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October 17, 2004
Tom Ford's Intermission
By CATHY HORYN
LOS ANGELES
The presidential debate is on in Tom Ford's bedroom. John Kerry's jaw looks Rushmorean on the big screen at the foot of the king-size bed, and the glow from the television, and from the lights of the Bel-Air hills beyond the plate-glass window, give the black room a lacquered triumphalism. This may be the room of an insomniac, for Tom Ford is a notoriously light sleeper, but it is not the room of someone with a dull mind.
Mr. Ford is dressed for the evening. He has on a black suit with a two-inch cuff on the trousers, and a white shirt that looks as if it has never been worn before and may never be again, and the gold studs in his cuffs are merely for show, since he has not bothered to close them.
He and his companion of 18 years, Richard Buckley, the editor of Vogue Hommes, are going for dinner at La Dolce Vita, a Beverly Hills restaurant that has the look and dietary tastes of old Hollywood. They will sit in the George Raft booth, which is opposite the one marked "The Reagans," and Mr. Ford will order a vodka tonic, followed by a Caesar salad and the filet mignon ("Very rare-bloody, bloody," he will tell the elderly waiter). Across the room, above the bar, is Slim Aarons's famous portrait of Clark Gable and Gary Cooper caught in a glamorous horse laugh.
After 14 years at Gucci, 10 as creative director — a period documented in a coming book from Rizzoli — Mr. Ford is about to find out if he has a second act. Since leaving Gucci on May 1, after possibly the longest aria in fashion history, he has been reading scripts and has settled on three projects he wants to direct, including one based on a novel whose rights he has bought. He has opened an office, hired a screenwriter, and met with his agent, Bryan Lourd, of Creative Artists Agency, most recently last Tuesday.
So why is Mr. Ford, 43, sounding like the classic Chicken Little Virgo, convinced that the sky is going to fall?
"I was driving home today from the office," he said, "and I had such a bad day, and I was thinking, God, why am I so worked up? I mean, technically, I don't even have a job. Why am I so worked up?" Mr. Ford said. Now he is sitting in the living room of his home, a cream-colored villa designed by Richard Neutra in 1955, which he shares with Mr. Buckley and their 2-year-old fox terrier, Angus. The glass doors are open to the terrace and a slope of 50-year-old pines. Bits of eucalyptus branches crackle in the gas fireplace. Floating near his right shoulder is a black Calder mobile that once belonged to Georgia O'Keeffe, while behind him are two black Warhol shadow paintings. The room is as stylish as it is warm.
"Maybe I need to learn to slow down," Mr. Ford continued. "Maybe it would be good for me if it took a long time to do a movie and it forced me to adjust to a different speed. The fashion business is so fast-paced. We're absolutely insane people. It's boom, boom, boom." He snapped his fingers.
Then he grew quiet. "And maybe," he said, "I'm never going to do anything again, and this will be it."
The confidence that Mr. Ford displayed on the runway, and which is contained in the 416-page black-bound book with his name in reverse white type ("It's very subtle, don't you think?" he said with a laugh), hasn't suddenly escaped him, like air in a balloon. This is a man, after all, who has a personal worth of several hundred million dollars, whose friends include Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks, the publisher Lisa Eisner and her husband, Eric, John Travolta and Kelly Preston, and, of course, the powerful dealmaker Mr. Lourd. This is a man whose "new best friend" is a former adversary, Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. They have met for lunch in Paris several times.
"I mean, it's funny," Mr. Ford said, "how things work out."
But Mr. Ford is shrewd enough to know he can't arrive in Hollywood resting on his past accomplishments or trophies. Some expression of humility is due.
He says the first thing he did after leaving his home in London in June was to "read every script that was out there." He added, "I needed to see my future, my next life."
Whereas some people in fashion think he would do better if he returned to design — and Mr. Ford doesn't mind hinting that he might — he has found the movie world far more receptive than skeptical.
"I had dinner with Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer a few weeks ago," he recalled, "and he said to me: `Don't worry about this. You can totally do this. Just do it. It's not that hard.' " Mr. Ford laughed.
"He was being really kind, but I have to say he was encouraging."
Mr. Ford isn't the first person to make the leap from fashion to directing — Joel Schumacher did it years ago — but he has been used to a greater degree of success. A bad first picture could be as spectacularly humiliating as a belly flop into the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones looking on.
"If I'm going to get one shot to make an impression," he said, "I want to have around me at least the padding of professional organization. I would not be able to make a little film that will go unnoticed the way it might for other beginning directors. Everyone will be looking. `Is he any good?' "
Mr. Lourd says he understands Mr. Ford's eagerness, but as he has cautioned him, making a film isn't anything like producing a collection or an advertising campaign.
"It might be years before Tom sees his first movie made," Mr. Lourd said, pointing out that it often takes a veteran director like Mr. Nichols a minimum of five years to bring a movie to the screen. "He's probably twitching somewhere, saying, `I hope not.' But that's the reality of the business."
Although Mr. Ford's three projects are not at a stage where he will talk about them, he said that one is a contemporary story he is working on with a screenwriter and another is a period piece. "All three are quite romantic," he said. "They're not at all what people might think I would be making. They don't have anything to do with fashion, anything to do with surface. I think you can layer on the visuals. The most important thing is the story." That may be, but after looking at the gleaming sprawl of bodies in the book, you are curious as to what a Tom Ford film would look like.
Still, there is a strain of melancholy in his words, and that may be because, until he has a purpose — a film to make — he will remain in limbo, which is an uncomfortable place for a man used to controlling the action. He seemed to regret a little his decision to return to Paris in July for the memorial for the photographer Helmut Newton, saying he felt part, and not part, of his former world. And though he checked out the recent collections, on Style.com, he declined to comment on those of his successors at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, only wishing them well. "I'm not there anymore, so my opinion doesn't matter," he said.
Mr. Ford could leave his most enduring mark in New Mexico, where he owns 24,000 acres of mesa and ranchland outside Santa Fe. He has commissioned the architect Tadao Ando to design three buildings of eight planned: a stable, a house and a mausoleum. He started thinking about a burial site after his beloved terrier John died. "I'd like to bury him out there," he said. "I'd like to be buried out there." He smiled. "We might as well have Tadao Ando do a mausoleum."
Mr. Ando's design for the house is spectacular: a two-level house sitting atop a mesa with a huge adobe-like wall at one end and a reflecting pool that covers the main roof, with a glassed living room that appears to be floating on the water. The project is expected to take five years to complete. Meanwhile, Mr. Ford has planted orchards and a vineyard on the ranch, which has served as a set for movies like "The Missing." The area used as the set lies in a part of the landscape that is not visible from the rest of the ranch. "And from that place you see nothing that resembles the 20th century," he said.
But, of course, Mr. Ford very much belongs to this moment, a point he demonstrated with almost ruthless cunning as a designer. And now Hollywood?
It was time to leave for La Dolce Vita, the George Raft booth, and the vodka tonic.
"Let me turn off the fire," Mr. Ford said, skipping over to the coffee table. He opened a black box, took out a remote control device and aimed it at the fireplace. The embers magically vanished.
