Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

as Wyler, working alongside him nevertheless had an effect. Years later, Ashby would recount the director telling him: “In film, 25 per cent of it is in the writing, 25 per cent of it is in the shooting, 25 per cent of it is in the editing, and the last 25 per cent is what you end up with.”²⁹

      If anything, The Diary of Anne Frank was a bigger operation than The Big Country. It was another three-hour epic, and in the Fox cutting rooms where he worked Ashby had cans of footage stacked high all around him. Sometimes it would take hours just to find one little bit of footage, but he had a superb memory for minute details in individual takes and was an invaluable help to Swink. The pair worked fourteen- or fifteen-hour days, putting editing before everything else. A secretary's memo informed the Society of Motion Picture Film Editors that “Messr.s [sic] Bob Swink and Hal Ashby missed the meeting this evening because it was necessary to work on our picture.”³⁰ Out of the nine editors employed on The Diary of Anne Frank, it was only Ashby, the most junior, who kept working alongside his boss rather than stopping to attend a union meeting.

      Ashby not only had a passion for his work but also felt a fierce loyalty to Swink. In the article “Breaking Out of the Cutting Room,” he wrote affectionately about Swink's influence on him:

      When I was lucky enough to be working with Bob, he hit me with everything from the technical aspects to a philosophy of film.

      “Once the film is in hand,” he would say, “forget about the script, throw away all of the so-called rules, and don't try and second-guess the director. Just look at the film, and let it guide you. It will turn you on all by itself, and you'll have more ideas on ways to cut it than you would ever dream possible.

      “And use your instincts! Don't be afraid of them! Rely on them! After all with the exception of a little knowledge, instincts are all we've got.

      “Also, don't be afraid of the film. You can cut it together twenty-six different ways, and if none of those works, you can always put it back into daily form, and start over.”³¹

      After The Diary of Anne Frank, Swink took Ashby with him from film to film for the rest of his apprenticeship. It meant not only a guarantee of employment but also an opportunity to observe one of the best editors around. At the start of 1959, the two were just getting started on Spartacus (1960) when, after just two weeks, producer-star Kirk Douglas fired director Anthony Mann. Swink and Ashby left the film when the new director, Stanley Kubrick, brought in his own editor, Ashby's friend Bob Lawrence.

      Mann's firing demonstrated the precarious position of directors, who were ostensibly less important than stars with inflated egos. When Ashby became a prominent director, he avoided the spotlight as much as possible and instead concentrated on his craft and helping others as he himself had been helped.

      Ashby saw at close quarters the negative effects of fame when his path crossed with the celebrated poet Robert Frost. Frost was the guest of honor at the wedding of Lelia Goldoni, star of John Cassavetes's Shadows (1959) and a friend of Mickey's. Ashby was photographed standing proudly next to the great man, but the story behind the picture is more revealing. Ashby and Mickey were fond of Frost's delicate, sensitive poetry but found that, in person, the man was irritable and unbearably arrogant. “He was an egomaniac!” Mickey recalls.³²

      Ashby had also seen a change in his friend Sammy Davis Jr. since he had risen to stardom. In the late 1950s, Ashby and Mickey would go for meals at Davis's house up in the hills. When Davis discovered Mickey was a painter, he commissioned her to paint his picture. Davis posed for Mickey, but she was interested in African art, and the tribal influences in her rendering of the Rat Packer were not to his liking. He had “an enormous ego,” Mickey said. “He wanted a Hollywood portrait, but I didn't have it in me to do that.”³³ As Davis's fame grew, he and Ashby grew apart. “One day Ashby and I were leaving the United Artists lot and Sammy stopped the car for a second,” says Ian Bernard. “Having been one of our great bosom buddies, he casually said, ‘We've got to get together sometime,' and Ashby and I both said, ‘Yeah, sure.' He'd sort of gone off to be a great star in his own mind.”³⁴

      Ashby felt that in order to develop, he had to broaden his horizons, both culturally and geographically. He wanted to be ready to direct important films with something to say. He needed to move to Europe.

      Mickey, however, was far from enthusiastic. “I was painting,” she says, “and we had this great house there up on a cliff above the ocean. As far as I was concerned we had it made, but he wanted to do this European thing.”³⁵ She would miss her friends and being surrounded by her animals, but, carried along by Ashby's excitement, she agreed to the move. They sold everything they owned, gave up the seafront house, and bid farewell to Laguna Beach.

      They went first to New York City, where they stayed with Ashby's old girlfriend Gloria and her husband. It was November 1960, and the city was covered in snow. Mickey and Gloria went out for a walk and stumbled across an apartment that they thought would be perfect for Mickey and Ashby. Mickey was much keener on the idea of moving to New York than that of changing continents, but her efforts to convince Ashby to stay were fruitless. “He wanted to go to Europe, maybe just to say he had been to Europe,” she says. “I couldn't have cared less.”³⁶

      Because he knew some film people there, Ashby chose to relocate to London. Mickey was now a sound-effects editor and had worked in television, and Ashby hoped they would both get film work through his contacts. However, they were shocked to discover on their arrival that they needed permits to work in Britain.

      In an effort to salvage the situation, they bought a Volkswagen (very alien with its right-hand drive) and headed for the Continent, hoping a change of location would bring better fortune. They had little money, but in Paris they met someone who agreed to loan them his apartment for a few weeks. At the American Express office where they picked up their mail, a charismatic young man invited them to an Algerian tearoom. Because of the current tensions between Algeria and France (the Algerians were trying to gain independence from French colonial rule), it was risky to go to such places, and Ashby feared he might be arrested in a raid by the French police. “Ashby was very cautious,” Mickey remembers. “It was the beginning of his career, and he sure didn't want to get into anything like that.” Luckily, they spent an uninterrupted afternoon drinking tea and enjoying the establishment's “relaxed” atmosphere. “They had a lot of hash,” says Mickey. “They cut open a regular cigarette and laid a chunk of hash in it, wrapped it back up and smoked it that way. Drugs kinda ran in and out of everything.”³⁷

      Ashby and Mickey next headed for Switzerland, where they met up with Ian and Judith Bernard in Zürich for Christmas. The two couples then drove through the Alps aiming for Rome, but a blizzard halted their progress, and they had to spend New Year's Eve in a little hotel in Piacenza. At dinner, they were befriended by a group of Italians who loved Americans because they had freed them from Mussolini and fascism. The two parties saw in the start of 1961 together, toasted it with optimism, and then retired for the night. The following morning, when Ashby checked out, he was told that the bill had been settled by the Italians from the night before. While the others were touched by this generosity, Ashby's pride was hurt. After a heated discussion, he stubbornly insisted they pay the bill again, much to Bernard's disgust.

      As Mickey had feared, they struggled to adapt to life in Europe. They had fit in perfectly in Laguna Beach, but here they were seen as oddballs and hippies. Even simple things like crossing the street became confusing, as the Europeans drove on the “wrong” side of the road. Driving their little Volkswagen was disorienting and particularly difficult in Rome: on one occasion Ashby was so intimidated by the Italians' reckless driving that he froze on a roundabout by the Coliseum. Bernard had to pry him from the driver's seat and take over at the wheel.

      After a few days in Rome, Ian and Judith left to go back to Laguna; Mickey enviously watched them go. As Ashby and Mickey were leaving Rome, they drove within a couple of blocks of the prison where Chet Baker was being held after a drug arrest the previous summer. The jazz icon was a friend of Mickey's, and she was desperate to see him, but Ashby refused, fearful of how the unpredictable Italian authorities might react to two strangers visiting an infamous drug