“I don’t even remember much about my time at Yves Saint Laurent, though I do think some of my best collections were [there]—other than that black-and-white initial one. That one wasn’t very successful and wasn’t very good. But being at Yves Saint Laurent was such a negative experience for me even though the business boomed while I was there. Yves and his partner, Pierre Bergé, were so difficult and so evil and made my life such misery. I’d lived in France off and on and had always loved it. I went to college in France. It wasn’t until I started working in France that I began to dislike it. They would call the fiscal police, and they would show up at our offices. You are not able to work an employee more than 35 hours a week. They’re like Nazis, those police. They’d come marching in, and you had to let them in and they’d interview my secretary. And they can fine you and shut you down.

Pierre was the one calling them. I’ve never talked about this on the record before, but it was an awful time for me. Pierre and Yves were just evil. So Yves Saint Laurent doesn’t exist for me.”

Ford didn’t buy anything from the YSL estate sale in February 2009. “God, of course not. I have letters from Yves Saint Laurent that are so mean you cannot even believe such vitriol is possible. I don’t think he was high when he wrote them either. I just think he was jealous, and Yves and I were friends before I took over the company. But then we began to move the company forward and were very successful…he just became so insanely jealous…that phase in my life just doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I was going through a very similar thing to what George [the main character is his directorial debut] is going through in the book—a very serious midlife crisis,” Ford says. “I think back during that part of my life I wasn’t in touch with my spiritual side. I had neglected that and had become absorbed really in materialism. I had a wealth…of every kind of material success. Fame, a great boyfriend, plenty of houses, tons of money. I could indulge in anything I wanted—which included a lot of cigarettes and vodka, which I have now stopped. But then I hit a point when I turned 40—even though I was still at Gucci until I was around 43—when I had a very severe midlife crisis. I have always struggled throughout my life with depression. I’ve never made any of this public because…well…”

Ford pauses and gathers himself. “I’m not one to wear any of this on my sleeve. When someone would come into my office in the morning and ask me how I was I’d always go, ‘I’m great! Great!’ But I wasn’t great. My own emotional suffering led me to realize I had neglected this spiritual side of my life. I had always depended on this inner voice to lead me along in life and I had shut it out. I had silenced it. I was raised a Presbyterian and went to a private Catholic school in Santa Fe, but I guess I’d describe myself now as perhaps closer to a Taoist. And this is why the book spoke to me so much—this renewed need for spirituality in my life. I had originally read the book in my 20s when you and Ian [Falconer] and I were visiting David Hockney and he introduced us to Christopher Isherwood.”

“I think I developed a taste for vodka and cigarettes because my first kiss with a guy was with Ian, and he tasted like vodka and cigarettes back then,” Ford says, both bemused and touched by the memory as he displays again a bit of his endearing brashness. “I never knew I liked men sexually until Ian came into my life. And he wasn’t just my first male kiss. The first blow job I ever gave anyone was the one I gave to Ian in the back of a cab on the way home from a night at Studio 54 as we made our way down to where he lived on Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. Of course, it was a Checker cab,” he jokes with his innate ability to be both snooty and vulgar at the same time (those now defunct taxis had large backseats—enough room for dalliances en route). Indeed, one of the many personal touches that Ford has incorporated in his version of A Single Man is giving George a last name: Falconer.

“One might think on the surface that I’m the boss, but really Richard is driving and running the relationship,” he says. “That’s because I want more than anything in the world for Richard to be happy. I sometimes think he doesn’t still believe that. But it’s true. Sometimes I think he forgets how much I still love him and how much his happiness means to me.”

“His soul,” Ford says without hesitation. “Something clearly spoke to me. It wasn’t his beautiful blue eyes and his silvery hair and his slender handsomeness. It was something that reached out to me through his false self—his true self connecting with my true self—and it was instant. On our first date he took me to a Southwestern restaurant in New York because he knew I was from New Mexico, and we were poor and could eat for about five bucks each. At the time one of Richard’s best friends was dying of AIDS and one of my best friends was dying of AIDS too, so we talked a lot about that, as I’m sure a lot of guys did on first dates back then. We were both just so emotionally exhausted. So there was no sex on that first date. I think it took about three dates before we had sex. He knew I had a fondness for sugary breakfast cereals, so he had put a box of Froot Loops under the bed, hoping I would come home with him that night of our third date. I did. And the next morning he pulled out that box of Froot Loops from under the bed. It was so cute. We moved in together a month after we met.”

“Yes, when it becomes a federal law. Right now it doesn’t do any good in the states. A few weeks ago Richard had to go into the hospital for something, and I had to carry around all these legal documents saying I could make medical decisions for him. It was insane. The fact that we are not married in the federal sense means that if I were to die, he’d have to pay all these taxes on my estate and receive but a fraction of it and he’d have to alter his life —whereas if we were married, he wouldn’t have to face that burden. That’s disgusting. It’s wrong. But that said, I think I am in favor of terming what I’m talking about as a civil partnership. We all get so caught up with this word marriage. For me, the word marriage is something that a religion should decide. Just give me all the same rights. A civil partnership is what I’d like for everyone—heterosexual as well as homosexual. Call it what you like—it’s the rights that are important. Getting hung up with the semantics derails the cause we’re all fighting for.”

“I think Richard was right,” he says now. “I’m not so sure I would have wanted to create a child and inflict the world we live in on him or her.” What if his parents had felt the same way? “I’m not so sure I wouldn’t have been happier never existing,” he says quietly. “I’m not so sure at all. Of course, if I had never existed, I wouldn’t know.” Those frown lines he is still able to summon crease his brow at such a thought. But then he wanly smiles. “I’m not so sure I’m glad I was born,” he whispers. “I’m not so sure.”

But he is careful to add, “I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. After I left Gucci I was in that deep depression. And now I can truthfully say that I’m happy. But that said, life is hard and can be so isolating. That is the theme of A Single Man that struck me so, and I exaggerated that theme in the film—the isolation one can feel in one’s life. But the most important thing that George says—and the thing that has proved the most valuable to me in my life, as I get older—is that ability to connect. That is the one thing I live for, to connect.”

“When I die no one will look at any of my fashion collections and get any true sense of me. But they can watch this movie and know what I was about.”