Vanity Fair interview: Heartthrob Hotel, December 1996

Heartthrob Hotel

On NBC’s monster hit ER, George Clooney became the boyish idol of millions of American women. As Clooney ascends to the ranks of Hollywood leading men—opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in One Fine Day, in Batman and Robin, and in the first DreamWorks movie, The Peacemaker—Jennet Conant discovers that his life combines frat-house clutter and lightning costume changes with perilous romance and miles and miles of heart.

By Jennet Conant

‘What are you doing?” asks a young man in rumpled boxer shorts and a surfer T-shirt.

What am I doing? It is nine o’clock in the morning and I am standing in George Clooney’s kitchen rummaging through his cabinets in search of a coffee cup, talking to some strange man who doesn’t look anything like Clooney.

“That’s my machine,” he says, pointing to the commercial-quality percolator which I just loaded up, and which is now gurgling noisily in the corner of the massive oak-paneled room. For a moment I think maybe I have the wrong house. Then I remember hearing that Clooney has roommates.

“That house is like a sitcom,” director Joel Schumacher warned me. “He has these buddies who have recently gotten divorced, and they’re all living there. There are piles of dirty laundry all over the place. I think there’ve been as many as three or four of them there at a time. George is like everybody’s older brother. I’m 57, but if I was in real trouble, I’d go see George.”

I wouldn’t mind seeing George about now either, but he hasn’t emerged from his bedroom yet. I’m pretty sure it was Clooney who yelled out some sort of greeting from an upstairs window when I drove up to his two-story, eight-bedroom Tudor house, so I have just made myself useful in the kitchen. The roommate silently sets two mugs on the counter. He asks no questions. Clearly, around here, an unidentified blonde is not exactly cause for alarm.

“There might not be milk,” he says as I root past a dozen packs of chicken franks and a lifetime supply of condiments in the refrigerator. We take turns sniffing a week-old carton of skim.

“Try the Coffee-mate,” he suggests. “It lasts forever.”

Roommate number two saunters in and raises his eyebrows in my direction. Then he turns to his housemate and inquires, “About last night?”

“Yeah, how was that blind date, Matt?” says George Clooney as he breezes into the kitchen carrying an electric razor. “Well?” he taunts, cocking his head to one side and smirking gleefully. His arms are folded across his chest. He’s making a game of it.

“Turns out she could see,” says his roommate, beating a hasty retreat out onto the deck.

‘I see you’ve met the boys,” Clooney says casually, referring to Matt Adler and Thom Mathews, two friends from way back. Clooney once crashed on the floor of Mathews’s closet for a while when he had no place else to stay, so he’s returning the favor. He grabs some coffee and leads the way to the living room, which is dominated by a Foosball table. The coffee table is littered with car magazines, and there is a dartboard over the bar. Sure enough, we pass a damp mound of jogging togs and balled-up athletic socks on the floor.

The term “bachelor pad” just doesn’t do justice to the sprawling Hollywood Hills hideaway that a cheesy-looking wooden sign worthy of Jed Clampett announces as CASA DE CLOONEY. Protected by an electronic fence and a steep, winding drive designed to discourage die-hard fans and the increasingly pesky paparazzi, Clooney’s compound boasts a pool, a tennis court, a basketball court, a fireplace in the master bedroom, and a garage that houses his vintage 1959 Corvette and his Ford Bronco. His 150-pound pet pig, Max, is in a pen out back. Clooney got custody of the animal in 1989, when he broke up with his former girlfriend Kelly Preston, the actress who is now married to John Travolta. In case you haven’t already figured out that this is the kind of fellow your mother warned you about, there’s the dragon sculpture on the mantel, on which he and his pals have ceremoniously hung their retired wedding rings.

Dressed in his favorite black jeans, Harley boots, and black bowling shirt, Clooney is considerably leaner than he was that first fall on ER as the boyishly handsome pediatrician Doug Ross, the television role that has made him one of the most popular male stars of his generation. He gnaws on a peach. His new eating habits, he confesses, are part of the price of success. “Now I’m just trying to maintain until I die,” he says grimly. His thick hair is flecked with gray and cut short. The Caesar bangs are gone. The strong jaw and knowing eyes are the constants. Clooney likes to say that he has “lived hard,” and it shows in his face. I had been prepared for his rugged good looks, but his dark golden skin, instead of being weathered, is baby-smooth. Then I realize the knocked-around look that makes him appear older than his 35 years comes from within. He seems much more grown-up than most of Hollywood’s new crop of leading men.

