Читать книгу Being Hal Ashby - Nick Dawson - Страница 13

The Family Man

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.

—Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock (1948)

Here in your hand, before your very eyes, is proof that your youngest son; the baby of your family is in fact becoming a more responsible individual.

—Hal Ashby

The Sound of Silence was written ten years after Ashby had bailed on Lavon and Leigh, and possibly marked a change in his attitude toward children. The idealistic hero, David Cassidy, has a seven-year-old son; given that the screenplay is set in 1965, he would have been born in 1958, right around the time that Ashby and Ian Bernard were writing the script. Was Ashby thinking about becoming a father again and imagining the world his child might grow up in?

Though Mickey had a daughter with John Barreto a few years after she left Ashby, she had told Ashby she did not want any children. However, she recalls that in his first few years as an apprentice editor, Ashby worked with a woman who was going through a difficult divorce and actually signed papers agreeing to be a guardian of her child. In May 1960, he did not stand in the way of Jim Montgomery, Lavon's second husband, who had raised Leigh, adopting his daughter and legally becoming her father. If the newly single Ashby felt an urge for parenthood now, he apparently wanted a fresh start at it.

In an odd coincidence, Shirley Citron was, like Mickey, an orphan, and she had always yearned for the traditional family setup she had missed out on as a child. Almost three years older than Ashby, she was a stunning blonde with long hair and gorgeous features. As Ashby's niece Meredith commented when she met her, she “even smoked sexy.”¹

According to Ashby, he and Shirley met only at the beginning of 1962, but they had both been apprentice editors at the same time, so their paths may have crossed earlier. (Shirley's only editing credit is for the film Invasion of the Animal People [1962]—a version of the Swedish creature feature Rymdinvasion I Lappland [1959] reworked with the addition of a few disjointed new scenes featuring John Carradine—which she had cut for Jerry Warren, a hack filmmaker who regularly bought and repackaged foreign films.)

Soon after they got together, Ashby wrote his mother that Shirley was pregnant. However, he was quick to explain, “The baby is not mine. Shirley was pregnant before I ever met her. Shirley was not married or even involved with anyone when she became pregnant. It was just one of those things that happen, and when it happens all you can do is make a decision. Shirley made the decision to have her baby. It was sometime later when I came along and we fell in love. I should say we discovered we loved each other.”²

Predictably, Ashby threw himself into the romance with total abandon. He and Shirley had an instant connection, and there was an irresistible logic to their relationship: she had a child on the way and no father in sight, and Ashby finally felt ready to have a family. It was also an opportunity to rescue the woman he loved and partly atone for leaving Lavon and Leigh. Only the fact that Ashby was technically Mickey's husband stopped him from marrying Shirley immediately, but in all other ways they were man and wife.

They moved into 9878 Easton Drive, a house on a secluded lane in Benedict Canyon, away from the noise and urban sprawl of Los Angeles. Secluded and peaceful, it was an ideal place to start a family.

Ashby wrote to his mother that he was “very much in love…unable to find the words that could express why I feel about her as I do.” Yet he acknowledged that their situations—his divorce and her pregnancy by another man—were a struggle, despite the strength of their feelings for each other: “Parts of it have been very rough; we had both our pasts.…But our love has been strong enough to carry us through the hardship of jealousy, fear and anything else you can think of.”³

The birth of Shirley's daughter brought them together and made them feel positive about the path they were on. Carrie was born in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on June 23, 1962, and christened with the surname Ashby. Though they weren't married yet, Shirley had already changed her name to Ashby, and so it was a proper family that returned to Easton Drive. A few months later, Ashby reported: “The joy of loving is fast pushing the bad things into oblivion.”⁴

Though Carrie was not his own blood, Ashby called her his daughter and treated her as such. He was a dedicated father and stayed at home for the first couple of months of her life. However, he soon ran out of money and had to return to work. Once Ashby was back in the editing room with Bob Swink, cutting Byron Haskin's Captain Sindbad (1963), his inability to balance work and family life became apparent. After years of letting his work utterly consume him, he was unable to break the pattern. For the rest of his life, he would be a workaholic. He took photos of Carrie in August, just after starting work on Captain Sindbad, but three months down the line had still not developed them. Shirley, however, was understanding and in a letter to Eileen Ashby wrote: “Men need to take their time when they're doing creative things and we must be patient with them.”⁵

Life on Easton Drive with Shirley, Carrie, and their two cats, Grey and Sheba, seemed to effect a change in Ashby. He had sporadically stayed in touch with his mother since leaving Ogden but was aware that from his teenage years on he had been far from an ideal son. Now that he had a family himself, he began to feel the urge to put things right. He started writing his mother every month, expressing his appreciation of her, and attempting to apologize for past wrongs. “I may treat you shabbily most of the time,” he confessed, “but don't ever think for a second that I am not aware of what you are. You have given the greatest gift there is to give. You have been able to give love. Nothing is more important than that.”⁶

Ashby told Eileen that her love was possibly the one constant in his life, the thing he could rely on no matter what. “I have begun to recognize your love as a kind of anchor; a solid base to living…to life,” he wrote. “No matter what tragedies might beset me; no matter how despondent I may become; I know there is someone who wants me to be; you want me to be because I am me.”⁷ Previously, he had felt guilty about the inadequacy of what he had given her in return. Now, however, as he looked at Carrie, he realized that it was the role of parents to give more than they would ever receive back.

