(Parade article below)
LA Times
Parade Article: An interview by Dotson Rader
"I like to think of myself as the Pete Rose of actors," George Clooney said.
"Pete Rose wasn't the most talented athlete, but he made up for most of it with
hustle. I sold suits, insurance, drew caricatures at a mall, sold women's shoes, stumbled
through a million things and ended up on a movie set because someone said, 'You really
ought to give acting a shot.' The only failure I know is never making the attempt. I had
to try."
George Clooney, 37, spent 12 years making numerous television pilots that were not picked
up and eight TV series that were, but he didn't win stardom until 1994, playing Dr. Doug
Ross on ER, the hit NBC show that has consistently been the top-rated television drama. In
the last two year, he has starred in four films: One Fine Day, From Dusk Till Dawn, The
Peacemaker and Batman & Robin. The latter - the first in a $28 million, three-picture
deal with Warner Bros. - was the least successful of the Batman films. While
unquestionably a major TV star, Clooney has yet to prove his clout at the box office. His
new movie, Out of Sight, a romantic crime caper with Jennifer Lopez, opens this month.
Despite his current stardom, Clooney has not had an easy journey. He had a difficult time
finding his way as an actor in Hollywood, his marriage to the woman he most wanted ended
unhappily, and - at a critical point in his career - a man he had admired and loved since
childhood died in his presence, changing Clooney's life. I visited Clooney at his home in
Los Angeles and found this notably private man surprisingly open about his life and the
friendships and values that sustain him. I started by asking about his childhood.
"I had a very strict family," he began. "My father's a big liberal
Democrat, but that doesn't mean he was liberal in any way with his kids. My mother was
easier than my father, but both were tough disciplinarians. My parents had immense
confidence in their own and their kids' abilities. You always felt you'd succeed if you
did things for the right reasons."
George Clooney and his older sister, Ada, grew up Irish Catholic in various small, rural
towns in Kentucky, near Cincinnati, Ohio. The family moved often, as his father, Nick,
went from job to job as host of a series of radio and TV programs before becoming a
successful local new anchor. (Today Nick Clooney is a host on the American Movie Classics
cable channel.) His mother, Nina, a former beauty queen, had a cable-TV talk show, and his
aunt is the great pop and jazz singer Rosemary Clooney.
"By the time I was 5, I was always on my dad's variety show," Clooney recalled.
"My mom did audience bits. I worked the cue cards, did skits and commercials. My
sister worked too. It was like Andy Hardy: My family put on a show. My dad also did about
200 personal appearances a year at public functions, and we were part of the act. We'd be
fighting in the car on the way over, but when we'd get out of the car and people would
shout, 'Nick!' and ask for autographs, we'd have our arms around each other, smiling.
After the show, we'd get back in the car and sulk all the way home." Clooney laughed,
"But I understood there is the real you and the public persona. Two different people.
You try to keep them separate, like I do now. When you can't anymore, that's when you're
in trouble."
As a child of a local celebrity, Clooney assumed that the line between private a public
life was respected. Today he feels it isn't. Several years ago he began a campaign against
the paparazzi, involving himself in a national controversy over the rights of privacy that
intensified after the death of Princess Diana. "The paparazzi are not the
press," he said. "We're always going to be a society that slows down to see a
car wreck on the side of the road. But you can't put the wreck there just to slow us down.
You can't create news. I don't care about a man taking my picture I a public place, but I
care if he comes into my yard and shoot in my bedroom window."
In 1979, Clooney graduated from Augusta (Ky.) High School, where he had been an
indifferent student but a star athlete. "I was good at a lot of sports," he
recalled. "I even tried out for the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. I'd been in a
world where I was the best around, and then I went into a camp where all the best around
met, and I was nowhere as good as those guys. They threw rockets. When I realized I was
never going to be those guys, I could walk away because I'd at least given it a run. My
greatest skill is probably understandings my own limitations."
"I had no idea what I was going to do," he continued. "I bounced from job
to job, never mastering any of them, because I secretly thought I'd never be great at it.
I went to Northern Kentucky University. I went all these routes, trying to figure out what
I could be. I couldn't live with the idea of just being Nick Clooney and Rosemary
Clooney's relative all my life. I needed success or failure on my own. I had to make a
name for myself."
In the summer of 1982, his cousin Miguel Ferrer, son of Rosemary Clooney and Jose Ferrer,
arrived in Lexington, Ky., to make a low-budget movie. He invited George to join
him. Clooney dropped out of college and spent three months on a sofa in Miguel's hotel
room. He was in only one small scene (the film was never released), but it was sufficient.
"When I found acting," Clooney said, "I was enthralled. All of a sudden
that whole Hollywood shine came down on the town in Kentucky, and I was taken away."
