Private Passions

July 1998
Redbook Magazine
by David Handelman

Sexy, yes (unbelievably sexy). Here, he talks about how his wife got him to change his bad-boy ways and the promise he made that keeps their love so strong.

From action hero to sexy leading man, he has the look that drives women crazy. What's even more appealing is his devotion to his wife and the sacrifices he makes to be a good dad. "I don't usually drink in the middle of the day," says Harrison Ford, pouring himself another glass of lunchtime Chardonnay. "Though I would if I had to do this."

What Ford is referring to is being interviewed. In the two decades plus since Star Wars propelled him from a carpentry career toward his current status as the biggest box-office star of the twentieth century, he still hasn't gotten accustomed to this part of his occupations - self promotions. In this case, he's talking about his new romantic comedy with Anne Heche, 6d7n's. Ford has always been ambivalent about playing the fame game. When asked the most basic celebrity question - would designed the dapper black suit he's wearing?--Ford seems baffled. He pulls open his jacket and reads aloud, as if from a foreign language, "Jil...Sander?" It's this kind of aloof, who me? Quality that has made Ford America's most dependable movie idol. He conveys an effortless glamour whether he's a swashbuckling archaeologist (Raiders-Lost Ark), a soft-spoken detective (Witness), or the leader of the free world (Air Force One). But the actor--who commands $20 million per picture--seems singularly unimpressed with himself and Hollywood. He doesn't parade for paparazzi at premieres, doesn't own a theme restaurant, and doesn't hunger for Oscar recognitions. (He's only been nominated one, for 1985's Witness.) In fact, his biggest hunger these days if for what he calls "simple, necessary anonymity."

The two things he hates to discuss-Ford's need for normalcy is satisfied far from Hollywood. His true abiding passion is his family: his wife of 15 years, Melissa Mathison (the screenwriter of The Black Stallion, E.T., and Kundun); their two children, Malcolm, 11, and Georgia, 8; his two grown sons from his first marriage, Benjamin and Willard; and his 4-year-old grandson, Eliel. Father hood can't be simple for someone whose profession requires constant world travel, who buys himself airplanes to fly as a hobby, and who is a close enough acquaintance of the Clintons to have had them over for dinner. But Ford has taken pains to be a presence in his kids' lives, and to keep things as normal as possible. At first, that means bringing them along on movie shoots. "We always tried to stay together when I was filming, or Melissa was working on a project," Ford says. But as Malcolm and Georgia got older, dragging them around became less easy. "As their school situation developed," says Ford, "their friends became more important to them." Ford and Mathison felt is was crucial to maintain some sense on continuity in their kids' lives--given the craziness of their parents' professions. So Ford now makes career sacrifices for the good of the family. He tries to restrict himself to one movie a year, usually one that films in the summer so the kids can come along. "Last year we spent the whole summer together in Hawaii when I was making 6d7n's," Ford says.

For his kids' schooling, Ford reluctantly switched their main residence a few years ago from his 843-acre ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming--which he loves--to New York, which he merely tolerates. "The most important thing is my kids being happy and well educated," he says. "Their educations is critical, especially facing the pressure of the unusual circumstances they're growing up under." Ford, a nature lover and conservationist, finds the city constricting. He says his family is ‘jazzed by the same energy in New York that drives me a little crazy. I'd rather not have to deal with it." Mostly, Ford is a homebody. "One of twice a week my wife and I go out for dinner or something, but I don't like to go out that much at night," Ford says. "Usually by the time we get home and get the kids settled down, the evening is over. And unlike some starts, who trot out their children like trophies, Ford is slow to reveal nay family anecdotes. Asked how Malcolm resembles young Harrison, Ford utters one and a half adjectives: "Free-spirited, self-," then clams up. "I don't talk about my kids in front of other people, for fear of their embarrassment," he says. "I just realized that I'm describing my son's personality, and he doesn't want to read that--to have some other kid tell him about what his mom read."

Likewise, he has been married for 15 years, yet seems baffled by a request to describe his marriage. "I'm not an expert on relationships," Ford says with reluctance. "If I were a person who had written a book on marital relationships, then it would be my obligation to have something to say about that. I haven't got the key to solving people's relationship problems." His tight-lipped nature, however, seems to be the key to his own strong and lasting marriage. He confesses, "Part of why we have a strong marriage is because we don't got talking about each other in public. I'm just uncomfortable with that level of intimacy in a magazine." When he does let a glimpse of his home life slip, he immediately tries to retract it. Waxing that his kids have enriched his marriage, Ford, carried away by the moment, blurts out, " I just wish they would sleep in their own beds!" Then he grimaces and says, "This is going to make them nuts if it turns up in an article."

