Center Stage
Music Man Extraordinaire, film star, and now Broadway show headliner, multitalented HARRY CONNICK JR. is also a New Orleans hero.
By Mark Seal
Photography By PALMA KOLANSKY
ACT I: SETTING THE STAGE
Harry Connick Jr. still hears the jazz greats calling him up to the bandstand, when he was just a kid growing up in the nightclubs of New Orleans. A musical prodigy, he spent a thousand nights in Maison Bourbon, a venerable French Quarter jazz spot where Harry Jr.’s parents would take him from age 5 to age 14 to listen to — and eventually play with — the greats. The son of two lawyers (his late mother was a judge, his father, Harry Sr., served as district attorney) who also owned a record store, Connick played publicly at 5, was performing professionally at 9, and recording soon after that. At 19, he released his first major-label album. Two years later, in 1989, he contributed songs to the sound track of When Harry Met Sally, a hit comedy starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal. Connick was young, stylish, and smart — and it was no wonder he hit the big screen, starring opposite Jodie Foster in Little Man Tate, Will Smith in Independence Day, and Sandra Bullock in Hope Floats. While swimming in a Hollywood hotel pool, he first spotted his future wife, then-Victoria’s Secret model Jill Goodacre, and dashed after her, soaking wet, to convince her to have dinner with him. Although they only went out for burgers, clothes-crazy Connick, a collector of cufflinks who color-coordinates the clothes in his closet and still has the jacket and shirt he wore for the cover of his first album for Columbia Records at 19, remembers exactly what they wore: “I wore a green velvet Armani three-piece suit with a green corduroy button-down shirt under it and brown suede shoes. She was wearing a red Azzedine Alaia dress.” They married in 1994 — but Connick continued his lifelong and very open love affair with New Orleans.
“The whole point of going to New Orleans is to realize that you sleep when you’re dead. You eat as much as you possibly can, and then when you’re finished eating, you go out and eat some more. Don’t diet when you’re down there, don’t worry about your cholesterol. If you were going to move there, then maybe you could try to implement some sort of alternate plan. But if you’re going to visit there for a week or a weekend, forget your diets, forget getting your beauty sleep, because it’s not going to happen.”
Last summer dawned bright and sunny for Harry Connick Jr., the multitalented singer, actor, and dancer, who was about to become an activist. He was based at his home in Connecticut, just outside of New York City, with this wife, the supermodel-turned-supermom Jill Goodacre and their three daughters, Georgia, Sara Kate, and Charlotte. For someone who says his life revolves on three different axes — family, music, and love — Connick had plenty of all three last summer. “I’m very lucky,” he tells me.
Best of all, he had several projects that would repeatedly take him home to New Orleans. On the music front, he released Occasion, a piano/saxophone duet with his childhood friend Branford Marsalis, which has two distinctively New Orleans songs, “Good to Be Home” and “Chanson Du Vieux Carre,” which, he says, “is about as New Orleans-themed as you can get.” Connick and Marsalis promoted the album on a summer tour, which included a stop at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., garnering raves along the way. “These New Orleans homeboys display their dizzying interplay and invention with the kind of ease that can only come from years of friendship,” read one. The pair also released a DVD, entitled Harry and Branford: A Duo Occasion.
As an actor, he also got to go back home, to star in a New Orleans-based film called Bug, which he describes as “kind of an obscure, dark story of paranoia,” co-starring Ashley Judd and directed by the legendary William Friedkin. The movie might be dark, but Connick seemed perpetually light when in New Orleans at favorite restaurants like Mandina’s and Brennan’s, or in music clubs like Snug Harbor. “I love my city, and it’s basically everything that I am, all the music that I play, all the food that I eat, the way I talk, my friends, my culture,” he says. “It’s very important to me.”
ACT II: THE STORM
On August 29, he was in front of a television in his home in Connecticut, watching a swirling tropical-storm-turned-Force-4 hurricane named Katrina slam into Louisiana, and the carefully choreographed pieces of Harry Connick Jr., a life that simultaneously stars in several arenas, temporarily ground to a stop. “I just remember feeling a sense of urgency to get down there, that was the most important thing: Get down there,” he says. “I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do, but I felt like I had to be there. I couldn’t get in touch with my dad, and that was freaking me out,” he says. Neither could he find a flight; all planes in and out of New Orleans had been canceled. So he booked the first flight he could find to Baton Rouge. He’d spent his childhood amid hurricanes, of course, but as a child it just meant no school and lots of splashing. “As a kid, we didn’t really have any consequences,” he says. “We didn’t really think about damages.” But driving from Baton Rouge into New Orleans before dawn that day, Connick braced for the worst.
“Everything was pitch black, and as the lights came up it was evident that this was a pretty dire situation,” he remembers. After he found out his father was safe in Mississippi, Connick got down to work, traveling the flooded city by boat, creating awareness by appearing on Larry King Live, and doing television segments for The Today Show, sometimes closing the show by singing a song from his city — although, he explained, he didn’t know what he was going to do to actually help the situation.
