Читать книгу Being Hal Ashby - Nick Dawson - Страница 12

Doors Open…

It is only with one's heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)

I received my reward that rainy night when you decided to hire me as the fourth assistant on The Big Country. That, as they say, is when it all really started to happen. —Hal Ashby (to Robert Swink)

Before the box-office failure of No Place to Hide curtailed Bill Otto's relationship with Josef Shaftel, the director rushed another film into production. The Naked Hills (1956), shot with the working title The Four Seasons, was a Western, again written, directed, and produced by Shaftel, starring character actors Keenan Wynn and Jim Backus. Shooting began in the fall of 1955 at Republic, the biggest of the Poverty Row studios, and Otto brought Ashby and Bill Box along to watch.

Determined to make the most of the opportunity, Ashby volunteered to carry cans of film and soon was hired as an assistant editor. It was a B-movie job that no doubt paid almost nothing, but it was a foot in the door. Working alongside chief editor Gene Fowler Jr. (the son of screenwriter and novelist Gene Fowler), Ashby spent every available moment in the cutting room, absorbing as much of Fowler's knowledge and expertise as he could. “We shared a house, but I barely saw Hal, he worked so hard,” Bill Box remembers. “He would be up before I was in the morning, off to work, and then at night come in, just grab a bite to eat and then go to bed because he was working into the night.”¹

Ashby's entry into the editing world marked the start of a period when work took precedence over everything else. At the age of twenty-six, he was now entirely focused on becoming a full-fledged editor and then realizing his ultimate dream of becoming a director. Though he would marry three more times and have many love affairs, from this point on his great passion was for his work. (Ironically, The Naked Hills is about a man who, for the majority of his life, lets his hunger for success jeopardize any chance of happiness that he might have with his wife and child. At the end of the film, the aging and down-on-his-luck protagonist finally realizes that it is love, not money, that he truly wanted all along.)

After this first editing job, Ashby applied to the Society of Motion Picture Film Editors, probably with Fowler's backing, in order to join the union. Editing was not a huge field, so the union was very careful about whom it allowed to join, but the timing was good, and Ashby was accepted. Thus he began the eight-year union-recognized apprenticeship that would allow him to work his way through the ranks.

By the time Ashby graduated from this arduous school of editing and became a director, his cinematic contemporaries were ten years his junior, fresh-faced film school grads with no concept of the effort he spent getting where he was. Looking back on his own experiences, he discouraged aspiring young directors from taking the editorial route: “You had to lie and cheat and do everything you could just to work. Of course, I would do editing on the side, and so forth, just to be into it and doing it. It was a tremendously debilitating thing. It is the members themselves, out of that tremendous desire to protect what they consider their livelihoods. They don't get into anything creative at all in their minds, except for a handful.”²

Ashby described his apprenticeship as a “a trip and a half,…a full-out struggle,” but it was well worth it for the education it gave him, not only in editing, but also in directing: “When film comes into a cutting room, it holds all the work and efforts of everyone involved up to that point. The staging, writing, acting, photography, sets, lighting, and sound. It is all there to be studied again and again and again, until you really know why it's good, or why it isn't. This doesn't tell you what's going on inside a director, or how he manages to get it from head to film, but it sure is a good way to observe the results, and the knowledge gained is invaluable.”³

Around the same time he joined the editing union, Ashby entered into another kind of union. He was still dating Gloria Flaum when John Mandel introduced him to a neighbor of his in Beachwood Canyon called Maloy Bartron, or Mickey to her friends. Ashby usually went for blonde, sweet, innocent types, and Mickey had short, black hair and was cute and playful with a tough edge. However, she was Ashby's age and a bohemian too, and something undeniably clicked between them.

Though they quickly fell in love, Ashby and Mickey's relationship may have begun on a professional basis. Mickey was a painter, but her art didn't make her much money, and she paid her bills working as a high-class Hollywood call girl. Mickey was an orphan who had been adopted by a couple who didn't understand her and whom she grew to resent, so coming to Los Angeles and not having to answer to anyone was a huge release for her. She was extremely sexually confident and had freely chosen to become a call girl because, as she would say, the job allowed her to sleep in every morning and work when she wanted. She had a telephone exchange where clients left messages for her, but she always had the option to say no. Her little black book contained only the names of high rollers, allegedly including Frank Sinatra, Desi Arnaz, and George Raft.

