"It would be nice if prodigiously gifted, handsome, multimillionaire George Clooney were in fact a bastard," says Michael Clayton co-star Tom Wilkinson. "He isn't."
(2 of 3)
Clooney also preempts situations that might earn him ridicule later. So he has either turned down every gift bag he's been offered or has put them up on eBay for charity. "I've been smart about that. Rich famous people getting free s___ looks bad. You look greedy. And I don't need a cell phone with sparkles on it," he says. He sends handwritten apology letters to the directors whose scenes he ripped off in the movies he directed--Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet, Sydney Pollack. He drives an electric car and a Lexus hybrid but won't be a spokesman for the environment because he flies a private jet. He feels passionately about Barack Obama but refuses his pleas to campaign for him--other than an introduction in late February in Cincinnati, Ohio--because he doesn't want it to backfire into a Hollywood-vs.-the-heartland attack. And he downplays and occasionally jokes about his problems, which include a bad back and some short-term memory loss he sustained when working on Syriana, quiet. "I know what pisses people off about fame," Clooney says. "It's when famous people whine about it."
It may look as if he is an effortless movie star, but he has actually given the job a lot of thought. He's not manipulative, but he is calculating, following the rules he learned from his family. When his aunt Rosemary Clooney went from being on the cover of this magazine to seeing her fame burst because musical tastes changed, she battled depression and took pills for much of her life. He knows random luck will eventually take fame away, just as random luck made him a star. If NBC had put ER on Fridays instead of Thursdays, I might have had Jonathan Silverman over for dinner. And while Clooney didn't get famous until his 30s, when ER hit, he had kind of always been famous because of his dad, a popular news anchor in Cincinnati. "From the moment I was born, I was watched by other people. I was taught to use the right fork. I was groomed for that in a weird way," Clooney says. "You give enough. You play completely. You don't say, I don't talk about my personal life. People say they won't talk about their personal life. And then they do. And even when the tabloids say really crappy things and it pisses you off and you know it's not true, you have to at least publicly have a sense of humor about it."
He's just as calculating about his career choices. "He was offered a stupendous amount of money to continue to do Roseanne," the sitcom he was on for 11 episodes, says his dad Nick Clooney. "I was thinking he could build a little nest egg and maybe acting would pay off after all. He said, 'No, I'll be in a cul-de-sac. I'll be that guy, and that's all I'll be.'" He pitched sitcom pilots and dramas and eventually won an Oscar nomination for co-writing the original screenplay for Good Night, and Good Luck. He makes sure to not get stuck in one character or type of film. He has a Joel and Ethan Coen movie coming out in which he plays an idiot (as he did in their O Brother, Where Art Thou?), and he's working on a movie about the founder of est and a comedy about the 1979 Tehran hostages who escaped. The next movie he directs and co-stars in is Leatherheads, a screwball comedy about pro football in the 1920s that comes out April 4. "After Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck I was offered the Richard Clarke book and every issues movie," Clooney says. "I didn't want to be the issues guy because if the issues change, you're done. The Facts of Life is a good example. If you're a young heartthrob--which I never caught on as--those fans not only abandon you, but they're embarrassed to have liked you. It's the same thing with issues movies. I want to just be a director."
He is good at slipping into many different worlds, even the one in my kitchen, where he is pouring in the egg mixture while I add the hot spaghetti for the carbonara. He reaches over and stirs the bacon, grabs a string bean from the pot and eats it. He is mad guesting, Olympic-level guesting. He's been over for two hours, and it occurs to me that the smooth bastard must have turned off his cell phone before he got here. When I leave the table to check on the lamb, he puts extra bacon on my pasta. He's doing impressions--Pat O'Brien confusedly reporting outside Clooney's Como villa, expecting Pitt and Jolie's wedding (Clooney had bought $1,500 worth of flowers and 15 tabletops as a prank on gossip reporters); James Carville denigrating John Kerry's campaigning skills; Daniel Day-Lewis doing John Huston in There Will Be Blood.
We're deep into a second bottle of Barolo when Clooney cuts into his rack of lamb, and, oh, there would be blood. This is why a star wouldn't take this invite, wouldn't be here, staring at a red-raw-inedible piece of meat. He says it's fine. I grab it, put it in the oven but forget to turn on the heat, so when I take it back out, it's just as raw. Fine again, he says. I put it back one more time. He takes more pasta and salad. Rattled, I drop the salt. "Throw it over your left shoulder," he says. "That's just bad mojo. You know it, and I know it." He may not believe in religion, but luck, Clooney has learned from his family, cannot be messed with.
One person Clooney will mess with--the thing he keeps coming back to the more we drink--is what a massive loser Bill O'Reilly is. It's an irrational feud because every time O'Reilly gets to be as important as Clooney, O'Reilly comes out way ahead. But Clooney can't help himself. He keeps talking about O'Reilly, and the little traps he's set for him and how thrilled he is when he falls into them. It's as if Clooney loves O'Reilly because he gives him permission to be an irrational 8-year-old. Maybe that's why anyone loves O'Reilly. But he is also the anti-Clooney, donning a public persona, one that's humorless and incapable of self-effacement. It's as if someone created for Clooney his own Elmer Fudd.