The Admirable Clooney

Despite an abiding passion for practial jokes, George Clooney is a man of deep convictions. At the star's new villa on Italy's Lake Como, where Clooney has been contending with burglars, cell-phone-camera-wielding babes, and paparazzi, Ned Zeman gets him talking about his dating dlilemma, his high-octane relationship with director Stephen Soderbergh, and the dangerous line he walks in his latest romantic comedy Intolerable Crulety, opposite Cathrine Zeta-Jones.

It turned out the details were a bit off, but in a fun sort of way. The Clooney part was right, and also the minivan. But there was no ham and no model; it was just Clooney and his driver, Giovanni, a thicklymuscled Roman whom Clooney calls "Gio." Gio favors wraparound sunglasses and has forearms the size of armadillos. He speaks rarely. When he does, you can barely hear him, which only adds to his air of authority. In Italy, he and Clooney are never far apart. "We've developed a relationship, haven't we, Gio?" Clooney says, winking. "See how big he is? What Gio wants, Gio gets. That's all I'm going to say."

Last year in Rome, Clooney and Gio once found 10 paparazzi, riding motorcycles, on their tail, Actually, it started out being 10, then became 12, as Clooney hid on the floor of the car and Gio left rubber in the Piazza della Repubblica, careering past vegetable carts and fist-waving pedestrians. "On one level, it was really kind of hilarious," Clooney says, "Every time you looked back, there was another one. It was like a Preston Sturges movie." The allusion is particularly apt these days, since Clooney's forthcoming romantic comedy, Intolerable Cruelty, which also stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, owes much to the 40s-era Sturges-Howard Hawks subgenre-"madcap" and "screwball" being the operative adjectives, and the Coen brothers being the writers and director.

That an affable, self-effacing Kentuckyborn Hollywood actor is fast becoming the most popular public figure in Italy says a little about Italy and a lot about Clooney, who isn't Italian, doesn't speak Italian, and lives here only in summertime, rarely showing his face outside the stunning 15bedroom villa he owns in the hills above Lake Como. He'd love to step out more often, but he can't. Whenever he does, it's Amarcord. Just the other day, a paparazzo cut a hole in his fence, squeezed through, and snapped a picture of him in the pool.

Plus, there are the damned cell-phone cameras. "I've literally gone out to dinner and a girl comes over to the table and says, 'Can I have a kiss?' She leans over, gives me a kiss, I go back to the house, and the photograph is on TV. It's hysterical." He means that both ways. "I'll tell you what's going to happen next, which is the scariest of all. Somebody's going to get one of those lipstick cameras and put it right on the top of your TV-in the hotel room, when you've got Spanktravision on-and that's going to be on the Internet. That's the next step!"

Clooney spent last night at Rome's luxurious St. Regis Grand hotel, where he'd holed up with director Steven Soderbergh, tinkering with a script until 5:30 A.M. That was four hours ago, though you wouldnt know it. Clooney isn't a big sleeper. After leaving Soderbergh's room, he lay awake in bed, worrying about an Act III plot point in Ocean's Twelve, a sequel to their winning 2001 remake, Ocean's Eleven.

Next thing Clooney knew, he threw on his usual outfit-khakis, black T-shirt, white Nikes, yesterday's whiskers-and Gio escorted him through the crowded lobby, where Clooney was a wonder to behold: shoulders forward, head down, eyes dead ahead, ears pinned. The ears are key. "The first thing you do is, you pretend you don't hear. Sometimes I actually pretend to be deaf. You're walking and you hear, 'George!' You just keep walking, and your friends do it, too, and people start to think that maybe they don't exist. They're yelling, and nobody is reacting to them. But playing deaf buys you a little bit of escape time. Because the truth is it's embarrassing."

