Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

on him.

      Much had changed in Ogden since his departure the previous year. The war was now over, and Jack had been back home already for six months. He had remodeled the grocery store, adding an ice-cream parlor to tailor it more to Eileen's area of expertise. Jack was also about to get married to Beth Christensen, a girl he had met in Ogden while back home for Christmas.

      Strangely, Jack was not the first Ashby boy Beth had had contact with. “A bunch of us girls had a little club that we belonged to, and we had a ‘girl ask boy' party,” Beth recalls. “I didn't have anyone I was going with, so I said to my friends, ‘Who shall I ask?' They said, ‘Ask Hal Ashby, he's a neat kid.' So I called Hal Ashby and asked him to this party—and he said no! It kinda took the wind out of my sails.”¹⁵

      Hal spent much of the summer of 1946 hanging out with Jack and Beth while his mother was working at the store. “Hal was in and out,” Beth recalls, “and he would ask me if I would mind pressing his trousers. He'd bring his clothes over to wash, and he'd bring the gang with him. They would sit around while they got their clothes cleaned, and I would make them some cookies.”¹⁶ After Jack and Beth got married, Hal took advantage of his elder brother's more upmarket lifestyle. Not only did he come round regularly to listen to Jack and Beth's record collection, but he twice borrowed Jack's Chrysler New Yorker, both times tearing the transmission out of it.

      Over the next two years, Eileen's children all began to settle into family life. Hetz got married in June 1946, and Jack and Beth followed suit that October. Ardith, who had married in 1942, had her first child, Larry, in September 1948, and a month later Guy, Jack and Beth's firstborn, made his entrance.

      Despite being only seventeen, Hal was also part of this sudden rush of familial activity. A sixteen-year-old blonde at Washington called Lavon Compton had caught his eye, and he asked a mutual friend to arrange a meeting. Lavon seemed interested, so Hal was invited round to the Compton family home, and the two started dating. It was a case of opposites attracting: Hal, the troubled teenager with a rebellious streak, fell for Lavon even though—or maybe because—she was the quintessential good girl, sweet natured, dainty, and petite.

      One day in February 1947, when they had been going out for three or four months, Hal and Lavon went to Eileen and told her that Lavon was pregnant and that they were going to get married. They were not old enough to wed legally in conservative Utah, but Nevada, famous for its quickie weddings, was not too far away. On March 1, 1947, Hal and Lavon drove the 250 miles from Ogden to Elko, Nevada, with Lavon's sister and brother-in-law in tow as their witnesses.

      The ceremony went off without a hitch, but the marriage was difficult from the beginning. On the day they eloped, Hal and Lavon left the following note for Eileen:

      Mom,

      We're sorry every thing turned out this way. But maybe some day things can be made right.

      This $10 is on the big bill we owe you. We'll pay the rest the best we can.

      We'll get our things as soon as possible.

      Try to understand.

      All our love,

      Lavon and Hal

      P.S. We both love you very much and thank you for all your help.¹⁷

      Eileen had significant reservations about the wedding but still loaned Hal and Lavon the $10 for the marriage license. However, a condition of their marriage was that Hal finish his studies back at PSNA, where there would be no further distractions. So, immediately after getting married, Hal and Lavon were separated.

      It was difficult for Lavon, who not only was apart from her new husband but also had to live at home with her disapproving parents. Like Eileen, they had frowned on the union, and they were also upset that the couple had not been married in the Salt Lake City temple like good Mormons. However, it was principally Hal that Lavon's parents objected to. Much of their dislike stemmed from the fact that he was so far from the good Mormon son-in-law they had hoped for. Conversely, Hal, as Jack put it, “had nothing good to say about good old George Compton [Lavon's father].”¹⁸

      Lavon was relieved when Hal returned to Ogden after finishing at PSNA, and they moved to a little apartment on the other side of town. The two weren't used to looking after themselves, and Hal would call Beth to ask how to cook French toast and other dishes Lavon didn't know how to make.

      Hal used his experience at the Uintah Dairy to get a job at another local dairy and, as the couple couldn't afford a car, walked to work every day. However, working at the dairy made Hal's eczema flare up, so he did not keep the job for long, and Lavon's parents became very forthcoming in expressing their opinions on Hal's conduct. “They were just always after Hal to shape up, to do this or do that,” remembers Jack. “It used to irritate Hal no end,” adds Beth, “because they were always trying to tell him to go to church.”¹⁹

      On September 19, 1947, just two weeks after Hal's eighteenth birthday, Lavon gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, whom she named Leigh after the film star Janet Leigh. The birth of his daughter changed Hal's life radically, but instead of making him more devoted to family life, it began to raise doubts in his mind. Eileen had just bought a new home, and as Hal was now unemployed, the young family moved into a small apartment attached to the house. Hal was back home again and once again dependent on his mother—except now, not only for himself, but also for Lavon and Leigh. Despite the less than ideal circumstances of the wedding, he had embarked upon married life full of optimism, but now he felt useless and frustrated and started to reconsider his current situation.

      When Lavon became pregnant, marriage was the only real option, and he did not question what he was doing because he and Lavon were in love. Yet, at the age of eighteen, suddenly he found himself married with a daughter, his freedom replaced by lifelong responsibilities. As Jack recalls, “He just wasn't ready for marriage, wasn't ready to settle down. He didn't want to be that tied down.”²⁰

      Hal had two choices: he could honor his marriage vows and stay, or he could leave. The latter option was selfish, but it would be a clean break, damage limitation. He knew that either way he would cause great pain, but he chose the path that he thought would be better for everybody in the long term.

      While it might be tempting to speculate that Ashby left Lavon and Ogden with dreams of Hollywood, in fact he simply needed to get out. Much later, when studios were repackaging his life to be more palatable and interesting to journalists, the story of his early life metamorphosed into the following:

      A native of Ogden, Utah, Ashby was born into a typical middleclass American family. His father, a hard-working tradesman, wanted young Hal to complete high school and then join him in operating a feed and grain shop, but the son had other ideas. After being graduated from Utah State University, he joined one little theatre group after another until he found one where the management would let him direct a play. Working secretly with the actors, Ashby came up with a highly-imaginative production of George Bernard Shaw's “Androcles and the Lion” which was well received by critics, but considered a calamity by his family. Reason: Ashby dressed his actors in modern clothes and set the scene on a football field, thus alienating all the influential alumni living in his home town. There was nothing to do but leave Ogden.²¹

      The claim that Hal had not only a college education but also a strong passion for drama going back to his adolescence was designed to make him fit in with other emerging directors of the time—Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Rafelson, Martin Scorsese—the so-called Movie Brats. They were all young, college-educated men whose passion for films stemmed from their very earliest days and whose efforts had been focused entirely on becoming filmmakers. But Hal was different. His interest in cinema was no greater than any other teenager's, he didn't go to Utah State (nor did his father own a feed and grain store), and his theater company experience (including the ludicrous Androcles and the Lion incident) was pure fiction.

      In early 1948, only a matter of months after Leigh's birth, Hal left everything he knew in Ogden behind—his wife and child, his mother, sister, and brothers—and set off to make a fresh start.