BY: DAVID COLEN
Originally Published: January 1, 2007

HE'S NATTILY attired in a dark business suit that’s perfectly pressed and fits perfectly on his ultra-lean, 6-foot-2 frame. He neither looks like nor carries himself like the teenaged bubblegum rapper who I, and the world, first glimpsed nearly two decades ago. Chatting him up on South Beach even reveals graying around his temples. Plenty of it.

We’re talking about fatherhood. About faith. About spirituality. Adult topics, for sure. Yet I cannot shake the sight of him sporting sideways that funny ball cap and those shiny Nike or Adidas kicks, whatever we kids were wearing back in the day. In my mind’s eye, all I can see is him flailing his arms, jabbering demonstratively into a mike about how his Parents Just Don’t Understand.

His most famous hip-hop anthem was released while he and I were both attending high school in Suburban America. His in the outskirts of Philly; Mine in a small waterfront village on Long Island. As any thirtysomething guy will attest, we hold on tightly to our memories from those years. It was when we were starting to do more with girls than just make out, when we were mapping paths to our own personal fortunes, when our only problems revolved around acne, the SAT and circumventing curfew.

So it’s a bit surreal, if not downright uncomfortable, to be speaking with the Will Smith who is relied upon so heavily both by Columbia Pictures -- as its most bankable actor -- and by three children (the first with ex-wife Sheree Zampino; two more with current wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith). I’d much rather be in the company of the carefree adolescent who aspires only to nab the keys to his mom’s new Porsche.

Nowadays, Smith is making the rounds to promote The Pursuit of Happyness, a film set for release in mid-December in which he stars as Christopher Gardner, a single dad with no money, no job and no apartment. Yet he manages to succeed at raising a young boy (portrayed by eight-year-old son Jaden).

The trailer includes one scene in which the pair is forced to spend a night sleeping on the floor of a public bathroom. Enough to make anyone with a pulse teary-eyed.

“It’s gut-wrenching for me to even think about it,” the 38-old-year Smith tells me moments before attending the East Coast premiere, an event at which Miami Dolphins defensive end Jason Taylor (a self-proclaimed "huge" fan of the actor) will formally introduce him to the crowd.

Willard C. Smith, who owned an air conditioning and refrigeration company in Winfield, Pennsylvania, was thankfully never so unfortunate. He and his wife, Carolyn, a school administrator from Pittsburgh, raised their four children (Will has an older sister named Pam and younger twin siblings, Ellen and Harry) in a middle-to-upper class neighborhood. They preached the importance of education as much as they did family values.

“I was raised in love,” says Smith, a Baptist, who to this day maintains childhood friendships with more than a half-dozen Muslims. “Love of life, love of all people.”

So important was education to Willard and Carolyn Smith that they chose to bus Will to a mostly white parochial academy until the tenth grade when he transferred to the nearby public high school. Hard to determine which he disliked more, the requisite uniform or the 90-minute roundtrip schlep.

Indeed, Smith has been labeled America’s first postracial superstar, and rightfully so.

He’s embraced by whites, who at once view him as edgy and non-threatening; and he's embraced by blacks, who at once view him as a role model and one of their own.

It is therefore no accident that Smith and his partner Jeff Townes, better known as DJ Jazzy Jeff, won the inaugural Grammy Award for best rap song back in 1988. That the duo has seen two albums reach double-platinum status. That Smith, with virtually no acting experience, was able to carry a sitcom on NBC for six seasons. That he was able to segue so effortlessly from the small screen to the big one.

He estimates that the second album, titled “He’s The DJ, I’m The Rapper” earned him a cool mil. And by all accounts, including his own, he blew through it faster than he made it. So much cash and no idea what to do with it. Smith once boasted to his father that he owned six automobiles, at which point the old man shot back, “Why do you need six cars when you only have one butt?”

His first two mistakes were hiring the wrong accountant and the wrong business manager. The next two mistakes were hiring Ellen and Harry, who were still teenagers, to oversee Will Smith Enterprises. By the time the IRS had finished scrutinizing Smith’s payoff from “He’s The DJ,” he was stuck with a six-figure tax bill.

“When the IRS did come and take my stuff one time,” says Smith, an audible laughter erupting to underscore the silliness of his own maniacal spending. “When that happened, I was by myself. I was single, I didn’t have any kids. It was a setback for me that I was able to take the brunt of by myself. It would be entirely different to be in that situation with a child that you are responsible for.”

It was many years before he’d cleared up his debt to the U.S. government, a process expedited by the debut of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a half-hour comedy series developed for him by Benny Medina and based loosely on his life.

Although desperate for cash (he was forced to move back home after his well-publicized bankruptcy), it still took a healthy dose of prodding by Quincy Jones and Bill Cosby for Smith to accept the role. Incidentally, it was Jones who mentored Smith through his 1995 divorce from Zampino.

Despite nearly being cancelled after Season Three, the show was a smash for NBC. It remained in production for six years and can still be found in reruns in virtually every market.

Smith toyed with a few films during hiatuses from Fresh Prince, most notably playing a gay con artist hustling rich Manhattanites in the 1993 flick, Six Degrees of Separation, a gig for which he wasn’t mentally prepared. It was an offer he should have declined on principle. Instead, he requested a double to perform a homosexual encounter with Anthony Michael Hall.

It was a silly role, but Smith needed to start somewhere if Hollywood producers would ever take him seriously. An entire litany of feature films soon followed. Thirteen to be exact. Most of them were respectable works; just about all netted him more than the previous.

Bad Boys was first, with $2 million going to Smith. Then came Men In Black and Independence Day, for which he received $5 million apiece. Ironically, he hit the eight-figure mark for the first time in what was roundly considered a flop, The Legend of Bagger Vance ($10 million), but he rebounded with the performance of a lifetime in Michael Mann’s epic, Ali ($20 million).

Ali made Smith. It was a role that required Smith to bulk up to 215 pounds. It also required him to absorb one punishing round after another from the former professional boxers who were cast as Muhammad Ali’s opponents. James Toney played Joe Frazier; Charles Shufford portrayed George Foreman. In the end, Smith sustained a bruised rib and a broken thumb.

Months and months of learning to box with Ali’s trainer Angelo Dundee -- and learning to act and speak like the inimitable Ali -- paid massive dividends. Smith was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award, an honor that ultimately went to Denzel Washington for Training Day.

More importantly, the dead-on performance and Oscar nomination erased any doubt that Smith wasn't still the one-dimensional sideshow who rose to stardom by busting rhymes over a sample of the “I Dream of Jeanie” theme, as was his very first cut, “Girls Ain’t Nothing But Trouble.”

Today, there is no role outside Will Smith’s range. As he explained to me on the Happyness red carpet, the journey has been a self-fulfilling one of sorts.

“When you play these roles, you always measure yourself against the characters. ‘Would I have been strong enough? Would I have been smart enough? Could I have been great enough?’ And there’s a moment in this film, when my character lays down in the bathroom the first night he’s homeless and he has to go to sleep. He has to sleep in a public bathroom with his son. Every time I saw that moment in this movie I’m like, ‘That’s the one that would have broken me.’ He got up the next day and took his son to school and went to work. I just don’t know if I would have been strong to do that.”

Something tells me otherwise, Will. Something tells me otherwise.