Читать книгу Being Hal Ashby - Nick Dawson - Страница 10

The Artist as a Young Man

As a rule, the teens are when a person comes closer and closer to the realities of life, and he doesn't want this to happen, but he knows, somewhere deep inside, it must and will come. The reality he dreads most is a plain, simple fact: One day, soon now, he will have to become a responsible human being. All of his life to date has been spent in the luxury of being cared for, and now he is faced with caring for himself. He is selfish by nature, and wants desperately to retain the security he has always known. He rebels against growing up with every means available.

—Hal Ashby

After Eileen brought the boys back to Ogden, Hal spent less time with Jack and began making friends, a luxury he had not had while they were moving around. He was charming and amiable and soon became widely liked. He started to express his personality through his appearance and was always up on the fashions of the day. His hair was perfectly cut and styled, and he wore peg trousers with a key chain. A dapper, handsome teenager, he looked very distinguished in his glasses, while his blond hair, blue eyes, and soft voice added an innocence to his mature sartorial style.

Following his father's death, Hal was thrust into a much more responsible role. He found himself one of the owners of the Uintah Dairy, which James had left to his four children, who, accordingly, turned it over to their mother. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, all American boys aged seventeen or eighteen were expected to enlist. Jack left Ogden in March 1943 to join the U.S. Navy, leaving thirteen-year-old Hal, now a student at nearby Washington High School, to be the man of the house.

Hal's adventurousness and exuberance had been tempered by Jack's good sense 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 week, his mother would send him a candy bar in an envelope. “Ashby had the idea that we should take this candy bar and pulverize it inside the envelope before we gave it to the kid,” says Swanson. “It was like handing him a bag of sand, because we broke the candy bar into as many pieces as we could without damaging the envelope. If you couldn't stand up for yourself, if you showed the other guys you were weak, we weren't very kind. To his credit, Ashby was one of the guys who would say, ‘OK, we've gone far enough,' and backed off.”¹⁰

It was not only his peers whom Ashby was tough on. One of the principal dishes made by Blackie, the PSNA cook, was something called “fried mush.” One day, Hal was eating this when he bit on something hard and almost broke one of his teeth. On inspecting the offending item, he discovered that it was the knob from Blackie's radio, which, unbeknownst to him, had fallen into the mush. Hal called Blackie into the mess hall and, in front of all the other cadets, gave him a dressing-down, about not only the offending knob but also the generally poor quality of the food. It cannot have done Hal's reputation or popularity any harm when there was a marked improvement in the standard of cooking following Blackie's very public shaming.

Another staff member Hal had a run-in with was Laird, the football coach. An ex-military man and former professional football player, Laird was, in Swanson's words, “tougher than a boiled owl, and was hard on us. [He] was trying to make men of us.” Laird slammed into the boys too violently, and Ashby wasn't afraid to protest the coach's cruel behavior. Swanson reveals that Ashby and Laird “sort of got into it a few times.…One time I thought him and Ashby were actually going to get into a fistfight!”¹¹

Because of the very small number of pupils at the academy, PSNA teams would invariably lose games, often by a large margin, but the one edge the boys had over their adversaries was mental and physical toughness. Gus Cooper nonchalantly recounts an incident that occurred when he was in one of the school vans on the way to PSNA's sister school, Hill Military Academy, in Portland, Oregon. “Jack Swanson was the driver, and went around the corner, and we tipped over. We were all in this van, Ashby, myself—there must have been about eight of us in there. We had to get out and push it back up, and we took off again.”¹²

Fortunately, life outside the classroom at PSNA was not all rigorous drill and sporting tribulation. The boys attended dances held twice yearly to which pupils from girls' schools in nearby Seattle and Tacoma were also invited. Jack Swanson had a crush on one of the girls but couldn't get any time alone with her: “Ashby had the idea that I ought to dress up like a girl and then I could go back to Seattle with these girls when they left the academy, which I in effect did. And got into trouble for it.”¹³ Swanson got on the girls' bus unnoticed in his disguise but was inevitably discovered when he tried to get on the ferry back to Seattle.