This last bit is pure Clooney, who tends to express himself in clean, perfectly formed paragraphs. He sounds like Johnnie Walker Black, even in the morning, and his delivery is exquisitely calibrated-equal parts defiance and deference-which basically allows him to say whatever he wants without sounding like an ingrate. To wit: "When I came to Italy for the Ocean's Eleven tour, one thing that became immediately clear is that I have no understanding of what it's like to be as famous as Brad Pitt. I mean no understanding. They used me as a stepping-stone to get to him. Giovanni was with us, and we're walking through the airport, and they're like, 'George!' And I'm like, 'Hey, guys-Brad Pitt!' And they're like, 'Brad Pitt!' and they'd take off after Brad, who'd say, 'Thanks, dude,' and take off, running."

0f the many and varied pranks Clooney has perpetrated over the years, the most famous involves Richard Kind and a cat's litter box. ("You've got to ask him about that one," says Sam Rockwell, who starred in Clooney's recent directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.) Best known as the nebbishy mayor's press secretary on Spin City, Kind is one of Clooney's dearest friends-one of the half-dozen who've populated Clooney's life since his pre-ER days. Once, Kind's cat had left an empty litter box for weeks, and Kind was fretting. "The way George tells the story, he then gave the cat a laxative," Kind says. "But the truth is, after I really began worrying, I looked in the box and found a chicken-potpie-sized human dump inside, and it was George's."

More recently, one of Clooney's other friends-we'll call him "Frank"-left him the following voice mail: "It's Frank, it's eight o'clock, and I like cock! I just like it!" This was shortly before Frank, Clooney, and some other pals headed off to Hawaii's remote Kona Village Resort, having agreed not to check phone messages during the weeklong vacation. Clooney, meanwhile, wangled the code to Frank's message center and replaced Frank's recorded greeting with the above voice mail. A week later, when they were at the airport to fly home, Clooney got to watch Frank screaming over the phone at his assistant, "Gimme the fucking code!" and, panicstricken, retrieving his numerous voice mails, including one from his mother, who "That was a weird message."

Clooney recalls this story halfway through the six-hour car ride from Rome to Lake Como, during which Gio drives at approx~ mately 400 miles an hour, stopping only for gas and panini, which in Italy can bought at the same place. Clooney answers questions the entire time, without so much,, as a bathroom break. His stamina knows no bounds.

Another story: while filming Ocean's Eleven, he befriended a teenager named Cindy, who'd been sponsored by a charity that puts terminally ill kids in phone contact with celebrities. Dying of pancreatic cancer, Cindy had been abandoned by her parents and adopted by a hospital-where, to make matters worse, she'd been raped. Clooney spoke to her every night for weeks. "I caift breathe:' she would say to him. "They tell me if I fall asleep, I'll die."

For months, Cindy had tempted death. One day Clooney called to inquire, but Cindy's adoptive mother, Kris, answered, explaining that Cindy was too sick to talk. By this time Clooney was becoming suspicious.

He demanded a photograph. The one that arrived was soft-focus but still revealed a 200-pound woman in her mid-40s, wearing the Ocean~ Eleven cap he had sent her. As a way of calling the mother's bluff he offered immediately to fly down on the Warner Bros. jet with Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. The offer was greeted with gushing excitement. But, while Clooney was explaining the situation to his friend Noah Wyle, his assistant pulled up and said skeptically, "Guess who just died?"

By this point, the jig was up. The hospital had no record of the ailing teen. Clooney called Kris, but Kris's sister picked up. He asked for Kris, who came on the line. "Have you been pretending to be Cindy?" he asked. The alleged mother screamed bloody murder. "Put the sister back on the phone and talk to me with her on the phone," said Clooney. "I doift have to do that!" she protested. "Put the fucking sister on the phone." Clooney briefly suspected that his friends were pulling the long con of all time. But no. Just the other day, he received a photograph of "Cindy's" coffin.

It's at this point that bitterness could (and possibly should) enter the picture, but Clooney isn't having it. "You only get a certain amount of time in this life," he says, "Most people live for the weekends and a two-week vacation. I'm doing what I love to do, you know? I go to work every day, loving it. That's really lucky. That's a pretty great thing right off the bat." Yes, he says. "the money's fantastic. I love having money. The idea of not having to worry about finances-a very lucky thing."

