Posted on 02/28/2003 7:27:32 AM PST by dead
He takes home a $35 million pay packet. He's adorable. He's political. He can out-soignee Sinatra. So why does George Clooney feel 'stoopid'? Sally Vincent reports.
As far as he is concerned, George Clooney has always been famous. Because his dad was famous. And his aunt was the singer Rosemary Clooney. His dad was, still is, a journalist, a television newsman. He grew up in Kentucky, where hillbillies live and the cheeseburger was invented and all the boys are called Billy-Bob or Billy-Joe or Billy-Jim, with only about 15 surnames between the lot of them, and if you fell off your porch you'd squash four dogs and injure yourself on your pick-up truck.
Clooney's folks had distinguished themselves from the common herd before he was born. His mother had been runner-up in the Miss Kentucky beauty pageant and his father showed his face in people's living rooms. When he went to school, all the other kids knew who his dad was. So they'd give him the knowing stare.
Then, when he was six or seven, his dad would have him on his shows on special occasions. Like St Patrick's Day, when they'd dress him up in a little green suit and his dad would say, "How's it going, leprechaun?" and Clooney would wave his pretend cigar and say, "Oooh, busy schedule, this time of year." At Easter, he'd be the Easter Bunny, with the same cigar, "Oh, busy time, busy time." He thought it was great. In his head, he sounded just like Gregory Peck.
But what with the peripatetic nature of journalism, the family moved around a good deal and Clooney had eight different schools at which to face new stares. Formative stuff.
With each new class, he'd have this compulsion to get over the moment by doing something daft. Pull a face, do a silly voice, cut a caper. Anything to get a laugh.
He's not sure to this day whether it was to deflect attention or to earn it. A bit of both, he thinks. He became the class clown, what Americans call a goofball. If he could get a laugh, he reasoned, he'd somehow be paying his dues. "That's my 12-year-old self," he says. "If I live up to your expectations, will you let me be me? I'll be anyone you want and I'll go on being him till I can be who I really am."
Meanwhile, at home, he was raised to be seen and heard. The Clooneys entertained and all the Clooney kids were expected to contribute their 10 cents worth. It was like living in a vaudeville show.
George specialised in Nat King Cole impersonations and providing the punchlines to his father's more risque jokes. He must have been a gas. The end product, he supposes, was a young man with an excess of self-confidence and not much else.
"Rather poignant, don't you think?" he says drily. Playing to the gallery, waiting to be who you really are till you find you've forgotten who you wanted to be in the first place.
The funny thing was, he never thought of becoming an actor. Not professionally. He studied journalism at university. Acting was more a peripheral fail-safe for real-life situations, impersonating someone else so as to protect the inner man, whomever he might be.
For instance? "You want humiliation?" he says. "I'll give you humiliation." How about door-to-door insurance salesman? He'd knock on the door and stand there looking gormless, "Is the husband in, ppphhhnn?" he'd say in idiot-speak so as not to feel too bad about himself. In six months he sold one policy.
Clooney seems easy with this line of inquiry. Doubtless it has often proved popular with casual acquaintances who get a bang out of picturing Adonis doing it tough.
One of his more enlightening occupations in those days was driving a band of illustrious lady songstresses while they sang out their declining years through the less salubrious show-places of the United States. Household names who had fallen foul of the rock'n'roll revolution in the mid-1950s.
He remembers asking his aunt one night, "How come you can still do it? How come you're better than ever?" And she told him it was because she couldn't do the vocal gymnastics any more, couldn't hit the notes the way she used to, she just wasn't showing off any more. "Just singing the song, George, just singing the song."
That was his first acting lesson. Don't show off. Let the song sing itself. "Like someone whispers," he says, "and everyone leans towards them."
One day, his cousin - Miguel Ferrer, Rosemary's son - came to town with his father Jose to make a film about horseracing. With nothing better to do, George hung out with them for three months. He liked the way the movie people took over the town - the sheer, ring-a-ding power of it all. He still can't think of anywhere he'd rather be than on a movie set.
Anyway, they gave him a small part, more out of pity than anything else, and he was hooked. As he headed off to California, he told himself he'd hate to wake up an old man and know he hadn't even tried.
Trying, it turned out, meant auditioning, auditioning and auditioning. Bad television, and other stuff. "You know?" I don't know. How does Return Of The Killer Tomatoes! grab you? Return To Horror High?
OK, he says, he made a lot of bad movies and he was no damned good in them. It never meant he didn't take it all seriously. Years later, he took Batman seriously, too. They all did. They'd work away on a scene and when it was a wrap they'd all congratulate each other, quite forgetting it was about a bat, for Christ's sake, saving the world.
When you're young, he says, fame is a great, white light you're heading towards. You think one day you'll be getting your Oscar and then, then, you'll be happy. He was 28 before he realised it doesn't work like that. The things they say make you happy, don't. Not another person, not success, not approval. The only thing worth having, that lasts, is the process of doing what you want to do. Which begins with the hardest part: knowing what it is you want. Once you know that, you can't be a pawn in someone else's game.
