Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

1. Enter Hal

Enter Hal  I was born in Ogden, Utah. Never a Mormon. Hated school. The last of four children. Mom and Dad divorced when I was five or six. Dad killed himself when I was twelve. I struggled toward growing up, like most others, totally confused.­ —Hal Ashby Hal Ashby’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Ashby, came to America in 1870. Just twenty-one when he left his hometown of Leicester, England, he crossed the Atlantic with his eighteen-year-old fiancée, Rachael Hill. After training as a shoemaker in Lynne, Massachusetts, then the American center of quality shoemaking, he moved west in pursuit of new opportunities . He ended up in Utah, and, after unsuccessfully joining a boot and shoemaking cooperative, he settled in Ogden, where he started his own business. Sixty miles north of Salt Lake City, Ogden was a growing town rich in potential for entrepreneurs because it was the “Junction City” of the Union and Central Pacific railway. The population was doubling every ten years, and Thomas Ashby benefited hugely from an ever-growing number of customers: by the early 1880s, he was employing eleven men and had moved to a specially constructed building with a factory in the rear and a shop in the front. His family was growing too: by 1885, Rachael had given birth to seven children (only five survived). The following year, however, she died, and Thomas married Emily Coleman, the sixteen-year-old daughter of James Coleman, one of his shoemakers. A year later, Emily bore him a son, James Thomas Ashby, but Thomas’s fortunes after this did not look up. His decision to bring his brother John into the firm and significantly expand the business coincided with a major downturn in the American economy that culminated in the Panic of 1893. Having had huge 1 Enter Hal  success as a maker of high-quality shoes and boots, he discovered to his great cost that luxury products were the last thing people bought when times got tough. Massively overstocked, and crippled by enormous debts, Thomas was forced to sell off $20,000 worth of goods for almost nothing. He ultimately lost his business as well as his wife, who married another man, Herbert Peterson. As the century drew to a close, Thomas left Ogden and moved to Salt Lake City. In early 1901, the “Salt Lake News” section of the Ogden Standard announced: “Thomas Ashby was yesterday examined by County Physician Mayo and Dr. H. A. Anderson touching his sanity. He was found to be insane and committed to the asylum. Ashby is 53 years of age and his mental derangement was brought about by business difficulties and domestic affliction.”1 Four years later, he died in Provo, Utah, aged only fifty-five. Raised by his mother and stepfather, Thomas’s son James Ashby never really knew his father. Though the overwhelming majority of people in Ogden (and Utah as a whole) were Mormon, Herbert Peterson was a Gentile, and James grew up only nominally a member of the church. A highly sociable youth, he attended more to fraternize than because of any religious fervor but was grateful he did when he met and fell for a pretty young Ogden girl, Eileen Hetzler, at a church social function. Eileen was intelligent, strong willed, and aspirational, and in the handsome and charismatic James she saw someone with similar drive and potential. Like James, Eileen had grown up in an unconventional family setup: she was the daughter of the polygamist Ogden dentist Dr. Luther Hetzler and one of his two wives, Martha Ann Hadfield. Dr. Hetzler had died when Eileen was only three, and Martha had remarried another fervent Mormon, David Steele, subsequently showing her daughter little affection at all. Eileen was, in fact, much closer to her “Aunt Cate”—Dr. Hetzler’s other widow, Catherine Tribe—with whom she remained close for many years. On November 10, 1909, James and Eileen were married in the temple in Salt Lake City, the home of the Mormon Church. Eileen quickly became pregnant and gave birth to a boy, James Hetzler Ashby (known as “Hetz”), in December 1910. He was followed just over a year later by a baby girl, Ardith, born in February 1912. James got a job working on the Bamberger trains that took commuters to and from Ogden and  Being Hal Ashby Salt Lake City, and Eileen would meet his train...