Читать книгу Being Hal Ashby - Nick Dawson - Страница 11

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 Janice. Grow, who was a year older than Ashby, had hung out with him after getting out of the navy in the fall of 1947 and remembers him as enjoyable company. They had gone to dances together and once drove to Lagoon, about twenty miles south of Ogden, to see the jazz pianist and bandleader Stan Kenton. Ashby had made a special point of befriending Kenton and his band for the night, not only because he was passionate about jazz, but also because they represented an artistic lifestyle that, whether or not he was aware of it, he wanted to be a part of.

In Evanston, Ashby and Grow worked on a railroad construction job. From Weber Canyon, Utah, all the way up into Wyoming, crews of men had been refacing the old railroad bridges, and the pair joined them in Wyoming. The work was grueling and repetitive and involved chipping off the old, “rotten” concrete on the bridges and then pouring in fresh concrete.

In September, the month of Ashby's nineteenth birthday—and his daughter's first birthday—as he and Grow chipped away at the old concrete, his senses told him it was time to move on. As summer turned to fall, the cold came in early. The winter of 1948–1949 was one of the harshest that the American West ever endured, with many states experiencing record low temperatures. “When we were up on the scaffold, it started to snow,” Grow recalls. “He kept saying, ‘Let's go down to Los Angeles; I've got an uncle there.'”⁶

Ashby later recounted the moment he decided to go to California: “We went down to get a drink from the water barrel at 10 A.M., and we had to break the ice to get through. And I said, ‘I don't know about you, but I'm going to California—livin' off the fruit of the land.'” Grow reached his breaking point soon after, when he smashed his thumb while working. After waiting three days for their pay, the pair hitchhiked south into the sunshine. “I wouldn't take any work clothes with me either,” Ashby recalled. “I brought slacks and a sports jacket and resolved that these would do fine for any job I was willing to undertake.”⁷

Ashby and Grow hitchhiked back down into Utah, refusing to squander their money on such things as lodgings. “Outside Provo, Utah, I slept all night by the side of the road,” Ashby subsequently recalled. “The next day a deer hunter, the deer tied to the fender, gave me a ride all the way to L.A.”⁸ (Later, seemingly in reference to this journey, he said, “I don't own any guns and I never have.…It wasn't until I saw some guys kill a deer that I decided it wasn't for me.”)⁹

Six hundred miles later, the hunter dropped Ashby and Grow at the intersection of Vermont Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard on the northeast side of Los Angeles. No doubt excited to have arrived, they were brought down to earth with a bump when they discovered that Ashby's uncle—his father's half brother, William Ashby, with whom they had been planning to stay—had died two years earlier. They quickly went from being men setting out to make their fortune in the city by the sea to boys with nowhere to stay in a huge, sprawling metropolis that neither had ever been to before. They had what was left of their $40 paychecks from Evanston and nothing else.

The money seemed to disappear with alarming speed. As Ashby told it years afterward, he was trying to live off onion sandwiches but reached a point where his funds were so depleted that he bought a Powerhouse candy bar that he made last for three days. With his final dime he called his mother collect and said, “Your little boy's in California starving.”¹⁰

Eileen responded, “Well, I never told you to go to California: you're a bright boy; I'm sure you'll think of something.”¹¹

Looking back on the incident, Ashby was grateful that his mother had forced him to face the repercussions of his actions. At the time, however, he was desperate and continued to solicit her help, this time in writing:

Dear Mom,

Well here is your little lost boy writing to you at last. I havent [sic] got a job yet, and I'm broke flat, but I guess everything will work out okay. I just wrote you to tell you I'm okay and to give you my address in case anything comes up. My address is

Hal Ashby

c/o Hi Ho Inn

2601 W. 6th St.

L.A., S. Cal

Well Mom, I can't think of anything to tell you, except the climate is certainly wonderful here. I'm read [sic] of my cold at least. I sure hope I can get a job of some kind, cause I've decided to make So. Cal. my home for life. That is if I live long enough and don't starve to death.

