What part of Indiana Jones is, undeniably, Harrison Ford? It’s the part that knows, in the final reckoning, that it’s every man for himself. And if you want to get out alive, you’d best know how to fly.

by Allison Glock

“It’s a cuisinart in back, so don’t exit the helicopter until I say so. And don’t touch those pedals. I touch the pedals. Only me. If you have to emergency-exit, go toward the nose, never the rear. Don’t touch the window. Keep your seat belt snug. And don’t worry: I won’t do anything to spill my coffee.” At this, Harrison Ford raises his mug, has a sip, and takes off, his Bell 407 helicopter lifting effortlessly into the blue.

He pilots along the Pacific coastline dressed in baggy gray pants and a black fleece that could use a wash. The day is trademark L.A. Sunny, breezy, the weather of shirtless muscleheads and Corona commercials. Surfers in wetsuits dot the water. Ford dips in low, low enough that his aircraft begins to honk a warning signal.

“Pay no mind to that,” he says brusquely, pushing the off button. “It’s just the helicopter’s way of saying we are too close to the ground.” With that he drops even lower, scanning the waves for sea life. “Usually the surfers flip me off.”

Ford flies himself everywhere. To his other homes in New York and Jackson Hole, to movie sets, to kill time on empty afternoons. It is both a habit and a hobby, a source of “great adventure, of awe, of, um, pleasure.” (He draws the last word out almost pornographically.)

He particularly enjoys the Bell, an aircraft his fellow pilots dub a hot rod because it can dive and turn and accelerate with gasp-inducing speed. You can thrust up and down at will, bank against canyon walls, undulate over riverbeds, and turn, if need be, in circles tight enough to invite nausea. Ford does all of this as he navigates through Topanga Canyon and over valley hills where only months ago fires had consumed the estates of the rich and famous. The charred footprints of the buildings are visible through the clear floor of the Bell.

“When you fly in a helicopter,” he says, “you really feel like you are flying. It’s like you’ve suddenly discovered the third dimension. You see the way things grew up ecologically, environmentally. You see sprawl, the superhighways, all that shit. You feel richly connected to geography.”

Plus, it’s the coolest thing ever.

“Yes,” Ford admits with a slow nod. “It is.”

Suddenly the chopper plunges down a few feet.

“Birds,” he offers laconically. “They’ll go right through the windshield. Knock you unconscious.”

That would be bad, yes?

“Yes. But not the worst thing.”

What’s the worst thing?

“The worst thing,” he says, a smile creeping over his face, “is you blow the fuck up.”

And then he laughs, a loud, goofy bwah-ha-ha.

Ford is not a big laugher. He’s more of a smirker, a man of irony, a wry observer. Letterman, not Leno. When he does break out a chuckle, the effect is startling, disarming. It shifts the air in the room. Or in the helicopter.

“He has this low-key sense of humor,” says friend and co-star Karen Allen, who played Ford’s lover in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a role she revisits in the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. “He’s not in his element having a lot of attention focused on him. When he does laugh, he does it with his whole person. But it doesn’t happen often. It’s odd he chose to be an actor. I think most of the time he’d prefer to be up in his plane, alone.”

It is a notion Ford does not dispute, admitting he gets “itchy” unless he flies every few days.

“This is how I met Harrison,” recounts 21-year-old actor Shia LaBeouf, who also stars in the new Indy installment. (He’s rumored to play the love child of Ford and Allen.) “I was rehearsing on this huge bike at some air force base with the stunt team. At some point in the film Harrison and I were going to have to ride this thing, and that was a big deal, an insurance issue. So I’m learning how to handle it, and I hear this tic tic tic tic tic, and I look up in the sky and spot this helicopter coming in, like on a movie. And inside the helicopter I see this one man, all by himself. Usually you ride with someone else when you fly, you know, in case shit happens. But not Harrison. And he lands the helicopter, pops open the door, gets out, stretches his back a little, waves to the crew, walks around to open the other door, pulls out his whip, and cracks it.”

LaBeouf pauses for a quick breath, then continues.

“It was magical. It was like a dream montage.”

He sighs.

“Working with Harrison was really special to me,” he says. “I didn’t tell him that, of course. He’s not the type of guy you go up to and say, ‘You’re special to me.’ He’s the kind of guy you give a handshake to and stay quiet. A man’s man. And not bullshit machismo either. He’s honest butch.”

