Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  He plowed ahead with new, and characteristically grandiose plans. He bought a radio station, City magazine, a Jet Ranger helicopter, and a half interest in a Mitsubishi MU2L turboprop, which he shared with financier George Gund. The aircraft were referred to within the company as Air Francis. Later he bought part ownership in a chain of theaters, Don Rugoff’s Cinema 5 in New York, which would take care of his exhibition needs (he had three films slated for production—Apocalypse Now, Tucker, and The Black Stallion), one very important brick in the edifice he hoped would eventually see him independent of Hollywood. “My motive has been to bypass the kinds of deals filmmakers have to make... deals in which the filmmaker has to totally surrender ownership, final cut, any say in how the film is released, in order to get the dollars up front to make a movie.” He even induced Rugoff to change the name to Cinema 7. April 7 was his birthday, and 7 was his lucky number.

  There were a lot of strange people flitting about Zoetrope, attracted by Coppola’s success. One was a girl nicknamed Sunshine, more for the substance (a kind of acid), than for the light. She was the kind of person who would slip a psychedelic in your drink and disappear with Pigpen of the Grateful Dead. She was gifted at reading people; whatever it was you were most insecure about, she would divine it in a second, and then she’d nail you. Francis had a black-board in his office. One day, when he wasn’t there, she waltzed in and wrote across the top, “When You’re Rich, You Never Have to Say You’re Sorry.” In subsequent months, Francis covered the blackboard with writing, erased it, covered it again, erased it. But he never erased Sunshine’s message.

  Six:

  Like a Rolling Stone

  1973

  • How Hal Ashby made The Last Detail over Columbia’s nearly dead body, while Beatty launched Shampoo, BBS got an ugly dose of reality, and Faye Dunaway nearly pissed away Chinatown!

  “Ashby was the most American of those directors and was the most unique talent. He was a victim of Hollywood, the great Hollywood tragic story.”

  —PETER BART

  Hal Ashby was scouting locations for The Last Detail in Canada, accompanied by casting director Lynn Stalmaster. Charles Mulvehill, his line producer, was supposed to meet his flight at LAX. He arrived a few minutes late. There was Stallmaster, but no Ashby.

  “Where’s Hal?”

  “The strangest thing happened. We got to the gate in Toronto, they stopped Hal, and they searched him, and they led him off.”

  “Led him off where?”

  “I don’t know. To jail, I guess.”

  “Didn’t you get off the plane?”

  “Hell no! I thought I should come home.” Says Mulvehill, “We all carried dope at that point. Hal had just enough on him for a joint, maybe a little hash. It wasn’t anything we considered heavy narcotics.” Ashby lamely told the inspectors he was carrying herbs. “Hal sometimes had a tenuous grip on reality,” says Jerry Ayres, who was producing the picture for Columbia. “The Canadian authorities, seeing this man who looked like a Vietnamese farmer, with his mosslike beard hanging down, well, who else would they search? Hal would be the first person you would stop. You wouldn’t even need the dogs to sniff him out. He just had a sign on him, ‘I’m a drugged-out hippie.’”

  Mulvehill phoned Ayres at the studio, said, “Hal’s in jail. Do something.” Ayres called the Columbia lawyers, while Mulvehill hopped a plane to Toronto to bring him back. “I got off the plane and walked into the main airport area, and there was Hal, going through his suitcase, trying to repack it. Today, we would look at him as a bag man, a street person.

  “ ‘Hal, you’re out!’

  “ ‘Yeah, I’m out.’”

  The studio lawyers had freed him. Ashby and Mulvehill got on a plane to L.A. Ashby, very unhappy, was cursing the “motherfucking” customs inspectors, and how unfair the laws were. Just after touchdown, as the plane was taxiing to the gate, there was an announcement over the loudspeaker: “Is there a Hal Ashby on board?” Mulvehill thought, Okay, the juice is finally starting to flow, now we’re going to get the red carpet treatment from Columbia. He waved his hand, said, “I’m with him, he’s on board, and ‘I’m with him.” The next thing they knew they were both in a holding area at airport security up against the wall being strip-searched. Hal said, “Really guys, you don’t think that I’d be stupid enough to carry some shit after having gone through what I just went through, do you?” He was angry, but he was quiet, polite. “On one level,” says Mulvehill, “Hal hated authority. But on another level, he was afraid of it.” The search concluded, Ashby and Mulvehill jumped into the Columbia limo that was indeed waiting for them, and were whisked away to Appian Way, in Laurel Canyon, where Hal lived. Three or four years later, the lawyers got the arrest stricken from his record.

