Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

Angeles

      Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over the streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

      —John Fante, Ask the Dust (1939)

      When Hal Ashby left Ogden, he knew that being responsible for a wife and child at such a young age was not what he wanted from life. He did not know what he did want, but he was confident that out there, traveling and working and experiencing America, he would find it. “I feel that Americans must leave their homes,” he said later. “It is easier if you come from a small town because the thrust of life is outward. I feel, for example, it is harder to leave the Bronx because it is more complex than a small town.”¹ In order to know oneself, Ashby felt, it is necessary to know one's country.

      For a few months, Ashby drifted around, doing jobs here and there, and reading whenever he could. It was all part of the process of finding himself. Every job he did, every book he read, every town he passed through, he hoped would bring him closer to discovering what had made him know that a town like Ogden was too small to hold him. He did, however, return to Ogden every so often and would see Lavon and Leigh occasionally.

      Not long after splitting up with Lavon, Ashby started dating Janice Austin, another girl he had been to high school with. He saw her on his visits to Ogden, and, according to Janice, she was very nearly the second Mrs. Hal Ashby: “He asked me to marry him, and he had bought me an engagement ring. He didn't have the money for it, and he charged it to his mom. His mom was so mad at him she made him take it back. She didn't like me very well.”²

      Eileen was understandably resistant to the idea of Ashby marrying again and told Janice that she would never accept anyone but Lavon as her daughter-in-law. Janice's father, who worked with Ardith at the waterworks, was also against the marriage, particularly when he learned that the couple's grandmothers were sisters, making them second cousins. Though marriage was no longer in the cards, Hal and Janice kept up a long-distance relationship, and Janice recalls that Ashby would write to her “every other day.”³

      Around March 1948, Lavon filed for divorce in order to be eligible for child-support payments from Ashby. The divorce came through on May 10, 1948, with a period of six months before a final judgment of divorce would be granted. Lavon was naturally granted full custody of Leigh, and Ashby was required to pay $25 every two weeks to help pay for her care. He sent an initial payment of $50, but after that nothing followed.

      Fifty dollars a month was a substantial sum, and Janice recalls that she was “always getting after him to pay alimony to Lavon for the little girl, but he was having problems because he didn't have too many jobs, and he never owned a car.”⁴ One suspects, however, that Ashby ultimately ceased payments, not just because of financial restraints, but because of an inherent weakness in himself. He was adored by the overwhelming majority of people who got to know him, and yet, particularly in the first half of his life, he managed to alienate and hurt the very people he claimed to love the most, many of whom became greatly embittered as a result. Starting with the death of his father, Ashby's life was defined by an insistent refusal to deal with traumatic incidents and emotional conflicts. It seems he believed that if he pushed them to the very back of his mind, he could make them un happen. “In life, Hal was the consummate editor,” says Ashby's friend, Haskell Wexler, “and some people ended up on the cutting room floor.”⁵

      By the summer of 1948, he found himself in Evanston, Wyoming, where he was joined by Max Grow, an old friend from Ogden. Ashby and Lavon had double dated with Grow and his future wife, who was also called Janice. Grow, who was a year older than Ashby, had hung out with him after getting out of the navy in the fall of 1947 and remembers him as enjoyable company. They had gone to dances together and once drove to Lagoon, about twenty miles south of Ogden, to see the jazz pianist and bandleader Stan Kenton. Ashby had made a special point of befriending Kenton and his band for the night, not only because he was passionate about jazz, but also because they represented an artistic lifestyle that, whether or not he was aware of it, he wanted to be a part of.

      In Evanston, Ashby and Grow worked on a railroad construction job. From Weber Canyon, Utah, all the way up into Wyoming, crews of men had been refacing the old railroad bridges, and the pair joined them in Wyoming. The work was grueling and repetitive and involved chipping off the old, “rotten” concrete on the bridges and then pouring in fresh concrete.

      In September, the month of Ashby's nineteenth birthday—and his daughter's first birthday—as he and Grow chipped away at the old concrete, his senses told him it was time to move on. As summer turned to fall, the cold came in early. The winter of 1948–1949 was one of the harshest that the American West ever endured, with many states experiencing record low temperatures. “When we were up on the scaffold, it started to snow,” Grow recalls. “He kept saying, ‘Let's go down to Los Angeles; I've got an uncle there.'”⁶

      Ashby later recounted the moment he decided to go to California: “We went down to get a drink from the water barrel at 10 A.M., and we had to break the ice to get through. And I said, ‘I don't know about you, but I'm going to California—livin' off the fruit of the land.'” Grow reached his breaking point soon after, when he smashed his thumb while working. After waiting three days for their pay, the pair hitchhiked south into the sunshine. “I wouldn't take any work clothes with me either,” Ashby recalled. “I brought slacks and a sports jacket and resolved that these would do fine for any job I was willing to undertake.”⁷

      Ashby and Grow hitchhiked back down into Utah, refusing to squander their money on such things as lodgings. “Outside Provo, Utah, I slept all night by the side of the road,” Ashby subsequently recalled. “The next day a deer hunter, the deer tied to the fender, gave me a ride all the way to L.A.”⁸ (Later, seemingly in reference to this journey, he said, “I don't own any guns and I never have.…It wasn't until I saw some guys kill a deer that I decided it wasn't for me.”)⁹

      Six hundred miles later, the hunter dropped Ashby and Grow at the intersection of Vermont Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard on the northeast side of Los Angeles. No doubt excited to have arrived, they were brought down to earth with a bump when they discovered that Ashby's uncle—his father's half brother, William Ashby, with whom they had been planning to stay—had died two years earlier. They quickly went from being men setting out to make their fortune in the city by the sea to boys with nowhere to stay in a huge, sprawling metropolis that neither had ever been to before. They had what was left of their $40 paychecks from Evanston and nothing else.

      The money seemed to disappear with alarming speed. As Ashby told it years afterward, he was trying to live off onion sandwiches but reached a point where his funds were so depleted that he bought a Powerhouse candy bar that he made last for three days. With his final dime he called his mother collect and said, “Your little boy's in California starving.”¹⁰

      Eileen responded, “Well, I never told you to go to California: you're a bright boy; I'm sure you'll think of something.”¹¹

      Looking back on the incident, Ashby was grateful that his mother had forced him to face the repercussions of his actions. At the time, however, he was desperate and continued to solicit her help, this time in writing:

      Dear Mom,

      Well here is your little lost boy writing to you at last. I havent [sic] got a job yet, and I'm broke flat, but I guess everything will work out okay. I just wrote you to tell you I'm okay and to give you my address in case anything comes up. My address is

      Hal Ashby

      c/o Hi Ho Inn

      2601 W. 6th St.

      L.A., S. Cal

      Well Mom, I can't think of anything to tell you, except the climate is certainly wonderful here. I'm read [sic] of my cold at least. I sure hope I can get a job of some kind, cause I've decided to make So. Cal. my home for life. That is if I live long enough and don't starve to death.

      Well Bye Bye for now Mom, and remember I always love you.

      Your