Well Bye Bye for now Mom, and remember I always love you.

Your Son

Hal oxoxoxoxo

P.S. Write when you get a chance.¹²

Ashby's calculated attempts to guilt his mother into sending money hinted at such desperation that Eileen finally gave in. He was still her baby boy—or, as he put it, “little lost boy”—and he knew that she could not hold out forever. But after a period of sending him money, Eileen decided that enough was enough.

The Hi Ho Inn was not, in fact, where he was lodging but a bar near MacArthur Park where he and Grow were regulars and had their mail sent. The two were staying in a rooming house on Fourth Avenue and Pico Boulevard, along with Herb Rose, Vern Hipwell, Ed Burton, and Dallas Fowler, a group of boys they knew from Ogden. They had come to make their fortune, seeing Los Angeles as a place where they had as good a chance as any to turn the American dream into reality.

They all recognized that getting a job, any job, was a necessity. Fortunately, with Christmas approaching, stores needed extra help. Ashby and Grow were both hired by Bullock's department store in the downtown area, working there over the holiday season and then afterward also for the January sales.

When Ashby and Grow left snowy, frozen Wyoming, they pictured Los Angeles as a city of sunshine and opportunity, at the center of which lay Hollywood. Janice Grow recalls that Ashby accompanied Grow to an open casting call at Maurice Kosloff Productions that they saw advertised in a newspaper. “Max was extremely good looking,” she says. “I think they thought he could be a big heartthrob star. Don't know what Hal's ideas were.”¹³

In fact, though he later admitted that he had wanted to be in the movie business because “it seemed glamorous,”¹⁴ at the time Ashby had not yet fixed on the idea of working in Hollywood as he had never given much thought to films. He was not a child who had spent every spare moment in darkened movie houses; instead, he'd been out living life. When he went to the theater, Ashby had been more interested in serials and cowboy movies than “regular movies.” “I doubt that his [Hal's] early movie experiences had any bearing on how he began his movie career,” Jack says. “I never actually heard him say he wanted to work in the movie business when he grew up.”¹⁵

After living together at Fourth and Pico for a year or so, Ashby, Grow, and the other Ogden boys went their separate ways. Grow moved to a single room elsewhere in the house, while Ashby ended up in a small $7-a-week room in Bunker Hill. The two friends subsequently grew apart. Two or three years later, when Grow was living in Hollywood, Ashby came round with a girlfriend and drove the three of them down to Tijuana for a day trip in his convertible. That was the last time Grow saw Ashby.

Ashby went into the world knowing that his future lay out there but uncertain of what it would be. He ended up working as a salesman but was not cut out for the job. Though he had the charm, he was uneasy selling products he knew were inferior to people who didn't deserve to be shortchanged. He tried selling magazines, encyclopedias, brushes, and more besides but was always troubled by his conscience. “You were always doing a con, telling a lie,” he said. “I don't like telling lies.”¹⁶

After his move to Los Angeles, Ashby had remained in contact with Janice Austin. She thought of him as her sweetheart, though Ashby may have viewed things as slightly more casual. She came down to visit him a couple of times and recalls that on one occasion he took her for a meal at a fancy nightclub where the renowned bandleader Woody Herman was playing and even got Herman to pose with them for a picture. Not long after this, Ashby stopped replying to Janice's letters. To find out why, she drove down to Los Angeles with her mother and brother. “I remember us sitting in Pershing Square while my brother went to see Hal,” she recalls. “When he came back, [I was told] Hal said he didn't want to see me. I just figured he'd met someone else.”¹⁷

She was right, as around that time Ashby got married for the second time. Little is known about the marriage, but what is certain is that on July 25, 1949, Hal Ashby married one Maxine Marie Armstrong in Las Vegas. “[I was] married and divorced twice before I made it to twenty-one,” Ashby claimed in an article he wrote for Action magazine.¹⁸ If this is indeed true, then Ashby (whose twenty-first birthday was on September 2, 1950) cannot have been married to Maxine for much more than a year.

