Marriage, Harrison Ford has discovered, is harder than finding the lost ark. I probably wasn't easy to be married to," he admits, reflecting on his life's lost covenant. "I resist maturity.I like to play."

"I am a chameleon," says Harrison Ford, whose portrayal of archaeologist/adventurer Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark has critics hailing him as a born-again Bogart."I alter the way I look to blend into the background." Ford's latest background has the hesitant hero meshing with a $22 million science-fiction adventure titled Blade Runner, which is to be released next summer. Ford plays a futuristic dick named Deckard who hunts down genetically engineered humanoids.

Now it's 2 a.m. on the set, and the star is weary of stalking "replicants," the second-class citizens of the future. "Cut!" OK, umbrellas, turn off your lights," orders British director Ridley Scott. His cinematic vision of the future includes smoky, polluted cities where the opposite side of the street is invisible without artificial light.

The six-foot Ford emerges from the futuristic scenery; pipe-ventilating systems along the buildings provide breathable air; parking meters with gobes line the streets and warn of electrocution if tampered with; a magazine at a newsstand boasts "All the News That's Fit to Kill."

After intriguing the public first by doing space heroics in Star Wars, then backing down the Lost Ark and now the elusive man-made humans, Harrison Ford - for the first time since his landmark summer of '81 - agreed to stop and track down Ford: the actor, the lover, the man.

When Harrison Ford talks about acting, he sounds more like Spencer Tracy - "All you have to learn is your lines" - than he does Bogart. "There's nothing mystifying about being an actor; you just tell yourself, 'Let's get there and do it,'" says the star, who notes that he made more money as a carpenter than he did playing Han Solo in Star Wars. "Now it's different," he says. "I ask - and they pay."

But Ford vividly remembers the lean days of dozens of uninspiring bit parts on television - Gunsmoke, The Virginian, Ironside - and a variety of very forgettable small film roles. "I played a bellboy once in a movie with James Coburn. I said, 'Paging Mr. Jones . . . Paging Mr. Jones.' He said, 'Boy!' and I said, 'Mr. Jones?' Big stuff, as you can see."

At $150 a week, the bucks weren't big enough to cover even the payments on the house he had bought for his wife, Mary, and their two children. So he went to the library, took out a book on carpentry and bought a toolbox.

"Fifteen years ago, when I started, I couldn't have handled this degree of success," he admits. "I'm a late bloomer. I resisted maturity because I had to learn to do my job, which takes a long time. In a way, I still resist maturity. I like to play.

So is his current girlfriend, scriptwriter Melissa Matheson, with whom Ford shares a two- bedroom house in Beverly Hills. "I probably wasn't easy to be married to," Ford says, reflecting on his divorce, after 15 years of marriage, from his high school sweetheart. "I respond to a sort of barometric pressure, and this is a stressful occupation. In the dark spaces of my personality, I show it. I can be moody." Matheson, who scripted Black Stallion, is apparently coping well with his spells of melancholy, although Ford permits few outsiders to see them together.

"I am independent but not solitary," he explains. "I like people in ones and twos, not in parties. I don't go to anyone for advice or for a shoulder to lean on. My questions are for me to answer out of my own experience."

Does this imply great detachment, or tremendous self-confidence? Ford stares back with his haunting eyes. "I swing between the two," he says, "but I lean much more toward detachment."

Case in point: Although Ford had worked successfully for producer George Lucas in both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, he wasn't first choice for the lead in Raiders of the Lost Ark. That might have wounded the vanity of another actor. Not Harrison Ford. "I am not caught in rumination," he says in his inimitable style. "It is today that counts.

Not what was yesterday or what will be tomorrow. When we were making Raiders, we had no idea what a hit it would turn out to be. We thought it was just efficient entertainment."

Above all, Harrison Ford, like the old-time movie heroes he conjures and the current ones he plays, is an optimist, a man who's kept the faith. "Right from the beginning, I believed that staying on course was what counted," he says. "The sheer process of attrition would wear others down. Them that stuck it out was them that won," he continues. "That was my belief then. It still is."

By David Lewin
US Magazine
1981