She came down to visit him a couple of times and recalls that on one occasion he took her for a meal at a fancy nightclub where the renowned bandleader Woody Herman was playing and even got Herman to pose with them for a picture. Not long after this, Ashby stopped replying to Janice's letters. To find out why, she drove down to Los Angeles with her mother and brother. “I remember us sitting in Pershing Square while my brother went to see Hal,” she recalls. “When he came back, [I was told] Hal said he didn't want to see me. I just figured he'd met someone else.”17
She was right, as around that time Ashby got married for the second time. Little is known about the marriage, but what is certain is that on July 25, 1949, Hal Ashby married one Maxine Marie Armstrong in Las Vegas. “[I was] married and divorced twice before I made it to twenty-one,” Ashby claimed in an article he wrote for Action magazine.18 If this is indeed true, then Ashby (whose twenty-first birthday was on September 2, 1950) cannot have been married to Maxine for much more than a year.
After Hal and Maxine were married, Eileen asked them to come back to Ogden. Jack and Beth had moved temporarily to Portland, Oregon, and Eileen wanted help running the store, which was now an ice-cream parlor and restaurant called Ashby's Ice Cream. Hal and Maxine moved into an apartment in Ogden and helped out at the store. It seems likely that Eileen had twisted Hal's arm to get him to come back; he had, after all, claimed that Southern California was to be his home for life.
Despite what he might have hoped he could do for Eileen, Ashby knew he could never be the dutiful son who takes over his aging mother's store. Almost inevitably, things didn't work out. Hal regretted coming back to Ogden and quarreled with Eileen. Over the years, he would repeatedly and sincerely tell her in letters how he loved her and how much her opinion meant to him, but whenever they spent prolonged periods of time together, their relationship became fraught and troubled. In the end, it was probably just a few months that Ashby and Maxine worked at the store as it quickly became obvious that it wasn't working out. The newlyweds returned to California, and Eileen sold the store soon after.
Back in Los Angeles, Ashby's marriage to Maxine fizzled out. During their time in Ogden, Maxine had had an abortion (most likely at Ashby's request), which seems to have been the beginning of the end for them. Ashby knew what he didn't want, namely, more children, but was no nearer to finding his true direction in life. “I was a kid looking for something,” he said, “but I didn't know what. The movie business seemed like a terrific thing to get into.”19
Though he went there only because it was free, it was the State Employment Office in Van Nuys that helped Ashby get his foot in the door. “I got my first job [in movies] through the State Employment Department,” he recalled. “Like a jerk I went down there and told them I wanted to get into motion pictures, and that woman looked at me like ‘What the hell is that?' and started going through the little index file and said, ‘Well, here's something.' So I said, ‘All right—I'm willing to start at the bottom.' ‘Well,' she said, ‘here's something at Universal with a Multilith machine. Do you know what that is?' And I said, ‘No.' So she said, ‘Do you know what a mimeograph machine is? Well, it's like a mimeograph machine. They don't particularly want experience.'”20
Ashby went to his local library to read up on the mechanics of a mimeograph (a hand-cranked copying machine) so as to be a proficient employee when he started the job a few days later. He quickly grew very comfortable at Universal, and although the job copying scripts was repetitive and undemanding, Ashby saw only opportunity around him. He says that, “like any red-blooded American,”21 he “looked around and said, ‘What's the best job around here?'”22 In his mind, it was a director.
Ashby was very keen, and the kid in the ink-spotted smock from the copy department became well-known for his pleasing manner and willingness to learn. Starting at the bottom meant that almost everybody knew more than he did, so he talked to people whenever he could and began to learn about the possible routes to becoming a director. He initially considered training to be an assistant director, but he soon learned that there was a better route. The directors he spoke to kept repeating the same advice. “Get into editing,” they told him. “With editing, everything is up there on film for you to see over and over again. You can study it and ask why you like it, and why you don't.”23
During his time at Universal, Ashby made it his aim to learn as much as he could about editing. He befriended staff in the editing department, ran errands for them, and became their unofficial coffee boy. Editors seemed to work longer hours than everybody else, so Ashby would complete his copying and then hang out with them in the cutting rooms. He sat and watched the editors as they worked and eventually was allowed to stay on after everybody had left. By learning how to splice film together, cleaning the Moviolas and the other equipment, and even doing some tentative editing himself, he learned the basics of the trade.
Ashby developed a feel for editing and with it a passion for the process. One night when he was out drinking in Los Angeles with Bob Ballantyne, his old friend from Ogden, Ashby insisted on taking him to the building where he worked. He excitedly told Ballantyne about editing, the art and science of it, the precision required, and the creativity it allowed. “Along with describing what film editing involved he said, ‘You know, you can even win an Oscar for film editing, if you're good enough,'” Ballantyne recalls. “My immediate thoughts were, ‘He's dreaming.' But I said, ‘Oh, really!'” Though Ashby was “wobbling from too much booze,”24 he seemed to Ballantyne more affected by his love of editing than by the alcohol.
When telling the story of Ashby's life, people often make the assumption that he progressed smoothly through the ranks from copyboy to assistant editor, to editor, to director, as if a conveyor belt was carrying him there. This misconception was reinforced by studio biographies of Ashby, something that amused and exasperated him: “It always amazes me how they compress years of pain and frustration into two sentences.”25 The truth is that the job at Universal came to an end, and it was not an easy transition from Multilith to Moviola. In order to get work as an editor, Ashby would have to join the union and serve an eight-year apprenticeship, and to even be admitted into the union, he needed a prominent editor to vouch for him. In the end, he realized he would simply have to go back to normal, everyday work. He would bide his time and wait for his opportunity to come.
Writing about the struggle to become a success in Hollywood, Sammy Davis Jr. once remarked: “I have got jobs for dozens of other people on the fringes to keep them in contact with films. The director Hal Ashby, for instance, lived at my place for a while when he was working as a third assistant in the cutting room. He made his way up to the huge success he is today—by learning his craft from the bottom.”26 Ashby wouldn't become an assistant editor until the mid-1950s, but he and Davis became friends and companions in the early part of the decade following his return from Ogden. Throughout his career, Ashby met and befriended talented people, but in many cases—that of Davis included—Ashby knew them before they were famous. In the 1950s, he was part of a tight group of bohemian friends, almost all of whom went on to achieve success in their respective fields.
Ashby was introduced to Davis by another friend, Steve Allen, the comedian, songwriter, author, and future Tonight Show creator, whom he listened to in the early days of his KNX radio show and whose comic sensibility was similar to Ashby's own. At the time, Davis was still in the Will Mastin Trio alongside his father and uncle, whom he had been performing with since he was first able to walk. Ashby arguably loved musicians and their music much more than movie stars. And despite his sheltered, small-town upbringing, he never displayed the racist attitude that was so prevalent at that time. A hippie before the word was coined, Ashby looked at the person, not the skin color, and was troubled by the unenlightened minds of most Americans. One of Ashby's girlfriends from the 1950s, Gloria Flaum, remembers his concern about “discrimination and a lot of things that were going on. Hal was pretty politically motivated. I know he read the poetry of [Carl] Sandburg, and marched on a black protest march in the South.”27
Ashby