"It's funny," he says. -You run toward that glaring spotlight as fast as you can. like a bug to a flame, and you can7t possibly know, or think it through enough to say you know. But the funniest thing is no one wants to hear you go, 'Well, there's some difficulties that come along with that.' And. by the way, that's fair. I get it. I used to say that about Batman. The problem with Ratman is nobody feels sorry for Batman. He's aluw%s miserable. And people go. -VML )uu li%r in a mansion, you drive the coolm cam mxii-e got all the coolest gadgets. you go out with the best-looking wornen.- He shrugs. -No one wants to hear you whine.

That Clooney once played Batman in 1997's Batman & Robin. should Dot cause people to think that he is hA-,e Batman-yet another Hollywood recluse pacing the halls of his giant house& aiaw md bereft. Famously outgoing and eregmaoswhe once labeled himself -a professional drinker"-he's a regular at Dan Tanaa, a clubby Los Angeles steak house. and has dated one beautiful woman after another: model Vendela, Renee Zellweger, model Celine Balitran. (Years ago. he was briefly married to Talia Balsam, the daughter of actor Martin Balsam.) He rarely finds himself alone. This week, he has 15 guestsfriends, relatives, their kids-ensconced at his three-tiered Como estate, which includes a screening room, a gym, a pool, and four obese ducks, who've grown so used to the good food that they routinely enter the house, climb the stairs, bull their way into his bedroom, and make demands for more. "Like The Sopranos," Clooney says.

"Sopranos," Gio says, nodding. "Yes." A few days ago the ducks stopped coming. "We're a little worried;' Clooney says. "We're thinking, maybe, witness protection."

Clooney happened upon the villa two years ago while on a motorcycle trip with his buddies, among them nightclub impresario Rande Gerber, who said, "Can you imagine living in this place?" The following year, to Clooney's surprise, the owners offered him the villa at a price well below the $25 million or so he'd imagined. "It cost me one agent," Gooney says, referring to a sticky piece of business involving Michael Gruber, an agent who, after a dispute over a finder's fee from the sellers, lost both his client and his job at the Creative Artists Agency. (Clooney watches his money closely, having learned from the travails of his aunt, bigband singer Rosemary Clooney. "She made every mistake you could make. Every one. She believed them when they told her she was great. She gave them all power of attorney, and they spent her money and didn't pay taxes. Till the day she died [in June of last year], she had to work literally every day of her life. The I.R.S. took everything.")

Villagate is about as scandalous as it gets in Italy for Clooney, who tends to follow a grueling regimen: breakfast, cruise on his motorboat, discussion of what to eat for lunch. lunch (wine included), swimming, discussion of what to eat for dinner, dinner oAme included), movie, bed, repeat. Villa di Giorgio has mostly been so quiet, in fact, that it's been burgled four times, albeit in a bumbling sort of way. Ignoring Clooney's computer. stereo, and big-screen TV, the thie%es beelined for a thousand-pound safe abandoned by the previous owners-an emptv thousand-pound safe, which happened to be marked EXPLOSIVES.-These idiots came in, cased the joint, and cleady decided, 'We'll need four more people.' It was like Ocea6 Eleven." During the burglars' second visit, they soaped the floor and slid the safe across it, making it balfway to their getaway car before they IN= spotted and fled. The thousand-pound sa* just sat there until the burglars' next viic wbrn they pushed it over a ledge before fleeing yet again. "We go inside and call the cops," Clooney says. "But when we come back, the safe is sitting up. Which means they came back a fourth time, They were doing everything they could to steal this fucking safe. So we put a giant red bow on it and left a note saying, 'Come and get it, you dumb fucks!"'