Pondering his troubled teenage years, Ashby acknowledged that he had refused his mother's help and emotionally excluded her, then never properly let her back into his life:

Perhaps there is a point when the child reaches an age where so many new things are happening all at once; he becomes confused and frightened; it panics him. He withdraws; he starts to close things off. He wants to stop the flow of newness. In his confusion, he shuts off love, also. From this point he needs a constant pressure on the valve from somebody who has the stamina to keep loving him; despite his refusal to accept it. One day he'll get a glimmer of this love and let the valve be opened freely. Love will pour in and, in a sense, he will be born again. He will start to learn what life really is. He will accept responsibility because it is a part of loving; not because it's something forced upon him. Love will be the one basic.⁸

For Ashby, the valve had been opened by the overwhelming emotions he experienced in the role of father and husband, and his new family helped him see his family back home in Ogden in a different light. He realized that he and Jack had not seen each other in years and expressed an interest in getting to know him once again. And when Eileen sent him a picture of Leigh, along with news of her progress, he needlessly returned the picture but said that he “would be more than pleased and happy” to meet her: “I imagine it would be a little awkward at first, but I'm certain those kind of things can be overcome and I am anxious to see what kind of person she is turning out to be. One of these days, when everything is right, maybe she can come and visit in California. That is if she doesn't have some boyfriend she would be homesick for all the time she's here. We both know how that can be don't we!”⁹

It was a valiant gesture but fell far short of reconciliation. Ashby may have been ready to be a father again, but he wasn't ready to face his guilt for abandoning Leigh. It's unclear whether, in saying that he would see her “when everything is right,” he was aware that that day would never come.

Nevertheless, in his newly enlightened state, he was trying to be a better person and reexamining his way of seeing things. “I was so smart,” he wrote to Eileen, “it only took me about twenty-eight years to learn the fact that people are people, and should be treated as such.…Now, I at least try and think before I act. I try to understand how a person could feel hurt; even if I don't believe they should feel that way.”¹⁰

Now that Ashby and Eileen were writing regularly and had a much greater understanding of each other, he invited her to visit him in Los Angeles and meet Shirley and Carrie. Eileen, however, was seventy-five, suffered from heart trouble and arthritis, and had money problems, so Ashby drove halfway to Ogden (he feared his car wouldn't make it the whole way) to meet her and took her to Los Angeles himself.

The visit was a roaring success. Not only was Eileen delighted with her new granddaughter, but she got on very well with Shirley, with whom she formed a strong bond over the next few years. In contrast to previous visits, during which Ashby barely saw her, this time they spent a lot of time together. After she left, he wrote to her, saying: “Gee, but did we enjoy you being here with us. I'll never be able to explain the good feeling I get when I see, hear, or think of you. Why don't you come again next week?”¹¹

In May, Ashby's divorce from Mickey came through, and on July 31, he and Shirley legally tied the knot in a Las Vegas quickie wedding. Again, after a few more months at home, Ashby had to return to work. Because of a paucity of editing jobs, the union was being particularly vigilant about giving priority to their most senior members. As a result, Ashby had to fight to get to work on The Best Man (1964), a Henry Fonda movie adapted from the Gore Vidal play. Bob Swink, however, insisted on having him. Now in the final stages of his epic apprenticeship as an editor, Ashby immersed himself in his work throughout the latter part of 1963 and helped get a rough cut finished by the end of the year. Vidal, unaware that this was just a preliminary version, was upset with the results and tried to have his name taken off the film. However, when later he saw the magic Swink and Ashby had worked on the final cut, he was delighted.

Despite the hard work he did there, the editing room was for Ashby a haven, a retreat from reality that allowed him to contemplate the world and his place in it. Though he corresponded less often when he was on a film, it was with Eileen more than anyone that he shared these ruminations, even rising at 5 A.M. to write to her before work.

A generation and some forty-two years apart, Hal and Eileen Ashby nonetheless looked at the world in much the same way. He had inherited from her what he called “a continual questioning of life,”¹² and during this period it was almost as if he was in a second adolescence as he reassessed everything around him. His former belief that he knew all the answers was replaced with a realization: “That any conclusion I might reach should be considered an ultimate is absurd. This feeling, this knowing that I don't know all the answers, is a good feeling. It's good because it allows me to approach life with an open-mind.”¹³ He concluded: “The overall reason for life; this earth and all that goes with it…is a puzzle, but an extremely beautiful puzzle.”¹⁴

