Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

not fully investigated is not actually so surprising: James was a highly regarded and successful Ogden man, and delving too deeply into his death would probably have caused more grief than it was worth and been considered inappropriate and disrespectful.

      The Ashbys were suffering greatly as it was. The funeral was held two days later, less than a mile from the Ashby home. It was still winter in Ogden, and snow fell as the family assembled for the service. Because of the severe bodily disfigurement, there was a closed casket and no viewing of the body. Despite his family's wishes, Jack was determined to take one final look at his father. In the swirling snow, he opened the casket and looked inside. Instead of a face, all he saw was a body with a towel wrapped around its head. “I never did see my dad…,” Jack recalls quietly.¹⁸

      The impact of James's death on his family is incalculable, but it was arguably Hal who struggled most with the loss. Because of the years he was away with Eileen in Logan and Portland and the long hours James worked at the store, Hal never properly got to know his father. The one time he discussed his father's death directly with an interviewer, he said: “I was 12 years old. My father used to make me laugh a lot. He would give me a dollar for taking the soda pop bottles to the basement of the store. But we didn't know each other. And only now, in retrospect, can I see how much pain he must have been in.”¹⁹ Losing one's father and believing that he killed himself would be incredibly tough at any age, but for it to happen at twelve, when Hal was dealing with the problems of adolescence, must have made it doubly so. He was unable to discuss it with his family, so instead he bottled up the emotion, the anger, and the feeling of injustice, only ever letting it out in uncharacteristic bursts of anger or private moments of desperation.

      On the rare occasions he talked to friends about his father, Hal apparently said that his father had arranged for Hal to meet him on the day he died and that when he came to find him, he discovered that he had committed suicide, abandoning him in the most permanent way possible. In the years that followed, Ashby struggled with issues about authority figures as well as fear of emotional closeness, abandonment, and betrayal. These personal demons, which massively affected every aspect of his personal life and business dealings, can be traced back to this incident.

      In 1973, the photographer Richard Avedon recommended to Ashby a New Yorker piece called “A Story in an Almost Classical Mode” by Harold Brodkey. A rawly honest autobiographical short story about Brodkey's teenage years in the early 1940s, which were overshadowed by his parents' illness and death, it had strong echoes of Ashby's own experiences at that time. Ashby wrote to Avedon and thanked him for “turning me on to the Harold Brodkey story in September's New Yorker. I really enjoyed it, and found it a beautiful, thoughtful and loving story.”²⁰ Ashby, however, never mentioned the parallels with his own life or the painful flashes of recognition that reading the story must have caused. Brodkey's work is a revisitation in middle age of the adolescent struggle with the impact of a parent's death, yet this is precisely what Ashby never did. At no stage—neither in his teens nor later on—did he ever delve deeply to examine and heal the scars caused by his father's death. That Hal Ashby “struggled toward growing up,…totally confused,” is really no surprise.²¹

      2

      The Artist as a Young Man

      As a rule, the teens are when a person comes closer and closer to the realities of life, and he doesn't want this to happen, but he knows, somewhere deep inside, it must and will come. The reality he dreads most is a plain, simple fact: One day, soon now, he will have to become a responsible human being. All of his life to date has been spent in the luxury of being cared for, and now he is faced with caring for himself. He is selfish by nature, and wants desperately to retain the security he has always known. He rebels against growing up with every means available.

      —Hal Ashby

      After Eileen brought the boys back to Ogden, Hal spent less time with Jack and began making friends, a luxury he had not had while they were moving around. He was charming and amiable and soon became widely liked. He started to express his personality through his appearance and was always up on the fashions of the day. His hair was perfectly cut and styled, and he wore peg trousers with a key chain. A dapper, handsome teenager, he looked very distinguished in his glasses, while his blond hair, blue eyes, and soft voice added an innocence to his mature sartorial style.

      Following his father's death, Hal was thrust into a much more responsible role. He found himself one of the owners of the Uintah Dairy, which James had left to his four children, who, accordingly, turned it over to their mother. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, all American boys aged seventeen or eighteen were expected to enlist. Jack left Ogden in March 1943 to join the U.S. Navy, leaving thirteen-year-old Hal, now a student at nearby Washington High School, to be the man of the house.

      Hal's adventurousness and exuberance had been tempered by Jack's good sense and caution, but with Jack stationed in Guam and his father gone, there was nobody but Eileen to rein Hal in. On the milk route with Jack, there had already been signs of his rebellious streak. Hal used to check the trucks to see if any of the drivers had left anything behind. When he came across a pack of cigarettes, he'd flip one out and enjoy an illicit smoke.

      Though Hal wrote Jack saying what a great time he was having in high school, the truth was that his rebelliousness stemmed from unhappiness. Many of his friends recall him dreading going home. James's death had sparked an inevitable anger and bitterness in Hal that made home life extremely difficult: he was angry at his father for leaving and at his mother because he partly blamed her, for whatever reason, for his father's suicide. Ashby's schoolmate Bob Ballantyne recalls that he referred to his parents as “that bitch” and “that son of a bitch.”¹ Ballantyne's father had left when he was eight, while another schoolmate, Bob Busico, had lost his father when he was eight, and throughout his life, Hal would latch onto friends who had also gone through their formative years without fathers.

      As a way of staying away from the house, Hal began to socialize more. Though he had many friends his own age, he also started hanging around with kids a few years older. The younger students were rarely accepted by the seniors, but Hal was easy to talk to, and if he liked people, he would show a genuine interest in them and make them feel valued. He also knew how to take a joke. “He was always making us laugh and had glasses as thick as coke bottles,” Busico remembers. “I was always saying, ‘Hal, let me borrow your glasses!' Then we wouldn't give them back and he couldn't see.”²

      Hal played basketball and football, and though he did not excel, whenever he didn't make the team, he would still be there on the bench, watching and supporting Busico and the other guys. He liked their company and enjoyed making them laugh and cheering up anybody who needed a lift. Busico was the school's star wrestler, and the crowd Ashby was socializing with was generally more sporty than academic and most interested in just having a good time.

      Though Hal had the potential to be an excellent student, school was neither important nor interesting to him, and he is remembered by his classmates as someone who did the bare minimum. He didn't even care enough about school to always attend and became too well known to the truant officer for Eileen's liking.

      Hal, along with Ballantyne and another friend, Clyde Brown, once decided to cut class and ended up running out of the school grounds pursued by their English teacher. The three hung out after school too, riding their bikes, shooting bows and arrows, and sometimes climbing the perimeter fence at night to take a dip in the school's old unheated swimming pool.

      Hal started to go missing later and later into the evening. “I used to wander at night a lot,” he once revealed in an interview, “but there were always four or five places my mother could call and find me.”³

      There was not a lot to do in a small town like Ogden, so Hal and his older friends would kill time bowling or playing pool. More often, however, they went to one another's houses, where they talked and played records. It was at this time that Hal developed a lifelong passion for music. As with anything style related, he always had his finger on the pulse, but he didn't do it to be cool; he genuinely adored music. Throughout his life, it would be a continuing joy and preoccupation, and his inspired