secret Thrill in what surfer Miki Dora called “The Golden Age:” waves were plentiful, crowds were minimal and surfboards were evolving from light balsawood to lighter plastics. 

The mid-50s were the times memorialized in the 1957 novella and 1959 movie Gidget and Janet was one of the first female surfers on the west coast. 

Janet graduated from San Francisco’s Convent of the Sacred Heart in 1955 and her graduation present was a summer trip to the Hawaiian Islands. “I stayed in Waikiki for three months. Rented an apartment with my sister and two other sisters.” Janet said to Jamie Brisick for a profile on Janet and her son Sean in The Surfer’s Journal. “I learned to surf with the beach boys.”

Three months surfing Waikiki with the beach boys put the hook in Janet - big time. She enrolled at Santa Barbara City College in 1957 and spent many hours surfing Rincon during a time when she had to beg people to surf with her: “It was really, really lovely,” Janet said to Jamie Brisick. “I don’t like to look back, but those really were the days.”

Janet studied education at Santa Barbara City College and graduated from San Francisco State with a teaching credential. She moved to Orange County, to Laguna Beach where she became part of an influential crew of surfers/engineers/entrepreneurs/playboys that included Philip “Flippy” Hoffman - who was heir to Hoffman Fabrics and would become one of the Founding Fathers of the modern surf industry. Renny Yater and Tom Morey were both educated surfboard makers - Morey invented the Boogie Board in the 1970s and Renny Yater continues to shape boards - including a mother of pearl bedecked beauty that Janet displayed proudly in her Malibu home. Grubby Clark was another Friend of Janet who cornered the market on polyurethane foam surfboard “blanks,” made a fortune by cornering the market, then abruptly closed up shop and is now the largest private landowner in Oregon. 

It was as good as it sounds. Janet and friends would surf all over southern California, then ski bum in Alta in the winter. 

Janet moved to Malibu in 1960, a year after the movie Gidget came out and when the surfin’ sensation was rumbling: Gidget looked back on The Golden Age of California surfing in the 1950s, and effectively ended it. The novella and movie Gidget lit the fuse of surf culture in the late 1950s that exploded in the 1960s: Jan and Dean, Dick Dale, the Beach Boys and the notorious Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello “surf” movies made by American International Pictures.

Malibu is a lovely wave, but surfing it in a crowd can be frustrating and hazardous and that is why a lot of Malibu surfers travel - and Janet was one of them. “I traveled to Mexico, Hawaii,” Janet said. “I was the first woman they had ever seen surfing in Peru. At Club Waikiki. Over the years I’ve been to the Seychelles, Reunion Island, South Africa, Africa, Indonesia, the Galapagos Islands. And I have skied all over Europe.”

In 1964, Bruce Brown had had enough of the “surf music” and “waxploitation” movies created by Hollywood non-surfers to cash in on the surfin’ sensation. In 1964, Brown set out on an around the world surfing safari with two talented surfers: Mike Hynson and Robert August. Their goal was to show the civilian world what real surfers were like, and to explain to landlubbers that “real surfers don’t break into song in front of their girlfriends.” 

The Endless Summer was a big sensation that swept the nation and became the most successful documentary of any kind made up to that point. One of the surfers in the New Zealand section of Endless Summer was a local rogue named Tim Murdoch. Janet and Tim met in California and married and moved to New Zealand. Janet became the New Zealand women’s surfing champion and was chosen to represent New Zealand at the 1966 World Surfing Championships in San Diego. But she took sick and wasn’t all that interested in competition anyway.

Janet also lost interest in her marriage and New Zealand, and returned to California with a little boy named Sean, the son of Tim Murdoch. Janet doesn’t like talking about all that too much, but did say: “Sean had a lot of dads.”

