Mickey remained unwell for the duration of their trip abroad. Finally, to her great relief, Ashby agreed that it was time to head home.
While staying with one of his film friends in New York, Ashby found temporary editing work that allowed them to remain there for a few months. Mickey was instantly more at ease: every morning she would go to Grand Central Station and sit in the shadows, filling a sketchbook with drawings of travelers milling around the majestic station.
Back in Laguna, Mickey turned her sketches into paintings, and Ashby enthusiastically returned to editing. He and Swink were back at Goldwyn, cutting Phil Karlson's The Young Doctors back-to-back with Wyler's The Children's Hour (both 1961). Wyler spent quite a bit of time in the cutting room yet never cramped Swink or the other editors. This became Ashby's preferred method of working, both as an editor and as a director.
To Ashby, Wyler personified good directing. Though stylistically there are few parallels between the two, Wyler had a huge influence on how Ashby conducted himself. “I carry him around all the time when I direct,” he said later, “even though I never had discussions with him about that. It all had to do with the absorption of his work and being close enough at times to really see how it happened. And it was the attitude about being able to listen to what other people had to say.”40 Ashby was always observing Wyler, right down to the tiniest details. One night, after a preview in Long Beach, Wyler and his editors returned to the Goldwyn lot to talk about the screening. During the whole discussion, Wyler was silent and just sat at his desk writing mysteriously on a pad of paper. As everyone was leaving to go home, Ashby sneaked a peek at what profound observations Wyler had jotted down. On the pad was just the word “Decisions,” which Wyler had written over and over in the same spot. The incident stayed with Ashby, proof that even the most experienced minds sometimes had to go back to basics. In the 1980s, the notepads in Ashby's office were all headed with one handwritten word: “Decisions.”
Ashby worked ceaselessly from his return to Laguna in spring 1961 until the end of the year, when The Children's Hour was released. That summer, Mickey began an affair with John Barreto, a man on the fringes of their social group. Ashby knew Barreto socially and got on well with him, but he had never identified him as a threat to his domestic happiness.
With Ashby so seldom at home, however, Mickey felt irresistibly drawn to Barreto, whom she found “magnetic, wonderful.”41 Their time in Europe had given her grave reservations about her marriage to Ashby. For the sake of his career, he had prized them away from the stability of all they knew: “My whole life was left in Laguna. I'd given up a whole lot to go on that trip. He insisted on that. It was the straw that broke my back.”42
The day after Christmas, Mickey left Ashby. She was so sure she was doing the right thing that, had Barreto not convinced her to do otherwise, she would have left without an explanation. Despite her lover's intervention, she still walked out on Ashby “in a very rude way. I just left him a note on the refrigerator, like you'd leave for the milkman.”43
In the eyes of their friends, Ashby and Mickey's relationship had become platonic. Ashby, however, had been so focused on his work that her departure was a huge shock to him. Whether he was fully conscious of it or not, he had shut her out sexually in the latter stages of their marriage, as work consumed his every waking moment. Mickey had done everything she could to get him interested again, using all her wiles and dressing up in exotic lingerie, but to no avail. (In the opinion of one of his friends, after he had “rescued” Mickey—who didn't really want or need to be rescued—Ashby found her appeal slowly lessening.)
Three days after Mickey left, a divorce complaint was drawn up against Ashby, claiming she had been subjected to “extreme cruelty” and that he had “wrongfully inflicted upon her grievous mental suffering.”44 His response was to claim that Mickey was insane and try to have her put under seventy-two-hour observation. According to Mickey, Ashby did not actually think she was mentally unstable, just “crazy for leaving him. He was on the up, and we were driving a Porsche.” Barreto, on the other hand, wandered from one casual job to the next, was a heroin user, and, Mickey admits, was “practically living in his car.”45
Ashby, however, accepted her decision and did not fight it. By the end of January, he and Mickey had been granted an interlocutory judgment of divorce. (The final judgment was not granted until May 1963.) Ashby did not contest the claims leveled at him in the complaint, although Mickey concedes they were false and made only to ensure a quick divorce. Mickey nevertheless felt guilty—and more so when Ashby generously gave her their right-hand-drive Volkswagen. “As far as I was concerned I didn't deserve anything; I had left him,” Mickey says. “But he gave me that car. He was very good to me. He was a good man, a good man.”46
She left the marriage not without the occasional backward glance. In a letter to Ashby from the early 1980s, she wrote: “Maybe I just wanted to say hello—I think I've wanted to for a long time now. Thank you for what you taught me and tried to teach me—Some dense pupil!”47 Looking back, she says, “He was a good husband, he really was. You couldn't ask for more. I never got over feeling guilty just leaving him like I did. But that was where my heart was taking me.”48
5
The Family Man
A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.
—Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock (1948)
Here in your hand, before your very eyes, is proof that your youngest son; the baby of your family is in fact becoming a more responsible individual.
—Hal Ashby
The Sound of Silence was written ten years after Ashby had bailed on Lavon and Leigh, and possibly marked a change in his attitude toward children. The idealistic hero, David Cassidy, has a seven-year-old son; given that the screenplay is set in 1965, he would have been born in 1958, right around the time that Ashby and Ian Bernard were writing the script. Was Ashby thinking about becoming a father again and imagining the world his child might grow up in?
Though Mickey had a daughter with John Barreto a few years after she left Ashby, she had told Ashby she did not want any children. However, she recalls that in his first few years as an apprentice editor, Ashby worked with a woman who was going through a difficult divorce and actually signed papers agreeing to be a guardian of her child. In May 1960, he did not stand in the way of Jim Montgomery, Lavon's second husband, who had raised Leigh, adopting his daughter and legally becoming her father. If the newly single Ashby felt an urge for parenthood now, he apparently wanted a fresh start at it.
In an odd coincidence, Shirley Citron was, like Mickey, an orphan, and she had always yearned for the traditional family setup she had missed out on as a child. Almost three years older than Ashby, she was a stunning blonde with long hair and gorgeous features. As Ashby's niece Meredith commented when she met her, she “even smoked sexy.”1
According to Ashby, he and Shirley met only at the beginning of 1962, but they had both been apprentice editors at the same time, so their paths may have crossed earlier. (Shirley's only editing credit is for the film Invasion of the Animal People [1962]—a version of the Swedish creature feature Rymdinvasion I Lappland [1959] reworked with the addition of a few disjointed new scenes featuring John Carradine—which she had cut for Jerry Warren, a hack filmmaker who regularly bought and repackaged foreign films.)
Soon after they got together, Ashby wrote his mother that Shirley was pregnant. However, he was quick to explain, “The baby is not mine. Shirley was pregnant before I ever met her. Shirley was not married or even involved with anyone when she became pregnant. It was just one of those things that
