Let’s just get the mustache out of the way. He won’t. It’s been there since Fernando Ferrer’s freshman year at NYU, and it’s not going anywhere. The one time he shaved it off, more than 20 years ago, his wife, Aramina, had a fit. “I love mustaches,” she said in a telephone interview. “My father had a mustache. My brother, who is deceased, had a mustache. Even our daughter told him to grow it back.”

Mr. Ferrer, front-runner in this, his third race for the Democratic mayoral nomination, is not always so obliging. At public events he can be laconic, gruff, unsmiling, and flat – grumpy even. Among the four Democratic candidates, he’s the one who does things on his own terms, and who can’t be counted on to perform the seal tricks that mark every campaign season.

When approached about an interview for this article at a cocktail party in early June, he looked like a man who’d just been instructed to hand over his wallet. All traces of tranquility drained from his face, and he took a step backward. “Why do you want to write about me? I need a martini,” he said, and he headed to the bar.

And so a long and elaborate courtship with Ferrer 2005 was born. A month after an encouraging e-mail belatedly promised “QT with FF” the following week, The New York Sun was invited to an audience at the Ferrer 2005 headquarters.

The candidate’s staff of about 20 works in a big and bustling space near Herald Square that is filled with industrial-looking office furniture, Styrofoam coffee cups, and white and blue signs haphazardly taped up all over the place. Mr. Ferrer’s personal office also feels temporary, but in a tidier, more grown-up way. The room is immaculate, empty except for the jackets hanging off the back of his door and the yellow bunting tacked over the window.

Some politicians seem to enjoy flirting or fencing with the press, but Mr. Ferrer, 55, is not among them. At press conferences his handlers hover nearby, holding onto their own tape recorders and leaning in close to whisper in his ear. When he looks out at a throng of reporters, his expression shifts between a bemused smirk and an irritated look, and he’s not above telling journalists he’s already answered their questions in the past, ordering them to look up archived articles.

On the day of his interview with the Sun, the candidate was seated behind his huge, shiny desk, looking rested and, surprisingly, not the least bit inhospitable. Asked if he has complicated feelings about the press, he shook his head slowly and said no. “I think I have an understanding of what the press’s job is, and I have an understanding of what my job is,” he said calmly.

In the comfort of his office, Mr. Ferrer was patient and good-natured, speaking, it seemed, without the mistrust that sometimes laces his voice. Asked about the Winnie the Pooh-colored string he always has tied around his right wrist, he smiled and explained it was a blessing he received from Buddhist monks on Staten Island. Told the yellow was a particularly cheerful hue, he looked it over and grinned. “Isn’t it nice?”

“What people may not know about him is he has the most incredible sense of humor,” his wife said. “We laugh more than anything. There’s this witty repartee going between us. We start our day always with some play on words.”

These days, a few words in the morning and phone calls throughout the day is pretty much all they’ve got. The last movie date they went on was a year ago, when they went to see “The Notebook,” an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks book. “You seen that movie?” Mr. Ferrer asked a reporter.

“No, but it looks very romantic.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw the ad for it. Is it good?”

“It’s very good,” he said, and he nodded gravely.

Mr. Ferrer said he’s doing his best to keep up with his other pastime, reading. He was in the middle of David McCullough’s “1776,” and he said he likes the occasional novel, his favorite being “The Grass Crown,” a historical novel about the Roman Empire, though he wasn’t sure who the author was. (It was Colleen McCullough.) “There are a lot of terms in Latin,” he said of the novel. “I get into it. I took four years in high school and two in college. I can impress my friends translating tombstones.”

Mr. Ferrer’s strategy of keeping the press at arm’s length might not lead to glowing profiles amplifying his appeal, but that seems to be a price he’s willing to pay if it means he can play it safe. He’s already made one major mistake, telling a group of police sergeants that the fatal shooting by police of an unarmed immigrant, Amadou Diallo, wasn’t a crime – something he has yet to apologize for, only calling the reference “careless” – and between now and the September 13 primary he seems eager mostly to avoid making another blunder. Throughout the campaign, his name has been accompanied by the phrase “the Democratic front-runner,” and he doesn’t need to pull off any desperate stunts to defeat his rivals, all of whom are trailing him in the polls by more than 10 percentage points. To carry him to the finish line, he’s counting on such easily steered vehicles as face-to-face campaigning and (better yet) the TV and radio ads he just rolled out.

The only trouble is that his cold shoulder isn’t reserved exclusively for the press. For somebody who’s known in some circles as a man of the people, in contrast to the Massachusetts-born billionaire Mayor Bloomberg, it would help if the Bronx native seemed less uncomfortable in the company of, say, the people. At a recent outdoor music festival in Harlem, he seemed eager to be done with the event. Working his way down a path, Mr. Ferrer stuck to his formula of walking up to somebody, saying, “How ya doin’?” and offering his hand only once he’d started to turn away. Faced with a friendly-looking woman who had a lime-green parrot perched next to her ear, Mr. Ferrer absently asked, “How ya doin’?” and began to turn away. The parrot looked hurt.

Mr. Ferrer’s supporters have recognized that he’s no rock star. He wears tasseled loafers everywhere, for crying out loud. Indeed, his unglamorous persona may be what they like about him. They say he should be mayor because he deserves it, because he’s a man who really cares about New York City. They point to his tenure as borough president, during which the burned-out Bronx saw the creation of 66,000 housing units and 34,000 jobs. They point to his commitment to ideas – he recently received his master’s degree in public policy at Baruch College, and before he started his campaign he was president of the Drum Major Institute, a center-left Manhattan think tank. And he’s got the backing of the machine, with endorsements from everyone from the Bronx Democratic Party to Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (and let us not forget the Union of Staff Analysts). As a Hispanic, he’s got the Latino vote and should attract a good portion of the black vote.