Through nature and nurture, Sean Macpherson is as surf-stoked, industrious and hard working as Janet. Sean is every inch a surfer but also a hard-working, Golden Touch, hotelier/restaurateur/ entrepreneur who changed the style of Los Angeles nightlife in the 1980s, then went east to grow with Manhattan’s Meatpacking District and now is a partner in an empire of sleek, chic boutique hotels and relentlessly popular restaurants: The Jane, the Maritime, The Bowery, The Marlton, The Ludlow. And out on Long Island, the Crow’s Nest restaurant, hotel and bungalows in Montauk - the east coast Malibu.
Out of the 1980s and into the 1990s, the projects Sean believed in included LA clubs El Dorado, Good Luck Bar, Jones, Swingers, El Carmen, and Bar Marmont. Sean’s evolutionary point was The Olive, opened in 1991 with no phone number, no signage, nothing external but lots going on inside. Future star Mark Ruffalo was the doorman, letting in the likes of Madonna, Mick Jagger, Robert DeNiro, George Clooney, Jack Nicholson, and Kurt Cobain - who almost got into a fistfight with Weird Al Yankovic over his spoof of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Sean did this all from the ground up: “I never gave him a penny because he never asked me for a penny,” Janet said. “I would have if he had asked, but he never did. I thought what Sean was doing was great. I encourage him to be an entrepreneur. That’s what life is all about. It takes self confidence to be able to do that.”
Looking for new challenges, Sean began his takeover of New York City in 2001, partnering with Eric Goode on The Park restaurant in 2001, as Manhattan’s Meat Packing District was evolving from dangerous to de rigueur. Goode and MacPherson then invested tens of millions of dollars to convert the National Maritime Union Building - a merchant-marine school with tiny, round windows and tinier rooms - into The Maritime, which opened in 2003 with 124 rooms on 12 floors and stands as one of the most popular boutique hotels in New York and the world: “It was not my intent to go into business per se,” Sean said to Haute Living. “but as my projects continued to work I became more interested in opening a hotel. The Maritime came up for sale, and I became emotionally connected to the building. A lot of people responded to that architecture too, but there were many who thought it was an eyesore.”

Since 2016, Sean has been one of three partners taking on the $250,000,000 redevelopment of New York’s historic Chelsea Hotel. Sean is doing it, come Covid, lawsuits or high water.

By the 1970s, Janet was back in Malibu and showing her own business acumen. She got into real estate, which is how a great many fortunes have been made in Malibu: “I took classes and off I went,” Janet said to Jamie Brisick. “by the seat of my pants. It was a way to keep the surfing lifestyle. I manage my own properties—all here in Malibu.” 
Janet now owns several homes around Malibu, which she rents out and uses as a foundation for her surf-travel lifestyle. Any house bought in the 1970s or 1980s is now worth multiples of the original purchase price, as Malibu has evolved from a nice, quiet little beach community to one of the most desirable and expensive places to live in California, the United States and the world: Where mobile homes can cost in the millions.

While on a surf trip in 1981 with son Sean and their friend Tim Corliss, Janet met an Australian chap who was on permanent walkabout. Stephen Farbus was on a Mexico/Central American/South America surf trip and was camping on the beach at Shipwrecks when he met Janet. 

They found they shared a love for the surf, the sun, the stars and equally restless Bedouin blood, and there began a three-decade relationship: “After meeting Janet in 1981 we did not reconnect until 1990 when I once again went to Mexico,” Steven said. “this time we remained together until this day.”

Originally from Perth in West Australia, Steven grew up rough as guts working on sheep and wheat stations and is one of those chaps who can repair any machine using chewing gum and bailing wire. Steven surfed all the Australia west coast spots in the 60's/70's but after tasting the warm water of Queensland he moved to Noosa in his early 30s and didn’t look back.

Janet and Steven were married in Australia in 2003 and spent their honeymoon diving the Great Barrier Reef 40 miles outside of Port Douglas, Queensland. “Janet loved to snorkel and dive,” Steven said. 