  THERE’S NO WORSE CAREER MOVE in Hollywood than dying. Hal Ashby is now largely forgotten because he had the misfortune to die at the end of the ’80s, but he had the most remarkable run of any 70s director. After The Landlord, in 1970, he made Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There, in 1979, before his career disappeared into the dark tunnel of post-70’s, Me Decade drugs and paranoia.

  Ashby was exactly ten years older than Coppola and Bogdanovich, born into a Mormon family in Ogden, Utah, in 1929. He was the youngest of four kids. His parents divorced when he was five or six. His father lost his dairy farm because he refused to allow his milk to be pasteurized. In 1941, he stuck a gun under his chin and pulled the trigger. Hal discovered the body in the barn. He was twelve.

  As a teenager, Ashby was rebellious and independent. He dropped out of high school, and was married and divorced by the time he was seventeen. He worked at a variety of odd jobs. One day he was repairing a concrete railroad bridge in Wyoming, when he had an epiphany. It was only September, and already the water in the cup he was holding had acquired a brittle crust of ice. He poked his finger through it, took a drink, and turned to a friend, said, “I’m goin’ to California and live off the fruit of the land.”

  It was 1950. Ashby was broke. After three weeks of pounding the pavements, he called his mother collect to ask for help. She accepted the call, but refused to help. With literally his last dime, he bought a Powerhouse candy bar that he made last for three days. On the fourth day, he went to the California Board of Unemployment and asked them to find him a job at a studio. They found one: operating a Multilith at Universal. Ashby married and divorced again by the time he was twenty-one, in 1950. The following year, he became an apprentice editor at Republic, then at Disney. He and Nicholson both worked at Metro in 1956 and 1957. Hal was an assistant editor.

  Early on, Ashby developed a social conscience. He got involved in the civil rights movement, went on some freedom marches. Later, he gave money to the striking farmworkers, hosted meetings at his home, and visited Cesar Chavez, their charismatic leader, up in Delano. He was deeply opposed to the war in Vietnam. On the other hand, as soon as he had some money, he bought a Cadillac convertible, which he proudly drove onto the lot. He hated the system with a passion, but part of him very much wanted to succeed in establishment terms.

  Eventually, Ashby found his way to Robert Swink, a first-rate editor who worked for William Wyler and George Stevens. Ashby was his assistant on several Wyler and Stevens films, The Big Country, The Diary of Anne Frank, and The Greatest Story Ever Told. Hal hated working for Stevens. He had to do all the shitwork, taking the thousands upon thousands of feet that Stevens shot, and cataloguing the frames at the head and tail of every shot. But he worked his way up and did the first cut on Tony Richardson’s The Loved One in 1965, which Calley produced. Ashby quickly earned the reputation for being one of the best editors in the business. For the generation that preceded him, cutting was just a job. Editors left the cutting room at 5:30, went home to their families. For Hal, it was a passion. He thought nothing of working twenty-four hours at a stretch, spending the night in front of the Moviola, chain-smoking cigarette after cigarette, head noddin
g over the screen. He was an insomniac, never seemed to need sleep, nor for that matter, food. He never needed to go to the bathroom. Hal had a remarkable memory; after seeing a piece of film once, he would never forget it, and he made it his business to have total recall of every take, every trim. If he were asked for a shot, he knew exactly where it was. But Hal drank heavily, went on binges where he disappeared for days at a time. In 1966, he went on the wagon, except for the occasional glass of wine, and switched over to grass.