Harrison Ford and the Conquest of the Sky

Ford, 65, has made a career of playing honest butch. It’s something that has come fairly easy to him, seeing as he is honest butch. He is also midwestern. A veteran of two lengthy marriages. A father of four grown children (and now helping raise girlfriend Calista Flockhart’s son Liam, seven). An environmentalist. An activist. A carpenter. With big, fucked-up carpenter hands. (He built his own house.)

And now he is a pilot. Twelve years ago, at an age when most men are donning Callaway visors and considering hip replacement, Ford was logging 10-hour days at flight schools all over America, determined to test himself in a way that felt real to him. Forget skiing, or tennis, or even race car driving. He wanted to put himself in a position where, if he failed, he could blow the fuck up.

“When I started flying, it changed my life,” he says, shelling pistachios into an empty cup as he walks through his pristine Santa Monica hangar. Nearby shelves stock Coke, bottled water, Amstel Light, and juice boxes. In the corner is a small wooden patio table on top of which rests a plate of cookies. Ford grabs one, takes a bite, then spits it into a nearby trash can. “Part of my diet,” he jokes.

“I really wanted to learn something new,” he says. “I’d been in the goddamned movie business for 25 years. I didn’t know if I could learn anything anymore.”

He now owns six aircraft. Maybe seven. He isn’t sure. In California he keeps a De Havilland Beaver from 1958 (“part of Air America during the Vietnam War”), a 1929 Waco Taperwing (“a rivet-for-rivet reproduction, beautiful”), a Cessna Citation CJ3 jet, and the Bell. His other Cessna is “in the shop.”

“This is what they used to fly the mail in,” he says, running his hand along the side of the Waco, a topless stunner in lustrous green and black. “I feel the history of it when I’m in it. Nobody makes anything like these older ones anymore. The aerodynamics are the same, but they are built for different purposes. They are purpose-built.”

This notion appeals to Ford. Both in his personal life and career he is nothing if not about purpose, effort, intention. He remembers once, when he was young, watching a neighbor shovel snow. The image comforted him. You take a mess. You work hard. And you clean it up. Life distilled. All the rest is nonsense.

“Most stars are so self-absorbed,” notes close friend Tom Brokaw. The two became confidants years ago when they met at a dinner party, what Brokaw calls an “insane, bacchanalian evening, just a wacko night.” Ford’s unexpected candor that day made an impression on Brokaw. “For actors every little thing in their life is the most important thing in the whole entire world. That’s never been the case with Harrison. We go out to dinner like normal people. No production. He sits quietly in the corner. You don’t ever think about him as a movie star.”

It is that very everyman quality that has made Ford not just a movie star, but an icon. Four of his films are among the top 50 largest moneymakers of all time, according to Nielsen EDI, and he remains one of Hollywood’s biggest-grossing stars, his films earning more than $3.5 billion domestically. And that’s before the upcoming, more-than-a-decade-in-the-making, blockbuster-in-waiting Crystal Skull, which hits theaters May 22.

“We laughed about it,” says Brokaw. “Seven years ago I said, ‘What is there left for you to do?’ And Harrison said, ‘I just want to make one more movie with Steven Spielberg.’”

“It was 80 days of shooting,” recalls Ford. “I had one day off. But it flew by. I had the same driver as Tom Hanks on The Terminal, this guy named Paulie. One day Paulie told me he said to Tom, ‘Tom, you’re working so hard. Don’t you sometimes wish you didn’t have to go to work?’ And Tom said, ‘Paulie, it’s like going to work with Einstein every day!’”

Ford smiles.

“Now, I’m not easily awed. And I don’t appear to be awed at any given time, but in retrospect, I have never seen anybody work as tirelessly or efficiently as Steven does. Working with him is a huge thrill for me.”

Even when it hurt.

“Harrison would be beat to shit every day,” says LaBeouf. “We didn’t have much CGI. All the stunts — he did 90 percent of it. I’d watch him take the hits. Over and over. And he never asks for the medic. Or a breather. Or a break. He just kept working. We nicknamed him ‘the Cowboy.’ ”

“Harrison told me, ‘My body is battered now. It’s so much harder,’ ” recalls Brokaw with a laugh. “I think Steven wanted him to dye his hair. Harrison refused. He wanted to be the age he is on the screen. Which is commendable.”