Janet bought a house in Pavones, Costa Rica in 1996, and another in Scorpion Bay, Baja Sur, Mexico in 2002 and out of the 20th Century and into the 21st she and Stephen were bedouin surfers, moving with the seasons, flowing with the winds and the currents and the swells: “Janet and I did three trips back to Australia, she loved to surf at Noosa. We also went to Cuba and China plus full mainland Mexico and central American surf trips. Apart from Pavones, Janet loved Rio Nexpa on the mainland, we camped there several times for up to a month. We also went to the Galapagos and also to South America but did not surf on those trips although we both had surfed the same spots there years apart. We both liked the waves in Ecuador and Peru. It's funny how we both had lived and surfed in New Zealand at different times, but knew the same people. Most of my other surf trips were through the Pacific, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Tahiti and Rarotonga, the Cook islands.”

Steven Farbus remembered one of their many adventures: “In the mid 90's we did a six-day mule trip into the mountains of central Baja to see the now World Heritage rock art sites. Two mules per person with two guides. There were six of us: Janet and myself, Rick and Carol Bury and Reny and Sally Yater. Janet always joked afterwards that she was the ONLY person that could have got Renny on a mule, in the desert for six days! She loved to explore rock art both in Mexico and here in the USA. Janet was more than just a surfer.”

Janet MacPherson was what you might call a “surfisticate:” educated, sophisticated, prosperous, accomplished, hard-working, well-read, well-traveled - but a surfer to the core. 

Her Malibu home was and is a museum, when people would come to see her and Steven: a surfisticated collection of artifacts collected in decades of surf and adventure travel from Scorpion Bay to the Galapagos to China. An eye-opening collection of arrowheads and shark’s teeth collected by Janet and her equally-adventurous Australian husband Steve Farbus on their many Baja trips, right up to Chinese statues that guarded the sliding glass doors. 

Over the years Janet tangled with nature by land, sea and air: She has lost three houses to Malibu firestorms in 1993 and 2007 and as recently as 2006, she stepped on a stingray while surfing in Baja - but she shook, shook, shook it off and kept surfing.

Janet’s migratory pattern changed in 2011 when Sean married Rachelle Hruska - founder of the society website www.guestofaguest.com and now proud owner of Lingua Franca, a maker of “ a line of sustainably-sourced, fair trade luxury cashmere sweaters, all hand-stitched by women in NYC.”  Sean and Rachelle now have two rascals, Maxwell and Dashiell, so Janet would zag from Baja or Aspen all the way to New York city to see Sean and Rachelle and her two grandchildren. 

It is true that many surfers stay lucid well into their 80s and 90s, fouling off Alzheimers and Dementia and other degenerative brain afflictions, because surfers spend most of their lives bathing their brains in endorphins and adrenaline and the liqueurs of the sea. Janet began to lose memory and function - a frustrating experience for a woman who had enjoyed eight decades of healthy, strong independence: “Janet’s health - mentality wise- started to go, or started to be noticeable around 2015/2016,” Steven said. “It got rapidly worse through 2017/2018. From there a steady decline, and then the cancer diagnosis this year was the final nail. 

I feel if she had been of a more sound mind she may have been able to tell us about what she felt. Unfortunately she could not. So by the time the cancer was found, it had metastasized into many other organs. This last month was really devastating for her, and all of us, especially me. I would not want anyone to go through what we did. She was such a strong woman, I held her hand and brushed her brow as she drew her last breaths. I will miss her immensely, she can not be replaced.”

Indeed, half her luck. Hopefully Janet’s afterlife is as good as she had it in California, Hawaii and the world as a surfer girl and ski bum in the middle of the 20th Century and all along her 85 years on earth.

Janet moved on on Friday, March 5. She is survived by her husband Steven Farbus, son Sean, daughter in law Rachelle and her soon-to-be-surfisticated grandsons Max and Dash. Her sister Marie Macpherson, nieces Lisa and Kevin Cullinane, grand nieces Kristina and Rachel Cullinane, nephew Mark Wiegner and countless friends around the world - from Scorpion Bay to Bombay.