  In the mid-’60s, Ashby hooked up with director Norman Jewison. The two men became extremely close; friends thought Ashby saw in Norman the father he missed. Jewison took care of him, let him sleep on the couch in his office during Hal’s divorce from his third wife, Shirley. Ashby worked on several of Jewison’s best pictures, including The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). In fact, says cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who shot some of these films, “I saw what a force Hal was, making Norman’s creativity blossom. They were a good combo, and I don’t think Norman’s made as good pictures since he and Hal were partners.”

  The climax of Ashby’s editing career came in 1967, when he beat out Bob Jones (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) to win an Oscar for In the Heat of the Night. He created a flurry of controversy by telling the press he was going to use his Oscar as a doorstop. By that time he had had it. “I’d been working seventeen hours a day, seven days a week for ten years,” he said. “I’d wake up at three A.M. and go to work. I’d try to leave the studio at six, and still be there at nine. I’d gotten better and better at my work, meanwhile wrecking [my]... marriages. Suddenly, I was tired. I’d become a film editor because everyone said it was the best training for a director. But suddenly I was almost forty, and I no longer had the energy to pursue it. So I stopped.”

  By the time Ashby was editing Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming! at the Mirisch Company for UA on the old Goldwyn lot, Mulvehill, who was only a kid, was head of production. Harold Mirisch was considered the only one of the Mirisch brothers with any brains. When he died suddenly, the bottom dropped out of the company. “There was nothin’ going on,” says Mulvehill. “I was the head of nothin’ going on.”

  Mulvehill hung out with Ashby, smoked grass, and talked about the kinds of films they wanted to make. “We would have philosophical discussions about how fucked up everything was,” he recalls. Ashby would say he wanted to make films about the “human condition.” Like the other New Hollywood directors, he “was anti-star,” continues Mulvehill. “At the time, I took that at face value, thought that was his philosophy of filmmaking, but now that I look back, it was ego. He felt the picture should be the star, not the actor, which meant, ultimately, the star was the director, Hal Ashby.”

  Hal was the quintessential flower child, even though in 1967 he was thirty-eight. He looked like a tall, hip Ho Chi Minh, with oversized, rose-tinted glasses in wire frames, his face hidden by blond, going-on-white hair parted in the middle that cascaded over his forehead and descended on either side into a wispy white beard he never trimmed. (It covered a weak chin.) Ashby favored bell bottom jeans or threadbare corduroy pants, sandals, and beads. He had neglected his teeth, and eventually spent a lot of time and money at the periodontist having his gums pared back. But he was clean to the point of fastidiousness. He smoked dope, all day long, on the job and off. Hal had a motorcycle, and was heavily into the music scene, especially the Rolling Stones. In another life, he would have loved to have been Mick Jagger. Ashby gave out mellow, laid-back vibes. But as with many such people, appearances were deceptive. Says Mulvehill, “He had a lot of anger and a lot of rage that he didn’t know how to handle and never dealt with.”

  Jewison gave Hal his shot at directing. He had acquired a book called The Landlord, which he was too busy to do himself. He turned it over to Ashby. It was produced by the Mirisches for UA. As would be his wont, Hal cast The Landlord without stars. On the set, in the middle of the production, he married Joan Marshall, a tall blonde, his fourth wife. Jewison and Ashby, mentor and protege, fell out over the ending of The Landlord. Creative differences. For Hal, it was probably a case of the son freeing himself from the father.

  Peter Bart saw The Landlord, liked it, and sent Ashby Harold and Maude. This was an oddball script, a black comedy featuring a young man who repeatedly tries to commit suicide until he forms a redeeming attachment to an eccentric woman old enough to be his grandmother. Says Bart, “To me, Harold and Maude was a symbol of that era. It would have been unthinkable in the ’80s or ’90s. In those days [late ’60s] people would walk in, wacked out, with the most mind-bending, innovative, and brilliant ideas for movies. Harold and Maude was written by a pool cleaner.”

  For Ashby, it was the perfect script, as loony as he could hope for. He cast Ruth Gordon, an elderly Broadway actress who had scored with a bit part in Rosemary’s Baby, and actor Bud Cort. Ashby blocked the studio’s attempt to impose a producer of its own, and instead asked Mulvehill to work on it as his producer, even though Mulvehill had little idea what a producer did. He resigned from Mirisch to embark on a new career. The two of them went into a meeting with Paramount, where they were forced to go over the budget line by line when they were so stoned they could barely read the numbers, and managed to get the studio to approve $1.2 million.