It helps, in Clooney’s case, that fame didn’t suddenly come calling after one screen test: he had to ring the bell, hammer on the door, and finally just barge on through. After 12 years of doing what he derisively calls “bad television,” including eight pilots that never got picked up and some truly forgettable movies—in Return of the Killer Tomatoes, Clooney actually had to deliver the line “That was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen a vegetable do”—his so-called meteoric rise felt as if it “took an eternity.” He thought he was headed for stardom back in 1985, when at age 24 he landed a role in the hit sitcom The Facts of Life. Though he has never wanted for work or money since, that early promise wasn’t fulfilled until he fought for his role on ER and emerged as the country’s new prime-time heartthrob. By the time From Dusk till Dawn, the campy vampire movie he shot in 1995 with Quentin Tarantino while ER was on hiatus, took in $10 million at the box office its first weekend, the big movie executives were already on the phone.

So now Clooney finds himself costarring with Michelle Pfeiffer in One Fine Day, an old-fashioned Tracy-Hepburn romantic comedy in which he plays the most hapless and irresistible divorced dad since Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer. He just wrapped DreamWorks’s The Peacemaker, an action-adventure movie with Nicole Kidman based on a story written for Vanity Fair by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn. This fall he returned to shooting ER four days a week, and the other three days he is playing the winged avenger in Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin, the fourth in the big-budget Batman series, this time featuring Chris O’Donnell as Robin, Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze. As if that weren’t enough, Warner Bros, is capitalizing on Clooney’s commitment to honor his five-year contract on ER, which is produced by Warner Brothers Television, by signing him to a $28 million, three-picture deal.

‘He has a roguish charm coupled with a really remarkable comic ability,” says Michael Hoffman, the director of Restoration, who directed Clooney in One Fine Day. Hoffman, who doesn’t watch much TV, had never seen Clooney’s work when his name was suggested as a possible male lead. Tom Cruise and Kevin Costner had already passed on the project, and Hoffman was beginning to worry that they would never find anyone with the right chemistry for the part. That is, until he met Clooney in person and saw his magnetic appeal during a reading with Pfeiffer. “He’s like watching Cary Grant. Men will like him because he’s a respectable and viable advocate for their position. And women obviously love him.”

“He’s definitely trouble—bad, been there, done that,” says Pfeiffer, chuckling. She’s just kidding. Clooney dated her sister DeDee years ago, and Pfeiffer says she still speaks highly of him. “He was certainly not as narcissistic and self-centered as some I’ve worked with,” she says. “He doesn’t take himself that seriously.”

The grudging compliment is in character for Pfeiffer. In One Fine Day, she plays a controlling career woman and divorced mother coping with Clooney’s caddishly charming workaholic newspaper columnist, and she says they pretty much played themselves. “I had to be the responsible one,” she says with a sigh, describing Clooney as a sort of bad uncle who would come to the set and get the kids all riled up and undo hours of discipline and order. “He really is that character,” she says. “But, for all the bravado, there’s something very vulnerable about him.

“It’s his eyes,” says Nicole Kidman, who agreed to be in The Peacemaker mainly because of her affection for Clooney. “He can say so much without saying a word. You can’t stop looking at him.”

“George is a very interesting actor,” says Schumacher, who has just completed the first few weeks of shooting on Batman and Robin. “He is someone who has been around awhile. He has been in things that have failed. He had become adjusted to the fact that, whatever his dreams were, they were not going to happen. That strength, and sadness, comes from having lived, and it comes across when he does very intense, complex scenes.”

Clooney’s favorite expression these days is that he “gets the joke.” That it could have gone the other way, and he’d be the one sleeping on the couch in one of his friends’ houses. He is very chary of success, and operates under the assumption that whatever Lady Fortune hands you she might one day want to take back. And he has the hard evidence to prove it. He watched what happened to his aunt Rosemary, the famous 50s crooner, who had had 15 gold records and whose face had adorned the cover of countless magazines, when her popularity faded and the only comfort came in the form of pills and tranquilizers. He was seven when—after her second marriage to actor José Ferrer failed—she checked into the psychiatric ward of Cedars-Sinai.

“People all of a sudden said, ‘What happened to Rosemary?’” recalls Clooney. “Well, rock ’n’ roll came, and women singers were out. Rosemary was on the road singing the whole time. She’d been working every day. The truth is she didn’t get less talented between 1950 and 1960. In fact, she got much better. But things changed, and you have to understand that.”