One Sunday afternoon, when Mickey and Ashby and the rest of the gang were gathered together at somebody's house, the two of them went down to have a look at Ian Bernard's new MG. It was the first time they connected, and their first “episode,” as Mickey called it, was on the back seat of that very car. Mandel had suspected that they would click, and indeed Hal and Mickey quickly became a couple. Gloria, who was oblivious to the developments, was justifiably angry when she found out. According to Gloria, she and Mickey “overlapped” as she and Ashby either were still together or had only just broken up at the time. Mickey, who later became good friends with Gloria, recalls that she “went ballistic when she came home one day and found out.”⁴

Despite having rushed into two short-lived marriages, Ashby was overcome by the intoxication of falling in love and proposed to Mickey almost immediately. He was deliberate, thoughtful, and considered in most other things, but when he fell in love, he surrendered to the feeling completely. “We had so much in common,” says Mickey. “He had his film thing, I had my painting thing, we both loved jazz, we were both ‘heads'—it all fitted in!”⁵ On August 4, 1956, the couple were married in Laguna Beach, a seaside town an hour's drive down the Pacific coast from Los Angeles. They had been together for less than a month.

During the early stages of the marriage, the couple struggled financially: Ashby had insisted that Mickey give up her job as soon as they became “exclusive,” but he couldn't get steady editing work. He ended up getting them both jobs at the debt-consolidation agency where he had worked previously. Because he knew Ray Kline, “we just walked into the job,” Mickey remembers. “But first I had to promise not to tell people because it fell short of his own standards, and the people we knew would criticize him for it. It didn't fit into the persona that he wanted.”⁶ Fortunately, Ashby soon got a job as an assistant editor at Walt Disney Pictures, where most likely he worked on television rather than film projects.

Early on in the marriage, Ashby and Mickey lived with Bill Otto in Laurel Canyon, up in the Hollywood Hills. As well as being a jazz aficionado and a keen reader, Otto was an avid amateur photographer and had a darkroom in the house. He and Mickey shared a mutual admiration of each other's artistic abilities: he was a great fan of her paintings, while she got heavily into photography, quickly becoming, as she put it, a “darkroom baby.”⁷ Mickey was the only woman in Ashby's inner circle of friends, but she loved having the guys around and being in the company of other creative people.

While Mickey was holed up in the darkroom, Ashby was spending increasingly long hours in darkened editing rooms. He was good at becoming friends with the right people, and one job led to another. His first major studio editing job came when one of the chief editors at Disney, Ellsworth Hoagland, brought Ashby with him to United Artists. The film was director Stanley Kramer's The Pride and the Passion (1957), starring Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, and Sophia Loren, and though the editing work he did was technical rather than creative, he made a positive impression while he had the chance. “He could read people well; that was why he could charm people,” Mickey says.⁸ During the course of the editing of The Pride and the Passion, Ashby not only made a lifelong friend in fellow editor Bob Lawrence, who almost thirty years later would work for Ashby on 8 Million Ways to Die, but also made contacts at United Artists that led to his next job.

During the first few years of his marriage to Mickey, Ashby's career was progressing well, and he and Mickey were very happy. There was an ease to their relationship not only because of Ashby's laid-back personality but also because they were so well matched. He had initially swept Mickey off her feet, but once the excitement of the romance began to lessen, she found that he was gentle, sensitive, and easygoing. Ashby was interested in Eastern mysticism, aspired to be as peaceful as one of his idols, Gandhi, and was generous to a fault. The happier he was, the more his sense of humor came to the fore, and he and Mickey had great fun together, really relishing each other's company. Ian Bernard and his wife, Judith, used to come round, and the four of them would stay up late, drinking and laughing, and often recording their conversations. They would then meet up again the next night and fall about with laughter listening to what they had said. But despite his happiness with Mickey, Ashby's demons remained. “He had a darker side which didn't come out often, but when it did it, it really did,” Mickey remembers. “He'd pound his head on the wall. When he got out of it, he really got out of it.”⁹

With his focus on his career, Ashby spent huge amounts of time working, but this did not seem to have a negative effect on his marriage. Mickey shared Ashby's love of cinema (she would later end up working as a sound-effects editor), and as an artist she understood his dedication to his craft. When Eileen came to stay with them, Ashby hardly saw her, which Mickey suspects was because “she wasn't in a position to further his career in any way. That was the way he was.”¹⁰

This attitude won Ashby a job as fifth assistant editor on William Wyler's epic Western The Big Country (1958), where he worked under Bob Swink, the chief editor on every one of Wyler's films since Detective Story (1951). Wyler was a double Oscar winner for Mrs. Miniver (1942) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and one of the most powerful directors in Hollywood. His relationship with Swink was as notable for its mutual trust and respect as for its unpredictable volatility. Wyler was known as “Forty-Take Wyler” and “Once More Wyler” because of the huge amount of film he shot, and Ashby, a noted hard worker, was hired because so many cutters were required.

