had been drinking since he was a teenager, had run with a group that smoked and drank heavily during the 1950s, and later recalled that by the mid-1960s he “was a great drinker.” However, he said: “One morning I woke up and decided I was poisoning myself.”24 Ashby all but ceased drinking from this point on, only occasionally allowing himself a glass of wine or a shot of tequila with friends. However, the tendencies that made him an alcoholic—a fascination with mood-altering substances and an addictive personality—remained, manifesting themselves now in his drug use and continued workaholism.
Around the beginning of April, Ashby and Shirley separated, and he left the family home, decamping to Jewison's office, a bungalow on the Goldwyn lot. Formerly inhabited by Frank Sinatra, it had a bed and a kitchen in addition to a production office and cutting rooms. “Having that bungalow,” recalls Jewison, “was the smartest thing we ever did because we were all alone, away from the suits,” but now it provided a refuge for Ashby from the wreckage of his marriage.25
April got no better for Ashby when the Oscars rolled around on the tenth. Russians was nominated in four categories, with the film up for Best Actor (Alan Arkin), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture, and Ashby and J. Terry Williams shortlisted in the Best Editing category. To everybody's disappointment, the film came away without a single award, leaving Jewison and Ashby to hope that In the Heat of the Night might fare better in a year's time.
In mid-May, Heat previewed in San Francisco. Ashby and Jewison, sitting nervously at the back of the cinema, heard the audience laughing at scenes that weren't supposed to be funny. Walking out after the screening, Jewison was distraught.
“I've ruined the movie,” he said.
“You're wrong, man,” Ashby protested.
They ended up walking for hours through the night streets, discussing the audience's reaction. Jewison was adamant that he had botched his chance to make even a small difference in the civil rights struggle, that the film was a failure.
“You don't get it man,” Ashby persisted. “The audience was really into the film. Maybe they weren't exactly sure how to react because the movie was such a new experience for them. The movie's so different.”
“They laughed,” Jewison said. “I can't believe they laughed so much.”
“Not at the movie, man. With the movie. They were so knocked out by it, they had to react the only way they knew how in a dark theater. You have to expect some participation from an audience.”
“I don't think so,” said Jewison. “I've blown it.”26
8
1968
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
“Have you ever gone to a preview and seen a film so outstanding that you wanted to rush into the street, grab the first person you see, and shout ‘Don't miss this when it comes to your favorite theatre!' Well, this is exactly how I felt when I saw In the Heat of the Night,” enthused Radie Harris in her Hollywood Reporter column. “If it isn't the big ‘sleeper' of the year, I'll toss my personal crystal ball overboard into the East River.”1
In early June, a new glow of optimism appeared in Ashby's life. In the Heat of the Night now seemed to be hitting just the right note with preview audiences; he and Norman Jewison were about to embark on a new film, The Thomas Crown Affair, in Boston; and an unusual proposition had given Ashby and Shirley a chance at reconciliation.
During the slow disintegration of their relationship, Ashby and Shirley had been in the process of trying to adopt a “hard-to-place” child, which Shirley hoped would help bring them back together. (Ashby allegedly had had a vasectomy sometime after leaving Ogden, so adoption might have been their only option.) When Ashby left, Shirley's shot at adopting went with him. However, before anybody had found out about the separation, Shirley appealed to him to help her.
“If there is one thing I'm good at,” she said, “it's being a mother, and I want to follow through with the adoption! Will you play the game? Will you help me?”
For Ashby, this meant not only paying for the adoption, but also spending time getting to know the child. There was also a tacit implication that by playing “the game,” Shirley and Ashby were taking a step toward mending their marriage and becoming a proper family again.
Shirley didn't press him for an immediate decision, saying simply, “Think about these things, and let me know your decision later.”
Ashby's desire to be a rescuer once again took over; though he no longer found Shirley irresistible, he could not resist the opportunity to save her. Against his better judgment, he agreed to go along with her plan a few days later. “God Bless You!” Shirley cried, overjoyed.2
Shirley ultimately decided to adopt a mixed-race toddler originally called Baby Boy Lawrence, whom they called Steven. Steven, who became known as Teeg, was three years old when Ashby and Shirley began the adoption process in the spring of 1967. A few years earlier, Sammy Davis had adopted a mixed-race child, and now, in the wake of the Watts riots, Ashby may have seen his adoption of Steven as a politically symbolic action. Ashby and Jewison had endless conversations about the adoption, and Jewison agreed to be his guarantor and tell the authorities that Ashby and Shirley were good parents. Nonetheless, at one point Jewison sat with the two of them and asked, “Are you sure you want to do this? It's eighteen to twenty years of your life!”3
Throughout the making of In the Heat of the Night, Jewison had worked with Alan Trustman, a practicing lawyer, on his script for The Thomas Crown Affair, then called The Crown Caper. The story of Thomas Crown, a Boston banker who masterminds audacious bank robberies for kicks and is pursued, both professionally and romantically, by alluring insurance investigator Vicki Anderson, was fundamentally shallow in nature, putting style before profundity, and required leads who were classy and sexy. The role of Crown was given to Steve McQueen after the actor convinced Jewison that, despite appearances, he had the necessary sophistication, but the casting of Vicki confounded Jewison and Ashby until, just weeks before shooting began, they chose a young actress named Faye Dunaway, who had just completed filming her first feature, Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
With the leads in place, there was just enough time before shooting started in Boston for Jewison to take Ashby and Haskell Wexler up to Montreal to Expo '67. He wanted them to see Canadian filmmaker Chris Chapman's A Place to Stand (1967), in which multiple screen techniques condensed more than an hour of footage into less than twenty minutes, with a view to using multiscreen as a stylistic device in The Thomas Crown Affair. Jewison and Wexler had so enjoyed experimenting with the cinematography on In the Heat of the Night, and Ashby had so enjoyed cutting their footage, that they agreed that in The Thomas Crown Affair visuals would be king.
The screening of A Place to Stand didn't disappoint, and Ashby, Jewison, and Wexler headed to Boston plotting the use of multiscreen in The Thomas Crown Affair; Ashby was probably the most excited of the three and looked back on Expo '67 as “the greatest film show I had ever seen in my life.”4 While in Montreal,