There the safe remains, in quiet solitude. Even the paparazzi have receded, bereft of money shots. "I haven't gone out," Clooney says. "To the European press, I'm fresh meat. That kind of frenzy-you have to really be up for it.... Dinner out is an ordeal. It's a big ordeal." As a result, Hollywood's Most Eligible Bachelor remains marginally more single than ever. For a while, he went out with a lovely Italian woman, but since he knew about as much Italian as she did English the "relationship~' foundered after the third date or so. "I knew it was in trouble during a phone conversation, if we can call it that," Clooney says. "She'd say, 'Oh, Geoooorge,' and I'd say, 'Ohhhh, youuu . Gio laughs heartily.

Tere's the great thing about dating," Clooney says. "You get to start over and go, 'I'm a really nice guy.' And, by virtue of saying it, you can be it. You can actually decide, O.K., now I'm a really nice guy. But my dates know everything about me, and some of it's true and some of it isn't.... So you have to sort of take the baggage. Also, the minute you start dating, it's pictures and stories and 'Who is sheT And it puts the pressure on it immediately. So you have to decide, before you go out in public, if you're willing to take those hits. [Usually] it's 'Well, why doM we stay in and have some drinks and get to know each other before we decide if we're willing to face up to this.' It does make those things awkward. But, again, you dont complain. Because no one's going to hear you or want to hear you. And I actually think that's fair."

Asked to describe the last time he struck out with a woman, Clooney nods agreeably, stares outside, and the question just sort of vaporizes into the blue Italian sky.

George Clooney can suck my dick."This from David 0. Russell, speaking figuratively. Russell is the gifted and voluble director of Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings, the latter of which starred Clooney as a U.S. Army officer who spearheads a Treasure of Sierra Madre-type heist amid the chaotic aftermath of Operation Desert Storm. That was in 1999, about two years after the TV star had begun his segue to movie star, having landed two big-ticket leads, in The Peacemaker and Batman & Robin. Three Kings was an interesting choice for Clooney, who had yet to truly "open" a movie, and who had received his share of abuse for the cinematic train wreck that was Batman & Robin, which he cheerfully describes as a "really bad" movie. "About a week after it was released, I was aware of that," he says. "That and never wear a rubber suit with nipples. Those are my two great lessons there."

Three Kings not only succeeded on a creative level, featuring one of Clooney's best performances, but also grossed more than $60 million. Nonetheless it proved a thoroughly wretched experience for Clooney and Russell, who loathed each other, and evidently continue to. While calling both Russell and the fihn "brilliant," Clooney says, "I would not stand for him humiliating and yelling and screaming at crew members, who weren' t allowed to defend themselves. I dont believe in it, and it makes me crazy. So my job was then to humiliate the people who were doing the humiliating."

"I won't even dignify that question with a reply," responds Russell when I ask him about it, and he notes that he's friends with most everyone who worked on Three Kings, including Spike Jonze and Mark Wahlberg. Clooney also accuses Russell of "homogenizing" the script's political tone in order to make it more studio-friendly. "He never said anything about that to me the entire time we were shooting," says Russell. "I don't know what the fuck he is talking about.... He's a really good person, and I'm a really bad person, right? He's a super-political, extremely manipulative guy, and he's not an artist. I think George is super-invested in making himself look like a good guy all the time. I think George will be president."

That Clooney wants to be liked is undisputed, even by Clooney. "I can' t even fight it," he says of the desire. "I have it." The jaunty self-effacement, the whole Cary Grant thing-they didn't come by accident. Then again, they can't easily be faked. "I think it's something he learned from watching his aunt Rosemary Clooney and his uncle Jos6 Ferrer," says Sam Rockwell.. "He became famous when he was 33, so he had lived a life. Before that, he had been humble. And he had struggled. So he knows what it is to be a real person."

"The thing is," Clooney says-and here he arches an eyebrow and waggles a finger skyward-"by whom do I want to be liked?

"In the two films I've done with the Coens and the four or five projects I've worked on with Steven, I have never once seen or heard an angry voice raised," Clooney says. "Steven and I have this life-is-too-short thing. Somebody will say, 'Hey, so-and-so wants to do a movie with you.' If we know he's a yeller, we're like, 'Life's too short. Not going to do it.' I don't believe in it."