Ashby once said, “My life changed when I met William Wyler and some others. Then all the doors opened, like in a movie.”¹¹ The experience prompted a radical change in the way he thought about film, which he began to see as “the wildest, most exciting medium of all.” On Ashby's very first day on The Big Country, one of the editors had assembled a rough cut of one reel of the film, so Wyler and his whole editing crew assembled in the projection room to look at it. Wyler stood up in front of everybody and, for the benefit of Ashby, the new boy, said, “If you have any ideas…any…no matter how wild they might seem, get them out. I, or we, might argue with you, and tell you it's a dumb idea and you are a dumb son of a bitch…but that doesn't matter because the heat of our anger comes only from the desire to make a good film. You must understand how we all feel about this film, and know in your heart that the words said in anger have nothing to do with anything personal. It will sound that way because we are driven by those strong feelings, and we don't take the time to be polite, but personal it isn't. So get those ideas out in the open and remember, the only thing any of us wants out of all this is to make a good film.”¹²

This blew Ashby's mind. It was a thrill to be working with somebody of Wyler's stature but even more of one to feel so welcomed into the process. Never before had he been considered important enough to offer an opinion. In previous jobs, he had been told: “Whatever they say, don't open your mouth. Don't you say a word.”¹³ Wyler, however, believed in collaborative filmmaking, in which everybody was considered significant enough to contribute, and it was a working method that Ashby fell in love with and would employ himself when he became a director. He conceded that there was “a lot of yelling, hollering and swearing that went on down in those cutting rooms, but there was also about eighteen tons of love floating around there, too!”¹⁴

Though he would later say that he wished he had an editor he could work with as well as Wyler did with Swink, he admitted that he had “never seen anybody have arguments the way they had arguments.”¹⁵ Swink told him stories of the massive fallings-out they had working on Roman Holiday (1953), and Ashby saw incidents where their constant needling led to shouting matches and Swink throwing reels of film on the floor.

Three months or so after shooting finished, a rough cut had been assembled, and Wyler, Swink, and the editing crew gathered in Projection Room A in Goldwyn Studios to watch the twenty-eight-reel version of the film (approximately four and a half hours long). After fourteen reels, the crew took a break for dinner. As Ashby was the most junior person there, food had not been provided for him, so he stayed where he was. He waited for the crew to return and was still waiting at 11:30 P.M. when Bob Belcher, one of the principal editors, came in and asked him why he was still there.

“I'm waiting for them to come back and we finish running the picture,” replied Ashby. “They've only run the first fourteen reels.”

“Oh, God,” said Belcher, realizing Ashby hadn't heard what had happened. “They're not coming back.”

“Why?” asked Ashby.

“Bob quit.”¹⁶

During the meal, Wyler and Swink had been discussing the first half of the film and had a huge argument that ended with Swink walking out on the film. Nevertheless, he came in the next day and got on with the job at hand.

The flip side to Wyler's belligerence was his subversive sense of humor, which Ashby experienced firsthand. He recalled with great amusement a time when Wyler had asked his opinion on an editing matter. Ashby was rambling on somewhat, as he was prone to do, when he noticed that Wyler had an object in his hand, something like a watch fob, which he was spinning. “And as he would spin it,” Ashby recalled, “you could see that it said ‘Piss On You.' Needless to say, I wasn't sure how he took my thing.”¹⁷