After Hal and Maxine were married, Eileen asked them to come back to Ogden. Jack and Beth had moved temporarily to Portland, Oregon, and Eileen wanted help running the store, which was now an ice-cream parlor and restaurant called Ashby's Ice Cream. Hal and Maxine moved into an apartment in Ogden and helped out at the store. It seems likely that Eileen had twisted Hal's arm to get him to come back; he had, after all, claimed that Southern California was to be his home for life.

Despite what he might have hoped he could do for Eileen, Ashby knew he could never be the dutiful son who takes over his aging mother's store. Almost inevitably, things didn't work out. Hal regretted coming back to Ogden and quarreled with Eileen. Over the years, he would repeatedly and sincerely tell her in letters how he loved her and how much her opinion meant to him, but whenever they spent prolonged periods of time together, their relationship became fraught and troubled. In the end, it was probably just a few months that Ashby and Maxine worked at the store as it quickly became obvious that it wasn't working out. The newlyweds returned to California, and Eileen sold the store soon after.

Back in Los Angeles, Ashby's marriage to Maxine fizzled out. During their time in Ogden, Maxine had had an abortion (most likely at Ashby's request), which seems to have been the beginning of the end for them. Ashby knew what he didn't want, namely, more children, but was no nearer to finding his true direction in life. “I was a kid looking for something,” he said, “but I didn't know what. The movie business seemed like a terrific thing to get into.”¹⁹

Though he went there only because it was free, it was the State Employment Office in Van Nuys that helped Ashby get his foot in the door. “I got my first job [in movies] through the State Employment Department,” he recalled. “Like a jerk I went down there and told them I wanted to get into motion pictures, and that woman looked at me like ‘What the hell is that?' and started going through the little index file and said, ‘Well, here's something.' So I said, ‘All right—I'm willing to start at the bottom.' ‘Well,' she said, ‘here's something at Universal with a Multilith machine. Do you know what that is?' And I said, ‘No.' So she said, ‘Do you know what a mimeograph machine is? Well, it's like a mimeograph machine. They don't particularly want experience.'”²⁰

Ashby went to his local library to read up on the mechanics of a mimeograph (a hand-cranked copying machine) so as to be a proficient employee when he started the job a few days later. He quickly grew very comfortable at Universal, and although the job copying scripts was repetitive and undemanding, Ashby saw only opportunity around him. He says that, “like any red-blooded American,”²¹ he “looked around and said, ‘What's the best job around here?'”²² In his mind, it was a director.

Ashby was very keen, and the kid in the ink-spotted smock from the copy department became well-known for his pleasing manner and willingness to learn. Starting at the bottom meant that almost everybody knew more than he did, so he talked to people whenever he could and began to learn about the possible routes to becoming a director. He initially considered training to be an assistant director, but he soon learned that there was a better route. The directors he spoke to kept repeating the same advice. “Get into editing,” they told him. “With editing, everything is up there on film for you to see over and over again. You can study it and ask why you like it, and why you don't.”²³

During his time at Universal, Ashby made it his aim to learn as much as he could about editing. He befriended staff in the editing department, ran errands for them, and became their unofficial coffee boy. Editors seemed to work longer hours than everybody else, so Ashby would complete his copying and then hang out with them in the cutting rooms. He sat and watched the editors as they worked and eventually was allowed to stay on after everybody had left. By learning how to splice film together, cleaning the Moviolas and the other equipment, and even doing some tentative editing himself, he learned the basics of the trade.

Ashby developed a feel for editing and with it a passion for the process. One night when he was out drinking in Los Angeles with Bob Ballantyne, his old friend from Ogden, Ashby insisted on taking him to the building where he worked. He excitedly told Ballantyne about editing, the art and science of it, the precision required, and the creativity it allowed. “Along with describing what film editing involved he said, ‘You know, you can even win an Oscar for film editing, if you're good enough,'” Ballantyne recalls. “My immediate thoughts were, ‘He's dreaming.' But I said, ‘Oh, really!'” Though Ashby was “wobbling from too much booze,”²⁴ he seemed to Ballantyne more affected by his love of editing than by the alcohol.

