Issue date:
September 26-28, 1997

The Clooney File
A television veteran, Clooney has had regular or recurring roles on successful series of the '80s and '90s. Among the more popular shows he's appeared in: ER,Sisters, Roseanne, and The Facts of Life. Click here for the Internet Movie Database's George Clooney filmography.

Why George Clooney says: "I live for the moment."

The ER star tells how fame and family have taught him to "live for each day." His new movie, "The Peacemaker," opens this weekend.

o matter how famous ER doctor George Clooney becomes -- and his new movie may send him over the top -- he'll always be waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The handsome youngest son of a show-business family, he earned his modesty honestly. He was there for the peaks and valleys of his aunt Rosemary Clooney's singing career. He lived the nomadic, ratings-driven, sometimes unemployed broadcaster's life his father, Nick Clooney, had chosen.

If experience is the greatest teacher, Clooney, 36, has taken the master class. "People assume that being related to somebody famous gives you a buy into [show business]," he says. "It doesn't. What it does do is give you a better overview. Rosemary was as successful as she could be and then unsuccessful, having nothing to do with her. When you see that, you have a better, clearer understanding of how little it has to do with you."

	CLOONEY vs. THE "STALKERAZZI"
	In the wake of Princess Diana's death, George Clooney's long-running criticism of paparazzi tactics took on new significance. Clooney -- who last year organized a star boycott of TV's Entertainment Tonight because its parent company owns Hard Copy, which uses what he calls "stalkerazzi" video -- told USA WEEKEND he understands it's his job to be photographed at parties and premieres. But when he's in the men's room and a photographer shoots over the top of a stall -- as happened this summer at a Planet Hollywood in Australia -- he considers that crossing the line. In that case, Clooney grabbed the photographer and his film. The next day he had the film developed for police, who were involved because the photographer claimed Clooney had assaulted him. One look at the pictures, which Clooney then destroyed, and the police dropped their investigation. Clooney also told us about a time he was coming off a plane in L.A. when paparazzi yelled ugly comments about a woman accompanying him to get his attention. Last week, paparazzi refused to photograph him at the premeire of his new movie, The Peacemaker.
	-- L.L.

Or as his father succinctly puts it: "He knows this white-hot stuff won't last. It happens and then it doesn't happen."

It's happening now, in a big way. Thursday's fourth-season premiere of NBC's ER, a scheduled live episode, was the result of an idea Clooney, backed by co-star Anthony Edwards, took to producers. This weekend, the first movie Clooney can call his own, The Peacemaker, opens nationwide. As a maverick Army intelligence officer fighting to get nuclear weapons out of terrorists' hands, he's the leading man -- and a macho one at that. He kisses no girls, not even co-star Nicole Kidman. "Peacemaker will be the first real test to see if I actually have any mettle for this," he says, dismissing summer's Batman & Robin with "I was just part of this giant machine."

Warner Bros., which produces ER and the Batman movies, certainly thinks Clooney's talent transcends television. He has a $28 million, three-movie deal.

Rosemary, who made a few movies herself, including the classic White Christmas, is an admittedly unobjective observer, but she's sure her nephew has exactly what it takes. Referring to last December's romantic comedy One Fine Day, she says, "He's very commanding. When your first very important picture is with Michelle Pfeiffer and you find yourself looking at George, that's quite a feat."

Rosemary says she always knew George would end up entertaining audiences for a living. "He was the youngest of all the children [including her five], so he had to work a little to get the attention, which was his main goal in life."

Yet neither Rosemary nor Nick wanted George to pursue acting. Nick, now 61 and a host of cable's American Movie Classics channel, thought he could steer George back to broadcasting, his son's first career choice and the one Nick saw as safer. "I was afraid that even with talent he wouldn't be able to break through and succeed. What I shortchanged him on was his absolute dedication."