Ashby's letters to Eileen from this period also reveal a concern for the direction in which America was going that would be expressed nationally over the course of the decade by the peace and civil rights movements. Ashby has always been personified as “the hippie director,” not only because of his appearance, but also because there was a freedom and a joy in his films coupled with a concern for the world and a will to change things for the better: “I truly enjoy the life I live. Even with its fear, frustration, and seeming madness at times there is still the joy of just being. The joy of knowing you, of seeing—seeing, not just looking at—all the beautiful things there are in this crazy world we live in. The joy of being able to have compassion for my fellow man. To have the capacity to cry because of something that has happened to some other person is truly a blessing. Life is absurd, but its very absurdity, makes it wonderful.”¹⁵

There was also a spiritual aspect to Ashby's soul-searching; though never a Mormon, he was nevertheless religious in a loose, modern sense. When Eileen asked him when he had given up God, he responded by saying: “I don't think anyone can just give Him up. They can renounce a conception, or idea of God, but, to my way [of] belief, to renounce God would be the same as renouncing all of life.…Life is much too wonderful. To dispute it, could only be a waste of time. The only thing I get angry about is when I think: Here I've been presented with this beautiful gift called Life, and someday it's to be taken from me. I'm selfish, and I want to keep it. However, I do accept that it was given, and ‘give and take' is a rule that applies to all of Life.”¹⁶

Perhaps because his father died when he was at such a vulnerable age, Ashby was painfully aware of the fact that life was short and that every opportunity should be taken, every moment savored. When discussing patience, in which Eileen was a great believer, he admitted: “If it costs me too much on the emotional ledger of my life, I refuse to…sit with people who have nothing in common with me just because it seems the patient thing to do. I have more important things to do with the short span of my life. Let them do what they want, but I would rather sit for an hour and communicate with a solitary leaf from a tree. To me, the leaf has more to say than some people.”¹⁷

The beginning of 1964 was a busy time for Ashby: not only were he and Swink putting together the final cut of The Best Man, but the Ashby family was also moving. Fortunately, the distance was minimal, as they were taking the house at 9853 Easton Drive, just a few yards up the lane. It was smaller, but, in a letter to his mother, Ashby described it as “the nicest place I've lived in since I left home.”¹⁸

Ashby finished his stint on The Best Man on the night of February 18 and began work on The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) the very next morning. “I've read most of the script,” he wrote to his mother, “and am truly enthused about it. What I have read is beautiful and moving, with a true feeling for the story of Christ. If the film is one-half as good as the script, it will end up as one of the finest films ever made.”¹⁹ George Stevens had shot hundreds of thousands of feet of film, making the editorial undertaking as epic as the film itself. When Ashby came on board, a crew of seven or eight editors had already been editing for a year, and he and Bob Swink, who had been assigned to cut the scenes from the Last Supper onward, were expected to be busy for a further six to eight months.

However, just two weeks after he and Ashby began, Swink was poached by William Wyler to work on his new film, The Collector (1965), adapted from the John Fowles novel. It was decided that Ashby should take over from his mentor, and he suddenly became a chief editor, one of four editors working under Harold Kress, the supervising editor, tirelessly assembling a film that would run four hours and twenty minutes when released. Just halfway through cutting the Last Supper, however, Ashby received an even more enticing offer from John Calley of the Filmways production company: Tony Richardson was interested in having him edit his new picture, The Loved One, an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novella.

On July 23, Ashby wrote a note to Stevens, telling him that he wanted to leave to become chief editor on The Loved One but that he would not do so without Stevens's permission. Stevens refused his permission, however, so Ashby said no to Calley. However, just two days later, Calley met with Ashby and asked him to begin the very next day, at a much greater salary than Stevens was paying him.

Ashby turned up at Stevens's offices with his note of resignation and decided to tell Kress rather than Stevens that he was quitting the film. Talking privately in Kress's office, he told him: “I have to leave you.”

“Hal,” warned Kress, “you're going to make the biggest enemy you ever had in the motion picture business.”

Ashby, fearful of Stevens's reaction, asked, “Will you tell him? He might get mad and haul off.”

When Kress passed on the news, Stevens responded by saying, “We just raised him from an assistant to an editor four months ago and now he's going to walk out on us?”²⁰

Ashby had contravened union rules, and Stevens filed a grievance. More important, however, Ashby had broken his word, lured away by ambition and money. Five years later, Ashby wrote, “The George Stevens people were mad at me—I hope they still aren't.”²¹

Though in terms of his career it made sense to quit as one of four editors working under a supervising editor to become chief editor for Richardson, Ashby felt guilty for many years. A seminar Ashby gave at the American Film Institute in 1975 was held just hours after Stevens's funeral, but because he had been immersed in his upcoming film, Bound for Glory, Ashby had missed the news of Stevens's death. Clearly shaken, he said that it might take him “ten or fifteen minutes to get into this thing.…It's a bit of a shock so if you could all just bear with me for a little bit. It's such a shock; it's the missing you know.” He went on to say, “[Stevens] certainly gave a lot to all of us, that's for sure.” Yet it was his guilt over Greatest Story (“an awful thing happened out of it”) that he lingered over, his voice trailing off as he spoke.²²