He's broken every box office record, but he won't bend your ear.

A man is walking down the main street of Cartersville, Georgia, a scrap of paper in his hand. The paper is small, yet the man is thrilled to have it, he literally cannot take his eyes off the two hastily written words it contains: "Harrison Ford." He carefully scrutinizes his prize, peering at it with a fearful intensity, as if by examining that autograph long enough and hard enough, he would come to understand fully and finally the signatory's talent, his success, his fame; he would, in short, come to know, as Ford himself later put it, "Why I was Harrison Ford and he wasn't."

Harrison Ford signed that piece of paper, but he is extremely chary about letting other parts of himself out, loathe to delude people into thinking they can casually come to know him when they cannot.

More than that, whenever he does publicity in this case, for the upcoming movie version of Paul Theroux's provocative novel The Mosquito Coast, the filming of which has brought Ford to Georgia in the first place the same anecdotes inevitably appear in story after story after story.

How he flunked out of Wisconsin's Ripon College three days before graduation due to "total academic breakdown." How he was told by a Columbia executive after a bit part as a bellhop in 1966's Dead Heat on a Merry Go Round that he acted so much like a bellhop there was no way he was ever going to be a star. How he taught himself to be a carpenter and constructed a $100,000 recording studio for Sergio Mendes without any previous experience: "I had the right costume, I had the right attitudes, he forgot to ask me if I'd ever done it before."

Ford smiles his easy, big cat's smile when reminded of how well these faithful retainers have served him over the years. "I'm thrilled that it seems to have sufficed so far," he says. "They're old, well-worn tales, and they keep me from having to go any deeper into any of this stuff. And they seem to serve people with enough signposts of recognition that they think they know who they're dealing with.

"And yet," and this is perhaps the crucial caveat where Ford is concerned, "it's not enough information so that they can decide that they absolutely know who they're dealing with. I'm not one of those people who go around promoting mystery around themselves, but on the other hand I'm not about to completely open myself up. Though those stories don't finally represent what I think the experience has been like, I'm not willing to absolutely gift-box myself up and say, 'This is the puzzle, no pieces are missing.' "

This reluctance to do cut-and-dried celebrity interviews has given Ford the reputation for being, in the words of one studio executive, "Mr. Non-Verbal," someone a fan magazine once slickly characterized as "a hot-shot screen adventurer who's a hermit at heart." "I still don't appear on the cover of People magazine; they ignore my existence because I won't play their silly game," Ford says. "I've been especially lucky; I haven't worked on my celebrity, but the things I've done have given me a recognition beyond their power. I've characterized myself as a private person, and not only are people now willing to accept that, in fact it feels better to them."

Yet one of the many paradoxes of Harrison Ford is that while no one would think of calling him effusive, he is in fact thoughtful and articulate to a surprising degree. It's just that in a business where, to paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn, a verbal deal isn't worth the paper it's written on, his careful attitude toward words runs contrary to the Hollywood grain.

Words mean something to him, they are to be used with discretion, treated with the same scrupulous regard he has at different times in his life applied to both carpentry and acting. In fact, when the subject of his work with wood comes up, he immediately says, "I'll tell you right now, about half the stuff people point to in this town and say 'Harrison Ford built this' is not my work. And it's not good work. "

Not surprisingly, then, the one word that most often came up unsolicited in talks with Ford's acquaintances and associates was "perfectionist." "Someone I know bought a truck from Harrison," says a friend of Ford's, "and it was in the neatest, most spotless, most perfect condition, immaculate to the tiniest detail. He doesn't do anything lightly, he's very intense." Comments the man himself, with a wry twist, "I'm probably impossible for me to live with. I get along much better with other people than I do with myself. I do not consider myself fun at a party. I'm judgmental in the extreme about my work, I'm demanding of other people in terms of their energy and their willingness to explore thoughts and exchange real ideas. I wear myself out."

That personal force and intensity is immediately palpable on meeting Ford. A lean, rangy 44 years old, he comes off as engagingly wary and formidably self-sufficient. His eyes, hooded and searching under imposing brows, are, like the rest of the man, unconsciously intimidating. So though he is careful to insist, emphasizing every word, "I know I'm not good-looking, I'm more normal-looking than anything; if I find the word 'handsome' in a script, I'll run away," it almost seems beyond the point.