Clooney’s childhood was one long object lesson in the ups and downs of show business. He grew up in Kentucky, moving from town to town in an orbit around Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father, Nick Clooney, was the host of a popular local talk show; his mother, Nina, was a former state beauty queen. “In the microcosm of Cincinnati, my father was Johnny Carson,” says Clooney, recounting the days when he was the floor director of The Nick Clooney Show, and the days when he and his dad read the news, did the weather, and hosted Bowling for Dollars and The 3:30 Morning Movie. “My father was as big a star as you could be, and a really respected citizen in town.”

But whenever a show got canceled, the Clooneys moved. “We had the weirdest life in the world. We would move from this tiny little shack of a house to this giant mansion,” says Clooney. “We lived in a trailer for a while and ate at the Beef and Boards [the local dinner theater, where his father often headlined in musicals].” He recalls a particularly bleak year when his father quit a show “for all the right reasons, and they held the contract out on him and said he couldn’t work within a hundred-mile radius of Cincinnati. So he bought the contract and beat it two days before the year was up, but we were unemployed for a stretch.”

Nick Clooney, who is now a host on American Movie Classics, remembers picking up George and his older sister, Ada, after school in Columbus, Ohio, after his variety show had been canceled. The front page of the morning paper had read, CLOONEY CANNED. It had been all the talk in school. “The kids were about seven or eight, and they were in tears,” he recalls, “so we got in the car and I thought what to do. So I said, ‘Remember when George Gobel was here last week and you had the whole class down to the station and lorded it over them? Well, there’s no free lunch. When their fathers get fired, no one knows about it. When you get to be famous and meet all those famous faces, well, here’s the payback.’”

The Clooney kids grew up in broadcasting studios. By the time George was five, he could work the control booth while his father read the weather on the radio, and he would pipe in with the temperature. When his father’s variety show was on, he and his sister would hold cue cards, manage props, and be on the air once or twice a week doing little skits, musical revues, and commercials for Husman Potato Chips. “Ada hated it, but George was a natural,” says Nick Clooney.

Ironically, Clooney says he never considered a career in acting while growing up. Certainly his aunt Rosemary never encouraged him. “I think acting is the most thankless profession in the world,” she says tersely. “I don’t think there was a finer actor than José [Ferrer], and I know the times he was rejected.” George’s father was also dead set against it, and thought George should become a news anchor, figuring that the odds of finding work were better. Clooney dabbled in broadcasting and theater at Northern Kentucky University, but by all accounts majored in having a good time. “To George, school was a very large restaurant and nightclub,” says Nina Clooney.

The siren call came from his cousin Miguel Ferrer, the oldest of Rosemary’s five children, who was in Lexington with his father on the set of a movie about horse racing called And They’re Off. “He said, ‘You know, you’re only 20 years old. You might as well come out and give it a run,’” recalls Clooney. It was all the invitation he needed. He dropped out of school and drove to Lexington, where he immediately landed a small part. The movie was never released, but Clooney had the time of his life.

“He came and camped out in my hotel room for the next three months,” says Miguel Ferrer, who is also an actor. “We played practical jokes, drank too much, and had sex with a million women.”

‘I fell in love with the whole industry,” says Clooney, who these days is trying to play down his colorful past. “I never thought I’d make any money at it, but I just loved doing it. I loved the attention.” He admits he was drawn to his uncle’s glamorous celebrity. “I was really very jealous of my cousins and the life they lived in California. In my estimation they were rich, although I don’t think they were. I remember seeing the tennis court and the pool and thinking, God, it’s just amazing.”

After shooting the movie, he cut tobacco and sold ladies’ shoes to make some money. Then he drove across the country in a rusted-out Monte Carlo he called the Danger Car and moved into his aunt Rosemary’s house in Beverly Hills. He did household chores and partied with his cousins. One of his jobs was to paint the fence around the pool. Clooney obliged, but he painted only the portion of the fence that his aunt could see from her bathroom window. “He ran pretty wild,” Rosemary Clooney recalls. “I was on the road a lot, but I noticed he had dark circles under his eyes, and he was awful young for that.”

Clooney had one year of being rejected at auditions before he landed his first sitcom, followed by a role in a small feature with Charlie Sheen and Laura Dern, who became his good friends. (The movie was never released.) By 23 he was cruising Beverly Hills in a 1960 Oldsmobile convertible with sponge dice hanging from the rearview mirror, keeping fast company and making a name for himself as one of the best-looking young actors in Hollywood. “It’s very easy to sit in a room at 23 and have everyone go, ‘You’re the greatest,’ and believe it,” he says, laughing. “Which I think I did for a minute, to be quite honest. I thought I was pretty happening because I had good TV hair.”

