Harrison Ford: Stardom Time for a Bag of Bones

After his first movie, 1966’s Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, Harrison Ford was called in by a Columbia executive. “Sit down, kid, I want to tell you a story,” the executive said to Ford, who had played a bit part as a bellboy. “The first time Tony Curtis was in a movie he delivered a bag of groceries. We took one look at him and knew he was a movie star. But you ain’t got it, kid, you ain’t got it. I want you to go back to class and study.” At which point Ford leaned across the desk and replied, “I thought you were supposed to look at him and say, ‘There is the grocery boy.’ “

That was the beginning of the end of Ford’s career at Columbia, but the beginning of the beginning of his life as an actor. Though the Columbia executive did not recognize it, Ford was demonstrating a talent that was later to become his trademark: the ability to deliver a fast, funny and sometimes devastating comeback. It took eleven years more–and Star Wars–before movie audiences were allowed to hear and see what Ford could do, but since then, he has shown over and over again that he has not only got it, but got it big enough to draw lines that stretch around the block and into the next galaxy.

In box-office bucks, there are no real competitors; Ford has starred in five of the ten highest grossers of all time: Star Wars, Return of the Jedi, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Now, returning from the outer space of the Star Wars sagas and the exotic locales frequented by that adventurous archaeologist, Indiana Jones, he is starring in Peter Weir’s Witness, a contemporary thriller that promises to be the first hit of 1985. Put into wide release on Feb. 8, the film made $4,540,000 in its first weekend, an exceptional figure for a picture that boasts neither gimmicks nor special effects.

Shortly after the picture begins, it depicts a brutal murder in the Philadelphia train station. The crime is witnessed by an Amish boy (Lukas Haas) who is traveling with his newly widowed mother (Kelly McGillis). Ford plays John Book, the Philadelphia detective who investigates, only to discover, with the boy’s help, that the murder was committed by high members of his own department who have become involved in the drug trade. The hunter becomes the hunted, and Book, wounded, is forced to seek refuge with the boy and his mother among the Amish, the Pennsylvania Dutch folk who live and dress in the manner of the 18th century and believe in nonviolence as a religious principle. Amused and baffled by them at first, Book gradually begins to appreciate the values of these simple people and falls in love, of course, with the boy’s lovely mother.

It is one of Ford’s best roles yet, allowing him greater scope than Han Solo in Star Wars or Indiana Jones or the hot rodder he portrayed in American Grafitti or the chilling Army officer in Apocalypse Now. But he is right when he says that John Book is not a stretch from his other characters: it is an extension. Some people, he complains, say, ” ‘Well, Witness is really acting. It’s great you’re getting a chance to play a real person.’ ” In fact, he says, with some asperity, “my ambition was to play real people in Star Wars and Raiders. Doing this movie didn’t feel any different to me from doing any other movie. The process is the same. It was regular acting.” Unlike some more timid actors, Ford is willing to take chances and experiment with a character. “He is constantly looking for the authentic moment,” says Irvin Kershner, director of The Empire Strikes Back. “You can try anything out on him.”

Some actors–Robert De Niro, for example–pour themselves into a character and are all but unrecognizable from one film to another. Others, usually actors from the past like Gary Cooper or Cary Grant, pour the role into themselves. Grant could be a stumble-footed comic in pictures like Bringing Up Baby and Arsenic and Old Lace or an urbane romantic hero in To Catch a Thief or North by Northwest, but no one would ever have mistaken him for anyone but Cary Grant.

The same can be said about Ford. Han Solo, that interstellar swashbuckler, is brash and egotistical; Indiana Jones, with his whip and wide-brimmed hat, is a dashing romantic; John Book is, in the end, sensitive and compassionate. All three characters are believably different, but all three are also brothers. All share that quarter-inch, side-of-the-mouth smile that follows a sardonic one-liner, and all are based on the rock-hard actor underneath. “The roles get lost in Harrison,” says Carrie Fisher, the Princess Leia of the Star Wars series. “I don’t think that there’s a lot that is dissimilar between the character and the person. It’s no accident that he plays a lot of heroes. He plays somebody you can rely on, who will take care of whatever it is, from a kid’s hurt finger to a murder to saving the galaxy. He has that quality.”

It is hard to imagine Ford’s being convincing as a creep or a cretin or even an ordinary villain, and his career has followed the dutiful, almost square path one would expect from the characters he projects. When he saw that he was not receiving the kinds of parts he wanted back in the ’60s, he did what the forthright, somewhat self-righteous John Book would have done. Rather than fritter away his talent as a bit actor on TV car-chase shows, he all but dropped out for seven years, turning down 90% of the jobs he was offered. With books borrowed from the public library, he learned how to put two pieces of wood together in a presentable fashion and became a carpenter to the stars, affording his wife and two sons a decent if modest living.

Carpentry taught him things he could never have learned in acting school. The first was the work ethic, which he had not grasped while growing up in the protected world of a Chicago suburb. Once so lazy that he had flunked out of Wisconsin’s Ripon College in his senior year, he became accustomed to picking up his hammer and saw early in the morning and continuing until the job was finished. “Now I find it difficult to enjoy myself when I’m not working,” he says. “And I am not able to distract myself when I’m waiting around on a set. I sit and stare at the walls or walk around and bump into my trailer.”

The second thing he learned was to approach a role from the ground up, as if he were building a house, or raising a barn, as he helps to do in Witness. “I’m a technical actor, and my approach to both jobs is almost totally technical,” he explains. “There’s no magic involved, only work and circumstance.” Ridley Scott, who directed Ford in the 1982 sci-fi thriller Blade Runner, observes that, like a good carpenter, Ford is obsessive about small things. “After going over the story line, he’ll turn to the details,” says Scott. “He wants to know not only what the character looks like but what he’d wear, right down to the kind of shoes and the type of gun he would carry, where he would live and how.” In researching the character of John Book, Ford spent two weeks following a real Philadelphia detective, participated in two police raids and tipped a few glasses with the men in blue. “When I began, I wasn’t confident about myself,” he says. “But now I have enough confidence to feel I’m capable of doing the job. It took a long time and experience.”

Carpentry is still Ford’s hobby and, as he describes it, his delight. Han Solo and Indiana Jones made him rich. “I am very, very rich,” he tells a reporter. “That’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it? Usually, I just demur. People would like to know exactly how rich I am, but it’s none of their goddam business.” Of course not, but it is safe to guess that he is probably rich enough to buy Louis XIV’s favorite armchair–and everything else in the palace of Versailles. But who would want such froufrou when he could have a genuine Harrison Ford bedside table? “It looks like a bedside table, and that’s why I like it,” says Ford, sounding like a boy in the first stage of puppy love. “It’s a simple piece with turned legs and a band-sawed skirt. I just like the work itself.”

Fanatical about keeping his life private, Ford is known as one of the hardest interviews in Hollywood. He refuses even to say what kinds of cars he drives. “I drive a red car and I drive a black car,” he reluctantly admits. “But that’s all I want to say, more or less. It’s too personal.” He is building –which is to say he is actually constructing–a house in the Santa Monica Mountains for himself and his second wife Melissa Mathison, who wrote the screenplay for E.T. He also has a hideaway someplace in Wyoming. “I don’t want to get more specific,” he says, fearing, apparently, that he will be cornered and trapped in that little state, which is, after all, only about twice the size of England. But there he probably does relax, and perhaps even forgets for a while about keeping in trim for his next Indiana Jones film, which is scheduled to begin shooting next January. “I’m just an ordinary 42- year-old creaky bag of bones,” he says, “and I have to work out to get in shape for a film.”