Davis called Ashby) acting as a secretary-cum-manager. Davis struggled tremendously against the bigotry that Americans at the time thought was acceptable: onstage he was praised and applauded, but after the show he was treated as grossly inferior by the white audiences who had been enjoying his act only moments before. In the first volume of his autobiography, Davis wrote about repeatedly coming across signs outside hotels saying things such as “No Niggers—No Dogs” and “Everybody Welcome but the Nigger and the Jew,”28 and Ashby would tell his friend Bill Box about the times he was refused entry to hotels simply because Davis, a black man, was with him. Ashby was working for Davis (though he was not with him) at the time Davis lost his eye in a horrific car accident and was one of the first by his bedside in the hospital. “He thought a great deal of Sammy,” recalled Hal's third wife, Mickey. “He was close to Sammy's family; he was like one of the family, even. They were very good friends.”29
Along with working at a button factory, several department stores, and a soda fountain (where he apparently drank more than he earned), going on the road with Davis was one of numerous jobs that he took in the 1950s just to keep the money coming in, but afterward Ashby and Sammy remained friends. During this period, Ashby met the people who would form the core of his life for the rest of the decade, the kindred spirits who would help him become the person he had always wanted to be.
Ashby's bohemian inner circle was made up of Bill Box, an aspiring cartoonist and writer, Bill Otto, who would end up in advertising, Ian Bernard, a jazz pianist and later a writer, and John Mandel, another jazz musician. Piecing together the story of their youthful exploits is something of a challenge because, as Bernard confesses, they were all smoking too much marijuana.
Shortly before he met Bill Box, Ashby was working as a secretary. He first worked for a businessman called John Brokaw who was rumored to own oil wells. Ashby not only took on secretarial and management duties for Brokaw but even painted the bathroom in his boss's West Hollywood apartment. Brokaw was neither a conventional nor a reliable boss, and once when he and Ashby were in Las Vegas on business, he was arrested for making what Box calls an “aggressive approach” to singer Lena Horne.30 Ashby and Brokaw's partnership ended abruptly one night, when Brokaw packed up his things and left, never to be seen again.
Ashby moved on to a job at a debt-consolidation agency in Hollywood run by a man called Ray Kline who managed two rising singers, Abbey Lincoln and Pam Garner, and didn't actually want to be in the debt-consolidation business. Neither, for that matter, did Ashby, who spent as much time as he could away from his desk, socializing with his coworkers. One of Ashby's favorite colleagues was Betty Gumm, and he would happily spend long periods sitting on the floor by her desk, cracking jokes. “Hal, we've gotta work, and all you're doing is making me laugh all day,” she used to tell him.31
Through another colleague, Bill Otto (known as “Blotto,” a slang term for drunk), Ashby became friends with Bill Box. Box had been parking cars at a restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, but crippling arthritis forced him to give up the job. Ashby, Otto, and the immobilized Box ended up living together in Beverly Glen, up in the Hollywood Hills.
While Box was housebound, he killed time by doodling and drawing cartoons inspired by jazz, one of the group's great shared passions. Box had always loved cartooning and saw the potential to turn his temporary incapacitation to his advantage. Along with a friend, Bill Kennedy, an aspiring singer whom he had met while parking cars, he started the Box Card Company in 1953, producing cards with bebop and hipster cartoons and slogans like “Keep Cool This Yule.” Though Bernard and Mandel were playing jazz regularly at that time, Box was really the first to find a path to success, arguably providing an example for the others and further fueling their ambition. Everybody in the group helped out with the company when they could, and Ashby was part of the “night crew” who wrapped cards for Box.
While they all worked hard to reach their goals, they also had fun when they were not working. Ashby and his friends regularly went to the Coronet, a small repertory theater on La Cienega, where they watched classic Hollywood films. If they were feeling particularly flush, they would buy a good dinner, then spend the evening at Ciro's, a favorite nightclub of Hollywood's big names. Sometimes they would drive down to the Lighthouse jazz club in Hermosa Beach, and Bernard would sit in with whichever of his friends, such as West Coast luminaries Jerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, was playing that night. Ashby, Bernard, and the two Bills also regularly went to Restaurant Row on La Cienega, where there was a lounge bar with a singer every fifty yards. They frequented the Captain's Table, the Encore, the Tally Ho. “We were just exuberant youths, four or five of us out having a good time together,” remembers Bernard. “We hung out at all the bars, and I had an apartment just above La Cienega, so it was very convenient. We should have all been dead probably because we were always driving with alcohol!”32 Ashby in particular was lucky to have survived: he would drink to excess and then drive his 1949 Ford without any shock absorbers or springs.
In addition to drinking a lot, Ashby and his friends discovered marijuana when they came to Los Angeles. Or, as Bernard puts it, they collectively “grew up on weed.” Ashby started smoking grass a year or so after he arrived in Los Angeles and continued to do so for almost forty years. (Some of his friends would blend his two names into one, calling him “Hashby.”) Box and Bernard quit smoking marijuana a year or so later, but Bernard confesses, “We should have been fat with all the chocolate cake we ate! In those days, Ashby and the rest of us were smoking a lot of pot, you know? Ashby was the champion: he pretty much had a joint in his hand at all times.”33 John Mandel has happy memories of the group watching the television talent show Rocket to Stardom “stoned out of our heads,”34 while Box nicknamed one of the places they lived during that period “The Happy House” because of all the pot they smoked there. Once when one of their less worldly friends came round and asked what the curious smell was, quick as a flash Ashby said, “We made some pea soup, and we burned it.”35
Bernard stresses that the marijuana was weak compared to modern standards but admits that Ashby still overindulged: “I think he smoked weed to excess. But it wasn't a negative effect that it had on him, it just meant he got sillier and sillier. And I never, in all those years, saw Hal as a depressed person or a loner.”36 Yet while Bernard did not see his darker moments, Ashby did not manage to hide them from everybody.
Ashby and his new crowd were all fans of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, whose narrator famously does not want to discuss “where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield crap.”37 Ashby did not feel like going into any David Copperfield crap either, and with his group of Ogden friends having dispersed, he was relieved to have new friends who were unaware of his unhappy past.
“None of us knew anything about his life before we met him,” Bernard recalls. “None of us knew that he'd had children, none of us knew he'd been married before—not a damn thing.”38 But Gloria started seeing the effect of Ashby's failure to deal with issues from his past: “He was very, very moody, and he could be so funny, I mean unbelievably funny. And then turn around and be every bit as moody and heavy.” Gloria dated Ashby for some time and once met his mother (“a wonderful lady”) when she came down to visit. After Eileen's stay, it became clear to her that his unexpected bouts of depression were rooted in unresolved problems from his troubled adolescence: “It was strange, because he could have you in stitches, but alone with him, he had a lot of dark moments. He'd become very, very upset and very down. It could be prompted by very little, because I don't think it was what was happening at the moment, I think it was stuff that he was carrying around about his father and his mother. I think that Hal had some deep feelings about his father's suicide and resentments about his mother, and I'm not sure exactly why, except that I'm sure it caused him a great deal of unhappiness.”39
As he grew closer to his group of friends, Ashby learned that he was not the only one with a tragic incident
