Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

a film called No Place to Hide, which was shot in Manila at the end of 1954. Won over by the director-producer-writer Josef Shaftel's big plans for the film (which were based around the exotic location and stars Marsha Hunt and David Brian), Otto invested the remainder of his inheritance in the film. Shaftel's pitch must have been particularly convincing as Otto was famously tight. “Canter's was one of our favorite places to eat, and we loved to go out to eat breakfast there,” Ashby's future wife Mickey recalls, “but nine times out of ten, when the bill came [Otto] would say, ‘Oh gosh, I seem to have forgotten my wallet.…'”⁵¹ No Place to Hide would eventually be released in 1956, almost two years later, and be consigned to B-movie obscurity rather than the marquee success its makers had hoped for. Otto unfortunately lost most of his investment, but it was through his connection with Shaftel that Ashby got his chance to break into editing and start that slow rise to the top.

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      Doors Open…

      It is only with one's heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.

      —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)

      I received my reward that rainy night when you decided to hire me as the fourth assistant on The Big Country. That, as they say, is when it all really started to happen. —Hal Ashby (to Robert Swink)

      Before the box-office failure of No Place to Hide curtailed Bill Otto's relationship with Josef Shaftel, the director rushed another film into production. The Naked Hills (1956), shot with the working title The Four Seasons, was a Western, again written, directed, and produced by Shaftel, starring character actors Keenan Wynn and Jim Backus. Shooting began in the fall of 1955 at Republic, the biggest of the Poverty Row studios, and Otto brought Ashby and Bill Box along to watch.

      Determined to make the most of the opportunity, Ashby volunteered to carry cans of film and soon was hired as an assistant editor. It was a B-movie job that no doubt paid almost nothing, but it was a foot in the door. Working alongside chief editor Gene Fowler Jr. (the son of screenwriter and novelist Gene Fowler), Ashby spent every available moment in the cutting room, absorbing as much of Fowler's knowledge and expertise as he could. “We shared a house, but I barely saw Hal, he worked so hard,” Bill Box remembers. “He would be up before I was in the morning, off to work, and then at night come in, just grab a bite to eat and then go to bed because he was working into the night.”¹

      Ashby's entry into the editing world marked the start of a period when work took precedence over everything else. At the age of twenty-six, he was now entirely focused on becoming a full-fledged editor and then realizing his ultimate dream of becoming a director. Though he would marry three more times and have many love affairs, from this point on his great passion was for his work. (Ironically, The Naked Hills is about a man who, for the majority of his life, lets his hunger for success jeopardize any chance of happiness that he might have with his wife and child. At the end of the film, the aging and down-on-his-luck protagonist finally realizes that it is love, not money, that he truly wanted all along.)

      After this first editing job, Ashby applied to the Society of Motion Picture Film Editors, probably with Fowler's backing, in order to join the union. Editing was not a huge field, so the union was very careful about whom it allowed to join, but the timing was good, and Ashby was accepted. Thus he began the eight-year union-recognized apprenticeship that would allow him to work his way through the ranks.

      By the time Ashby graduated from this arduous school of editing and became a director, his cinematic contemporaries were ten years his junior, fresh-faced film school grads with no concept of the effort he spent getting where he was. Looking back on his own experiences, he discouraged aspiring young directors from taking the editorial route: “You had to lie and cheat and do everything you could just to work. Of course, I would do editing on the side, and so forth, just to be into it and doing it. It was a tremendously debilitating thing. It is the members themselves, out of that tremendous desire to protect what they consider their livelihoods. They don't get into anything creative at all in their minds, except for a handful.”²

      Ashby described his apprenticeship as a “a trip and a half,…a full-out struggle,” but it was well worth it for the education it gave him, not only in editing, but also in directing: “When film comes into a cutting room, it holds all the work and efforts of everyone involved up to that point. The staging, writing, acting, photography, sets, lighting, and sound. It is all there to be studied again and again and again, until you really know why it's good, or why it isn't. This doesn't tell you what's going on inside a director, or how he manages to get it from head to film, but it sure is a good way to observe the results, and the knowledge gained is invaluable.”³

      Around the same time he joined the editing union, Ashby entered into another kind of union. He was still dating Gloria Flaum when John Mandel introduced him to a neighbor of his in Beachwood Canyon called Maloy Bartron, or Mickey to her friends. Ashby usually went for blonde, sweet, innocent types, and Mickey had short, black hair and was cute and playful with a tough edge. However, she was Ashby's age and a bohemian too, and something undeniably clicked between them.

      Though they quickly fell in love, Ashby and Mickey's relationship may have begun on a professional basis. Mickey was a painter, but her art didn't make her much money, and she paid her bills working as a high-class Hollywood call girl. Mickey was an orphan who had been adopted by a couple who didn't understand her and whom she grew to resent, so coming to Los Angeles and not having to answer to anyone was a huge release for her. She was extremely sexually confident and had freely chosen to become a call girl because, as she would say, the job allowed her to sleep in every morning and work when she wanted. She had a telephone exchange where clients left messages for her, but she always had the option to say no. Her little black book contained only the names of high rollers, allegedly including Frank Sinatra, Desi Arnaz, and George Raft.

      One Sunday afternoon, when Mickey and Ashby and the rest of the gang were gathered together at somebody's house, the two of them went down to have a look at Ian Bernard's new MG. It was the first time they connected, and their first “episode,” as Mickey called it, was on the back seat of that very car. Mandel had suspected that they would click, and indeed Hal and Mickey quickly became a couple. Gloria, who was oblivious to the developments, was justifiably angry when she found out. According to Gloria, she and Mickey “overlapped” as she and Ashby either were still together or had only just broken up at the time. Mickey, who later became good friends with Gloria, recalls that she “went ballistic when she came home one day and found out.”⁴

      Despite having rushed into two short-lived marriages, Ashby was overcome by the intoxication of falling in love and proposed to Mickey almost immediately. He was deliberate, thoughtful, and considered in most other things, but when he fell in love, he surrendered to the feeling completely. “We had so much in common,” says Mickey. “He had his film thing, I had my painting thing, we both loved jazz, we were both ‘heads'—it all fitted in!”⁵ On August 4, 1956, the couple were married in Laguna Beach, a seaside town an hour's drive down the Pacific coast from Los Angeles. They had been together for less than a month.

      During the early stages of the marriage, the couple struggled financially: Ashby had insisted that Mickey give up her job as soon as they became “exclusive,” but he couldn't get steady editing work. He ended up getting them both jobs at the debt-consolidation agency where he had worked previously. Because he knew Ray Kline, “we just walked into the job,” Mickey remembers. “But first I had to promise not to tell people because it fell short of his own standards, and the people we knew would criticize him for it. It didn't fit into the persona that he wanted.”⁶ Fortunately, Ashby soon got a job as an assistant editor at Walt Disney Pictures, where most likely he worked on television rather than film projects.

      Early on in the marriage, Ashby and Mickey lived with Bill Otto in Laurel Canyon, up in the Hollywood Hills. As well as being a jazz aficionado and a keen reader, Otto was an avid amateur photographer and had a darkroom in the house. He and Mickey shared a mutual admiration of each other's artistic abilities: he was a great fan of her paintings, while she got