Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

about editing, the art and science of it, the precision required, and the creativity it allowed. “Along with describing what film editing involved he said, ‘You know, you can even win an Oscar for film editing, if you're good enough,'” Ballantyne recalls. “My immediate thoughts were, ‘He's dreaming.' But I said, ‘Oh, really!'” Though Ashby was “wobbling from too much booze,”²⁴ he seemed to Ballantyne more affected by his love of editing than by the alcohol.

      When telling the story of Ashby's life, people often make the assumption that he progressed smoothly through the ranks from copyboy to assistant editor, to editor, to director, as if a conveyor belt was carrying him there. This misconception was reinforced by studio biographies of Ashby, something that amused and exasperated him: “It always amazes me how they compress years of pain and frustration into two sentences.”²⁵ The truth is that the job at Universal came to an end, and it was not an easy transition from Multilith to Moviola. In order to get work as an editor, Ashby would have to join the union and serve an eight-year apprenticeship, and to even be admitted into the union, he needed a prominent editor to vouch for him. In the end, he realized he would simply have to go back to normal, everyday work. He would bide his time and wait for his opportunity to come.

      Writing about the struggle to become a success in Hollywood, Sammy Davis Jr. once remarked: “I have got jobs for dozens of other people on the fringes to keep them in contact with films. The director Hal Ashby, for instance, lived at my place for a while when he was working as a third assistant in the cutting room. He made his way up to the huge success he is today—by learning his craft from the bottom.”²⁶ Ashby wouldn't become an assistant editor until the mid-1950s, but he and Davis became friends and companions in the early part of the decade following his return from Ogden. Throughout his career, Ashby met and befriended talented people, but in many cases—that of Davis included—Ashby knew them before they were famous. In the 1950s, he was part of a tight group of bohemian friends, almost all of whom went on to achieve success in their respective fields.

      Ashby was introduced to Davis by another friend, Steve Allen, the comedian, songwriter, author, and future Tonight Show creator, whom he listened to in the early days of his KNX radio show and whose comic sensibility was similar to Ashby's own. At the time, Davis was still in the Will Mastin Trio alongside his father and uncle, whom he had been performing with since he was first able to walk. Ashby arguably loved musicians and their music much more than movie stars. And despite his sheltered, small-town upbringing, he never displayed the racist attitude that was so prevalent at that time. A hippie before the word was coined, Ashby looked at the person, not the skin color, and was troubled by the unenlightened minds of most Americans. One of Ashby's girlfriends from the 1950s, Gloria Flaum, remembers his concern about “discrimination and a lot of things that were going on. Hal was pretty politically motivated. I know he read the poetry of [Carl] Sandburg, and marched on a black protest march in the South.”²⁷

      Ashby and Davis went on the road together, with “Billy Hal” (as Davis called Ashby) acting as a secretary-cum-manager. Davis struggled tremendously against the bigotry that Americans at the time thought was acceptable: onstage he was praised and applauded, but after the show he was treated as grossly inferior by the white audiences who had been enjoying his act only moments before. In the first volume of his autobiography, Davis wrote about repeatedly coming across signs outside hotels saying things such as “No Niggers—No Dogs” and “Everybody Welcome but the Nigger and the Jew,”²⁸ and Ashby would tell his friend Bill Box about the times he was refused entry to hotels simply because Davis, a black man, was with him. Ashby was working for Davis (though he was not with him) at the time Davis lost his eye in a horrific car accident and was one of the first by his bedside in the hospital. “He thought a great deal of Sammy,” recalled Hal's third wife, Mickey. “He was close to Sammy's family; he was like one of the family, even. They were very good friends.”²⁹

      Along with working at a button factory, several department stores, and a soda fountain (where he apparently drank more than he earned), going on the road with Davis was one of numerous jobs that he took in the 1950s just to keep the money coming in, but afterward Ashby and Sammy remained friends. During this period, Ashby met the people who would form the core of his life for the rest of the decade, the kindred spirits who would help him become the person he had always wanted to be.

