Such is Ford's reputation for principled contrariness that even Michelle Pfeiffer, his What Lies Beneath costar, felt compelled to declare on the Today show that "the most surprising thing is, he's really funny." More than that, says Wendy Crewson, who played Ford's First Lady in Air Force One and has a small role in Beneath, "he's got the devil in his eyes. You don't really see that impishness onscreen, but he has got a wild side." Melanie Griffith saw it while partying with Ford and Mathison during the filming of 1988's Working Girl. "He was knocking back tequilas, and the last thing I remember was Harrison did one shot and he was on the floor of the bar," she recalls. "Melissa was walking out the door, and she was like, 'Forget this guy!' It was pretty funny."

And there may be an inexplicable quirk or two. "When he meets people," claims The Fugitive's Sela Ward, "he looks at everybody's shoes. When I first arrived in Chicago, I happened to be wearing cowboy boots. I noticed that he really checked out my shoes, and I thought, 'We must be bonding over my boots. I have a farm, he has a ranch . . .' "

Friends say he's a jokester

Suffice it to say that the ear-piercing he got in 1997 (lately he favors a gold stud) isn't the only giveaway: The real Ford isn't quite as reserved as he likes to make out. "He remembers every joke in the world -- loves to tell them," says Pollack. (Few are printable.) And his impersonations, says friend Yvon Chouinard, the famous mountain climber and founder of the Patagonia sportswear chain, are dead on. "He's a riot," Chouinard says. "He has an unbelievable sense of irony and cynicism." Even his fellow luminaries aren't spared. On the set "everybody's getting their hair and makeup done," says Crewson, "and he'll flip through magazines and dish the stars." When the camera rolls, though, he is purely professional. "I had no idea how meticulous he was," says Robert Zemeckis, who directed What Lies Beneath, in which Ford plays a research scientist whose wife (Pfeiffer) is haunted by a vengeful ghost. Days before he was due on the Vermont set, Ford, who earned his pilot's license five years ago, flew up in his de Havilland Beaver to check it out. "He didn't want to walk into his house as the character on the first day without having gotten a sense of it beforehand," says Zemeckis. "He spent hours making sure everything felt right."

Similarly, Ford's passion for flying -- he goes up three or four times a week -- knows few bounds, even if some of the landings have been a little rough. Last October, Ford was practicing emergency landings with a flight instructor in a dry lake bed north of Los Angeles when his helicopter's motor failed -- causing it to crash. Two months ago he emerged unscathed from a bumpy landing in Lincoln, Neb., that damaged his six-passenger Beech Bonanza. The culprit was wind shear. "Not a wind gust," he points out, adding that most reports of the incident -- including one in this magazine that he missed the runway -- got it wrong. "To simply say that a wind gust had blown me off the runway is to misunderstand the techniques of landing. This was a wind shear, where the wind totally comes from another direction."