and caution, but with Jack stationed in Guam and his father gone, there was nobody but Eileen to rein Hal in. On the milk route with Jack, there had already been signs of his rebellious streak. Hal used to check the trucks to see if any of the drivers had left anything behind. When he came across a pack of cigarettes, he'd flip one out and enjoy an illicit smoke.
Though Hal wrote Jack saying what a great time he was having in high school, the truth was that his rebelliousness stemmed from unhappiness. Many of his friends recall him dreading going home. James's death had sparked an inevitable anger and bitterness in Hal that made home life extremely difficult: he was angry at his father for leaving and at his mother because he partly blamed her, for whatever reason, for his father's suicide. Ashby's schoolmate Bob Ballantyne recalls that he referred to his parents as “that bitch” and “that son of a bitch.”1 Ballantyne's father had left when he was eight, while another schoolmate, Bob Busico, had lost his father when he was eight, and throughout his life, Hal would latch onto friends who had also gone through their formative years without fathers.
As a way of staying away from the house, Hal began to socialize more. Though he had many friends his own age, he also started hanging around with kids a few years older. The younger students were rarely accepted by the seniors, but Hal was easy to talk to, and if he liked people, he would show a genuine interest in them and make them feel valued. He also knew how to take a joke. “He was always making us laugh and had glasses as thick as coke bottles,” Busico remembers. “I was always saying, ‘Hal, let me borrow your glasses!' Then we wouldn't give them back and he couldn't see.”2
Hal played basketball and football, and though he did not excel, whenever he didn't make the team, he would still be there on the bench, watching and supporting Busico and the other guys. He liked their company and enjoyed making them laugh and cheering up anybody who needed a lift. Busico was the school's star wrestler, and the crowd Ashby was socializing with was generally more sporty than academic and most interested in just having a good time.
Though Hal had the potential to be an excellent student, school was neither important nor interesting to him, and he is remembered by his classmates as someone who did the bare minimum. He didn't even care enough about school to always attend and became too well known to the truant officer for Eileen's liking.
Hal, along with Ballantyne and another friend, Clyde Brown, once decided to cut class and ended up running out of the school grounds pursued by their English teacher. The three hung out after school too, riding their bikes, shooting bows and arrows, and sometimes climbing the perimeter fence at night to take a dip in the school's old unheated swimming pool.
Hal started to go missing later and later into the evening. “I used to wander at night a lot,” he once revealed in an interview, “but there were always four or five places my mother could call and find me.”3
There was not a lot to do in a small town like Ogden, so Hal and his older friends would kill time bowling or playing pool. More often, however, they went to one another's houses, where they talked and played records. It was at this time that Hal developed a lifelong passion for music. As with anything style related, he always had his finger on the pulse, but he didn't do it to be cool; he genuinely adored music. Throughout his life, it would be a continuing joy and preoccupation, and his inspired use of music in his films would become a trademark. As a teenager, he listened to jazz and bebop, but it was ultimately rock and roll that most struck a chord with his rebellious nature.
Eileen felt that Hal's rebellious side was becoming too dominant. Though he never got into serious trouble, hanging around with an older crowd meant that he was growing up too fast for her liking and drinking beer long before the legal age of twenty-one. One day, when Hal was in the tenth grade, Eileen found a pack of cigarettes and some condoms in his pocket. She immediately called up Ardith, who was working at City Hall, and told her to come home.
“I can't,” said Ardith. “I'm working.”
“You have to,” Eileen insisted. “It's an emergency!”4
During all his teen years, and for the rest of his adult life, Eileen and Hal had that difficult relationship that develops when a mother's intense love manifests itself as controlling and domineering and the child clearly wishes to escape this excessive influence. In Hal's case, he got his wish. Eileen decided what he needed was a proper education and not the miseducation in life he was getting in Ogden. At the beginning of the eleventh grade, Hal Ashby found himself far from home and at a very different kind of school.
Puget Sound Naval Academy (PSNA) was situated on Bainbridge Island, ten miles across the water from Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1938, it was a preparatory school for the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard but was often used by parents as a place for straightening out their undisciplined sons. It was remote, set in forty acres of prime land four miles from Winslow, the nearest town, and an all-male environment where discipline was always at the fore: a place with a minimum of distractions ideal for getting the best out of its pupils. The school taught not only the regular high school subjects but also naval drill, seamanship, and the rudiments of officers' behavior. Students quickly learned that no lapse in attention—whether to the subject being taught or to making one's bed—would go unnoticed. Those, like Hal, who had meandered through school and had relative freedom at home suddenly found much more demanded of them. Merits and demerits were handed out depending on pupils' performance, and if the latter outweighed the former, the imbalance could be expunged only by an hour of hard labor or drill marching per demerit.5
Despite having been independent and a tearaway in Ogden, Hal missed Eileen and all the comforts of home when he arrived at PSNA in the autumn of 1945. “He didn't like it at first at all,” says Jack Swanson, a contemporary. “The discipline and regimentation—getting up, going to breakfast and going to lunch at a certain time—wasn't anything that he cared for.”6 After overcoming his initial frustration, however, Hal began to fit in and, as at Washington High, soon made friends and became popular.
Even more so than in Ogden, he stuck out at PSNA as somebody who was different, particularly in his appearance. “He was very neat,” remembers another classmate, Gus Cooper. “He dressed more modern, like a kid from the big city.”7 “He had this crew cut and these big horn-rimmed glasses that made him look more professorial,” adds Swanson. “In fact, he gave you the impression that he was a wimp at first if you didn't know him. But he was a good size, and you soon found out that he could look after himself.”8
Swanson was at PSNA because he had previously run away from home and, like Hal, had been sent there to get him on the straight and narrow. He ended up becoming the cadet commanding officer, with Hal as his second in command. The two roomed together and, during their time at PSNA, became close friends, though Hal was noticeably reluctant to discuss home and family. “My memory of him was that he was special in some way,” says Swanson. “It's hard to explain, but he seemed to have a certain air about him that was more mature. He loved playing jokes and stuff, but he seemed older than the rest of us in some way. He was really one of those people that you never forget.”9 That ability to be serious and authoritative while also displaying a sense of fun was something that Ashby developed at PSNA and that would become invaluable to him when he was a director.
As is often the case with young people put in positions of authority, Hal took his role as a cadet officer very seriously and was as tough on the other cadets as a staff member might have been. In the mess hall, the boys ate at long tables covered in Masonite sheets. Unimpressed by the state of the tabletops, Hal once got the boys on mess duty to pick up the sheet and march out of the hall with it. For the next two hours, he made them wash and scrub it until he was satisfied with its condition. Hal also tried to toughen up the junior cadets, known as “dipes” (short for diapers), a name they hated. There was a boy from Seattle who, from the minute he arrived at PSNA, made it clear that he really didn't want to be there. Every