When asked if Ford reminds him of Indiana Jones offscreen, Brokaw is quick to share a story about a proposed climbing trip to Gannett Peak in Wyoming, an expedition that after years of cajoling Ford ultimately declined to take. “Indiana Jones was not up for an adventure with us,” Brokaw says drolly. “Dr. Kimble from The Fugitive — that’s the Harrison Ford I know. The authenticity. The intensity. I see him as the lone guy getting himself out of hot water.”

Harrison Ford and the Wind Shear of Doom

He wants you to know it could’ve been worse. And that in the end no one blamed him, although there were questions at first, something he fully supports, because “nobody wants some clown out there bouncing around not knowing what the fuck they’re doing.”

It happened June 18, 2000, in Lincoln, Nebraska. Ford was landing his Beechcraft Bonanza when the wind shifted. “I was seven feet off the ground, and it was at that point that the wind sheared from right off the nose of the airplane to 90 degrees. Which meant suddenly I was 17 knots under airspeed. I just bounced out of the sky.” He slams his hand against his leg to emphasize the impact. “It got to be a bit of a rodeo.”

Ford tipped from wing to wing, crumpling both, damages he likens to “losing a hubcap on a Mercedes.”

“They are crushable zones, by the way,” he says with a grin. When Ford finally landed he was zooming along in a ditch off the edge of the runway. It was then he noticed the auxiliary building dead ahead.

“I was able to fly over it. Barely,” he says. “It all happened in about six seconds. Maybe 10. There wasn’t time to be frightened.”

Ford says he never considered finding a less perilous pastime.

“Not for a second.” He looks at the ground, fiddles with a coffee stirrer. “Nothing makes me feel the same way as flying.”

Nothing?

“Well, maybe acting.”

Harrison Ford and the Kingdom of Hollywood

Shia LaBeouf’s father only ever watched spaghetti westerns and action hero films, and the only action heroes who ever meant anything in his house were Harrison Ford and Steve McQueen. “My father would watch Harrison take a punch or get thrown through a window and say, ‘He’s the Man!’”

If you ask Ford how he came to be the Man, he will say it was serendipity. This is not to suggest that he doesn’t do the work. Ford takes his job, if not his profession, seriously. He prepares. He considers.

“It’s a real crapshoot every time you go out. Every time you make a movie you have the potential of seriously embarrassing yourself and whatever fool put up the money. It isn’t logical, but I feel a great deal of responsibility when I’m the lead. I feel responsible for the product. I know to some extent people are buying the product because they bought it in the past and they didn’t get sick. They recognize the box. And they expect the same service they got before.”

Where other performers romanticize and marinate in method and motivation, Ford sees acting as a “service profession.”

“I think I have an appropriate sense of myself,” he says. “And if I’m critical, it is because there is room for improvement.”

Are you self-punishing?

“Well, I’m half Jewish.”

Here, Ford offers a joke.

“This little old Jewish lady is walking down the beach with her favorite son, and a freak wave comes in and washes him out to sea. And she raises her hands to the heavens and cries [Ford affects a Jackie Mason accent], ‘God! I’ve been a good Jew. I’ve gone to temple. I give money to UJA. He’s my favorite son! Please, God, don’t do this!’ A second wave comes and the son washes up on the shore. Thanks be to God, he’s breathing. She looks at him, and she looks back up at God, and she raises her hand again and says, ‘He had a hat!’ ”

Ford chuckles for a minute, then sighs. He knows that he is an anachronism, a self-loather in a climate of self-love. “I’m too old for that shit,” he says of the popular habit of embracing yourself even if you happen to be a total a-hole. “I’ve heard about it. But I don’t practice that religion. I don’t mind introspection. I just don’t think it’s very attractive to do it in public.”

“The appeal of Harrison is that he’s a little unavailable, unreachable,” says Karen Allen. “He lets you in just enough to stay interested.”

Privacy, and the resulting preservation of dignity, is something Ford has valued since childhood. Born in Chicago and raised in the suburb of Des Plaines, Ford was a C student, a nonathlete. He spent a good deal of time on his own, or with the other members of his model train club, or being tossed off embankments by bullies. During summers he worked in the commissary at a Boy Scout camp. One of those campers, Brokaw points out, was Hank Paulson, the current secretary of the treasury. When Paulson later heard the man he had called “Harry” was Harrison Ford, movie star, he was shocked. It had never occurred to him that they could be the same person.