When telling the story of Ashby's life, people often make the assumption that he progressed smoothly through the ranks from copyboy to assistant editor, to editor, to director, as if a conveyor belt was carrying him there. This misconception was reinforced by studio biographies of Ashby, something that amused and exasperated him: “It always amazes me how they compress years of pain and frustration into two sentences.”²⁵ The truth is that the job at Universal came to an end, and it was not an easy transition from Multilith to Moviola. In order to get work as an editor, Ashby would have to join the union and serve an eight-year apprenticeship, and to even be admitted into the union, he needed a prominent editor to vouch for him. In the end, he realized he would simply have to go back to normal, everyday work. He would bide his time and wait for his opportunity to come.

Writing about the struggle to become a success in Hollywood, Sammy Davis Jr. once remarked: “I have got jobs for dozens of other people on the fringes to keep them in contact with films. The director Hal Ashby, for instance, lived at my place for a while when he was working as a third assistant in the cutting room. He made his way up to the huge success he is today—by learning his craft from the bottom.”²⁶ Ashby wouldn't become an assistant editor until the mid-1950s, but he and Davis became friends and companions in the early part of the decade following his return from Ogden. Throughout his career, Ashby met and befriended talented people, but in many cases—that of Davis included—Ashby knew them before they were famous. In the 1950s, he was part of a tight group of bohemian friends, almost all of whom went on to achieve success in their respective fields.

Ashby was introduced to Davis by another friend, Steve Allen, the comedian, songwriter, author, and future Tonight Show creator, whom he listened to in the early days of his KNX radio show and whose comic sensibility was similar to Ashby's own. At the time, Davis was still in the Will Mastin Trio alongside his father and uncle, whom he had been performing with since he was first able to walk. Ashby arguably loved musicians and their music much more than movie stars. And despite his sheltered, small-town upbringing, he never displayed the racist attitude that was so prevalent at that time. A hippie before the word was coined, Ashby looked at the person, not the skin color, and was troubled by the unenlightened minds of most Americans. One of Ashby's girlfriends from the 1950s, Gloria Flaum, remembers his concern about “discrimination and a lot of things that were going on. Hal was pretty politically motivated. I know he read the poetry of [Carl] Sandburg, and marched on a black protest march in the South.”²⁷

Ashby and Davis went on the road together, with “Billy Hal” (as Davis called Ashby) acting as a secretary-cum-manager. Davis struggled tremendously against the bigotry that Americans at the time thought was acceptable: onstage he was praised and applauded, but after the show he was treated as grossly inferior by the white audiences who had been enjoying his act only moments before. In the first volume of his autobiography, Davis wrote about repeatedly coming across signs outside hotels saying things such as “No Niggers—No Dogs” and “Everybody Welcome but the Nigger and the Jew,”²⁸ and Ashby would tell his friend Bill Box about the times he was refused entry to hotels simply because Davis, a black man, was with him. Ashby was working for Davis (though he was not with him) at the time Davis lost his eye in a horrific car accident and was one of the first by his bedside in the hospital. “He thought a great deal of Sammy,” recalled Hal's third wife, Mickey. “He was close to Sammy's family; he was like one of the family, even. They were very good friends.”²⁹

Along with working at a button factory, several department stores, and a soda fountain (where he apparently drank more than he earned), going on the road with Davis was one of numerous jobs that he took in the 1950s just to keep the money coming in, but afterward Ashby and Sammy remained friends. During this period, Ashby met the people who would form the core of his life for the rest of the decade, the kindred spirits who would help him become the person he had always wanted to be.

Ashby's bohemian inner circle was made up of Bill Box, an aspiring cartoonist and writer, Bill Otto, who would end up in advertising, Ian Bernard, a jazz pianist and later a writer, and John Mandel, another jazz musician. Piecing together the story of their youthful exploits is something of a challenge because, as Bernard confesses, they were all smoking too much marijuana.

