Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

3. Los Angeles

Los Angeles 26 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 3 Los Angeles 27 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 unhappen. “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 Janice. Grow, who was a year older than Ashby, had hung out with him after getting out of the navy...