HARRY Connick Jr.: “I’ll sing whatever’s on my mind.” Photo by Ruben V. Nepales
LOS ANGELES—It all started innocuously when a reporter asked Harry Connick Jr. if he has pets. The musician-composer-actor was doing press for his new movie “Dolphin Tale” in Clearwater, Florida.
His blue eyes matched the hue of his shirt and the Gulf of Mexico that shimmered in the background.
“I have a cat and three dogs,” he answered, and then proceeded to reveal an outrageous sense of humor: “I have about 14 chickens—that number keeps changing because I keep eating them. The same with the turkeys. That number is constantly fluctuating but for the next 10 or 12 years, the dog and cat number will stay exactly the same, barring any unfortunate accident…”
Right away he blurted out the potential sensational headline for what he had just said: “Chicken Killer Connick!”
Laughing, the New Orleans native—who lives in Connecticut when he’s not performing or shooting films—added: “This is turning into a whole different conversation. I think I’ve just said too much. Now, wait a minute!”
Before his comments ruffle a few chicken and turkey feathers, Harry issued a caveat: “I need to clarify that I’m not out there slaughtering 50 chickens. That’s not my life. I mean, I might kill one every six months. I still go to the store. I don’t live in the middle of the woods or anything like that. I go to Whole Foods and buy chickens and things.”
Hunting trips
Harry, the son of a New Orleans district attorney (Joseph Harry Connick) and a Louisiana Supreme Court Justice (the late Anita Livingston Connick), explained how he honed his skills with animals. “I had an uncle who was an outdoorsman,” he said. “He was a hunter and a fisherman. My father wasn’t—he would go fishing and hunting sometimes but my Uncle Ray was a very important part of my life. We used to go on hunting and fishing trips all the time. I loved that part of my life.”
Harry said it was his Uncle Ray who showed him how to kill and cook a chicken. “He showed me how to make a roux (a mixture used to thicken sauces and soups). That’s how we cook in New Orleans, with a roux. He taught me all those things, from hunting an animal all the way to serving it to your family. It’s a part of my life.”
Speaking of family, don’t Harry’s three daughters with model and video director Jill Goodacre get attached to the chickens and turkeys roaming the Connick backyard?
“I’ll give you a quick story,” Harry replied. “I had two roosters. One was black, the other white. You can’t have two roosters living together. They’ll fight. So one of them had to go. It happened to be on an election night when I decided I was either going to kill Barack or McCain. At dinner night, I told my family: ‘You need to understand that we are eating John McCain.’ My smallest daughter, who was about 6 or 7 at the time, goes, ‘Perfect!’”
Harry pointed out why he raises fowl for food. “I like those eggs that I get and I like the way those chickens taste,” he said. “I know what they’re eating. It’s a graphic thing to kill an animal. Some people don’t like that. There are vegans out there who don’t think it should be done. Whatever works for you. I don’t have a problem with it.”
iPhone without music
Harry doesn’t have an iPod. But he owns an iPhone which he claimed doesn’t have music, but has pictures of his… chickens and turkeys. He quipped: “I have to save as much space for the real stuff.”
He brought out his iPhone and started looking for those photos. “Let’s see if I have a good one,” he said with a chuckle. “You didn’t come for this but I’m very proud. I’ll show you a picture of me with the turkeys that were born about three months ago…”
After a few seconds, he found a picture. “That’s me holding a couple of my baby turkeys,” Harry said as he held his iPhone in front of us. “I don’t know if I’ll kill these two particular ones because we have so many. I might give some to friends. I might give them back to a farm where I got some of them originally. They may end up on the table. I don’t know.”
All this talk led us to say that we grew up in the province in the Philippines where having homegrown chickens for lunch or dinner is routine. “I love the Philippines!” exclaimed the artist who performed at the Philippine International Convention Center in March 2008. He may eat chickens and turkeys but not balut, the subject of which he brought up. “I could not stand balut,” he said of the Pinoy street snack, an unhatched fertilized duck egg. Harry proceeded to describe with gusto what a balut is to our colleagues.
