Lavon was relieved when Hal returned to Ogden after finishing at PSNA, and they moved to a little apartment on the other side of town. The two weren't used to looking after themselves, and Hal would call Beth to ask how to cook French toast and other dishes Lavon didn't know how to make.
Hal used his experience at the Uintah Dairy to get a job at another local dairy and, as the couple couldn't afford a car, walked to work every day. However, working at the dairy made Hal's eczema flare up, so he did not keep the job for long, and Lavon's parents became very forthcoming in expressing their opinions on Hal's conduct. “They were just always after Hal to shape up, to do this or do that,” remembers Jack. “It used to irritate Hal no end,” adds Beth, “because they were always trying to tell him to go to church.”19
On September 19, 1947, just two weeks after Hal's eighteenth birthday, Lavon gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, whom she named Leigh after the film star Janet Leigh. The birth of his daughter changed Hal's life radically, but instead of making him more devoted to family life, it began to raise doubts in his mind. Eileen had just bought a new home, and as Hal was now unemployed, the young family moved into a small apartment attached to the house. Hal was back home again and once again dependent on his mother—except now, not only for himself, but also for Lavon and Leigh. Despite the less than ideal circumstances of the wedding, he had embarked upon married life full of optimism, but now he felt useless and frustrated and started to reconsider his current situation.
When Lavon became pregnant, marriage was the only real option, and he did not question what he was doing because he and Lavon were in love. Yet, at the age of eighteen, suddenly he found himself married with a daughter, his freedom replaced by lifelong responsibilities. As Jack recalls, “He just wasn't ready for marriage, wasn't ready to settle down. He didn't want to be that tied down.”20
Hal had two choices: he could honor his marriage vows and stay, or he could leave. The latter option was selfish, but it would be a clean break, damage limitation. He knew that either way he would cause great pain, but he chose the path that he thought would be better for everybody in the long term.
While it might be tempting to speculate that Ashby left Lavon and Ogden with dreams of Hollywood, in fact he simply needed to get out. Much later, when studios were repackaging his life to be more palatable and interesting to journalists, the story of his early life metamorphosed into the following:
A native of Ogden, Utah, Ashby was born into a typical middleclass American family. His father, a hard-working tradesman, wanted young Hal to complete high school and then join him in operating a feed and grain shop, but the son had other ideas. After being graduated from Utah State University, he joined one little theatre group after another until he found one where the management would let him direct a play. Working secretly with the actors, Ashby came up with a highly-imaginative production of George Bernard Shaw's “Androcles and the Lion” which was well received by critics, but considered a calamity by his family. Reason: Ashby dressed his actors in modern clothes and set the scene on a football field, thus alienating all the influential alumni living in his home town. There was nothing to do but leave Ogden.21
The claim that Hal had not only a college education but also a strong passion for drama going back to his adolescence was designed to make him fit in with other emerging directors of the time—Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Rafelson, Martin Scorsese—the so-called Movie Brats. They were all young, college-educated men whose passion for films stemmed from their very earliest days and whose efforts had been focused entirely on becoming filmmakers. But Hal was different. His interest in cinema was no greater than any other teenager's, he didn't go to Utah State (nor did his father own a feed and grain store), and his theater company experience (including the ludicrous Androcles and the Lion incident) was pure fiction.
In early 1948, only a matter of months after Leigh's birth, Hal left everything he knew in Ogden behind—his wife and child, his mother, sister, and brothers—and set off to make a fresh start.
3
Los Angeles
Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over the streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.
—John Fante, Ask the Dust (1939)
When Hal Ashby left Ogden, he knew that being responsible for a wife and child at such a young age was not what he wanted from life. He did not know what he did want, but he was confident that out there, traveling and working and experiencing America, he would find it. “I feel that Americans must leave their homes,” he said later. “It is easier if you come from a small town because the thrust of life is outward. I feel, for example, it is harder to leave the Bronx because it is more complex than a small town.”1 In order to know oneself, Ashby felt, it is necessary to know one's country.
For a few months, Ashby drifted around, doing jobs here and there, and reading whenever he could. It was all part of the process of finding himself. Every job he did, every book he read, every town he passed through, he hoped would bring him closer to discovering what had made him know that a town like Ogden was too small to hold him. He did, however, return to Ogden every so often and would see Lavon and Leigh occasionally.
Not long after splitting up with Lavon, Ashby started dating Janice Austin, another girl he had been to high school with. He saw her on his visits to Ogden, and, according to Janice, she was very nearly the second Mrs. Hal Ashby: “He asked me to marry him, and he had bought me an engagement ring. He didn't have the money for it, and he charged it to his mom. His mom was so mad at him she made him take it back. She didn't like me very well.”2
Eileen was understandably resistant to the idea of Ashby marrying again and told Janice that she would never accept anyone but Lavon as her daughter-in-law. Janice's father, who worked with Ardith at the waterworks, was also against the marriage, particularly when he learned that the couple's grandmothers were sisters, making them second cousins. Though marriage was no longer in the cards, Hal and Janice kept up a long-distance relationship, and Janice recalls that Ashby would write to her “every other day.”3
Around March 1948, Lavon filed for divorce in order to be eligible for child-support payments from Ashby. The divorce came through on May 10, 1948, with a period of six months before a final judgment of divorce would be granted. Lavon was naturally granted full custody of Leigh, and Ashby was required to pay $25 every two weeks to help pay for her care. He sent an initial payment of $50, but after that nothing followed.
Fifty dollars a month was a substantial sum, and Janice recalls that she was “always getting after him to pay alimony to Lavon for the little girl, but he was having problems because he didn't have too many jobs, and he never owned a car.”4 One suspects, however, that Ashby ultimately ceased payments, not just because of financial restraints, but because of an inherent weakness in himself. He was adored by the overwhelming majority of people who got to know him, and yet, particularly in the first half of his life, he managed to alienate and hurt the very people he claimed to love the most, many of whom became greatly embittered as a result. Starting with the death of his father, Ashby's life was defined by an insistent refusal to deal with traumatic incidents and emotional conflicts. It seems he believed that if he pushed them to the very back of his mind, he could make them un happen. “In life, Hal was the consummate editor,” says Ashby's friend, Haskell Wexler, “and some people ended up on the cutting room floor.”5
By the summer of 1948, he found himself in Evanston, Wyoming, where he was joined by Max Grow, an old friend from Ogden. Ashby and Lavon had double dated with Grow and his future wife, who was also called