Shortly before he met Bill Box, Ashby was working as a secretary. He first worked for a businessman called John Brokaw who was rumored to own oil wells. Ashby not only took on secretarial and management duties for Brokaw but even painted the bathroom in his boss's West Hollywood apartment. Brokaw was neither a conventional nor a reliable boss, and once when he and Ashby were in Las Vegas on business, he was arrested for making what Box calls an “aggressive approach” to singer Lena Horne.³⁰ Ashby and Brokaw's partnership ended abruptly one night, when Brokaw packed up his things and left, never to be seen again.

Ashby moved on to a job at a debt-consolidation agency in Hollywood run by a man called Ray Kline who managed two rising singers, Abbey Lincoln and Pam Garner, and didn't actually want to be in the debt-consolidation business. Neither, for that matter, did Ashby, who spent as much time as he could away from his desk, socializing with his coworkers. One of Ashby's favorite colleagues was Betty Gumm, and he would happily spend long periods sitting on the floor by her desk, cracking jokes. “Hal, we've gotta work, and all you're doing is making me laugh all day,” she used to tell him.³¹

Through another colleague, Bill Otto (known as “Blotto,” a slang term for drunk), Ashby became friends with Bill Box. Box had been parking cars at a restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, but crippling arthritis forced him to give up the job. Ashby, Otto, and the immobilized Box ended up living together in Beverly Glen, up in the Hollywood Hills.

While Box was housebound, he killed time by doodling and drawing cartoons inspired by jazz, one of the group's great shared passions. Box had always loved cartooning and saw the potential to turn his temporary incapacitation to his advantage. Along with a friend, Bill Kennedy, an aspiring singer whom he had met while parking cars, he started the Box Card Company in 1953, producing cards with bebop and hipster cartoons and slogans like “Keep Cool This Yule.” Though Bernard and Mandel were playing jazz regularly at that time, Box was really the first to find a path to success, arguably providing an example for the others and further fueling their ambition. Everybody in the group helped out with the company when they could, and Ashby was part of the “night crew” who wrapped cards for Box.

While they all worked hard to reach their goals, they also had fun when they were not working. Ashby and his friends regularly went to the Coronet, a small repertory theater on La Cienega, where they watched classic Hollywood films. If they were feeling particularly flush, they would buy a good dinner, then spend the evening at Ciro's, a favorite nightclub of Hollywood's big names. Sometimes they would drive down to the Lighthouse jazz club in Hermosa Beach, and Bernard would sit in with whichever of his friends, such as West Coast luminaries Jerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, was playing that night. Ashby, Bernard, and the two Bills also regularly went to Restaurant Row on La Cienega, where there was a lounge bar with a singer every fifty yards. They frequented the Captain's Table, the Encore, the Tally Ho. “We were just exuberant youths, four or five of us out having a good time together,” remembers Bernard. “We hung out at all the bars, and I had an apartment just above La Cienega, so it was very convenient. We should have all been dead probably because we were always driving with alcohol!”³² Ashby in particular was lucky to have survived: he would drink to excess and then drive his 1949 Ford without any shock absorbers or springs.

In addition to drinking a lot, Ashby and his friends discovered marijuana when they came to Los Angeles. Or, as Bernard puts it, they collectively “grew up on weed.” Ashby started smoking grass a year or so after he arrived in Los Angeles and continued to do so for almost forty years. (Some of his friends would blend his two names into one, calling him “Hashby.”) Box and Bernard quit smoking marijuana a year or so later, but Bernard confesses, “We should have been fat with all the chocolate cake we ate! In those days, Ashby and the rest of us were smoking a lot of pot, you know? Ashby was the champion: he pretty much had a joint in his hand at all times.”³³ John Mandel has happy memories of the group watching the television talent show Rocket to Stardom “stoned out of our heads,”³⁴ while Box nicknamed one of the places they lived during that period “The Happy House” because of all the pot they smoked there. Once when one of their less worldly friends came round and asked what the curious smell was, quick as a flash Ashby said, “We made some pea soup, and we burned it.”³⁵

Bernard stresses that the marijuana was weak compared to modern standards but admits that Ashby still overindulged: “I think he smoked weed to excess. But it wasn't a negative effect that it had on him, it just meant he got sillier and sillier. And I never, in all those years, saw Hal as a depressed person or a loner.”³⁶ Yet while Bernard did not see his darker moments, Ashby did not manage to hide them from everybody.

