“Somebody Has to Be in Control: The Effort Behind George Clooney’s Effortless Charm” by Ian Parker in the April 14, 2008, issue of The New Yorker
ON A STRANGE MESSAGE LEFT ON HIS VOICEMAIL:
“You haven’t heard the message we had?” Clooney asked Sarah Larson, when they were sitting on the sofa in L.A. “It’s about you, you know.”
She was a little taken aback. “What?” she said. “What?”
“It’s right here. Listen to this.” He stood up and tried to make the telephone give up its voicemail. “Is this the volume? Where’s the volume? I’m losing my mind.” (His friends say that he is not good with domestic technology: he later told me that he had no real idea how to use the Internet; and he had a bit of trouble with the espresso maker that he is paid a fortune to advertise in Europe.) Someone had repeatedly called on his private line, and had then left an odd message. “It’s not a prank—none of my friends would do that,” Clooney said. He found the right switch, and we heard a calm, middle-aged male voice: “Dude, your friends asked me to give you a message: Dump the bitch before you’re sorry.”
After a moment’s pause, Larson said, “‘Before you’re sorry’?”
“ ‘Before you’re sorry,’ ” Clooney said, with a laugh. “ ‘Dump the bitch before you’re sorry.’ ” The message was perhaps fan mail of a perverse kind, from a Clooney admirer in some way disappointed with Larson—for being young, or for being a non-celebrity and therefore an interloper. (There’s been some unpleasant press, and Larson brought it up with me: “They say that I’m a stripper. There’s a ton of stuff about that. I’ve never been a stripper. You know, just because I’m from Las Vegas I must be a stripper. Because I’m a cocktail server that means I’m an escort.”) Or it might have been a wrong number. Larson was not aghast, but she did not seem quite comfortable, either. Clooney, though, was punchy, seeming to accept the voicemail as no more than a test of his good humor: a chance to reconfirm his efficient, uncomplaining handling of the complications of a public life.
He said that, with the help of his police-officer driver, the number had been traced to a pre-paid cell phone. Now they were trying to find out if the suspect had paid by credit card. But—Clooney laughed—“there are certain laws that, you know, that are applicable.” And then, to Larson: “It’s wild, isn’t it? Isn’t that interesting?”
“Yeah,” Larson said.
ON TRUST AND PRIVACY:
Asked if he could ever be assured of the social sincerity of new people he met, Clooney said that one test was whether or not, “three days later, your conversation is recounted on a talk show or in a magazine, which has happened a lot. Oh, yeah. That’s frustrating. And it makes you trust so little. You trust nothing. Because I was Nick’s kid, and Rosemary’s nephew, and then spent my time being famous, there is not a moment in my life when I haven’t been aware of the idea that at any moment, including taking a bath or taking a shower or going swimming in my pool, somebody might be watching, or photographing. It’s freaky, so you have to live your life in a very different way. You don’t pick your nose, you know. Or, if you do, you do it under a desk somewhere.”
ON ACTING:
He went on, “I’m jealous of Daniel. Let’s face it, we all are. I’m jealous of the ability to completely immerse yourself. Because it means you’re willing to not be liked for a period of time. Not just on film, perhaps.” (Clooney was referring to Day-Lewis’s intensity during filming, which has at times unnerved fellow-actors.) “It’s part of the acting thing—is you sort of want to be liked.”
ON THE FABIO INCIDENT:
I asked Clooney about the Fabio incident last November, and he laughed, saying, “What do you want? Dinner at an Italian restaurant with Sarah and myself and my buddy Benny and his girlfriend Meilani, and there’s a table sitting there full of four or five women and Fabio with his back to me, and it’s one of those things where they just keep taking your picture.” He went on, “This isn’t new to me. I’m going to go to dinner tonight, and they’ll do it, they’ll position themselves. I know it, and I’m used to it. But it went on and it went on, and I gave them the finger”—a photograph of the gesture was published online—“and they kept doing it and Fabio was looking over his shoulder and laughing and smiling and shit. So finally I go, ‘O.K., enough.’ I go, ‘Knock it off, enough.’ ” And, speaking across to Fabio’s table, “ ‘I thought you were a nice guy.’ ”
I later spoke to Fabio. He said that Clooney had had a drink or two, and overreacted, and this seemed at least possible. But Fabio perhaps overdressed his story. In his account, nobody had taken a photo of Clooney—“Let me tell you, nobody noticed him!”—and Clooney had shouted “fat pig” and “ugly bitch” at Fabio’s dinner companions.
Fabio went over to Clooney’s table, he said, in the spirit of “a gentleman.” Clooney was taken aback. “I honestly don’t know what he was thinking.” Clooney continued, “I was pissed. ‘Get the fuck out of my booth!’ And I have to say, he’s a big cat and I kind of thought, I’m going to get the shit kicked out of me by Fabio—just not exactly how I want it to play.” There was contact of some sort. “It was that moment that guys get, where you’ve shoved each other and, it’s: O.K., now what’s going to happen?”
ON RANDE GERBER REDESIGNING HIS HOME:
Clooney lived and worked elsewhere for much of last year, and, in that time, the L.A. house was largely remodelled by Rande Gerber, a longtime friend, who is the owner and operator of many fancy bars, and the husband of Cindy Crawford, the model. The result is not extravagant, but it carries the hint of a hotel steakhouse under bold new management: dark wood, beige curtains, a chandelier. According to both men, Gerber made all the decisions, without a word of consultation: everything from the size of the swimming pool to the framed photograph of Steve McQueen in the living room. (“I didn’t know if George likes Steve McQueen,” Gerber told me.) In Clooney’s screening room, behind DVDs of “Once” and “All the President’s Men,” I saw a row of tall glass jars containing packaged candies, which I took to be a personal quirk until I read that Rande Gerber keeps packaged candies in tall glass jars in his offices in New York and Malibu. This all surely points more to the pressures on Clooney’s time than to a weirdly unformed sense of self, but it was nonetheless curious to hear Clooney joke, when we were standing in a leathery side room where his friends are allowed to smoke, “I suppose I have a flask collection”—pointing to a line of hip flasks on a shelf.
ON DRINKING:
He said, “I don’t drink by myself; I drink like my dad a little bit. If it’s a social event, I really do like having a drink.” But he keeps watch: “After the motorcycle accident, they gave me some painkillers, and you’d take those and start drinking and all of a sudden I need a drink to go to sleep, and suddenly it was: ‘O.K., I’d better mellow that out.’ ”
ON THE PRESSURE TO PLEASE:
[Actor and Clooney friend Richard] Kind told me, “I’m very protective of him. When I’m staying with him, I will never bring anyone to the house while he’s there. The reason? This is almost pathological: he has to entertain that new person. Even if he doesn’t want to, he will draw that person in with stories, and will entertain him. He could have been working all day, he could have a headache, it doesn’t matter, when he’s at that dinner, he’s got to talk to that person, and make that person . . . I don’t know whether it’s make that person like him, but he wants to make him feel at home.”
“He does tend to decide the mood of the room, which, frankly, must feel like a bit of a strain for him,” Tilda Swinton told me in an e-mail.
ON STAYING THIN:
She [Sarah Larson] was genial and soft-spoken and seemed a little shy. He was bouncy. He scooped out some of the salad that Larson had made while he was out (“Oh, Miss Sarah!”) and dressed his with something sprayable called Balsamic Breeze, this process accompanied by joshing between them about calorie intake. “She’s trying to keep me from getting fat and old,” he said, although it sounded more like she was teasing him for his own watchfulness.