Ford left the Midwest for L.A. after dropping out of college a few weeks before his senior finals. A philosophy student who took a few drama classes, he quickly got studio work (mostly small parts in TV shows and forgettable movies), but found it dull, so he took up carpentry, teaching himself from library books. Then came a chance meeting with George Lucas and American Graffiti, then Star Wars, then Raiders, then unprecedented, unimaginable worldwide fame.

Ford appreciates his luck, but he chafes at his celebrity and the public’s perception that because he plays men with heroic inclinations he must also, in some way, be heroic. When reminded that he has in fact rescued people from freezing mountaintops on more than one occasion, Ford shrugs, as if to say, Who wouldn’t?

“I don’t play heroes; I play men with dilemmas,” he says sharply. Men who, upon being tested, choose the right path. Men whose masculinity comes not from careful grooming and deliberate peacockery, but from an absence of affectation. Men who are grown-ups. Men, though he would never say it, not unlike himself.

“I think of him as somebody who reveals himself in the character, like Jimmy Stewart,” says Allen. “Stewart was always essentially himself, and yet he was totally believable in every role he played. Harrison is the same.”

Harrison Ford and the Cheating of Death

“You don’t just fall out of the sky, like people think.”

Ford is explaining what happens when your helicopter engine dies. “It takes a couple of seconds to talk yourself into the fact that it is actually happening.” He pauses, swallows. “If you assume the right attitude, you can stretch your glide and make a good decision about where to put it down. It’s not certain death.”

Ford knows this because in 1999 his helicopter engine stalled out during a training drill. He was 50 feet off the ground.

“It was a less than ideal circumstance,” he says drily.

The aircraft slammed into a dry riverbed, spreading the skids where he landed. He was reaching to turn off the battery when full power came back on, creating “a torque event.”  The helicopter instantly flipped on its side and commenced chewing itself up.

“I was pretty amazed nobody was hurt,” Ford says now. “It happened like that!” He snaps, then exhales.

Ford walked away only slightly bruised. The helicopter, however, was toast.

“Flying is an art, an imperfectible art,” he says, explaining why crashes happen, and why he’ll never quit flying, no matter how many times they happen to him. Accountability is part of the game. Ford likes this. To be part of something that isn’t based on charisma. To put himself in a milieu in which charm is irrelevant, in which no one slides by or gets anything he doesn’t deserve. Where hard work counts and posturing can kill you. An environment in which he need never, not even for a minute, suffer fools.

“Pilots are a responsible breed,” Ford says. “That was part of the appeal for me. I became a member of another world.”

Harrison Ford and the Secret of the Universe

Ford is remembering his first solo flight to europe. How he stopped for the night in Reykjavík, gliding in over the icebergs. The thrill of seeing Greenland, and Dublin, and Barcelona. The primal satisfaction of being concretely in charge of his own destiny.

“I used to fish,” he says. “But I don’t do it much anymore. Most of my friends who are avid fishermen become competitive about it. Brokaw tells this story about taking me out to learn how to cast. He says I threw my rod into the river. I think that’s bullshit. I got frustrated, but I don’t think I threw my rod in the river. I don’t care that much. I’ve never been a competitive guy.”

What Ford liked about fishing, he says, were the places he fished in, and once he could buy his own pristine acreage and fly to those locations on a whim, the need for an excuse to be there disappeared. In time, so did everything else that didn’t fit in with his new plan.

“As I’ve gotten older I’ve let go of the ability to bullshit myself,” Ford says. “Although I can, on some occasions, summon the skill, given sufficient provocation.”

Most days now Ford is, if not buoyant, content. He likes his job. He loves his hobby. He fights the good fight against political ineptitude and environmental degradation. He “surveys the Hudson with Bobby” Kennedy for Riverkeeper, and sits on the board of Conservation International.

“You see encroachment when you fly,” Ford says. “You see effluent in the ocean that is coming out of some sewage system. You see all kinds of stuff. The last time we stopped in Greenland, you could see where there used to be a glacier close to the airport, and it was just gone. Gone. Disappeared.”

So Ford presses on. Giving his time and his money. Lending his person and his planes. “He lives the life he wants to live as well as anybody I know,” says Brokaw. For this Ford makes no apologies.

“When I look back, I basically always knew what a schmuck I was,” he says, letting his chin drop to his chest. “How lucky I was. How lame I was. Well, it’s not that any of that has changed.”

He lifts his head, offers a tentative smile.

“I just don’t give a shit anymore.”

This article originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.