Ashby became known at the academy as an adviser on matters pertaining to the opposite sex. His old Ogden friend Bob Ballantyne confesses that Ashby, despite being younger, had been more up on these things than he had: “We together learned the early ways of sex. We masturbated a couple of times together. He showed me how to get the last juices out, so it won't be dripping. It was all part of growing up.”¹⁴

Not only was he was more clued up on certain matters than his peers, but the tall, gawky, professorial-looking Hal also unwittingly won the hearts of a Winslow shopgirl, one of the PSNA coaches' daughters, and one of the Seattle schoolgirls (who asked Swanson to put her in touch with Ashby long after Hal had left). Jack Swanson, however, recalls that the adoration of these young women was never particularly reciprocated by Hal. In the summer of 1946, he returned home to Ogden and that fall started his senior year at Washington, where he became a member of the Sigma fraternity. And it was at Washington that he would meet the first girl to have a real impact on him.

Much had changed in Ogden since his departure the previous year. The war was now over, and Jack had been back home already for six months. He had remodeled the grocery store, adding an ice-cream parlor to tailor it more to Eileen's area of expertise. Jack was also about to get married to Beth Christensen, a girl he had met in Ogden while back home for Christmas.

Strangely, Jack was not the first Ashby boy Beth had had contact with. “A bunch of us girls had a little club that we belonged to, and we had a ‘girl ask boy' party,” Beth recalls. “I didn't have anyone I was going with, so I said to my friends, ‘Who shall I ask?' They said, ‘Ask Hal Ashby, he's a neat kid.' So I called Hal Ashby and asked him to this party—and he said no! It kinda took the wind out of my sails.”¹⁵

Hal spent much of the summer of 1946 hanging out with Jack and Beth while his mother was working at the store. “Hal was in and out,” Beth recalls, “and he would ask me if I would mind pressing his trousers. He'd bring his clothes over to wash, and he'd bring the gang with him. They would sit around while they got their clothes cleaned, and I would make them some cookies.”¹⁶ After Jack and Beth got married, Hal took advantage of his elder brother's more upmarket lifestyle. Not only did he come round regularly to listen to Jack and Beth's record collection, but he twice borrowed Jack's Chrysler New Yorker, both times tearing the transmission out of it.

Over the next two years, Eileen's children all began to settle into family life. Hetz got married in June 1946, and Jack and Beth followed suit that October. Ardith, who had married in 1942, had her first child, Larry, in September 1948, and a month later Guy, Jack and Beth's firstborn, made his entrance.

Despite being only seventeen, Hal was also part of this sudden rush of familial activity. A sixteen-year-old blonde at Washington called Lavon Compton had caught his eye, and he asked a mutual friend to arrange a meeting. Lavon seemed interested, so Hal was invited round to the Compton family home, and the two started dating. It was a case of opposites attracting: Hal, the troubled teenager with a rebellious streak, fell for Lavon even though—or maybe because—she was the quintessential good girl, sweet natured, dainty, and petite.

One day in February 1947, when they had been going out for three or four months, Hal and Lavon went to Eileen and told her that Lavon was pregnant and that they were going to get married. They were not old enough to wed legally in conservative Utah, but Nevada, famous for its quickie weddings, was not too far away. On March 1, 1947, Hal and Lavon drove the 250 miles from Ogden to Elko, Nevada, with Lavon's sister and brother-in-law in tow as their witnesses.

The ceremony went off without a hitch, but the marriage was difficult from the beginning. On the day they eloped, Hal and Lavon left the following note for Eileen:

Mom,

We're sorry every thing turned out this way. But maybe some day things can be made right.

This $10 is on the big bill we owe you. We'll pay the rest the best we can.

We'll get our things as soon as possible.

Try to understand.

All our love,

Lavon and Hal

P.S. We both love you very much and thank you for all your help.¹⁷

Eileen had significant reservations about the wedding but still loaned Hal and Lavon the $10 for the marriage license. However, a condition of their marriage was that Hal finish his studies back at PSNA, where there would be no further distractions. So, immediately after getting married, Hal and Lavon were separated.

It was difficult for Lavon, who not only was apart from her new husband but also had to live at home with her disapproving parents. Like Eileen, they had frowned on the union, and they were also upset that the couple had not been married in the Salt Lake City temple like good Mormons. However, it was principally Hal that Lavon's parents objected to. Much of their dislike stemmed from the fact that he was so far from the good Mormon son-in-law they had hoped for. Conversely, Hal, as Jack put it, “had nothing good to say about good old George Compton [Lavon's father].”¹⁸

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.