Harrison Ford’s 1970s side-hustle supplying the stars: ‘That’s my pot dealer!’
By now, it’s tough to imagine a time when Harrison Ford was anything other than Harrison Ford, the movie star.
He looks the picture of it, making it easy to believe that he has always been a leading man, but the truth of his career is a very different story, including blacklists, setbacks, and a fever dream period was Ford was, allegedly, the favourite dealer for an infamous scene.
But first, let’s begin with the context: Ford describes himself as a ‘late bloomer’, meaning that he didn’t even attempt to try acting until he was in college, but once he made his move, he was all in, relocating to Los Angeles and being picked up for the Columbia Pictures’ new talent program. However, after offending power producer Jerry Tokofsky, Ford’s name was shuffled right to the bottom of the hiring list, struggling for a long while after to get anything beyond unnamed, and even often completely uncredited, roles.
He needed money, especially because, by the end of the 1970s, Ford already had a wife and two kids, and those mouths won’t feed themselves. Ford didn’t just go out and get a bartending job or a barista job, though; through a chain of events, the future star fell headfirst into the world of rock and roll, but specifically the world of rock and roll literary icons. In 1968, Ford took on a job as a camera operator working for The Doors on one of their tours, getting to know the band and their circle as one of their roadies.
That same 1968, two writers were invited to go watch The Doors record: Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, two widely different yet equally vital voices for the ‘60s and ‘70s. Babitz adored the band as she fell into a love affair and then friendship with Jim Morrison, while Didion wrote a doubtful take, stating, “On the whole my attention was only minimally engaged by the preoccupations of rock-and-roll bands”, openly admitting that even after she was invited to witness the entire making of their third album, she “did not see it through”.
This is relevant because in the 2024 book Didion & Babitz, in the reflection of these two writers and their shared Los Angeles crowd, Harrison Ford appears again and again, not as a film star, but as the stoner kid bringing them their weed.
It was the Franklin Avenue scene crowd that hung out at parties at Didion’s home, where intellectuals, musicians, actors and artists mingled, from Annie Leibovitz and Kurt Vonnegut to Tennessee Williams and Warren Beatty. Even Janis Joplin made appearances, and Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate were there, before the horrifying Manson Family murders that took her life scared them all away to other parts of the state. But even when they did, with the Didions moving out to Malibu, the scene followed them, and according to The Mama’s and the Papas‘ Michelle Phillips, Ford was there, supplying the party.
“I didn’t even know Harrison was an actor,” Phillips said. “I remember getting dragged to Star Wars at 10 am on a Saturday morning by my stepbrother, who’d done animation for the movie. I was sitting there, watching the screen, and all of a sudden Harrison comes on, and I gasped and said, ‘That’s my pot dealer!’”
While obviously this is all alleged, there are also rumours that, really, Ford’s position with The Doors was less camera operator and actually more just keeping the band’s supplies topped up.
The cover is that Ford was actually just the Didions’ carpenter, that’s why he was always at their house. At one point, he really did build them a front porch, or at least the guise of building that porch allowed him to bring home some money to support his family, but I’m not really sure what’s a wilder story: Harrison Ford the weed dealer to the stars, or Harrison Ford the self-caught semi-professional carpenter to the literary icons.