Though Wyler's reactions didn't always inspire confidence, the veteran director started Ashby thinking not only technically but also emotionally and creatively. As a result, Ashby felt greatly attached and committed to Big Country. When the film previewed in San Francisco, he was one of the few not brought along by Wyler, but he nevertheless paid his own way to attend the screening. Wyler was so impressed that Ashby was there that he had his expenses reimbursed. Everybody settled down to watch the film, and all was going well until, about an hour or so into the film, one of the reels went out of sync. It took a group of nervous editors almost ten minutes to rethread the negative and sort out the problem, by which time, as Ashby recalled, “a lot of people had come out to the popcorn stand to get candy and popcorn and so forth. And when they started the picture back up again, there was Willy running around in the lobby saying to people, ‘The picture's started again, the picture's started again,' forcing them back into the theater! There was no question about it: he wasn't polite, he was just grabbing them and throwing them back in! It was hysterical.”¹⁸

Ashby was learning by example all along, and seeing Wyler's passion for his films reinforced his certainty that this was where he wanted to be. Encouragingly, there were a number of editors who had gone on to direct, most famously David Lean and Robert Wise, and Ashby had only to look around him to see others who had done so. The first editor he had worked under, Gene Fowler Jr., had progressed to directing and by the end of the decade had made a clutch of films, such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), that were bound for classic B-movie status. One of the senior editors he had worked alongside at Walt Disney, Basil Wrangell, had combined editing with directing short films, second-unit material, television shows, and even a few features and was about to direct Cinerama's South Seas Adventure (1958). But there was another example even closer to home: Bob Swink.

Swink was desperate to become a director like Wyler, and the love-hate relationship between the two was greatly fueled by this desire. Wyler encouraged Swink by allowing him to shoot second unit on Big Country and Friendly Persuasion (1956) and, when he was too ill to make it to the set, had Swink oversee directorial duties on the latter for a few days. But though Wyler tantalized Swink with tidbits of directing work, he needed him as his editor and never really intended to let him go.

It wasn't just their shared dream of directing that bonded Ashby and Swink. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind asserts that the absence of Ashby's father in his life from age twelve onward led him to seek out paternal substitutes, namely, Swink and, later, Norman Jewison. While there is definitely truth in this, Ashby and Swink were also particularly well-matched professional partners. In Swink, Ashby saw a master editor and mentor figure who could take him up through the system; Ashby, conversely, was the ideal pupil, a keen young man quickly becoming a skilled editor who, like Swink, was willing to work incredibly long hours to get the job done.

Ashby worked throughout the week but devoted weekends to Mickey and his friends. Ian Bernard had moved to Laguna Beach in 1956, and it was only a matter of time before Bill Box, and then Ashby and Mickey, followed. The Ashbys rented an apartment in Villa Rockledge, a beautiful cliffside house on the seafront. Both Mickey and Ashby loved it: she could paint at her leisure and soon had a little menagerie of animals made up of the strays that always seemed to gravitate toward her, and he was thrilled to be near the ocean. Bernard says the house was “a joy” to Ashby: “That's one thing I'll say, he did love the ocean. He never sat out and sunbathed, and I never saw him swim, but it was the bitch of the ocean, you know? It had a romantic implication to him.”¹⁹

When Ashby was working on a film, he'd get up before dawn to beat the traffic and then drive up the coast to Los Angeles with the glow of the rising sun on the open road. According to Bernard, Ashby's workload and commuting “took the constitution of an eighteen-year old,” but he never needed more than four hours' sleep. “He would leave before anybody was up and came back when we were all in bed,” Bernard remembers. “We would leave some food out for him. I don't know how he did it.”²⁰

The Laguna crowd was described by Tom Blackwell as “artists, surfers, vagabonds,” all getting by as best they could.²¹ Blackwell was a young painter who had come from Chicago to try and make his name but was still a decade or so away from his breakthrough success as part of the photorealist movement. He enjoyed being part of this bohemian group and was a regular visitor at Ashby's seafront house. On weekends, everybody would gather together on the beach to smoke weed, drink, listen to music—Miles Davis, Art Pepper, John Coltrane—and talk about every conceivable topic. Blackwell was still wet behind the ears and latched onto Ashby, who quickly became his friend and mentor.

The aspiring artist was living on the breadline and was “so poor,” Bernard says, “I think Ashby gave him clothes and some shoes. I have this weird recollection that he gave him a pair of sandals!”²² Ashby took Blackwell under his wing and brought him along to jazz clubs, braving some of the rougher Los Angeles neighborhoods to share musical delights with the young man.