Clooney slogged through a dozen years of Hollywood apprenticeship, which must say something for the ameliorating endurance of a sense of humour. By the time he was in his mid-30s, he had the wit to grasp his toy-boy days were numbered; that he must rise from the ashes of ER heart-throbbery and assert rather more of himself. In short, he wanted to make films about subjects he could honourably endorse.
It was not an easy transition. He made One Fine Day, which was sweet, and Out Of Sight, which was a thriller with a little more to it. Both films were stylish and respectable. The millennium was upon us all. At this point he remembers something Warren Beatty said to him. He said they never forgive you. He said no matter what you do, they'll never give you credit for making a smart movie. Clooney knew what he meant. He knew he was talking about his own experience, but they both knew what was unsaid. Pretty boys are not allowed to have minds of their own.
In the 21st century, Clooney showed us what he was made of. He made a series of films in a variety of genres, none falling below the status of "caper" and none calling upon him to indulge in such cinematic cliches as bare-arse simulated copulation.
First he took the lead in Three Kings, where it is impossible not to feel the depth of his personal disgust for the cynical hypocrisy of the Gulf War and for President Bush Mark 1's administrative weaselings. From Three Kings he went on to give himself a hard time making The Perfect Storm, a gruelling and unsentimental account of the inevitability of man's failure when he pits himself against the elements, and then the exquisitely absurd O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Then, lest we forget that Clooney can out-soignee Sinatra, he did the remake of Ocean's Eleven. These films pitched Clooney into the upper echelons of stardom, where $US20 million ($35 million) is routinely offered for his services. It is a bait he has so far refused.
If he wasn't so adorable, you'd think he was boasting. "I did O Brother for nothing," he says. "I did Three Kings for nothing." I imagine he means comparatively nothing. Nothing compared with the national debt. "I did Solaris for nothing."
Clooney relishes his own wilfulness. He can approach a studio with a film he knows they're never going to make, offer his services for free and have a $US40 million production budget pressed upon him. It's what he calls a fun thing.
The furthest he's stuck his neck out, to date, has been to direct the upcoming Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It is palpably nuts. Or is it? Basically, it's "based on a true story" - in other words, this is someone's account of himself. Put it this way: back in the 1950s, an unprepossessing squirt of a fidget called Chuck Barris wanted to make a name for himself in television. To this end he invented - precursed, if you like - those game shows where members of a benighted public make fools of themselves and are jeered at by other members of a benighted public - The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, The Gong Show. You know the kind of abomination.
Having squeezed the pips out of this wheeze for a good 20 years, Barris retired to write his memoirs, in which he claims to have pursued a parallel career as a hitman for the CIA, during the course of which he assassinated no less than 33 enemies of God's Own Country.
Unsurprisingly, the book mouldered in remainder bins until it was unearthed by Charlie Kaufman, a screenwriter with a penchant for the more unusual cinematic narrative (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation). Kaufman bashed out a screenplay and took it to Clooney, who asked the obvious questions. "Is it true? Do you believe it?" To which Kaufman looked him in the eye and gave him the hard stare. Which settled it. Now, when anyone asks Clooney, as I did, "Is it true? Do you believe it?" they get the same hard stare.
It is a matter of principle. A philosophy, if you must. There are no answers, only questions. At 41, that's Clooney's conclusion. And he's only just beginning to know the questions. Let's not rush things.
"Does it depress you," he asks, "when you see Tony Blair going around with his arm around George Bush?" It is a safe question. He already knows the answer. It is depressing. Yes. Clooney, like a lot of Americans, has always made the assumption that the English are, in some indelible, God-given way, smarter than Americans.
An English actor comes on the set and they all automatically assume he's a better actor than they are. He likes that. It makes you feel safe, doesn't it, to have someone smarter than you around the place. Just in case. It makes him uneasy to see Bush and Blair all buddy-buddy. But, hey, what does a stupid film star know? A film star who voices his political opinions when he doesn't toe the party line is supposed to be overstepping the mark of his celebrity. He is somehow disenfranchised.
But Clooney's a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a liberal like his dad. What else would he be? For instance, he's never dated a Republican. Holy hell! It would be too hard. He wouldn't hang out with someone who thought Bush was an intellectual, though he'd defend anyone's right to hold that opinion, if that was the best they could come up with.
"People have different cut-off points. They can't tolerate uncertainties. They try to deal with things, and when it all gets too much they turn to religion. For the certainty of it. I don't want to piss on anyone's beliefs and I don't want anyone pissing on mine. For me, when it all gets too much, I think it's my problem, something I've got to face out. I can't dump it on God. But if you must, you must. You believe when you die you sprout a pair of wings and go flying off into the ether? You want to go the snake-handling route? It's allowed. You've got to tolerate other people's cut-off points. It's not about who's right and who's wrong. You've got to assume everyone's doing the best they can.