“I haven’t slept in days,” he wrote on his website, www.harryconnickjr.com. “Although I now finally know that my immediate family in New Orleans is safe, I have not heard from many, many friends and family members. It is hard to sit in silence, to watch one’s youth wash away. New Orleans is my essence, my soul, my muse, and I can only dream that one day she will recapture her glory. I will do everything within my power to make that happen and to help in any way I can to ease the suffering of my city, my people!”
“I felt very helpless,” he tells me. “There was nothing I could really do. But I felt like I needed to be there. Where do you even start?”
The answer was soon apparent. Connick would do what he’s always done: He would play music. On September 2, just days after Katrina slammed New Orleans, Connick was back in New York at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, performing in the first relief concert with Wynton Marsalis, Aaron Neville, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill. “We played a bunch of tunes,” he says, meaning they played New Orleans songs, songs that once were love songs or celebration songs that now — in the face of the flood — were transformed and elevated to myth, balm for the suffering, truly music for the soul. “It was very hard,” he says, when asked how he felt singing the songs of his city. “We all were just sort of in a state of shock at that point. When you think about the song ‘Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans,’ that’s kind of a melancholy song anyway, but when you think about the future of the city actually being in danger of existing at all? It definitely takes on a different meaning.”
The concert was a beginning, bringing financial aid and awareness. Still, Connick wanted to do more. He continued raising aid and awareness through media appearances and would later testify before the U.S. Senate Committee On Finance for hurricane relief, offering suggestions on how to help the region rebuild in a positive and sustainable way. Still, Connick says, it didn’t seem like enough.
“I thought maybe I could help by bringing back some of the musicians who had been displaced,” he says. “So we came up with this idea, me and Branford Marsalis and our manager, Ann Marie Wilkins, of starting what we now call Musicians’ Village, that will include houses we’ll build in conjunction with Habitat for Humanity to house displaced New Orleans musicians,” he says. “There will also be a school, The Ellis Marsalis Center for Music [named for the patriarch of the Marsalis family, of whom Connick was once a musical student], which is going to be focused on traditional jazz and keeping that tradition alive in a formal setting. So we’re excited about that. That’s something I feel like I can actually help with.”
The song, dance, and acting man had discovered a secret to activism: When you don’t know what to do, do whatever you can. Along with The New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village, Connick and his friends continue to raise funds through The New Orleans Musicians’ Hurricane Relief Fund, which relocates displaced musicians and their families; provides food, clothing, and medical assistance; and helps musicians find work and touring opportunities.
ACT III: THE SHOW MUST GO ON
Meanwhile, six months after Katrina, multifaceted Connick fulfilled an obligation he’d made before the hurricane struck to perform on yet another stage. The show is The Pajama Game, a Broadway revival of the 1954 hit musical, described by The New York Times as “a frisky tale of a union dispute at a pajama factory.” Connick plays Sid Sorokin, the pajama factory supervisor who romances a union activist played by Kelli O’Hara. Previews began on January 19th for a February 23rd opening. It must have been tough, I say, to go from his shattered city to a Broadway stage. But he stops me in mid-sentence.
“I’m an entertainer, man!” he exclaims, stating the law he learned on the bandstands of New Orleans. “No matter what happens in your personal life, that’s not important when you’re on stage, at least in this context. Obviously, New Orleans is a big part of what I’m thinking about. But when I’m performing, I don’t think about it. I just do what I have to do and give the best show I can. Since I was a kid, that’s just all I’ve ever known. It’s just in my blood. The audience doesn’t really care about what you’re going through personally. They pay money for a seat and want to see a show.”
They like what they’re seeing. The Pajama Game is sold out through its mid-June run, the show’s success due, in part, to Harry Connick Jr. and Kelli O’Hara, who create such chemistry that, the Times raved, “they pulse with an immediacy that makes them, hands down, the hottest couple in the New York theater.”
For eight shows a week, Connick acts, sings, and dances, performing everything from high-energy moves to ballads. “There’s a lot of running around and dancing and jumping around on stage, so you want to be physically ready for it,” he says. So he’s in the gym regularly, but he spends his days off on the first point on his personal axis: He goes home, “to hang with my family.”
Much of the family was there opening night, he says, “Thrilled. My kids loved it, and they all have their favorite parts of the show, like, ‘Oh, Dad, we liked it when you played piano,’ and my wife thought it was really good.”
I ask him if his daughters have a favorite song in The Pajama Game.
“There is a song called ‘The World Around Us’ that my oldest daughter Georgia really likes,” he says. “Which was a surprise to me because it’s kind of a slow song and it’s kind of unheralded. There’s not a lot of hoopla around it. It just kind of comes and goes in the middle of the show, and she likes it for whatever reason, and that’s nice.”
He thinks about this a moment. “My character and the character Kelli O’Hara plays, we have sort of a falling out, and as we’re getting back together I try to explain to her. The lyric is, ‘The world around us is trying to tear us apart. But let’s let ’em know they’re trying in vain.’ In other words, we’ll be together throughout the turmoil we’re going through . . . ”
Considering Harry Connick Jr.’s year, his daughter’s favorite song doesn’t seem so strange at all.