“He was the smartest man I'd ever met,” says Blackwell. “Funny, as well. Without him being showy, you would know that he was the smartest guy in the room. The thing about Hal was the commanding way he spoke. He was so verbally acute, he would immediately gain your respect. He would get to the essence of things in an offhand and unforgettable way. He could summarize a scene in a way that made it so compelling, after that you could only see it his way.”²³

In his early days of editing, Ashby was already thinking a lot about directing. Blackwell recalls a car journey they took together during which they discussed Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which Blackwell had just read. Over the course of the ride, the two talked about the possibility of turning it into a film, but Ashby decided it wasn't viable, that it was “way too far ahead of the zeitgeist.”²⁴ (According to Blackwell, Ashby was always a year or so ahead of everybody else's tastes.)

Ashby continued to read widely and watch a lot of films—Hitchcock and Fellini were among his favorite directors—and whether he was making industry connections or broadening his cultural horizons, everything he did was in some way geared toward readying himself to direct. In a letter written in the early 1980s, Mickey reminded Ashby of “the days we used [to] sit around digging Basie or whom ever and throwing ideas around about making films to the music instead of vice versa.”²⁵ She maintains that more than ten years before he started directing, Ashby already knew exactly what kinds of films he would make. “He was a very idealistic man,” she says. “He wanted to make films that had a message but didn't hit people over the head with it. You know, like a subtle thing. He believed he was going to become a director; that was what he'd wanted from the very beginning.”²⁶ Ashby was particularly influenced by Wyler because he made films marked by realism, restraint, and humor. Ashby respected Wyler because he “didn't want to be untruthful. He had very strong feelings that way, and he would make films for reasons.”²⁷

In around 1958, the year that Mandel broke into Hollywood with his groundbreaking jazz score to Robert Wise's I Want to Live, the Susan Hayward melodrama, Ashby and Bernard came up with a plan for a movie inspired by their activities with the antinuclear group SANE. The Sound of Silence, written by “Ian Bernard and Wm. Hal Ashby,” is set in 1965, twenty years after the dropping of the atomic bomb. It centers on David Cassidy, a war correspondent obsessed with Hiroshima who begins a personal crusade to prevent further nuclear activity. The script showcases pacifist perspectives and reveals the writers' belief that art can precipitate change. The last meaningful statement in the script is from David's wife, Allyn, who tells him that as a writer he has “the ability to reach men's hearts; you can make them feel and understand. You can do a lot of good because of this. That's the way I think you should fight.”²⁸

Cassidy is a lot like Ashby: married with a young child and unsure whether the conventional happiness of family life can give him all he needs. Like Ashby and many of his 1970s male protagonists, he is essentially still a child, an adult whose immaturity and insecurity lurk just below the surface. He too gets angry and impassioned about events outside his control, that anger and distress coming predominantly from an inability to affect things, rather than from the wrong itself.

Ashby and Bernard were friendly with Reva Frederick, Robert Mitchum's personal assistant, and The Sound of Silence was written with Mitchum in mind as they felt he would be ideologically sympathetic with the film's views. Mitchum was supposedly interested, but nothing came of it, and the film was never produced.

The Sound of Silence was too personal and polemical to be entirely successful: certain characters are stereotypes, some scenarios lack realism, and the dialogue is at times clunky. Yet considering how inexperienced both writers were, the script succeeds much more than might be expected, and its powerful pacifist message was a sign of things to come.

As soon as The Big Country was completed, Swink moved base to Twentieth Century–Fox to begin work on George Stevens's The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), taking his keen-eyed protégé with him.

Stevens, like Wyler, was a veteran who had as much power and sway as any director in Hollywood and a reputation for shooting a lot of footage. In the past, Stevens had infuriated his bosses with overblown production times and lengthy editing periods, but the consistent commercial and critical success of his films made him an asset to any studio. Three of his previous four films—Giant (1956), Shane (1953), and A Place in the Sun (1951)—had been huge successes, and Giant and A Place in the Sun both won Stevens Best Director Academy Awards. Though Stevens didn't have the same impact on Ashby as Wyler, working alongside him nevertheless had an effect. Years later, Ashby would recount the director telling him: “In film, 25 per cent of it is in the writing, 25 per cent of it is in the shooting, 25 per cent of it is in the editing, and the last 25 per cent is what you end up with.”²⁹

If anything, The Diary of Anne Frank was a bigger operation than The Big Country. It was another three-hour epic, and in the Fox cutting rooms where he worked Ashby had cans of footage stacked high all around him. Sometimes it would take hours just to find one little bit of footage, but he had a superb memory for minute details in individual takes and was an invaluable help to Swink. The pair worked fourteen- or fifteen-hour days, putting editing before everything else. A secretary's memo informed the Society of Motion Picture Film Editors that “Messr.s [sic] Bob Swink and Hal Ashby missed the meeting this evening because it was necessary to work on our picture.”³⁰ Out of the nine editors employed on The Diary of Anne Frank, it was only Ashby, the most junior, who kept working alongside his boss rather than stopping to attend a union meeting.