''He possesses magnetic qualities. He's capable of filling a room with his personality," explains Peter Weir, the Australian director of The Mosquito Coast and Witness. "If he'd been a plumber and came to fix your tap, he's a person you would notice."

Ford's emotional power has another, less captivating, manifestation, an almost predictable tendency toward moodiness, to which he readily confesses. Longtime associates of the actor have become almost immune to his shifts in temperament ("He's always been cranky; it's his way of being. I'm just amused by it," says producer Fred Roos, a friend for more than twenty years), partly because he tries not to inflict them on others, but mostly because his other personality strengths make his moodiness seem peripheral. When Ford and his I l-year-old costar, Lukas Haas, went to Japan on a Witness publicity tour, remembers Haas's mother, writer Emily Tracy, "Harrison was so protective of his not being overwhelmed. The first time we ate sushi, Harrison very carefully introduced him to it. A lot of people could care less to take the time and energy to relate that way to a child." "Though it may seem like it's almost against all his wishes," concludes one friend, "he is a better person than anybody knows."

When asked to describe Ford, the largely Australian crew who worked with him on Witness and now Mosquito Coast gravitated toward a single word, "matey," and Ford, after joking "I'm delighted it wasn't 'asshole,'" seriously allowed as how he was "flattered beyond belief." '''Matey,'" says Peter Weir, "means a team player, friendly, someone who could pull rank if they wanted to but wouldn't, like Prince Charles going out with the blokes and having a beer." "When we started Witness, I asked Peter what Harrison was like," reports director of photography John Seale. "And he said, 'If he didn't have an accent, he'd be an Australian.' He's not one of those deck-chair actors, swanning around and saying, 'Bring up my motor home, please.' He pitches in and helps you make a movie.''

And, in yet another surprising twist, Harrison Ford, for all his intensity and moodiness, has a crackerjack sense of humor that ranges from sophisticated one-liners, such as telling The New York Times that the hardest stunt in Raiders of the Lost Ark "was keeping that hat on the whole time," to lying down on a bed, languidly throwing his arm behind him a la Gloria Swanson and announcing with mock airiness, "Okay, I'm ready for the interview to begin.'' "Seriousness makes me playful; I just can't stand being serious as a steady diet," Ford explains. "The line between serious and pretentious is one step, and not to have a sense of self-irony is real dangerous."

When Paul Theroux's novel came out in 1982, it was a success both critically and commercially, but did not find its way onto Harrison Ford's reading list. When he was filming Witness, Ford knew that Peter Weir had be come attached to The Mosquito Coast project, which at that point was slated to star Jack Nicholson, but he didn't ask to see the script and Weir did not proffer it, though he did tell the actor that most people thought the lead character, Allie Fox, ''was a tough guy, not as accessible or likable as usual movie heroes were." When the Nicholson deal fell through Ford was shown the script. My reaction was immediately' positive," he says. "I felt, 'Hey, I can play this. Why are people saying he's crazy?' ''

As delineated by Theroux, Allie Fox is a cantankerous, autocratic dreamer who believes "how can I be wrong if I'm going against the current?"; a self-described ''Yankee with a knack for getting things accomplished," who holds modern American civilization in the most vivid and picturesque contempt. "He liked the idea of setting out," writes Allie's son Charlie, the book's narrator, "moving away, starting off in an empty place with nothing but his brains and a toolbox." True to his desire, Allie moves his wife and four children from New England to the blighted jungles of the Mosquito Coast of Honduras, there to experience both the beginning of a new civilization as well as the most fearful kind of Conradian disintegration.

Producer Jerome Hellman (Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home bought the rights to the book outright in 1982 for $250,000, before realizing that ''in my own enthusiasm I didn't fully appreciate how out of the ordinary the Establishment would consider this.'' Or, as Theroux nicely puts it, "This isn't Mr. Mom.'' "We were turned down everywhere, most places three or four times,'' recalls Hellman. "I presented it to people I wouldn't want to be in the same city with and got turned down."

