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It's a sunny fall afternoon and I'm in downtown Manhattan, sitting outside Balthazar, checking my messages, and when I look up, there's Harry Connick, Jr., standing maybe two feet away. I'm not surprised to see Connick—we have a date for a late lunch inside—I'm just surprised to see what he's up to. He's bumming a cigarette, a Parliament as it happens, from an understandably startled girl on the street. When I introduce myself, he's sheepish and apologetic and makes a move to put it out. But I stop him. I'm not above bumming the odd cigarette myself, (though they aren't nearly so readily given up by total strangers). And I'm relieved to find that the man has a vice.
At 40, Connick is something of an anomaly in his business. A consummate family man, he and his wife, the model Jill Goodacre, have been together for more than 17 years, since the very day they met at a hotel pool in L.A. (She walked by, he jumped up and introduced himself, "and there was no looking back," he says. She called her mother that night and told her she'd met Him. "We just knew," she says.) The Connicks live in Connecticut with their three girls whom Harry dotes on. After a recent three-day trip to L.A., he went so far as to visit them at school because he couldn't bring himself to wait until they got home. ("When Jill asked me why, I said, 'I just want to see them,' so I went and knocked on their classroom doors.")
To be sure, Connick, a notorious prankster, has a bad-boy side. "We enjoy cutting each other to ribbons," says his friend Brian Williams, the NBC news anchor. "He has a lightning-fast sense of humor—very irreverent and close to the edge. He even works blue." But any truly bad-boy impulses are expressed through his work, Connick says, the one place he can do anything he wants. "That's why I love what I do. Socially and personally, I don't have those needs. I don't go out, I don't do drugs, I don't do whores." His one indulgence would be to "live on Krispy Kremes," but at lunch he orders instead a frisée salad with slices of chicken breast—only after making sure the chicken has no breading. He's thrifty too, dutifully sticking to a monthly allowance doled out by his manager of 20 years. "If I wanted to buy a Lamborghini, she'd say, 'You gotta stick with the budget,' and I don't mess with that."
In a world where an endless parade of stars' mug shots has replaced the studio stills of old, Connick is a throwback to genuine glamour, as well as to professionalism and versatility: He's equally at home crooning jazz standards in a white dinner jacket or recording an album of New Orleans funk. A pianist, he also composes, arranges, and conducts, and even designs the sets for his concert tours. (The current one, in support of his Oh My Nola album, is, like the record, an homage to his hometown and features ceiling fans and French Quarter streetlamps.) His Broadway debut in last year's The Pajama Game earned him comparisons to Elvis, Sinatra, and James Dean by no less than The New York Times's Ben Brantley, and this month's P.S., I Love You, with Hilary Swank, will be his fifteenth film.