That said, Clooney loves a good brawl, especially if it involves a cranky right-winger. Right-wingers drive him nuts, and always have. Back in Kentucky, his parents were the only ones in town who voted for McGovern. He's called President Bush "dim," and the Bush administration "worse than the Sopranos." After watching Election Night coverage at Gregory Peck's house-"Embarrassing, isn't it?" Peck said-Clooney protested by pulling his money out of the stock market. He is, at heart, a political creature, so much so that he and Soderbergh are producing a documentary-style television series about the inner workings of Washington. The show, K Street, has just debuted on HBO. He's mad at Republicans for exploiting 9/11, and he's mad at his Democrats for letting them do it. "Patriotism is a dangerous thing," Clooney says. "It's a great thing when it's positive. I'm a patriot. I believe in the country ... but it's always good to keep reminding ourselves that we make these huge errors based on patriotism, wrapped in patriotism, and surrounded by fear. First, it was the Russians getting the bomb. Now it's terrorism. It's the same thing."

Clooney has always been a media guy. His father, Nick, was a popular TV personality in Cincinnati, and he's even developing a film project about famed radio and television newsman Edward R. Murrow, whom he tends to refer to when mixing it up with a frequent sparring partner: the media. He's funny that way. For years he boycotted media outlets that broadcast paparazzi-type footage, and he'll go at it with any critic or publication that pushes his buttons. Three years ago, Elle reported that one of the "stars" of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line liked to smell his dates' armpits, which was true. Unfortunately, editors titled the article "Dont Date George Clooney." Clooney is many things, including a star of The Thin Red Line, but he is not a pit sniffer-a fact he made abundantly clear to the editors at Elle. That guy, after all, said things to the interviewer such as "I never go east of the 405," or San Diego Freeway, referring perhaps to a less fashionable part of L.A., and Clooney is no snob.

"I went out to dinner with one of the actors in the movie," says Clooney. "We're at Mr. Chow's and we're sitting there going, 'Who is itT We come to the conclusion it's this one actor. That's got to be it. Then I say, 'Let's go get a drink.' We go to Jones [a bar in West Hollywood], and he follows me. And as he gets out at the valet, he goes, 'I can7t believe I came all the way over here. I never go east of the 405.' And I turned around and said: 'You fuck! You slimy, sneaky, armpit-sniffing fuck!"'

If he's really pissed, he'll write letters. He's an inveterate letter writer, and he's good at it. Rarely has he balked at professional criticism. That's all fair and fine and part of the deal, he figures. But anything that veers toward the personal, or questions his integrity, he'll jump all over-a phenomenon that played out earlier this year when certain critics hammered his Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, written by the ubiquitous Charlie Kaufman and based on a "memoir" by Gong Show host Chuck Barris, who purported to have been a C.I.A. assassin. "An an ry fucking guy," Clooney says of Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan. "He just destroyed Confessions. It was a real personal attack. It was really brutal. And then there was the Washington Post critic Stephen Hunter, who, though generally impressed by the film's trippy, nonlinear sensibility, wrote, "The credits saN George Clooney, but the movie says Steven Soderbergh.... It's the story of a man who wasn' t there by a director who may not have been there either."

Clooney did not go quietly. "Certainly things from Steven rubbed off-you bet," he says. Plus, Clooney lifted a transitional device from The Parallax View, a 1974 thriller directed by Alan J. Pakula. "There's a lot of Coen brothers, and I sent letters of apology to Mike Nichols and Sidney Lumet about things I stole directly from them. So. you know, I stole from everybody. The oversaturated look that [Hunter] said I stole from Traffic-well, actually, it was stolen from Three Kings." He grins. "So it was stolen from David 0. Russell." And so the ink fle". albeit with Clooney-esque stylistic flourishes, specifically the kicker: "Letter written by Steven Soderbergh."

"For a variety of reasons, that article wasn't true," Soderbergh says. "It wasnt literally true-I was on the set once, for 20 minutes, and I was busy making my own movie. And it wasn't true figuratively, because that's not how I work as a producer. And it just goes to show that people who write about the film business tend not to understand how it really works."