Meanwhile, Weir, all geared up to work, told his agent he would read anything that was a go project: He was shown Witness, and the result was eight Oscar nominations, including Best Actor for Ford. That film's success turned Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously) into a "money director" in studio eyes, but Hellman, tired of the Establishment runaround, made a deal with independent producer Saul Zaentz (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus) to have his company finance the film. ''The studios," Zacntz says with a sigh, "all want high-concept pictures, like 'What's Prince doing this week?' ''

Ford's keenness for the project (''He came through the door with guns blazing," remembers Hellman), combined with the producers' inability to close a deal with Nicholson, gave Ford the role, but not without a bit of controversy. Even though Ford has appeared in five of the ten top box-office films of all time, five films that have collectively grossed nearly a billion dollars, he has not always been at the top of Hollywood's actor list. He was a last-minute choice for both Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark (Tom Selleck was set to go as Indiana Jones but couldn't get away from Magnum, P.l.) and had (until Witness) to endure the rap of being someone who couldn't do romantic roles. This lack of respect is something that Ford doesn't allow himself to get caught up in, but it infuriates partisans, who feel he is being penalized by small minds who automatically discount his acting ability because of his leading-man qualities and the fact that he didn't put in his time trotting the careworn boards of the New York stage.

In truth, Ford harks back to Gary Cooper's and John Wayne's way of simply being onscreen. He makes it look so effortless that it tempts some to dismiss him. But anyone who doesn't understand the level of sheer, almost drawing-room-comedy kind of skill needed to bring off, for instance, the breezy insouciance of an Indiana Jones has to look no farther than the plodding work of Kurt Russell in a similar role in the recent Big Trouble in Little China. It took twenty years for skeptics to realize what a consummate screen actor Clint Eastwood is. And while it seems unlikely that it will take Ford that long to achieve respect, his casting in The Mosquito Coast was in fact disparaged by the usual industry second-guessers as not as good a choice for this kind of dark, troubled role as Nicholson would have been. Paul Theroux, for one, strongly disagrees. ''With Jack, you're always feeling 'In a minute he's going to flip; look, he's flipping now!' " Adds Hellman, ''Harrison's strength is that there's no way in the world you could predict what he'd do in this part." More than that, Ford, just by the power of his personality as well as his extensive experience as a carpenter, exudes a critical sense of physical capability.

As for Ford himself, the stimulation that playing Allie Fox brought him is palpable. ''He's complicated, he's fucking complicated. I love that," he literally exclaims at one point, noting that he feels not just some but ''all connections' ' with the character, including his dark side. "I see that all the time in life. I can't imagine why it shouldn't be the stuff of movies. Some of the people who are the darkest have great personal charm. He's unique, driven, and, finally, if you had enough patience or were able to see him in sufficient light, you'd find him understandable."

The challenge for Ford, who says he was "variously sympathetic and suspect at the same time" about Allie, was to re-create that same duality in audience response to the character. "We wanted a lot of the edgy feeling of the book still to be preserved; we didn't want to abandon the balls of it," he says, "because it's not necessary for him to be entirely likable as long as the audience can understand what he's about. You're always saying, 'I know what he's talking about here,' but then it's 'He's going too far. Jesus Christ!' Part of his irresistible charm is that he's willing to go further than anybody in the audience would have gone, he's got to outstrip them emotionally. And they've got to be by turns delighted and frightened by where he's going."

Trying to make this balance work means the actor's involving himself in "a process of constant assessment. If you added a pinch of stuff earlier on, you've got to assess the fact that even though you don't taste it yet, you know it's in there and it's going to come through in the final stew. It's just very complicated, an unending enterprise, some of which goes on in your head, some in your gut. But that's the job. That's what the job of acting is,"

Helping with the job, and a prime reason Ford was eager to do The Mosquito Coast, was Peter Weir. A man who began his career as a director by "gathering a bunch of friends together on weekends and picking and choosing from their ideas," Weir parallels Ford in being a strong believer in the collaborative nature of filmmaking. Their constant chats were a regular feature of the Mosquito filming ("They're like a couple of old aunties, off in the corner yakking all the time," jokes actor Dick O'Neill, who plays Allie's employer and nemesis, Polski), but both men say the talk was not always harmonious. "We provoke each other," says Weir. "It's no cozy fireside chat, two old colonels agreeing. There's healthy friction; we both have extremely strong opinions."