"The question is," he goes on, "do we go on murdering each other, or are we going to take time out to ask ourselves why we're so angry in the first place? I get mad at someone, then I find out more about why they did what they did to make me mad, and the anger disperses. We get angry because we don't have enough information."
"It's the head guys who really tick me off," he says. "You dumb down at the top, so what does that do to the bottom? Who's going to stand up for us now? I just want someone smart to stand up and shout, 'Bullshit!' They tell us we're going to war and no one's saying 'Bullshit' loud enough. And the language! Listen to the language! 'Evil.' 'Evil'? 'Nexus of evil'? 'Evil-doer'? That's my favourite, 'Evil-doer'! What's wrong with their vocabulary: couldn't they come up with 'schmuck'?"
I laugh uncontrollably. "Look at us," he cries. "We're the guys who marched into France and liberated them, handing out stockings and chocolate. And we've slowly become all the things we fought against. How'd it happen?
"They're selling us a pre-emptive war and no one says, 'Bullshit'. We've been lying to ourselves since Vietnam. And if you say that, if you stand up and say no to the war in Iraq, immediately you're being 'unpatriotic'. But if you don't, if it's not you, who the f---'s it going to be?"
O Captain! My Captain! "It's not my place. I'm not a big, like, yogi guy, I'm just a stoopid film star. Stooooopid, goofball film star."
"Big guru guy," I say.
"Big guru guy," he says.
"I'll tell you what'll happen some day," he says. "Some day, some point when we've had enough of the idea that we're going to win any fight by killing people, when we're willing to ask ourselves why we hate and why we're hated, we're going to get us a president who comes out on the 'Yes I Did It' campaign. He's going to look back at where he's been and admit it. 'Yes, I slept with her.' And he's going to look where he's going. And one day he's going to say, listen, in 10 years' time cars won't work on the internal combustion engine. We'll all have electric cars. If their usefulness to us doesn't exist any more, we won't have to blow up Sudan or Iraq or Saudi Arabia or Libya. Take away the want. Go back to our proper position in the world, which ain't running it. Yup. That's it. Don't kill people. Drive electric cars."
They came and took him away at that point. His minders, that is.
While we were setting the world to rights (in the dining room at Claridges in London), I'd taken what Americans call a bathroom break. I ran both ways. He couldn't have been alone for more than two minutes. When I got back, he was chuckling to himself. He said he'd been playing with my tape-recorder and had left me a special message on it, hee-hee-hee.
Next day, odd things started to happen. I found a teaspoon in the rubbish at the bottom of the receptacle I am pleased to call my handbag. Then another spoon. Then a pair of sugar tongs. God knows how they got there. And then I came upon my special message: "I'll be warning the maitre d' that a woman has been stealing the silverware."
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind opens on April 17. Solaris is on now.
We'll all have electric cars. If their usefulness to us doesn't exist any more, we won't have to blow up Sudan or Iraq or Saudi Arabia or Libya. Take away the want. Go back to our proper position in the world, which ain't running it. Yup. That's it. Don't kill people. Drive electric cars.
Moron. I guess he thinks that the wonderful “electricity” springs magically from the ether.
“Any of you fellas smithies? Or if not smithies, perhaps skilled in the metalurgical arts?”
Self awareness is half the battle in the twelve step program to overcome the disease of liberalism, George.
Because a "schmuck" is someone who says or something stupid... An "evil-doer" is someone who does evil. And yes, George, there IS such a thing as evil, although I realize that you, as a liberal, don't believe that there can be such a thing as an evil person. You don't like the idea that we should judge people by their actions: An evil person is one who does evil things, hense the term "evil-doer."
What would you call the person who forced his sons to watch the torture of political prisoners to "toughen them up?" What would you call the person who oders that political prisoner be forced to watch his wife raped, or his children tortured, just to "make a point?" What would you call a person who odered the gassing of entire villages?
George, YOU are a schmuck!
Mark
MKM
And I don't want Fop. I'm a Dapper Dan man.
Oy, I personally thought this was the worst movie I have ever seen. There is one scene in particular I will never forget. They're running away ... or something and they find themselves underground in a bunker which keeps going further down and down. Miraculously, they come upon a heap of CELLULAR PHONES! Eureka! And incredibly enough, the phones work! THEY'RE IN A BUNKER, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MIDDLE EAST, WAY, WAY underground and I'm supposed to believe that their CELL PHONES WILL WORK???? I can't even get a signal when I'm going through a tunnel! I know it's a small point, but this movie was just SOO STUPID.
Secondly, he can "feel" anything he wants about his politics, but if he makes up facts, lies, or distorts, then he WILL be called for it. To bad he doesn't want anyone to go beyond his "cut-off point", but if you can't stand the heat, stay the %$^# out of the kitchen.
Finally, Clooney isn't that good of an actor, frankly. The comparisons to Sinatra are stupider than Clooney. No comparison!
That's fine, but the question is: "are you bonafide"?
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