made it to dinner.
That day, he was at the Uintah Dairy Company offices. Just before noon, he told one of his young employees, Denzil Shipley, that he was going to clean his guns, which he had not done since the end of the hunting season. At five past midday, another employee, Bernadine Anderson, heard a shot and rushed into her boss's office. By the time she got there, he was already dead, having died instantly from a shot to the head.
On the few occasions that Hal would discuss his father's death, he always said it had been a suicide; what he did not say was that he was the only person in the family who believed that. It has been said that Hal's father killed himself because he had refused to pasteurize his milk and therefore lost the dairy,15 that he killed himself in a barn, and that Hal was the one who first discovered the body.16 None of these stories is true: Hal's father had not lost the dairy; he had no livestock, let alone a barn; and Hal did not find his father's body.
However, determining the truth surrounding James's death is not a straightforward matter. If James was considering rekindling his relationship with Eileen and had no major business problems, there is no readily discernible motive for suicide. And that Hal alone believed his father killed himself makes suicide even less plausible. However, if one examines the sheriff's department's report, it begins to look more likely:
Weber County Sheriff John R. Watson said today officials had decided the death of James Thomas Ashby, 54, of 3531 Washington, who died of a gunshot wound Sunday, was accidental. After an investigation, he said, officers concluded there was no need of an inquest, and none will be held unless requested by the family.
Mr. Ashby died at twelve—five P.M. Sunday at the offices of the Uintah Dairy Products Co., 3667 Washington, of which he was president. Investigation revealed he had been cleaning guns at the time of the accident. He had cleaned two, and was working on the third when it was discharged.
When police arrived, they discovered the barrel of a .32-calibre rifle clutched in one hand. The bullet had entered the head beneath the chin, and medical reports indicated death was instantaneous. Mr. Ashby was alone in his office at the time of the accident. Miss Bernadine Anderson, an employe [sic], was in the next room when she heard the shot. Another employe, Denzil Shipley, said he had been talking to Mr. Ashby a few minutes before. He told the youth he had not cleaned his guns since the hunting season so he decided to do it Sunday afternoon, and then have them registered, according to the sheriff.17
Whether or not there was an obvious motive, the circumstantial evidence all seems to point clearly to suicide. The fact that James pointedly told an employee he was cleaning his guns five minutes before he shot himself seems too measured, as if he were giving others a way of interpreting his death as accidental; and it seems highly implausible that a man so accustomed to dealing with firearms would clean a .32 rifle while it was loaded. Furthermore, the fact that he shot himself beneath his chin so the bullet entered his brain immediately causing almost instantaneous death suggests that it was a deliberate act. That his death was not fully investigated is not actually so surprising: James was a highly regarded and successful Ogden man, and delving too deeply into his death would probably have caused more grief than it was worth and been considered inappropriate and disrespectful.
The Ashbys were suffering greatly as it was. The funeral was held two days later, less than a mile from the Ashby home. It was still winter in Ogden, and snow fell as the family assembled for the service. Because of the severe bodily disfigurement, there was a closed casket and no viewing of the body. Despite his family's wishes, Jack was determined to take one final look at his father. In the swirling snow, he opened the casket and looked inside. Instead of a face, all he saw was a body with a towel wrapped around its head. “I never did see my dad…,” Jack recalls quietly.18
The impact of James's death on his family is incalculable, but it was arguably Hal who struggled most with the loss. Because of the years he was away with Eileen in Logan and Portland and the long hours James worked at the store, Hal never properly got to know his father. The one time he discussed his father's death directly with an interviewer, he said: “I was 12 years old. My father used to make me laugh a lot. He would give me a dollar for taking the soda pop bottles to the basement of the store. But we didn't know each other. And only now, in retrospect, can I see how much pain he must have been in.”19 Losing one's father and believing that he killed himself would be incredibly tough at any age, but for it to happen at twelve, when Hal was dealing with the problems of adolescence, must have made it doubly so. He was unable to discuss it with his family, so instead he bottled up the emotion, the anger, and the feeling of injustice, only ever letting it out in uncharacteristic bursts of anger or private moments of desperation.
On the rare occasions he talked to friends about his father, Hal apparently said that his father had arranged for Hal to meet him on the day he died and that when he came to find him, he discovered that he had committed suicide, abandoning him in the most permanent way possible. In the years that followed, Ashby struggled with issues about authority figures as well as fear of emotional closeness, abandonment, and betrayal. These personal demons, which massively affected every aspect of his personal life and business dealings, can be traced back to this incident.
In 1973, the photographer Richard Avedon recommended to Ashby a New Yorker piece called “A Story in an Almost Classical Mode” by Harold Brodkey. A rawly honest autobiographical short story about Brodkey's teenage years in the early 1940s, which were overshadowed by his parents' illness and death, it had strong echoes of Ashby's own experiences at that time. Ashby wrote to Avedon and thanked him for “turning me on to the Harold Brodkey story in September's New Yorker. I really enjoyed it, and found it a beautiful, thoughtful and loving story.”20 Ashby, however, never mentioned the parallels with his own life or the painful flashes of recognition that reading the story must have caused. Brodkey's work is a revisitation in middle age of the adolescent struggle with the impact of a parent's death, yet this is precisely what Ashby never did. At no stage—neither in his teens nor later on—did he ever delve deeply to examine and heal the scars caused by his father's death. That Hal Ashby “struggled toward growing up,…totally confused,” is really no surprise.21
2
The Artist as a Young Man
As a rule, the teens are when a person comes closer and closer to the realities of life, and he doesn't want this to happen, but he knows, somewhere deep inside, it must and will come. The reality he dreads most is a plain, simple fact: One day, soon now, he will have to become a responsible human being. All of his life to date has been spent in the luxury of being cared for, and now he is faced with caring for himself. He is selfish by nature, and wants desperately to retain the security he has always known. He rebels against growing up with every means available.
—Hal Ashby
After Eileen brought the boys back to Ogden, Hal spent less time with Jack and began making friends, a luxury he had not had while they were moving around. He was charming and amiable and soon became widely liked. He started to express his personality through his appearance and was always up on the fashions of the day. His hair was perfectly cut and styled, and he wore peg trousers with a key chain. A dapper, handsome teenager, he looked very distinguished in his glasses, while his blond hair, blue eyes, and soft voice added an innocence to his mature sartorial style.
Following his father's death, Hal was thrust into a much more responsible role. He found himself one of the owners of the Uintah Dairy, which James had left to his four children, who, accordingly, turned it over to their mother. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, all American boys aged seventeen or eighteen were expected to enlist. Jack left Ogden in March 1943 to join the U.S. Navy, leaving thirteen-year-old Hal, now a student at nearby Washington High School, to be the man of the house.
Hal's