  The picture wrapped in late February, early March of 1971, right around the time The Godfather started up. Hal edited up at his Appian Way house. He rented, because he was paying so much alimony he was afraid to own anything. In those days, Laurel Canyon was a hippie community. The houses were cheap, and they were filled with struggling artists, musicians, and actors. Carole King lived next door to Ashby, pounding on her piano. Spielberg lived there, across the street from Don Simpson, who was sharing a house with Jerry Bruckheimer. Alice Cooper had a house nearby, so did Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees. Fleetwood Mac lived behind it. Hal’s was a funky, two-story, Spanish-style affair, with arched doorways between the rooms, each painted a different pastel color. He lived in one large room upstairs, where there was a bed, a pool table, and a big Advent TV. He lived sparsely, as if unwilling to make any place home, unwilling to undertake the obligation of being there. His Oscar was nowhere in sight.

  The studio was high on Harold and Maude, and the buzz was good, so much so, in fact, that Ashby and Mulvehill figured they had it made. “We felt it was going to be the best film of the year, it was gonna knock ’em dead,” recalls Mulvehill. “We were gonna have control over what we were gonna do.” They started a film company called DFF, Dumb Fuck Films.

  Ashby’s marriage to Joan fell apart just as the production began. He started seeing a girl who was a stand-in for Ruth Gordon. She lived in a van, had a diamond drilled into one of her front teeth. But after four divorces, Ashby had learned not to marry again. He liked tall, thin, athletic girls built like boys and, as Wexler puts it, “they’d usually end up with a Mercedes, if nothing else.” When he was bored with a girl, he would ignore her, spend all day watching TV and then tell her to get out. According to his close friend Bob Downey, Sr., he used to say, “When one’s gone, you just open the window, there’s another one climbing right in.” At one screening, Ashby asked if he could invite a few of his ex-wives. Recalls Bart, “There was this whole row of them, big blond girls who all looked like they were born in Utah.”

  The picture opened at Christmas 1971, in time for Oscar consideration, although, as it turned out, it didn’t get much consideration. The reviews were scathing. In the very first one, A. D. Murphy wrote in Variety that the film was about as funny as a burning orphanage. Paramount cut it loose without another word. Even though Harold and Maude would eventually become a cult classic, it closed in a week. “You couldn’t drag people in,” says Mulvehill. “The idea of a twenty-year-old boy with an eighty-year-old woman just made people want to vomit. If you asked people what it was about, ultimately it became a boy who was fucking his grandmother. We were devastated, couldn’t believe it, and the
scripts and phone calls that had been coming in just stopped. It was as though somebody had taken an ax to the phone lines. It was really a rude awakening. It was a big, big shock to Hal.” After Harold and Maude, Ashby dissolved DFF.

  Then the phone rang. It was Ayres, asking Hal if he’d gotten Robert Towne’s script for The Last Detail. When Towne returned from the set of Drive, He Said, he plunged into the task of adapting Darryl Ponicsan’s novel. Ayres had convinced Columbia to give him the shot on the basis of his consultant’s credit on Bonnie and Clyde. Ponicsan’s novel was another exercise in ’60s-style anti-authoritarianism. It presents two navy lifers, “Bad Ass” Buddusky and “Mule” Mulhall, whose job it is to escort a third sailor, Meadows, from a base in Norfolk, Virginia, to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Naval Prison to serve eight years for the crime of attempting to lift a polio donation can. The novel ends in true ’60s fashion with the two escorts going AWOL in disgust. Towne put a more pessimistic spin on it. The lifers merely do their duty as charged. “I didn’t want Buddusky and Mulhall to feel overly guilty about transporting Meadows to jail,” he explained. “I wanted to imply that we’re all lifers in the Navy, and everybody hides behind doing a job, whether it’s massacring in My Lai, or taking a kid to jail.”