Looking back, Clooney says what kept his feet on the ground were the cautionary tales he had learned from his father. “My dad was probably the best for me about understanding the basic law of show business, which is that you’re never as bad as they say you are when they say you’re bad, and you’re never as good as they say you are when they say you’re good. Once you understand that, you’ll survive anything.” One thing his childhood taught him was to be more budget-conscious than his parents. “I’m smarter about money, or have some sense that maybe I won’t blow everything,” he says. “I mean, let’s leave a little over here so we don’t end up in a trailer.”

For Clooney, work wasn’t the issue; quality was. Good roles just didn’t come his way. “George was handicapped by his looks,” explains John Wells, executive producer of ER. “There was always a sense that he was going to be a star—that’s why he did so many pilots. He jumped off the screen as a great guy. But with anyone that cute and personable, it was hard to tell if he had the acting chops.”

After more than a decade in Hollywood, Clooney found himself trapped in sitcom hell. The money was good, but the scripts were often terrible. By 28 he had started to resign himself to the fact that he was never going to get those great features. He had to stop thinking of himself as “this film actor who happens to be doing television.” It was very hard to do, he says softly, “almost impossible.”

Clooney wanders over to the window seat and stretches his 5-foot-11-inch frame out on the cushion. He looks around the room and shakes his head. “I had a beautiful house then, and the greatest friends in the world,” he says. “I had a great time—I did. But you get lost a little bit. Toward the end of my 20s was a really bad time for me.”

He hit bottom while working on a truly awful series called Baby Talk, produced by Ed Weinberger, whom Clooney calls “a man who systematically destroys people and bragged about it. There was a meanness to him that I’d never seen before.” Clooney wasn’t the focus of Weinberger’s displeasure, but it was a tense, miserable place to work. Clooney finally couldn’t take it anymore and mouthed off. “At some point I said, ‘Don’t you ever talk to those people like that again.’ There is that moment where you go, O.K., now we’re two men sitting in a room. Now, do you want to fuck with me? Forget that you’re the executive producer, who could fire me, because now my job’s out the window. You have nothing over me now. Now I own you. Now I’m bigger than you.” Clooney still sounds rankled by the memory. “He called up ABC and said that I was physically threatening him because I was standing in front of him,” he says disgustedly. “He hadn’t had anybody stand up to him in his life, you know?” Weinberger doesn’t deny being volatile, but says that all of Clooney’s statements are untrue. “I was unhappy with him. He was unhappy with me. I released him early from his contract.”

Clooney, who has a habit of looking down and talking to his feet, suddenly looks up. “That was the low point,” he says. “That was literally the day I changed my life. I changed everything from that point on.”

The incident contributed to his already unraveling personal life. “I’d gotten out of one relationship that wasn’t going very well and married the one girl that I truly loved and had loved for years,” he says. In 1984, Clooney had fallen in love with Talia Balsam, his co-star in a local play. When she broke off with him, he took it hard. Years later, when they got back together, Clooney proposed. But after barely three years, the marriage was in trouble. “It was a very tough time,” he says, “and in the middle of it all I had a bleeding ulcer and I was really sick.” He’d put on 20 pounds because he couldn’t exercise. He was physically a mess and very unhappy. In 1992 they divorced.

“I probably—definitely—wasn’t someone who should have been married at that point,” he says. “I just don’t feel like I gave Talia a fair shot. I was responsible for the failure of that marriage.” The divorce started off amicably but didn’t end up that way, once the lawyers got involved. “I would say to Talia, ‘You tell me how much—what you think is fair. I’ll write the check. I won’t negotiate.’” He shrugs. “Instead, I paid $80,000 in lawyers’ fees. And that makes me crazy.”

After indulging in some post-breakup debauchery with his bachelor pals, Clooney started to turn his life around. He credits his close friends—the same six guys who were his first friends when he moved to Los Angeles—with helping him get through the rough patch. “It’s a kind of fraternity,” he says, smiling. And his house is their headquarters.

Clooney also adjusted his attitude toward work. He decided not to try out for B movies anymore but rather to use his pull at the networks to position himself in better television projects. “It’s not the kiss of death,” he told himself. “Most of them, starting with Eastwood, had television series. It’s just finding the right one.”