In any event, the Clooney-Soderbergh union has developed into one of Holhwood's most compelling partnerships; it the only one teaming an A-list star with an A-list dire ctor-although, it must be said. these designations weren't so clear during their first collaboration, in 1998's Out Of Sight, a crackling-good Elmore Leonard caper which inexplicably tanked at the box offlee-as did Soderberghs other late-90s gem. The Limey. Clooney, still smarting from Th~ Peacemaker and Batman & Robin, told Soderbergh, "Look, you and I are, like, 600pound gorillas each. But together we can be a lot bigger than an 800-pound gorilla, and we can force-feed some shit to them'-"shit meaning edgier material, "them" meaning studio executives. "We just might be," Soderbergh replied.

Soderbergh~s next two movies were Erin Brockovich and Traffic, which earned a combined $250 million and brought him double Oscar nominations for best director, Traffic being the winner. Meanwhile, Clooney had finally "opened" a picture, The Perfect Storm, whose runaway successit grossed more than $180 million-prompted Warner Bros. executives to gather at the Palm to toast his fabulousness. "The truth is this is a movie about a wave," Clooney says. "But since I took so much shit for Batman & Robin, I take all of the credit. I call it even."

By the time Clooney and Soderbergh reteamed for the hugely successful Ocean's Eleven, in 2001, studio coffers were wide open. They had the run of the place, but spent much of their time producing films by heralded but commercially unproven directors, including Todd Haynes's Farfrom Heaven and Christopher Nolans Insomnia.Clooney says that when he started producing "I had to stop thinking, Hey, I got a job, and start thinking, I have to be responsible for the films I'm going to make. So then I said, 'O.K., I cannot do a press junket anymore where I go in and say, "Well, uh, it's the biggest film I've ever seen."' You run out of things to lie about." He resisted several big-ticket job offers (in the $15 to ,$20 million range), although few suitors proved as persistent as action-film producer Joel Silver, who very much wanted Clooney to co-star in the 2001 techno-thriller Swordfish. While Clooney vacationed in SaintTropez, Silver trailed him in a pontoon boat, shouting, "EIGHTEEN MILLION FOR EIGHT WEEKS' WORK!"

Then came Solaris.

Fufl disclosure: I liked Solaris. ("You're the guy!" Soderbergh cries.) That being said, and like the dozen or so 'other moviegoers who actually paid to see it, I have only the vaguest idea of what Solaris was aboutsomething involving a psychologist who boards a space station, meets his dead wife, and feels bad about it. Nearly everyone found the movie ponderous and mopey, and it sank like a stone, grossing only $15 million-about a third of its production cost.

Initially, Soderbergh wanted Daniel DayLewis for the lead, but he passed. Clooney asked for the role-in writing, naturally. Such is their relationship, which cuts both ways: after Harrison Ford and Kevin Costner opted out of the drug czar's role in Trafficeventually played by Michael DouglasSoderbergh turned to Clooney. "Fuck you," said Clooney. "I'm 15 years too young to do this." Soderbergh replied, "Everyone thinks youre 50." (Which is true. Today, at 42, Clooney may be the only Hollywood star who routinely plays older. "He's an adult," says director Todd Haynes. "There"s a lot of youth fetishism going on in the industry, and maybe in the culture in general. A denial of aging and maturity, and he challenges that.")

Solaris tanked in tandem with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which made for one hell of a Christmas over at Section Eight productions. But Clooney and Soderbergh stand by their movies, resolutely. "Neither of us was accustomed to not having people like what we were up to," Soderbergh says. "But 10 years from now, we'll both be glad to have made those films, which were unafraid aesthetically and uncompromising. Otherwise, what are you doing besides taking up shelf space?" As for Clooney, Soderbergh says, "None of the characters he's choosing play off the preternatural charm that he inherently has. And the really good news is he's restless."