Standing outside City Hall with the city comptroller, William Thompson Jr., to announce Mr. Thompson’s endorsement of his campaign, Mr. Ferrer spoke in measured but unfocused sentences. While a group of adorable teenagers provided by the Bronx Democratic Party stood on the steps whooping and spiritedly chanting “Freddy! Freddy!” Mr. Ferrer distanced himself from the theatrics of the day, casting dubious looks at the onlookers and soberly stressing that his call for affordable housing was “more than a political catchphrase,” but “a foundation for stable family life.” When asked by a reporter if he saw the comptroller’s endorsement as a major turning point, he said, “Sure I do,” with what sounded like a shrug in his voice.

“The campaign seems lethargic,” a professor of political science at Baruch College, Douglas Muzzio, said. He is an old friend of the candidate’s and was Mr. Ferrer’s thesis adviser at Baruch when he completed his master’s degree last year.

“You can only play defense for so long,” Mr. Muzzio said. “You need to start playing offense. You can’t beat an incumbent mayor with limited resources if you don’t destroy his image and offer a compelling alternative. He hasn’t done either.”

While some observers said Mr. Ferrer is less fired up than in his past campaigns, having run in two previous mayoral elections puts him at an advantage over the other three Democratic aspirants: He may suffer from a case of charisma-on-hiatus, but at least people have heard of him.

Mr. Ferrer was born in the South Bronx. His parents divorced when he was 8, at which point his father pretty much checked out. He and his father are no longer in touch. “My mother is still here,” he said. “They’re both alive.”

He grew up in a fifth-floor walk-up on Fox Street, and at age 10 he worked as a shoeshine boy outside the subway station. His grandmother worked in the kitchen at the Waldorf-Astoria. What was it like being so poor? “I only found out we were poor when I got to high school and college,” he said. “We didn’t have much by any stretch of the imagination, but you know, we had friends, family stickball, the P.A.L. was a few blocks away.”

He says he was a regular kid, spending his time goofing around with neighborhood kids, playing pick-up basketball, and building homemade scooters out of milk crates and rollerskate parts. Yet he was always a serious student.

He traces his political aspirations to the day John F. Kennedy was elected to the White House. In high school, he volunteered for local political campaigns, helping out in campaign offices or handing out fliers on the street.

He also became involved in Aspira, a Hispanic youth organization, where he met Aramina Vega, a Catholic schoolgirl his age. “It was love at first sight for me,” she said. “I knew I was just a kid but I said, ‘This is the guy for me.'” They went steady for seven years and on August 16 will celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary.

When Mr. Ferrer was borough president, he instituted a no-talking-about-work-in-the-house rule, one he still observes. “We never talk about politics,” his wife, principal of an elementary school in the Bronx, said. “I’ll always say, ‘Is there anything happening?’ He’ll say, ‘Nothing.’ He’s very protective of me. If we’re having brunch, we’ll talk about something like our mothers.”

After graduating from NYU, he wasted little time before entering politics. He taught social studies for a year at Elizabeth Irwin, a private school downtown, then moved over to city government, holding down jobs in everything from the state Assembly to the city Human Rights Commission. After a failed run for an Assembly seat, he was elected to the City Council in 1982, at 32.

In 1987, when the Bronx borough president, Stanley Simon, was indicted on bribery charges, Mr. Ferrer was named to replace him.

Following his appointment, Mrs. Ferrer recalls getting in the car together to drive around the borough and see what exactly they were getting into. The borough’s neighborhoods, which had barely survived the “Bronx is burning” 1970s, were rundown, neglected.

“I said this is going to be really, really hard work,” Mrs. Ferrer said. “Turning around the Bronx was a struggle. He was able to rally everyone. It’s the sense of struggle that came out of the ’60s. You have to roll up your sleeves and do hard work to make that happen.” During those years he was rarely home before 10 o’clock at night. It was like he was campaigning the whole time.”

On the weekends during his borough presidency, the Ferrers would steal off to their cabin in the Catskills, where Mr. Ferrer developed a skill for grilling. He’s since moved on to traditional cooking – and the Food Network. (The other television station he watches, he said, is the History Channel.) During his Drum Major years, he said he was able, finally, to spend a great deal of time in the kitchen.

“I don’t have a dish,” he said. “I have several. More than a few. It began with grilling, and you know, everything from stuffed butterflied leg of lamb – actually stuffed pork tenderloin with dried fruit.”

The Ferrers had one child, Carlina, who is 26. She is now very close to her parents, but during her teenage years, the relationship was a little rocky.

“Adolescence is a rough time for everybody concerned,” Mr. Ferrer said. “That’s when a father wants to say, ‘I want to take a leave of absence. Come back when you’re 22 and say everything’s all right.'” Mrs. Ferrer said, “She gave him a run for his money as a teenager, and I think that’s great.”

Carlina, a banker, now lives elsewhere in the Bronx, with her husband and two sons, who are 6 and 4.

For the past seven years, a droopy-eared cocker spaniel named Winston Churchill Ferrer has been keeping Mr. and Mrs. Ferrer company in their Riverdale apartment. Mr. Ferrer always gives him the first and last walk of the day. “He’s 7, so he’s middle aged,” Mr. Ferrer said. “Sort of like me.”