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Do Not Go Gentle 333 Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. —Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (1951) He found out that he had cancer. He knew he was going to die but he never complained. He had a smile for everyone. At the start he didn’t want to take any drugs. But then he had to. —From Hal Ashby’s script for Handcarved Coffins (1988) After hearing Ashby’s prognosis, Beatty took him to Johns Hopkins for more tests, CAT scans, and pancreatic scans, which revealed that there were malignant tumors in his pancreas and the cancer had almost entirely consumed his liver. His doctors recommended an aggressive treatment beginning with surgery, but Ashby refused. “I think you should have the surgery,” Beatty told him.1 Ashby could not be convinced, however, and returned home. Agreeing to surgery would have been admitting he might die, so as he had often done in his life, he chose denial instead. Back home, Ashby kept working and even tried to take over She’s De Lovely, a script by his friend John Cassavetes that Sean Penn wanted to do. Penn had initially been set to make it, but when Cassavetes became terminally ill, he had to pass the project on. Not long after, it became clear that Ashby too was in no shape to consider taking on the film. (It 27 334 Being Hal Ashby was later filmed, after significant changes, as the 1997 She’s So Lovely, with Penn directed by Cassavetes’s son, Nick.) Soon after his return, Ashby’s blood clots made him suffer a stroke that caused hemisphere damage. “After that,” says Padilla, “he wasn’t the same. He didn’t know what was going on; he was mentally different. He was like a five-yearold : if you’d asked him for a check for $10,000, he probably would have written you one.”2 The ailing Ashby was being looked after by Lynn Griffis, a striking southern blonde known to everyone as Grif who had gotten to know him after writing him a fan letter, hoping he might cast her in one of his films. Though in his last years Ashby had enjoyed the company of many women without committing to, let alone living with, any of them, after his stroke Griffis appointed herself Ashby’s live-in nurse and girlfriend and set out to heal him. Ashby was desperate to get better and hopeful that he could be cured, and Griffis persuaded him to try New Age methods and alternative medicines. Though Ashby had been given three months to live, Griffis admits now that she was convinced they were going to beat the cancer through alternative therapies and that Ashby would then make a film letting the world know how he had miraculously cheated death. Ashby had money, so she brought healers from all over the world who laid hands on him, tried to draw out the tumors, “zapped” him. Nothing worked, however, and he became visibly more ill. As word got out, a stream of friends came to visit him at the Colony. “I set up a schedule with all the calls that started to come in from his friends who had heard about Hal’s illness,” Griffis says. “We set up every afternoon for people to come by and sit on the bed and be with Hal. . . . We always had no more people than could sit on the bed at one time. . . . It actually was the bed from Being There, so it was a big bed and could hold a lot of friends at one time.”3 Many of those who visited Ashby pleaded with him to go back to Johns Hopkins, but Warren Beatty recalls, “It was about five or six weeks—I felt they were crucial weeks—before me and Jack [Nicholson] and Haskell finally talked him into going back and having the surgery.”4 Ashby made the decision suddenly one afternoon when Dustin Hoffman was visiting him. “Dustin happened to be there and he planned right then and there to fly with us, and the three of us left and went...

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