‘Woody Allen once said that success gives people permission to become exactly who they were always meant to be,” says Schumacher. “Some people, when they get successful, punish everyone. Others, like George, are grateful.” Schumacher says he can’t tell me the specific acts of kindness he’s witnessed Clooney perform, because they are private, but he says simply, “George is extraordinarily generous. It used to be called character,” he adds. “He has seen it all. Because he is so attractive, he has been invited to all the parties. All the women stars know who he is. He has seen a lot of people self-destruct.”

For someone with Clooney’s machismo, he can be unexpectedly tender. “Sweet” is how his ER co-star Julianna Margulies puts it. “It can be a pretty high-testosterone set when all the guys are on, and probably the most sensitive person there is George. That humanity comes through.”

The womanizing rap, like the assumption that he’s an alcoholic because he plays one on TV, has begun to grate. The tabloids have linked him with every available model, from Elle Macpherson to Vendela to Cindy Crawford. When he and Macpherson made the cover of the National Enquirer as a couple, they had met only once, in a bar. (She appears in Batman and Robin, so they met again on the set.) “I met one girl that I kind of liked, and it ended up being a story in the tabloids,” Clooney says, adding that he just can’t seem to escape headlines such as MY ONE-NIGHT FLING WITH GEORGE. As for the real women in his past, he says he has nothing to apologize for. “I’m single, I’m allowed. The problem is kind of the image. As you get older, that image isn’t as cute anymore, not like when you’re 18 and going out with a bunch of girls. When you’re 40 and you do it, it’s kind of sad.”

Clooney has a new woman in his life, Céline Balitran, a French law student he met in Paris. They made their public debut last spring, when he escorted her to the Emmys. But his shooting schedule is so demanding that it doesn’t allow him much time for a relationship. And the paparazzi don’t allow for much privacy. They are so dogged that he has had to instruct Balitran to drive by the house to make sure that no one is tailing her. Photographers have even climbed his fence to snap their picture. “I’ve actually said to her, ‘Hang in there,’” he says. “Dating me is a hassle.”

Now that Clooney is seeing someone, his leading ladies are all taking bets as to when he will have children. In an interview with Barbara Walters last year, Clooney asserted that he had no intention of ever tying the knot again, or of becoming a father. Nicole Kidman doesn’t believe it. “I have a $10,000 bet with him that he’ll have a kid in the next five years,” she says. Michelle Pfeiffer agrees.

“He has a real love-hate relationship with children,” she muses, “but once he gets started, he’ll have 10.”

‘It’s dangerous when you surpass your goals,” Clooney tells me. As much as he appreciates his success, he can’t help looking around the corner to when it will be gone. “I mean, ultimately, nobody gets to be Cary Grant. Nobody gets to quit in 1966 because you decide you don’t look good anymore on the screen. For everyone else, things start to fall off. I don’t want to be 65 years old and worrying about what some casting director thinks about me as an actor.”

Clooney is explaining why he is working so hard, why he has worked so many seven-day weeks in the last year and is locked into the same grind for months to come. He changes from his scrubs into his Batsuit, and is in costume these days more than he is in his own clothes. He can’t remember the last time he played golf, a sport he is passionate about. But he knows no one wants to hear him complain. “The truth of the matter is that I’m afraid that out of laziness I could end up letting a moment pass me by that could actually put me in position where I can choose,” he says. “Because that’s all I’m trying to do— get to work with better and better people.

“I had friends who were very successful—old men who had Academy Awards, like my uncle José,” Clooney says. “There were things that were very important to them, like getting up and saying, ‘I’d like to thank ...’ or the movie opening. But those are just tiny little moments in your life. You look forward to them for months, and then it comes, and then it’s gone. So what I’ve learned is that you have to love the entire process. You have to love auditioning, you have to love going to work, because otherwise it all rushes by.”

Which is in part why Clooney would never “pull a Caruso” and leave ER the way actor David Caruso leveraged his way out of NYPD Blue two years ago. He is intensely loyal. “It has been a tremendous two years in the way his career has skyrocketed, and George has set a really wonderful example of not becoming a jerk movie star,” says his co-star Anthony Edwards. “He’s not ego-tripping. He is so solid within himself that he hasn’t changed.”

“The most important thing is that when all this goes away, and it will, he’ll still be centered,” says Clooney’s father. The last time George called home, just before filming on Batman and Robin began, he warned his parents that they were all in for a wild ride. “I’m at the top of the roller coaster,” he said, “and I can’t get off.”