Ashby not only had a passion for his work but also felt a fierce loyalty to Swink. In the article “Breaking Out of the Cutting Room,” he wrote affectionately about Swink's influence on him:

When I was lucky enough to be working with Bob, he hit me with everything from the technical aspects to a philosophy of film.

“Once the film is in hand,” he would say, “forget about the script, throw away all of the so-called rules, and don't try and second-guess the director. Just look at the film, and let it guide you. It will turn you on all by itself, and you'll have more ideas on ways to cut it than you would ever dream possible.

“And use your instincts! Don't be afraid of them! Rely on them! After all with the exception of a little knowledge, instincts are all we've got.

“Also, don't be afraid of the film. You can cut it together twenty-six different ways, and if none of those works, you can always put it back into daily form, and start over.”³¹

After The Diary of Anne Frank, Swink took Ashby with him from film to film for the rest of his apprenticeship. It meant not only a guarantee of employment but also an opportunity to observe one of the best editors around. At the start of 1959, the two were just getting started on Spartacus (1960) when, after just two weeks, producer-star Kirk Douglas fired director Anthony Mann. Swink and Ashby left the film when the new director, Stanley Kubrick, brought in his own editor, Ashby's friend Bob Lawrence.

Mann's firing demonstrated the precarious position of directors, who were ostensibly less important than stars with inflated egos. When Ashby became a prominent director, he avoided the spotlight as much as possible and instead concentrated on his craft and helping others as he himself had been helped.

Ashby saw at close quarters the negative effects of fame when his path crossed with the celebrated poet Robert Frost. Frost was the guest of honor at the wedding of Lelia Goldoni, star of John Cassavetes's Shadows (1959) and a friend of Mickey's. Ashby was photographed standing proudly next to the great man, but the story behind the picture is more revealing. Ashby and Mickey were fond of Frost's delicate, sensitive poetry but found that, in person, the man was irritable and unbearably arrogant. “He was an egomaniac!” Mickey recalls.³²

Ashby had also seen a change in his friend Sammy Davis Jr. since he had risen to stardom. In the late 1950s, Ashby and Mickey would go for meals at Davis's house up in the hills. When Davis discovered Mickey was a painter, he commissioned her to paint his picture. Davis posed for Mickey, but she was interested in African art, and the tribal influences in her rendering of the Rat Packer were not to his liking. He had “an enormous ego,” Mickey said. “He wanted a Hollywood portrait, but I didn't have it in me to do that.”³³ As Davis's fame grew, he and Ashby grew apart. “One day Ashby and I were leaving the United Artists lot and Sammy stopped the car for a second,” says Ian Bernard. “Having been one of our great bosom buddies, he casually said, ‘We've got to get together sometime,' and Ashby and I both said, ‘Yeah, sure.' He'd sort of gone off to be a great star in his own mind.”³⁴

Ashby felt that in order to develop, he had to broaden his horizons, both culturally and geographically. He wanted to be ready to direct important films with something to say. He needed to move to Europe.

Mickey, however, was far from enthusiastic. “I was painting,” she says, “and we had this great house there up on a cliff above the ocean. As far as I was concerned we had it made, but he wanted to do this European thing.”³⁵ She would miss her friends and being surrounded by her animals, but, carried along by Ashby's excitement, she agreed to the move. They sold everything they owned, gave up the seafront house, and bid farewell to Laguna Beach.

They went first to New York City, where they stayed with Ashby's old girlfriend Gloria and her husband. It was November 1960, and the city was covered in snow. Mickey and Gloria went out for a walk and stumbled across an apartment that they thought would be perfect for Mickey and Ashby. Mickey was much keener on the idea of moving to New York than that of changing continents, but her efforts to convince Ashby to stay were fruitless. “He wanted to go to Europe, maybe just to say he had been to Europe,” she says. “I couldn't have cared less.”³⁶

Because he knew some film people there, Ashby chose to relocate to London. Mickey was now a sound-effects editor and had worked in television, and Ashby hoped they would both get film work through his contacts. However, they were shocked to discover on their arrival that they needed permits to work in Britain.