The two men do agree about practicing filmmaking as a craft, not an art, what Weir for his part bluffly calls a "let's cut all the crap and get down to turning out a workmanlike product, giving value for money" attitude. Ford elaborates by making, as he frequently does, an analogy to construction work. "Acting is interpretive by nature. An architect may be called an artist on account of having an overall vision, but it takes the attention of craftsmen like plumbers and carpenters and sheet-metal men and roofers to bring it to life. And the analogy holds for film. What I do is a relatively mechanical, obsessively intellectual process. You try and figure out what to do, and then you go out there and do it. If you've figured out what to do but don't have the craft to do it, you're in trouble. I'm quite happy to be a craftsman. I don't feel lessened by that at all, there's no curtailing of ambition. It's the facts, Jack."

To watch Harrison Ford working over several hours is to see something that even those observations don't fully capture. The scene they're filming is not a major dramatic moment: Allie and son Charlie are driving through their hometown, supposedly Northampton, Massachusetts. (Actually Cartersville, in northern Georgia, a change necessitated by such arcana as when the weather permitted shooting in Belize, which doubled for Honduras . ) Disgusted by the evils of flab, Allie spies a group of overweight teenage girls and screams "Cheeseburgers!" at them out the truck window.

Ford is first of all patient, not to say stoic, sitting in the truck's cab as all the endless technical minutiae of rigging a camera to the back of the pickup take place. He has to say that single word and gun his engine an uncountable number of times, but not only doesn't he get bored, the amount of energy he puts into each effort shows he is the most involved person there. More than that, he comes back to yell the same thing still more times while the camera shoots the girls' reactions, just so the extras involved will have the real thing and not some assistant director to react against. But when the extent of his devotion to the final product is pointed out to him, Ford is nonplussed. "That's my job, man, and I'm surprised when anybody indicates that there's anything unusual about that," he says. "I mean, my job is not to sit in my trailer and read other scripts. I take a fair amount of money for it, and I would be embarrassed not to do any of that."

That this would be Harrison Ford's job was not something anyone could have guessed early on. Born in Chicago, Ford the son of a Jewish mother ("Can't you see that in my work?" he cracks) and a Roman Catholic father ("There's a clash of two very strong cultures herc") who achieved renown in advertising circles by creating the concept of the see-through washing machine and pioneering the use of time-lapse photography for Parkay margarine. Ford didn't get interested in acting till college: " it scared the shit out of me to get up in front of peoplc, but what I was most drawn to was thc challenge of overcoming that fear. It was the first time I really remember having any significant ambition to do anything. Thcn I began to experience the fun of it, and also for the first time I felt a sense of working with other people. I could never come together around the pep squad or football games or politics, but I could through this."

After flunking out of Ripon, Ford decided, half out of desperation, that professional acting might be a possibility. "All I knew about being an actor was you had to go to either New York or Los Angeles. That really was the limit of my knowledge I figured if you're going to be poor, you might as well be poor-warm, so we [he and his first wife, Mary, whom he met at Ripon] went to Los Angeles. I didn't know the names of the major motion-picture studios at that point."

After a stint as "an assistant buyer in knickknacks and oil paintings for Bullock's, part of the junior management team," Ford got involved with the Laguna Playhouse and ended up under contract first to Columbia and then to Universal. What followed was years of small parts in features and episodic TV, playing "the sensitive younger-brother bank robber or the guy who didn' t do it. But I was doing the same thing over and over again, and I thought I would wear out my face on television if I didn't hold out for better stuff. And that's when I became a carpenter in order to put food on the table."

Ford literally learned the trade from books he took out of the Encino Public Library, paralleling an experience in college when he took a summer job cooking on a yacht on Lake Michigan. "I'd never cooked before, but the Chicago Tribune still had a readers' service you could call up and say, 'How long does it take to cook a baked potato?' And they'd say, 'Is this Harrison again?'" And when he talks about carpentry, it is still with enormous regard. " I liked working with people, investigating their ambitions for a certain project, coming up with ideas, helping them do something and taking money from them, which would help me eat. What I liked best about it was that there was no mystery at all. It was a simple process, and if you submitted yourself to the logic, you would always come up with the answer. But if you came in with egotistical impulses, you were almost completely fucked." Given all that, doesn't he miss it? "No, I use the same process in acting. It's exactly the same. I get tired of it as a metaphor, but it's true."