The big chip he couldn't conceal-His paternal devotion did not extend, however, to accompanying his kids to the rereleased Star Wars trilogy last year. "I didn't want to get see 20-year-old acting of mine," he explains. Actually, it took more than a decade following Ford's 1966 debut as a bellhop in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round before anyone in America wanted to see one of his movies either. Along the way he had to break some bad habits and to find himself, both in his career and in his personal life. Ford became an actor not due to some inner yearning, he says, but because "I just didn't want to have a real job. And I imagined that with acting, you worked in a different places with a different group of people on each project." Ford says he grew up "somewhat shy and resolutely middle-class" in Chicago's outlying suburbs, the son of an advertising executive father and a homemaker mother. After flunking out of Wisconsin's Ripon College, he married his college sweetheart, Mary Marquardt, in 1964, and they drove their Volkswagen bus to Hollywood. They soon had two sons, Ben (31, a chef at the farm in Beverly Hills) and Will (29, a karate instructor and charitable foundation executive). "I was 22 years old," Ford recalls. "I wasn't capable of thinking about what [marriage and children] meant. It was just the reality."

Discovered while in a play in Laguna Beach, he was signed o a contract at Columbia Pictures that paid $150 a week. At the time, the movie studious were trying to sustain the old Hollywood system on locking up actors with exclusive deals, testing them in various small roles and grooming them for stardom. Gelling his personality and talent were being pressed, he developed a huge chip on his shoulder. To make ends meet and restore his sense of self-worth, Ford taught himself carpentry from library books. He began turning down TV jobs because, he says, "I wanted to hold out for movie work, which I thought to be more ambitious."

Yet when offered a small part as a cowboy-hatted hot-rodder in young director George Lucas's American Graffiti, Ford almost didn't take it, because it only pain $485 a weeks. He was earning twice as much as a carpenter and had a wife and two kids to supports. (He relented when his salary was upped to $500.) When Graffiti was released in 1973, it launched several careers, including those of Lucas and stars Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, and Cindy Williams--but not Ford's. On the set he had upheld his bad-boy reputations by drinking a lot of beer, racing cars up and down the streets, once even tossing Dreyfuss into a swimming pools. Today, Ford ways that because the movie was shot a night, "when we weren't working there was nothing to do except sit around and party. I made a fuss when they said we couldn't drink beer. I was 30 years old. I didn't want somebody telling me I couldn't drink beer." So, several years later when Lucas was casting Star Wars, the director initially didn't want to use Ford. But Lucas realized Ford's ornery side made him the perfect Han Solo. The experience of working with seasoned actors in Star Wars mellowed Ford a bit. Lucas later said, "He became a very good professional actor from that point on."

What he was always looking for - Ford wasn't behaving that well at home, either. He later revealed, " I was definitely not Mr. Sweetness and Light. I was an inadequate husband and father in my first marriage." (Ben recently described Ford as "pretty strict, but not unfair,") In 1979 Ford and Marquardt divorced after 15 years, under terms he has described as "mutual and generous." I was a down period for Ford. Even Star Wars didn't really explode his career; it upped his salary, but he didn't have another hit until 1980's The Empire Strikes Back. Ford was also not the first choice for producer Lucas or direct Seven Spielberg to play Indiana Jones in 1981's Raiders-Lost Ark. They wanted Tom Selleck, but Selleck couldn't get out of his Magnum P.I. contract. Ford turned the role into his true breakout performance. Once Witness proved he could do human stories as well as superhuman ones, his place in the pantheon was assured.

Soon after his divorce, he got his personal life back on track when, on the set of Apocalypse Now, he met Mathison, who was a script supervisor. The daughter of the West Coast bureau chief of Newsweek, Mathison got into showbiz when she became Francis Ford Coppola's assistant on The Godfather, Part II in 1974. On a whim, she handed Coppola a script, and from there was given the chance to cowrite The Black Stallion. Her career was well on its way when she met Ford. It's telling that for his second wife, Ford fell for a brainy and beautiful screenwriter, not a Hollywood starlet. Ford found that her innate happiness softened him, and they married in March of 1983. "When I married Melissa," he told Redbook in 1989, "I found it was such a pleasure not to be angry and not to have that bitterness running around in my system."

Trying to change the rules-Today, after a decade of box-office hits, Ford is one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, and can play the movie-star role when he needs to. But unlike fellow thespians like Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, and Mel Gibson, Ford doesn't pursue developing his own projects, or directing--which has won all the others Oscar recognition. Ford says, "I'd rather go flying." Which leads us to Six Days. It wasn't much of a stretch for Ford to play a pilot--he's had his license for a few years. "What's interesting to me is the responsibility, the independence, the concentration it requires, in which I find a kind of freedom." In other words, in flying Ford has found something that requires so much undivided attention that he can forget his stardom. His character in Six Days is also a bit of an avoider. "He's a guy who's been disappointed in his life and has relocated to the South Seas and has a girlfriend who dances in the tourist show, and he thinks that will make him happy." Then Anne Heche and Ford get thrown together on a deserted island and an interesting relationship develops. Is it consummated? "She's engaged," he says. "And I'm a relatively noble kind of guy." That's perhaps the best description of Ford, on-screen or off. Though he doesn't use his fame for a soapbox, he has challenged the President's open trade policy with China, because of the Chinese government's mistreatment of Tibet. (The movie Mathison recently wrote and produced, Kundun, was about Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.) But Clinton remained unswayed. "I do believe that all of politics in economics," Ford says, "and all of economics is self- interest."