In an effort to salvage the situation, they bought a Volkswagen (very alien with its right-hand drive) and headed for the Continent, hoping a change of location would bring better fortune. They had little money, but in Paris they met someone who agreed to loan them his apartment for a few weeks. At the American Express office where they picked up their mail, a charismatic young man invited them to an Algerian tearoom. Because of the current tensions between Algeria and France (the Algerians were trying to gain independence from French colonial rule), it was risky to go to such places, and Ashby feared he might be arrested in a raid by the French police. “Ashby was very cautious,” Mickey remembers. “It was the beginning of his career, and he sure didn't want to get into anything like that.” Luckily, they spent an uninterrupted afternoon drinking tea and enjoying the establishment's “relaxed” atmosphere. “They had a lot of hash,” says Mickey. “They cut open a regular cigarette and laid a chunk of hash in it, wrapped it back up and smoked it that way. Drugs kinda ran in and out of everything.”³⁷

Ashby and Mickey next headed for Switzerland, where they met up with Ian and Judith Bernard in Zürich for Christmas. The two couples then drove through the Alps aiming for Rome, but a blizzard halted their progress, and they had to spend New Year's Eve in a little hotel in Piacenza. At dinner, they were befriended by a group of Italians who loved Americans because they had freed them from Mussolini and fascism. The two parties saw in the start of 1961 together, toasted it with optimism, and then retired for the night. The following morning, when Ashby checked out, he was told that the bill had been settled by the Italians from the night before. While the others were touched by this generosity, Ashby's pride was hurt. After a heated discussion, he stubbornly insisted they pay the bill again, much to Bernard's disgust.

As Mickey had feared, they struggled to adapt to life in Europe. They had fit in perfectly in Laguna Beach, but here they were seen as oddballs and hippies. Even simple things like crossing the street became confusing, as the Europeans drove on the “wrong” side of the road. Driving their little Volkswagen was disorienting and particularly difficult in Rome: on one occasion Ashby was so intimidated by the Italians' reckless driving that he froze on a roundabout by the Coliseum. Bernard had to pry him from the driver's seat and take over at the wheel.

After a few days in Rome, Ian and Judith left to go back to Laguna; Mickey enviously watched them go. As Ashby and Mickey were leaving Rome, they drove within a couple of blocks of the prison where Chet Baker was being held after a drug arrest the previous summer. The jazz icon was a friend of Mickey's, and she was desperate to see him, but Ashby refused, fearful of how the unpredictable Italian authorities might react to two strangers visiting an infamous drug addict. “When we didn't go by and stop and see Chet in prison, I really wasn't happy about that,” she says. “It wasn't that risky. But Ashby was very cautious; he was at the beginning of his career and didn't want to do anything that would knock it off track.”³⁸

Mickey and Ashby left Italy and briefly returned to France before heading for Madrid. Because The Pride and the Passion had been shot in Spain, Ashby thought they might find work there. On the way, they got lost and ended up on a back road where they saw how Franco's fascist regime had reduced Spain to crippling poverty. In Madrid, too, they saw department stores covered in dust because nobody could afford to buy what was being sold. In stark contrast to the feting they had received in Italy, here they were hated because of the United States' support of Franco's government. The Spaniards did not even try to hide it. Ashby and Mickey were refused work everywhere and came away ashamed to be American. Recalling the trip, Ashby said, “The first time I ever traveled, I was disillusioned with [my] country and with what I thought we stood for.”³⁹

Things went from bad to worse when Mickey became very ill after eating shellfish. She returned to London, while Ashby spent two weeks in France and Spain, adding to the already considerable strain on their relationship. When he rejoined Mickey, they stayed with friends in London's comfortable Earl's Court district, but Mickey remained unwell for the duration of their trip abroad. Finally, to her great relief, Ashby agreed that it was time to head home.

While staying with one of his film friends in New York, Ashby found temporary editing work that allowed them to remain there for a few months. Mickey was instantly more at ease: every morning she would go to Grand Central Station and sit in the shadows, filling a sketchbook with drawings of travelers milling around the majestic station.

