The Chiseled Charm Of Kevin Bacon

One Of America's Most Ubiquitous And Beloved Actors Finds A New Gear.

- Rachel Syme

THE AFTERNOON that Kevin Bacon has planned for the two of us sounds like something out of a Nora Ephron film. We meet in the marbled lobby of his apartment building on Central Park West, where a friendly doorman tips his cap as we leave, take a long amble through Central Park, down a path where Bacon knows the cherry blossoms are in bloom, and end up drinking dirty martinis at the Leopard—the white-tablecloth revamp of Café des Artistes, which served the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Rudolph Valentino. It’s all so classic, so swoony, rat-a-tat olde New York, that I start to wonder if Bacon and Ephron ever worked together. They never did, but according to The Oracle of Bacon, a clunky GeoCitiesesque website that has, since 1996, been calculating the actor’s arterial connections with other actors in Hollywood, they are only three degrees apart (one chain has Carrie Fisher and Meg Ryan in between).

When we walk into the Leopard, the maître d’ greets him like an old friend. Bacon asks for the table he likes, way in the back, past the elephantine Impressionist murals, past the gleaming oak bar. A server tries to offer him a few other plum tables, but he turns them all down, like a salt-and-pepper Goldilocks. At 61, Bacon radiates a comforting confidence. He’s at ease asking for what he wants in the kind of uptight spot that would make most people uneasy.