Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

of the year. Vidal, unaware that this was just a preliminary version, was upset with the results and tried to have his name taken off the film. However, when later he saw the magic Swink and Ashby had worked on the final cut, he was delighted.

      Despite the hard work he did there, the editing room was for Ashby a haven, a retreat from reality that allowed him to contemplate the world and his place in it. Though he corresponded less often when he was on a film, it was with Eileen more than anyone that he shared these ruminations, even rising at 5 A.M. to write to her before work.

      A generation and some forty-two years apart, Hal and Eileen Ashby nonetheless looked at the world in much the same way. He had inherited from her what he called “a continual questioning of life,”¹² and during this period it was almost as if he was in a second adolescence as he reassessed everything around him. His former belief that he knew all the answers was replaced with a realization: “That any conclusion I might reach should be considered an ultimate is absurd. This feeling, this knowing that I don't know all the answers, is a good feeling. It's good because it allows me to approach life with an open-mind.”¹³ He concluded: “The overall reason for life; this earth and all that goes with it…is a puzzle, but an extremely beautiful puzzle.”¹⁴

      Ashby's letters to Eileen from this period also reveal a concern for the direction in which America was going that would be expressed nationally over the course of the decade by the peace and civil rights movements. Ashby has always been personified as “the hippie director,” not only because of his appearance, but also because there was a freedom and a joy in his films coupled with a concern for the world and a will to change things for the better: “I truly enjoy the life I live. Even with its fear, frustration, and seeming madness at times there is still the joy of just being. The joy of knowing you, of seeing—seeing, not just looking at—all the beautiful things there are in this crazy world we live in. The joy of being able to have compassion for my fellow man. To have the capacity to cry because of something that has happened to some other person is truly a blessing. Life is absurd, but its very absurdity, makes it wonderful.”¹⁵

      There was also a spiritual aspect to Ashby's soul-searching; though never a Mormon, he was nevertheless religious in a loose, modern sense. When Eileen asked him when he had given up God, he responded by saying: “I don't think anyone can just give Him up. They can renounce a conception, or idea of God, but, to my way [of] belief, to renounce God would be the same as renouncing all of life.…Life is much too wonderful. To dispute it, could only be a waste of time. The only thing I get angry about is when I think: Here I've been presented with this beautiful gift called Life, and someday it's to be taken from me. I'm selfish, and I want to keep it. However, I do accept that it was given, and ‘give and take' is a rule that applies to all of Life.”¹⁶

      Perhaps because his father died when he was at such a vulnerable age, Ashby was painfully aware of the fact that life was short and that every opportunity should be taken, every moment savored. When discussing patience, in which Eileen was a great believer, he admitted: “If it costs me too much on the emotional ledger of my life, I refuse to…sit with people who have nothing in common with me just because it seems the patient thing to do. I have more important things to do with the short span of my life. Let them do what they want, but I would rather sit for an hour and communicate with a solitary leaf from a tree. To me, the leaf has more to say than some people.”¹⁷

      The beginning of 1964 was a busy time for Ashby: not only were he and Swink putting together the final cut of The Best Man, but the Ashby family was also moving. Fortunately, the distance was minimal, as they were taking the house at 9853 Easton Drive, just a few yards up the lane. It was smaller, but, in a letter to his mother, Ashby described it as “the nicest place I've lived in since I left home.”¹⁸

      Ashby finished his stint on The Best Man on the night of February 18 and began work on The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) the very next morning. “I've read most of the script,” he wrote to his mother, “and am truly enthused about it. What I have read is beautiful and moving, with a true feeling for the story of Christ. If the film is one-half as good as the script, it will end up as one of the finest films ever made.”¹⁹ George Stevens had shot hundreds of thousands of feet of film, making the editorial undertaking as epic as the film itself. When Ashby came on board, a crew of seven or eight editors had already been editing for a year, and he and Bob Swink, who had been assigned to cut the scenes from the Last Supper onward, were expected to be busy for a further six to eight months.

      However, just two weeks after he and Ashby began, Swink was poached by William Wyler to work on his new film, The Collector (1965), adapted from the John Fowles novel. It was decided that Ashby should take over from his mentor, and he suddenly became a chief editor, one of four editors working under Harold Kress, the supervising editor, tirelessly assembling a film that would run four hours and twenty minutes when released. Just halfway through cutting the Last Supper, however, Ashby received an even more enticing offer from John Calley of the Filmways production company: Tony Richardson was interested in having him edit his new picture, The Loved One, an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novella.

      On July 23, Ashby wrote a note to Stevens, telling him that he wanted to leave to become chief editor on The Loved One but that he would not do so without Stevens's permission. Stevens refused his permission, however, so Ashby said no to Calley. However, just two days later, Calley met with Ashby and asked him to begin the very next day, at a much greater salary than Stevens was paying him.

      Ashby turned up at Stevens's offices with his note of resignation and decided to tell Kress rather than Stevens that he was quitting the film. Talking privately in Kress's office, he told him: “I have to leave you.”

      “Hal,” warned Kress, “you're going to make the biggest enemy you ever had in the motion picture business.”

      Ashby, fearful of Stevens's reaction, asked, “Will you tell him? He might get mad and haul off.”

      When Kress passed on the news, Stevens responded by saying, “We just raised him from an assistant to an editor four months ago and now he's going to walk out on us?”²⁰

      Ashby had contravened union rules, and Stevens filed a grievance. More important, however, Ashby had broken his word, lured away by ambition and money. Five years later, Ashby wrote, “The George Stevens people were mad at me—I hope they still aren't.”²¹

      Though in terms of his career it made sense to quit as one of four editors working under a supervising editor to become chief editor for Richardson, Ashby felt guilty for many years. A seminar Ashby gave at the American Film Institute in 1975 was held just hours after Stevens's funeral, but because he had been immersed in his upcoming film, Bound for Glory, Ashby had missed the news of Stevens's death. Clearly shaken, he said that it might take him “ten or fifteen minutes to get into this thing.…It's a bit of a shock so if you could all just bear with me for a little bit. It's such a shock; it's the missing you know.” He went on to say, “[Stevens] certainly gave a lot to all of us, that's for sure.” Yet it was his guilt over Greatest Story (“an awful thing happened out of it”) that he lingered over, his voice trailing off as he spoke.²²

      6

      Norman

      Hal Ashby was, without doubt, the most committed editor I ever worked with. Over the course of my next three films, which I did with Hal, we would bond as close as brothers.

      —Norman Jewison

      Had Ashby known what lay ahead, he might have thought better of his decision to work on The Loved One; in a letter to Ashby, the film's creative assistant, Budd Cherry, referred to its production period as “the Great Trauma of '64.”¹

      In 1964, Tony Richardson was the hottest young director in town. Just a few months before The Loved One started shooting, his film Tom Jones (1963) had won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Richardson, from its ten nominations. However, when MGM, with whom he had a multipicture deal, refused to reward his Oscar success with an improved contract, Richardson