Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

Write when you get a chance.¹²

      Ashby's calculated attempts to guilt his mother into sending money hinted at such desperation that Eileen finally gave in. He was still her baby boy—or, as he put it, “little lost boy”—and he knew that she could not hold out forever. But after a period of sending him money, Eileen decided that enough was enough.

      The Hi Ho Inn was not, in fact, where he was lodging but a bar near MacArthur Park where he and Grow were regulars and had their mail sent. The two were staying in a rooming house on Fourth Avenue and Pico Boulevard, along with Herb Rose, Vern Hipwell, Ed Burton, and Dallas Fowler, a group of boys they knew from Ogden. They had come to make their fortune, seeing Los Angeles as a place where they had as good a chance as any to turn the American dream into reality.

      They all recognized that getting a job, any job, was a necessity. Fortunately, with Christmas approaching, stores needed extra help. Ashby and Grow were both hired by Bullock's department store in the downtown area, working there over the holiday season and then afterward also for the January sales.

      When Ashby and Grow left snowy, frozen Wyoming, they pictured Los Angeles as a city of sunshine and opportunity, at the center of which lay Hollywood. Janice Grow recalls that Ashby accompanied Grow to an open casting call at Maurice Kosloff Productions that they saw advertised in a newspaper. “Max was extremely good looking,” she says. “I think they thought he could be a big heartthrob star. Don't know what Hal's ideas were.”¹³

      In fact, though he later admitted that he had wanted to be in the movie business because “it seemed glamorous,”¹⁴ at the time Ashby had not yet fixed on the idea of working in Hollywood as he had never given much thought to films. He was not a child who had spent every spare moment in darkened movie houses; instead, he'd been out living life. When he went to the theater, Ashby had been more interested in serials and cowboy movies than “regular movies.” “I doubt that his [Hal's] early movie experiences had any bearing on how he began his movie career,” Jack says. “I never actually heard him say he wanted to work in the movie business when he grew up.”¹⁵

      After living together at Fourth and Pico for a year or so, Ashby, Grow, and the other Ogden boys went their separate ways. Grow moved to a single room elsewhere in the house, while Ashby ended up in a small $7-a-week room in Bunker Hill. The two friends subsequently grew apart. Two or three years later, when Grow was living in Hollywood, Ashby came round with a girlfriend and drove the three of them down to Tijuana for a day trip in his convertible. That was the last time Grow saw Ashby.

      Ashby went into the world knowing that his future lay out there but uncertain of what it would be. He ended up working as a salesman but was not cut out for the job. Though he had the charm, he was uneasy selling products he knew were inferior to people who didn't deserve to be shortchanged. He tried selling magazines, encyclopedias, brushes, and more besides but was always troubled by his conscience. “You were always doing a con, telling a lie,” he said. “I don't like telling lies.”¹⁶

      After his move to Los Angeles, Ashby had remained in contact with Janice Austin. She thought of him as her sweetheart, though Ashby may have viewed things as slightly more casual. She came down to visit him a couple of times and recalls that on one occasion he took her for a meal at a fancy nightclub where the renowned bandleader Woody Herman was playing and even got Herman to pose with them for a picture. Not long after this, Ashby stopped replying to Janice's letters. To find out why, she drove down to Los Angeles with her mother and brother. “I remember us sitting in Pershing Square while my brother went to see Hal,” she recalls. “When he came back, [I was told] Hal said he didn't want to see me. I just figured he'd met someone else.”¹⁷

      She was right, as around that time Ashby got married for the second time. Little is known about the marriage, but what is certain is that on July 25, 1949, Hal Ashby married one Maxine Marie Armstrong in Las Vegas. “[I was] married and divorced twice before I made it to twenty-one,” Ashby claimed in an article he wrote for Action magazine.¹⁸ If this is indeed true, then Ashby (whose twenty-first birthday was on September 2, 1950) cannot have been married to Maxine for much more than a year.

      After Hal and Maxine were married, Eileen asked them to come back to Ogden. Jack and Beth had moved temporarily to Portland, Oregon, and Eileen wanted help running the store, which was now an ice-cream parlor and restaurant called Ashby's Ice Cream. Hal and Maxine moved into an apartment in Ogden and helped out at the store. It seems likely that Eileen had twisted Hal's arm to get him to come back; he had, after all, claimed that Southern California was to be his home for life.

      Despite what he might have hoped he could do for Eileen, Ashby knew he could never be the dutiful son who takes over his aging mother's store. Almost inevitably, things didn't work out. Hal regretted coming back to Ogden and quarreled with Eileen. Over the years, he would repeatedly and sincerely tell her in letters how he loved her and how much her opinion meant to him, but whenever they spent prolonged periods of time together, their relationship became fraught and troubled. In the end, it was probably just a few months that Ashby and Maxine worked at the store as it quickly became obvious that it wasn't working out. The newlyweds returned to California, and Eileen sold the store soon after.

      Back in Los Angeles, Ashby's marriage to Maxine fizzled out. During their time in Ogden, Maxine had had an abortion (most likely at Ashby's request), which seems to have been the beginning of the end for them. Ashby knew what he didn't want, namely, more children, but was no nearer to finding his true direction in life. “I was a kid looking for something,” he said, “but I didn't know what. The movie business seemed like a terrific thing to get into.”¹⁹

      Though he went there only because it was free, it was the State Employment Office in Van Nuys that helped Ashby get his foot in the door. “I got my first job [in movies] through the State Employment Department,” he recalled. “Like a jerk I went down there and told them I wanted to get into motion pictures, and that woman looked at me like ‘What the hell is that?' and started going through the little index file and said, ‘Well, here's something.' So I said, ‘All right—I'm willing to start at the bottom.' ‘Well,' she said, ‘here's something at Universal with a Multilith machine. Do you know what that is?' And I said, ‘No.' So she said, ‘Do you know what a mimeograph machine is? Well, it's like a mimeograph machine. They don't particularly want experience.'”²⁰

      Ashby went to his local library to read up on the mechanics of a mimeograph (a hand-cranked copying machine) so as to be a proficient employee when he started the job a few days later. He quickly grew very comfortable at Universal, and although the job copying scripts was repetitive and undemanding, Ashby saw only opportunity around him. He says that, “like any red-blooded American,”²¹ he “looked around and said, ‘What's the best job around here?'”²² In his mind, it was a director.

      Ashby was very keen, and the kid in the ink-spotted smock from the copy department became well-known for his pleasing manner and willingness to learn. Starting at the bottom meant that almost everybody knew more than he did, so he talked to people whenever he could and began to learn about the possible routes to becoming a director. He initially considered training to be an assistant director, but he soon learned that there was a better route. The directors he spoke to kept repeating the same advice. “Get into editing,” they told him. “With editing, everything is up there on film for you to see over and over again. You can study it and ask why you like it, and why you don't.”²³

      During his time at Universal, Ashby made it his aim to learn as much as he could about editing. He befriended staff in the editing department, ran errands for them, and became their unofficial coffee boy. Editors seemed to work longer hours than everybody else, so Ashby would complete his copying and then hang out with them in the cutting rooms. He sat and watched the editors as they worked and eventually was allowed to stay on after everybody had left. By learning how to splice film together, cleaning the Moviolas and the other equipment, and even doing some tentative editing himself, he learned the basics of the trade.

      Ashby developed a feel for editing and with it a passion for the process. One night when he was out drinking in Los Angeles with Bob Ballantyne, his old friend from Ogden,