With the $700 he'd earned cutting tobacco as a field hand in Kentucky, Clooney headed to
L.A. At first he stayed at his Aunt Rosemary's house, then moved in with a friend, Thom
Mathews, an actor, where he stayed for eight months. "We took a bunk-bed mattress and
laid it on the floor of the walk-in closet, and it was the greatest time of my life.
Because of it, Thom will always be my best friend."
It was during his first years in L.A. that Clooney found that people who today remain his
closest friends - people who looked after him in a hundred small ways, he said. They
proved their loyalty to him then. "The only virtue is loyalty," he stated.
"If you're going to err, it has to be on the side of your friends." "It's
easy to be loyal when you're on top of the wave and things are going well," he added.
"The test is when they're not."
Clooney took acting classes, paying his tuition by cleaning up and working in
construction. He snagged small roles in showcases and small theaters for no pay.
Gradually, he began to get paid for work. Over the next eight years or so, he starred in
unsuccessful TV pilots and forgettable films. In 1988-89, during its first season, he
played the boss on Roseanne.
In 1989, Clooney married Talia Balsam. He had fallen in love with her six years earlier
when both were acting in an L.A. theater production. He pursued her despite the fact she
was seeing someone else. They dated for a year and a half, broke up and then found each
other again. But after three years, the marriage ended. "Talia and I were together
for a long time," Clooney said quietly, reluctantly. "She was the girl I chased
and was in love with, the girl I always wanted to marry. I was 28, and in Kentucky, when
you get to be that age, you're supposed to get married, and you know exactly what the
marriage should be like. I had this image of marriage. When ours didn't exactly fit that
image, I thought it didn't work. I wasn't very bright about it. We had to reconstruct our
marriage a little bit, and I wasn't willing to do that. I walked away. I could have been
scared. Maybe I wasn't ready to be married. It was my fault all the way down the
line." Although Clooney has declared he will never marry again or have children, he
dates regularly and is currently involved with Celine Balitran, 24, a beautiful French lay
student who now lives in L.A.
Clooney lives in a sprawling, eight-bedroom, mock-Tudor house on many expensive acres
below a nature preserve. Outside there are tennis courts, a pool, gardens and a pen for
Max, Clooney's 150-pound pig. Inside the house is a half-completed screening room, a
partially finished kitchen and general masculine disarray. It is here that Clooney's best
friends, the seven men he has known for 16 years and calls "The Boys," hang out
and play basketball on weekends, drink beer, watch sports and generally act as what they
are: his chosen family. In their bluntness, honesty and affections, they give him what he
needs - a sense of who he really is and what matters in life. "We all keep in
touch," Clooney said. "We've all crashed on each other's coaches over breakups,
whatever. The great thing is we're all support of each other."
George Clooney has a strong, handsome face, his large brown eyes intelligent and gentle,
and in them one occasionally catches an unguarded look of vulnerability undisguised by his
easy smile. One senses an unspoken sadness. When asked about it, he replied by speaking of
George Guilfoyle, the great-uncle after whom he was named. "My uncle George was a
bomber pilot at 22 who flew in 15 missions over Germany in the war," Clooney said.
"He was the manager of Rosemary and her sister, Betty, when they started out singing.
He was an all-star basketball player, a good-looking, witty guy who dated Miss America. He
was on fire with life." He paused a moment, then added: "But I didn't know him
then. I knew him when he was a man who trained horses, became a drunk and slept in a barn.
He was a guy who never lived up to his potential, but he could still walk into a room and
light it up. He was the guy you wanted to teach you how to throw a baseball when you were
little, the guy who could captivate you and with a story teach you some sort of moral. He
was everything you'd want from a man except success. We had a very close and special
relationship. I loved him very much, and when he died of cancer in 1990, I was holding his
hand. It changed by life dramatically. I don't know if I believe in heaven or even God,
but I thought my Uncle George might be somewhere watching me, seeing how I did."
What Clooney did first, when he returned to L.A. after his uncle's death, was quit his
acting job at the same time, because he would not tolerate what he felt was the cruel
behavior on the set toward other actors. "It wasn't about me," he said.
"But by knowing about it, seeing it and doing nothing, I was culpable. I was part of
it. I walked away, thinking my career was over. Five days later I got another pilot."
Clooney went on to another series, NBC's Sisters, and then ER.
"I'm now aware of how brief life is," he said, "and how you have to mark
every day and make it matter - not just the best moments, the award nominations, the
opening nights. If all my life is about is these satellite moments, what then? They come,
and they're gone. I have to live it whole. It's finally about friendship and loyalty and
treating people right."