Back in Laguna, Mickey turned her sketches into paintings, and Ashby enthusiastically returned to editing. He and Swink were back at Goldwyn, cutting Phil Karlson's The Young Doctors back-to-back with Wyler's The Children's Hour (both 1961). Wyler spent quite a bit of time in the cutting room yet never cramped Swink or the other editors. This became Ashby's preferred method of working, both as an editor and as a director.

To Ashby, Wyler personified good directing. Though stylistically there are few parallels between the two, Wyler had a huge influence on how Ashby conducted himself. “I carry him around all the time when I direct,” he said later, “even though I never had discussions with him about that. It all had to do with the absorption of his work and being close enough at times to really see how it happened. And it was the attitude about being able to listen to what other people had to say.”⁴⁰ Ashby was always observing Wyler, right down to the tiniest details. One night, after a preview in Long Beach, Wyler and his editors returned to the Goldwyn lot to talk about the screening. During the whole discussion, Wyler was silent and just sat at his desk writing mysteriously on a pad of paper. As everyone was leaving to go home, Ashby sneaked a peek at what profound observations Wyler had jotted down. On the pad was just the word “Decisions,” which Wyler had written over and over in the same spot. The incident stayed with Ashby, proof that even the most experienced minds sometimes had to go back to basics. In the 1980s, the notepads in Ashby's office were all headed with one handwritten word: “Decisions.”

Ashby worked ceaselessly from his return to Laguna in spring 1961 until the end of the year, when The Children's Hour was released. That summer, Mickey began an affair with John Barreto, a man on the fringes of their social group. Ashby knew Barreto socially and got on well with him, but he had never identified him as a threat to his domestic happiness.

With Ashby so seldom at home, however, Mickey felt irresistibly drawn to Barreto, whom she found “magnetic, wonderful.”⁴¹ Their time in Europe had given her grave reservations about her marriage to Ashby. For the sake of his career, he had prized them away from the stability of all they knew: “My whole life was left in Laguna. I'd given up a whole lot to go on that trip. He insisted on that. It was the straw that broke my back.”⁴²

The day after Christmas, Mickey left Ashby. She was so sure she was doing the right thing that, had Barreto not convinced her to do otherwise, she would have left without an explanation. Despite her lover's intervention, she still walked out on Ashby “in a very rude way. I just left him a note on the refrigerator, like you'd leave for the milkman.”⁴³

In the eyes of their friends, Ashby and Mickey's relationship had become platonic. Ashby, however, had been so focused on his work that her departure was a huge shock to him. Whether he was fully conscious of it or not, he had shut her out sexually in the latter stages of their marriage, as work consumed his every waking moment. Mickey had done everything she could to get him interested again, using all her wiles and dressing up in exotic lingerie, but to no avail. (In the opinion of one of his friends, after he had “rescued” Mickey—who didn't really want or need to be rescued—Ashby found her appeal slowly lessening.)

Three days after Mickey left, a divorce complaint was drawn up against Ashby, claiming she had been subjected to “extreme cruelty” and that he had “wrongfully inflicted upon her grievous mental suffering.”⁴⁴ His response was to claim that Mickey was insane and try to have her put under seventy-two-hour observation. According to Mickey, Ashby did not actually think she was mentally unstable, just “crazy for leaving him. He was on the up, and we were driving a Porsche.” Barreto, on the other hand, wandered from one casual job to the next, was a heroin user, and, Mickey admits, was “practically living in his car.”⁴⁵

Ashby, however, accepted her decision and did not fight it. By the end of January, he and Mickey had been granted an interlocutory judgment of divorce. (The final judgment was not granted until May 1963.) Ashby did not contest the claims leveled at him in the complaint, although Mickey concedes they were false and made only to ensure a quick divorce. Mickey nevertheless felt guilty—and more so when Ashby generously gave her their right-hand-drive Volkswagen. “As far as I was concerned I didn't deserve anything; I had left him,” Mickey says. “But he gave me that car. He was very good to me. He was a good man, a good man.”⁴⁶

She left the marriage not without the occasional backward glance. In a letter to Ashby from the early 1980s, she wrote: “Maybe I just wanted to say hello—I think I've wanted to for a long time now. Thank you for what you taught me and tried to teach me—Some dense pupil!”⁴⁷ Looking back, she says, “He was a good husband, he really was. You couldn't ask for more. I never got over feeling guilty just leaving him like I did. But that was where my heart was taking me.”⁴⁸