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 Son
Hal oxoxoxoxo
P.S. Write when you get a chance.12
Ashby's calculated attempts to guilt his mother into sending money hinted at such desperation that Eileen finally gave in. He was still her baby boy—or, as he put it, “little lost boy”—and he knew that she could not hold out forever. But after a period of sending him money, Eileen decided that enough was enough.
The Hi Ho Inn was not, in fact, where he was lodging but a bar near MacArthur Park where he and Grow were regulars and had their mail sent. The two were staying in a rooming house on Fourth Avenue and Pico Boulevard, along with Herb Rose, Vern Hipwell, Ed Burton, and Dallas Fowler, a group of boys they knew from Ogden. They had come to make their fortune, seeing Los Angeles as a place where they had as good a chance as any to turn the American dream into reality.
They all recognized that getting a job, any job, was a necessity. Fortunately, with Christmas approaching, stores needed extra help. Ashby and Grow were both hired by Bullock's department store in the downtown area, working there over the holiday season and then afterward also for the January sales.
When Ashby and Grow left snowy, frozen Wyoming, they pictured Los Angeles as a city of sunshine and opportunity, at the center of which lay Hollywood. Janice Grow recalls that Ashby accompanied Grow to an open casting call at Maurice Kosloff Productions that they saw advertised in a newspaper. “Max was extremely good looking,” she says. “I think they thought he could be a big heartthrob star. Don't know what Hal's ideas were.”13
In fact, though he later admitted that he had wanted to be in the movie business because “it seemed glamorous,”14 at the time Ashby had not yet fixed on the idea of working in Hollywood as he had never given much thought to films. He was not a child who had spent every spare moment in darkened movie houses; instead, he'd been out living life. When he went to the theater, Ashby had been more interested in serials and cowboy movies than “regular movies.” “I doubt that his [Hal's] early movie experiences had any bearing on how he began his movie career,” Jack says. “I never actually heard him say he wanted to work in the movie business when he grew up.”15
After living together at Fourth and Pico for a year or so, Ashby, Grow, and the other Ogden boys went their separate ways. Grow moved to a single room elsewhere in the house, while Ashby ended up in a small $7-a-week room in Bunker Hill. The two friends subsequently grew apart. Two or three years later, when Grow was living in Hollywood, Ashby came round with a girlfriend and drove the three of them down to Tijuana for a day trip in his convertible. That was the last time Grow saw Ashby.
Ashby went into the world knowing that his future lay out there but uncertain of what it would be. He ended up working as a salesman but was not cut out for the job. Though he had the charm, he was uneasy selling products he knew were inferior to people who didn't deserve to be shortchanged. He tried selling magazines, encyclopedias, brushes, and more besides but was always troubled by his conscience. “You were always doing a con, telling a lie,” he said. “I don't like telling lies.”16
After his move to Los Angeles, Ashby had remained in contact with Janice Austin.