"If I get those movies made, then I win," Clooney says. "Ultimately, how much money do you need?" He spent nearly two years on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which he edited while filming both Solaris and the Coens' Intolerable Cruelty. No wonder his character in Solaris looks so tired. Sometimes he'd spend the day playing the gloomy spaceman, peel off his space suit, run across the Warner Bros. lot, climb into an editing bay, work into the night, call the dying-girt-who-wasn't-dying-and-wasn't-agirl, fall asleep, wake up, and run other set, where he played a glib, relentlessly teeth-bleaching divorce lawyer.

Then again-and this is something the studios can't seem to grasp-comedy has always been Clooney's greatest gift. He's in on the joke. Ask him if he'd ever remake one of his favorite movies, Lumet's 12 Angry Men, and off he goes. "You'd have to do backstories," he says, "and you'd probably show some of the trial." "You'd put in some physical jeopardy," comes the reply. "You'd do it like Snake Eyes and have a hurricane come through." "There'd be a ticking clock." "Right! And somebody would have a heart attack." "Somebody would have a baby." "It's going to have women, so it would be 12 Angry People." " 12 Angry Persons." "And they can't be angry. They can just be upset. 12 Conflicted Persons."

Witness Out of Sight, Ocean's Eleven, and the Coens' 0 Brother "ere Art ThouZ wherein Clooney played a vaingloriously stupid chain-gang escapee, Ulysses Everett McGill, who covets hair pomade and endlessly shouts, "We're in a tight spot!" McGill is among the Coens' greatest idiot-kings, right up there with Tim Robbins's Norville Barnes (in 1994's The Hudsucker Proxy) and Nicolas Cage's H. 1. McDonnough (in 1987's Raising Arizona). "What makes George great, and what makes him different from many stars, is that he's not afraid of being a buffoon."

This from Joel Coen, although possibly it's from Ethan Coen-one never really knows. In any event, they both agree that it was Clooney who persuaded them to make Intolerable Cruelty, in which Clooney's shark lawyer and Zeta-Jones's shark divorc6e fall in love, albeit "in a sick, black, Coen-brothers way," as Zeta-Jones puts it. "This one terrifies me," Clooney says of his performance. "It could really be bad. The thing is this: if you read the script, you can~t do it any other way. You've got to commit. Now, that can go good or bad. I think 0 Brother, Where Art Thou? worked really well over the top, and I'm proud of it. I think that if this movie works, this will work great. But it's worrisome, I have to say."

"I sort of heard George was uptight about it after the fact," says Joel/Ethan, laughing. "I dont think he went too far with it. He perfectly walks that line. George is quick to understand that sort of role, and he gets the stylistic requirements of the buffoon. He inhabits it. I don't know if he knows he has that ability, but he does."

Anyway, Clooney's not that worried. He and Soderbergh are busy planning their next projects, among them K Street; Leathernecks, a feature about the early days of the MEL.; The Good German, a postWorld War 11 thriller; and, not least, Ocea6 Twelve, whose cast has reunited to steal a Faberg6 egg. Meanwhile, Clooney has guests to entertain, including the local mayor, whom he wants to build a bridge near the villa. "I'll take him to Milan and see how it goes," he says jokingly. "Get him liquored up, get him to sign something." He nudges Gio. "Let's take pictures of him with some hottie girl. Paparazzi-oh, we could work that out." He points out Villa d'Este, the palatial hotel on Lake Como. "There's the pool down there. Beautiful women, by the way." He shrugs. "I'm just saying."

Clooney waves good-bye, and Gio leaves rubber. Days later, the following crackled out of my tape recorder: "This is a message to whoever is transcribing this. Um, Ned just went into the bathroom. We're about two hours outside of Milan, and he's been drinking a great deal. And I think he has a problem. And I just think you should know that-I think it should come out. A lot of drinking, a lot of drooling, and Giovanni here thinks there's some drugs involved. I just think you should know that, O.K.T' Pause. "Oh, and he's bilking Vanity Fair out of a lot of cash."

source: US Vanity Fair magazine, October 2003
Text-Scan by Marie - many thx! :)