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photograph and the toys tucked away in Jack’s wing, deep pink roses
and wine-dark dahlias bring in the only color, just one or two of each
in squat vases—Ford hates large flower arrangements. Critics of his
second film, Nocturnal Animals, have asked whether its main character,
a gallery owner living in stilted isolation, surrounded by trophies, is a
stand-in for Ford himself. The answer is yes.
“Making other people beautiful, the search for perfection, the need
to see women look like elegant beings—that drives him,” says his old
friend Elizabeth Saltzman, the fashion stylist. “But I think Tom suffers
from a lack of freedom. You put yourself in your ad campaigns, and
you’re no longer free. Wherever we go, women come up to him and
say, Tell me what color lipstick I’m wearing! Smell my neck—what
fragrance is it? He’s kind enough to pay attention. I think he adores
freedom but has so much less of it. He likes quiet, and he looks for
quiet. But this is what happens to people who become larger than life.”
Ford recently took Jack to Disneyland, and he was pleased to notice
that, for a change, no one seemed to recognize him. They are likely to
return. But on most days he is wrestling with how to raise a child in
the rarefied air of his life in Los Angeles, in a milieu of movie stars and
moguls. A few days before we met, he opened the refrigerator in the
poolhouse, where typically there is a single box of the basic Popsicles
that Jack enjoys. On weekends at home, when there is no staff, Ford and
his son like to play Monopoly or float in the pool eating Popsicles. They
have other simple rituals: Jack likes vanilla wafers because Ford—a
vegan who cheats on sweets—likes vanilla wafers, old-fashioned and
plain. But now the freezer was stocked with 20 or so boxes of Popsicles,
the refrigerator lined in deep rows of Evian and Perrier and Hint Water
and Diet Coke. “The idea of a childhood where there’s just an endless
supply of Popsicles! It’s tricky,” Ford says. “What I sell is happiness
through a new pair of shoes, and of course that’s not really possible.
However, we are material creatures. Jack gets a dollar a day. He saves
that money, and no matter what he wants, unless it’s Christmas or
his birthday, he has to buy it. It’s very cute: Whenever Jack’s done for
the day, he has a chair next to his bed where we sit, and I read to him
at night, and I’ll go in later to make sure everything’s OK. Tuck him
in again. Sitting in the chair will be whatever thing he has made that
day, found that day, been into that day, right there so he can see it. I
remember doing that as a child with new shoes or whatever it was that
I had bought that I was so in love with. Those material things can bring
you a sort of happiness.”
The psychologist D. W. Winnicott called these transitional ob-
jects—toys, dolls, blankets that make the absence of a parent easier
to bear. If Ford has one of his own, it’s the Calder mobile hanging in
the living room, the only artwork he could never imagine parting with.
It belonged to Georgia O’Keeffe, whom his grandfather introduced
him to as a boy outside the La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe. “I thought
she was the strangest person I’d ever met in my life,” he recalls. “My
grandmother was from Texas, and she wore makeup and always had her
hair done. I didn’t understand this creature at all. If we were in Santa
Fe, I’d lead you to my bathroom, and right there, next to my mirror
where I get dressed, is a Warhol Polaroid of Georgia O’Keeffe. And
she is fucking cool-looking, just covered in CONTINUED ON PAGE>566NEUTRAL TERRITORY
“I love people’s houses
that are incredibly
colorful and patterned,”
says Ford, seated in
his bedroom. “But I
can’t think in them.
Color distracts me.”