Ashby and his new crowd were all fans of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, whose narrator famously does not want to discuss “where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield crap.”³⁷ Ashby did not feel like going into any David Copperfield crap either, and with his group of Ogden friends having dispersed, he was relieved to have new friends who were unaware of his unhappy past.

“None of us knew anything about his life before we met him,” Bernard recalls. “None of us knew that he'd had children, none of us knew he'd been married before—not a damn thing.”³⁸ But Gloria started seeing the effect of Ashby's failure to deal with issues from his past: “He was very, very moody, and he could be so funny, I mean unbelievably funny. And then turn around and be every bit as moody and heavy.” Gloria dated Ashby for some time and once met his mother (“a wonderful lady”) when she came down to visit. After Eileen's stay, it became clear to her that his unexpected bouts of depression were rooted in unresolved problems from his troubled adolescence: “It was strange, because he could have you in stitches, but alone with him, he had a lot of dark moments. He'd become very, very upset and very down. It could be prompted by very little, because I don't think it was what was happening at the moment, I think it was stuff that he was carrying around about his father and his mother. I think that Hal had some deep feelings about his father's suicide and resentments about his mother, and I'm not sure exactly why, except that I'm sure it caused him a great deal of unhappiness.”³⁹

As he grew closer to his group of friends, Ashby learned that he was not the only one with a tragic incident in his past. Bill Otto's father had died young, and Otto blamed his mother for pushing him to work himself into an early grave. Clyde Wilson, a friend of Box's from his hometown of Bremerton, Washington, had come home one day to find his father had shot his mother and then turned the gun on himself. There was a kinship between the three of them, but Ashby revealed very little even to them. His persistent refusal to talk about his problems and accept help when it was offered resulted in him struggling with the demons of his past for the rest of his life. He could ignore them for periods of time, but when things went awry in his professional or personal life, it would become unbearable for him, as if the weight of the world had suddenly fallen on him.

Possibly as a way of papering over the cracks, Ashby threw himself into whatever work he was doing, trying to make money while he waited for his editing break. He was seemingly willing to pursue even the most unlikely business opportunities. He went to the Los Angeles Exhibition Center to sell rubberized floor mats and became involved with Clyde in an equally oddball moneymaking scheme. “Clyde reveals one day that he has this furniture polish or household cleaning product,” recalls Box, “and it worked really well. Somehow he had the rights to it, and Hal saw this as an opportunity. So he went to Washington state with Clyde to see if they could do something with that, but I think nothing came of that. I think he would have welcomed some kind of entrepreneurial opportunity.”⁴⁰

Ashby no doubt was frustrated to be selling household goods rather than doing something he was passionate about, but his sense of humor (he was “the champion giggler of all time,” according to Bernard)⁴¹ and enjoyment of life kept him going. “Hal had little or no cash assets but he was loaded in the humor department,” says Box. “And when the mood struck him he could have you rolling on the floor.”⁴² Ashby had a very idiosyncratic way of looking at life, comic, but with a philosophical slant. One day in the kitchen of the house in Beverly Glen, he suddenly said, “I earn $35 a week, and where does it go? Right down this garbage disposal. If this garbage disposal were an animal, it'd be the strongest beast on the face of the earth.”⁴³