      Ashby's bohemian inner circle was made up of Bill Box, an aspiring cartoonist and writer, Bill Otto, who would end up in advertising, Ian Bernard, a jazz pianist and later a writer, and John Mandel, another jazz musician. Piecing together the story of their youthful exploits is something of a challenge because, as Bernard confesses, they were all smoking too much marijuana.

      Shortly before he met Bill Box, Ashby was working as a secretary. He first worked for a businessman called John Brokaw who was rumored to own oil wells. Ashby not only took on secretarial and management duties for Brokaw but even painted the bathroom in his boss's West Hollywood apartment. Brokaw was neither a conventional nor a reliable boss, and once when he and Ashby were in Las Vegas on business, he was arrested for making what Box calls an “aggressive approach” to singer Lena Horne.³⁰ Ashby and Brokaw's partnership ended abruptly one night, when Brokaw packed up his things and left, never to be seen again.

      Ashby moved on to a job at a debt-consolidation agency in Hollywood run by a man called Ray Kline who managed two rising singers, Abbey Lincoln and Pam Garner, and didn't actually want to be in the debt-consolidation business. Neither, for that matter, did Ashby, who spent as much time as he could away from his desk, socializing with his coworkers. One of Ashby's favorite colleagues was Betty Gumm, and he would happily spend long periods sitting on the floor by her desk, cracking jokes. “Hal, we've gotta work, and all you're doing is making me laugh all day,” she used to tell him.³¹

      Through another colleague, Bill Otto (known as “Blotto,” a slang term for drunk), Ashby became friends with Bill Box. Box had been parking cars at a restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, but crippling arthritis forced him to give up the job. Ashby, Otto, and the immobilized Box ended up living together in Beverly Glen, up in the Hollywood Hills.

      While Box was housebound, he killed time by doodling and drawing cartoons inspired by jazz, one of the group's great shared passions. Box had always loved cartooning and saw the potential to turn his temporary incapacitation to his advantage. Along with a friend, Bill Kennedy, an aspiring singer whom he had met while parking cars, he started the Box Card Company in 1953, producing cards with bebop and hipster cartoons and slogans like “Keep Cool This Yule.” Though Bernard and Mandel were playing jazz regularly at that time, Box was really the first to find a path to success, arguably providing an example for the others and further fueling their ambition. Everybody in the group helped out with the company when they could, and Ashby was part of the “night crew” who wrapped cards for Box.

      While they all worked hard to reach their goals, they also had fun when they were not working. Ashby and his friends regularly went to the Coronet, a small repertory theater on La Cienega, where they watched classic Hollywood films. If they were feeling particularly flush, they would buy a good dinner, then spend the evening at Ciro's, a favorite nightclub of Hollywood's big names. Sometimes they would drive down to the Lighthouse jazz club in Hermosa Beach, and Bernard would sit in with whichever of his friends, such as West Coast luminaries Jerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, was playing that night. Ashby, Bernard, and the two Bills also regularly went to Restaurant Row on La Cienega, where there was a lounge bar with a singer every fifty yards. They frequented the Captain's Table, the Encore, the Tally Ho. “We were just exuberant youths, four or five of us out having a good time together,” remembers Bernard. “We hung out at all the bars, and I had an apartment just above La Cienega, so it was very convenient. We should have all been dead probably because we were always driving with alcohol!”³² Ashby in particular was lucky to have survived: he would drink to excess and then drive his 1949 Ford without any shock absorbers or springs.

      In addition to drinking a lot, Ashby and his friends discovered marijuana when they came to Los Angeles. Or, as Bernard puts it, they collectively “grew up on weed.” Ashby started smoking grass a year or so after he arrived in Los Angeles and continued to do so for almost forty years. (Some of his friends would blend his two names into one, calling him “Hashby.”)