One of the people whose eye Ford caught was Fred Roos, then a casting director, who pushed him for a sizable number of roles, including a part in the 1970 film Zabriskie Point that got left on the cutting-room floor. "People kept saying, 'What is this guy, he's strange,"' Roos remembers. "That's something that doesn't go down easily in this town. But that very singularness is the stuff of stars."

Roos cast Ford in the critical role of his career, that of hot-rodder Bob Falfa in 1973's American Graffiti. It was a turning point not so much because of the film's success but because it showed Ford for the first time what thc acting process could be like. "George Lucas wanted me to get a crew cut. I suggested the cowboy hat, then it was a straw cowboy hat, and all of a sudden there was a character, and George said, 'I remember those guys!' I was thinking like an actor, and the fun was realizing that people wanted to hear that kind of stuff from me. It's the first time I remember having the feeling that my wings would carry me."

Those wings have carried him to enviable critical and commercial success, but one of the results has been an intensification of his natural search for privacy. "He's not one of those guys who pals around with you on the set," says Dick O'Neill, and Ford agrees. "I think I make connections with people, but I don't make alliances," he says. "I don't have the time or the ambition to stay in a lot of relationships." He does not talk about his first marriage (which ended in divorce in 1979) and when asked about his two sons, 19-year-old Benjamin and 17-year-old Willard, he smiles and says, "I'd love to tell you that they're both in military school in Argentina and I haven't heard from them in six years, but I don't want to bust them, I don't want to drag them into this." He has been married since 1983 (exceptionally happily, his friends say) to Melissa Mathison, screenwriter of E.T., and he won't talk about that either.

What he will talk about is why privacy is so vital to him. "I've seen the price you pay," he says, "and if you glibly give it up, you never get it back, What I dislike more than anything else is constantly being reminded of the difference between yourself and other people; it's quite tedious after a while. And it doesn't get any better, it builds geometrically. I can feel people turning around on the street after I've passed them, or you hear your name out of the corner of your ear, and I hate that, because I can't get rid of it, I can't stop being aware."

More than that,"you're disadvantaged as an actor by becoming observed rather than being an observer. If your life changes so much that you're no longer able to have mundane experiences, then your personality's going to undergo an inevitable shift that's not going to be appropriate to the work you do. So you've got to protect yourself. It makes it more necessary to have a normal life, to invest yourself in real things."

So, though Ford and Mathison have just moved into a new house in los Angeles he helped build himself, he is more likely to be found in Wyoming, where he has a ranch. "It represents an opportunity for nne to have a second life, as it were," he says, "being responsible for that land and what happens to it, the stewardship of the animals. Being part of another community whose concerns are different than the concerns of Hollywood. The opportunity for physical work and to see something develop and grow. Mostly, it's someplace I can go to be alone . "

As much as the solitude, though, Ford tangibly relishes "the simplicity of it all. I love the smallness of the concetns at hand. I like to wake up in the morning with jobs to do, tasks to complete, lists to be made and items to be scratched off. I get real joy out of dealing with the Fish and Game guys about having to improve the stream habitat and having them call me up at seven in the morning and saying, 'You want to see those eggs we're going to put in the stream? Come on up to Byron's place.' And there are things to do up there which I have to summon up the guts for. I've got people willing to take me to within a hairbreadth of my limits climbing mountains or skiing or whatever. I'm just beginning to explore the potential of that place for me as a source of physical challenge and mental challenge too."

Given all of this, when Ford is asked what he still wants out of life, his answer is not surprising. "I'm finding less and less time in my life to do the things that I've already started to do,?' he says, "so I'm not trying to expand myself. I'm just trying to get what I started finished. I' d like to see it all come to a comfortable resting place, with the assurance that I'd done it to the best of my ability, so that I could go on to something else, whether it's raise more chickens or raise more kids or look forward to life on the ranch. I'm slowly trying to transfer stock into my personal life and make sure I still have some years left for that. "

And then, as the talking finally ends, comes the last laconic word from Harrison Ford: '*How are you gonna keep 'em down in Paree," he says with a grin, "after they've seen the farm?"

By Kenneth Turan
GQ film columnist
November, 1986