Shower impulse
Does he sing when he’s taking a shower or killing a chicken? “That’s funny,” Harry reacted with a laugh. “Can you imagine if I’m going like this?” Without missing a beat, he pretended to be chopping a chicken in rhythm while singing “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly” from “Annie Get Your Gun”: “Folks are dumb where I come from/They ain’t had any learning/Still they’re happy as can be/Doin’ what comes naturally.”
But the Grammy and Emmy winner does sing in the shower. “I’ll sing whatever’s on my mind,” he said. “It’s almost like an impulse when I get into a shower. It could be anything. It’s whatever was just on the radio or from a documentary I was just watching. I do this to my daughter all the time. She’s 9. She’s reading a book and she’s really into it. I’ll be on the other side of the room. I’ll sing, ‘Folks are dumb where I come from…’ and she’ll sing too, ‘They ain’t had any learning…’ She’ll just start singing along. She won’t sing around me because she gets embarrassed but I get her to sing without her realizing it.”
That’s Charlotte, who, her dad proudly pointed out, is in a scene toward the end of “Dolphin Tale.” The Charles Martin Smith-directed family movie was inspired by the true story of a young dolphin who was caught in a crab trap, critically damaging, and eventually losing, her tail. She was rescued and brought to the Clearwater Marine Hospital in Florida, where she was named Winter.
Harry portrays a marine biologist who takes care of Winter (she plays herself) along with his daughter (Cozi Zuehlsdorff) and a young boy (Nathan Gamble). Morgan Freeman is Dr. McCarthy, who creates prosthetics for war veterans, and makes a new tail for Winter. Ashley Judd and Kris Kristofferson also star.
The 44-year-old Harry—who learned to play keyboards at age 3 and recorded with a local jazz band at 10—displays yet another talent in one scene in the movie: He plays “Everything Happens To Me” on tenor sax. He deadpanned: “I called my friend, Branford Marsalis, who knows a thing or two about saxophones.” The esteemed member of a legendary family of musicians recommended a sax manufacturer. “They sent me three saxophones,” he said, and then joked, “I picked the prettiest one. I didn’t even know anything about it.”
Of the scene-stealing dolphin in the title role, Harry said: “Winter was pretty good. I was a little nervous when we shot the scene where we had to put the prosthetic tail on her. It’s one thing to talk about it but when you’re in the water with this massive animal and you have to hold her…
“All the while you’re hoping that Winter will remain calm. It was really scary. She’s looking back at you and it’s almost as if she’s saying, ‘I know you’re not trying to hurt me but it’s still very uncomfortable so please be careful as you can.’ You almost get that she’s feeling those types of sentiments. It was intense. It really makes you respect the people who are around her.”
Relief efforts
We got to see Winter and other sea animals being treated at the Clearwater Marine Hospital. “The great benefit of doing a movie like this is that the hospital is going to benefit greatly,” Harry said, referring to the moviegoers who will become aware of the hospital’s worthy goals.
Harry is himself heavily involved in the Musicians Village in New Orleans, a Habitat for Humanity housing program for musicians who lost their homes in the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He tirelessly helped in the relief efforts in the aftermath of the disaster that hit his hometown, pleading for help on national television and spearheading hurricane relief fundraising projects.
He announced that he’s returning to Broadway in a newly written version of the musical, “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” which opens on Dec. 11. He said he’s “really excited about it. It’s being directed by Michael Mayer. It’s a different story line from the original. I play a psychiatrist who ends up hypnotizing a young man; while in the movie, the story was that of a young woman played by Barbra Streisand who channels someone from her past—another woman.
He added that in the Broadway musical, “I’m hypnotizing David, a young gay man who channels Melinda, a young woman from his past. So there’s an interesting love triangle going on among the three of us. David Turner is playing David. This fantastic talent from Chicago, Jessie Mueller, is playing Melinda. It’s a very well-written, smart story with great music.”
And then he wisecracked: “There will be no dolphins but there will be a lot of singing.”
E-mail the columnist at rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com.