His enthusiasm for the arts was also infectious and revealed in him a knack for storytelling. “He was wonderful when he was talking about having seen Guys and Dolls or read some book and [would] retell it so wonderfully well,” enthuses Box. “It was a real treat. He remembered things in great detail and was so enthusiastic about them. His monologues created little scenes and characters.”⁴⁴ Ashby had an incredible memory for the things that interested him—he loved Broadway shows, bought the LPs of musicals, and knew all the words to West Side Story—and it was this talent that helped him bring stories so fully to life. Because listening to one of his descriptions was so enjoyable, Box says, the “book he talked about or the film he had seen might not always live up to Hal's colorful telling of it.”⁴⁵ Mandel also remembers Hal's enthusiasm and his great interest not only in art but also in people: “He was great to be with. He had a tremendous curiosity about everything and was really interested in people. He was unlike anyone I'd ever met.”⁴⁶

A number of Ashby's friends, including Bill Otto and Ian Bernard, ended up living at the Sunset Colonial Hotel, a place that became “a center for the young Turks,” according to Bernard.⁴⁷ The author John Ridley describes the hotel as “ground zero for a bushel of fresh-off-the-bus actor and actress types…[who had] headed west with a lot of ideas on becoming stars…but not a single plan on how to reach their destination.”⁴⁸ It was seedy and therefore cheap, but Ashby had friends and other like-minded dreamers all around. What's more, they knew how to have fun. When Bill Otto got married, Ashby and Bernard snuck into the groom's room on the day of the ceremony and took all the furniture out of it. “When he came home from his honeymoon to spend the night there,” laughs Bernard, “there wasn't a stick of furniture in the room. Not even a bed. He wasn't that pleased.”⁴⁹

Sammy Davis Jr., now a rising star, also had an apartment at the Sunset Colonial. Ashby and Davis would hang out with actors Byron Kane and Jeff Chandler, and the four formed a club called “The Face Men of America,” the name apparently referring to a certain shared sexual preference. Because Davis spent so much time on the road, he was only an occasional member of Ashby's gang but was still considered one of them. Bill Box remembers being invited along with Ashby to a party thrown by Davis after the recording of his hit song “Hey There” and seeing Sammy, one of the fastest draws in the business, showing off by twirling a pair of pistols and slamming them in their holsters. Over the years, Davis disappeared from the group as other friends became more important to him. “After he became a Rat Packer, he moved in different circles and I believe was corrupted by his own self importance,” says Bernard. “Surrounded by sycophants, he forgot the ‘little people.'”⁵⁰

However, those in Ashby's circle were becoming successful too. The Box Card Company continued to thrive, and Box also started doing artwork for jazz albums put out by Mode Records. Ian Bernard cowrote and arranged the acclaimed albums Rain or Shine (1955) and Moondreams (1957) for singer Dick Haymes, with the latter release also featuring John Mandel. In the mid-1950s, Ashby himself made an appearance on a popular television show hosted by Art Linkletter called People Are Funny, a precursor to reality television that got its contestants to perform outrageous or zany stunts for the audience's amusement. According to Box, Ashby was given a relatively appealing task: the show sent flowers, chocolates, and other love offerings from “Your secret admirer” (i.e., Ashby) to an unsuspecting girl, and Ashby's mission was simply to bring her back to the show, which he succeeded in doing.

Bill Otto's activities in the entertainment world, however, were to prove most important for Ashby. Otto acted as assistant to production on a film called No Place to Hide, which was shot in Manila at the end of 1954. Won over by the director-producer-writer Josef Shaftel's big plans for the film (which were based around the exotic location and stars Marsha Hunt and David Brian), Otto invested the remainder of his inheritance in the film. Shaftel's pitch must have been particularly convincing as Otto was famously tight. “Canter's was one of our favorite places to eat, and we loved to go out to eat breakfast there,” Ashby's future wife Mickey recalls, “but nine times out of ten, when the bill came [Otto] would say, ‘Oh gosh, I seem to have forgotten my wallet.…'”⁵¹ No Place to Hide would eventually be released in 1956, almost two years later, and be consigned to B-movie obscurity rather than the marquee success its makers had hoped for. Otto unfortunately lost most of his investment, but it was through his connection with Shaftel that Ashby got his chance to break into editing and start that slow rise to the top.