Nick recalls a painful parental moment when, worried for his son, he tried to persuade him to return home to Augusta, Ky. "Come back, finish school, and when you're finished you'll have [broadcasting] to fall back on," he fairly pleaded in a phone call to California. "There was this long pause. Then he said, 'Pop, if I have something to fall back on, I'll fall back.' "

So far, Clooney has fallen back on no one. He's been luckier than his elders, but he's also prepared. He gets a lot of credit -- too much, he says -- for "struggling." He has worked since his early 20s, having made some 15 TV pilots, eight of which got some network run. "Let me tell you something: You don't struggle if you're a regular on a TV series. You make a lot of money. I've had a very good life."

He likens his professional life to building a practice. Like that of a doctor or lawyer, it took time. Meanwhile, he built a personal life to go with it. (Married for three years, his expensive divorce led to a vow to never marry again.) ''The whole thing is about creating a foundation so you can't fall from here" -- he puts a hand over his head -- "all the way down. So that as things start to fall, you have this great foundation of people and things. ... You don't spend your money like it's gonna keep coming in. You pay off your house.

"I remember saying to my friends, after I got famous, after the first year of ER, 'I now know I'll never want for an acting job again. I won't have to do anything else if I don't want to. If I have to, 25 years from now, I can be doing Hollywood Squares. I could be doing dinner theater in Harrison, Ohio.' That's a great place to be if you're an actor. It's frustrating if you're at my level and then you have to go back and do dinner theater. But if you do what I do for a living, you'd do it for free."

Later he adds, "It's such a ride, such a roller-coaster ride. I can say things like, 'Oh, I'm ready for it when the other shoe drops and I'm doing dinner theater.' But I think I'll go kicking and screaming."

Clooney has a steady girlfriend in Céline Balitran, 24, whom he met last year in France. But it's a pack of seven men, "The Boys," to whom he's committed. "We've all been together for 15 years," he says, and they talk all the time. "It's a big web of fun." By self-appointment, Clooney is at the center. "Sundays, everybody comes by and everybody plays basketball, and we're all really close and really supportive of one another."

"We are what makes him George," says actor Richard Kind, one of The Boys, who met Clooney when they played brothers on a pilot. "Everything else makes him George Clooney." Kind, who plays gullible press secretary Paul on ABC's Spin City, says: "Things are very difficult with The Boys right now. One [Clooney] is a superstar. He has shot to the heights. Others are in various stages of career. We have to work hard to maintain the communication. George is the hub. He's the one who initiates it."

What he initiates may be as simple as his at-home "taco fests" (he cooks) or as complicated as a cross-country golf vacation on a rock 'n' roll tour bus. Sometimes it's George who makes sure the right thing gets done.

Recently, Kind's father died. "It was a big shock," Clooney explains, "and Richard was trying to be a big boy about it. I called everybody and said, 'Richard's dad died.' So we got a plane. We flew to Trenton, N.J., on a Sunday morning and Richard was up doing the eulogy at this synagogue. He's about halfway through it and looks up and sees his seven best friends in black suits in the back row. He was sobbing. ... It was one of those moments in your life when you realize 'This is what it's all about.' "

By that he means simply being there. Clooney keeps track of such moments and more. "Anybody who knows me knows I actually live for the moment."

He recalls meeting legendary screenwriter-director Joshua Logan (South Pacific, Mr. Roberts), who died in 1988. "I was at [his] house. He has a Pulitzer Prize holding the door open," and other awards, including Tonys, here and there. Conversation led Clooney to surmise that, in his late 70s, Logan felt he had never achieved what he had wanted.

"It breaks your heart because you're looking at this man who has accomplished so much. Part of it was that he was getting older and he felt no one wanted him around, but part of it was that what seemed important were these satellite moments: the premiere, the winning of the [awards]. What I learned is I can't rely on those seven days a year -- a premiere or your big episode of the TV show. Coming to work every day has to be those moments. Coming to work and saying something that makes everybody laugh. ... You've got to live for each day."

He doesn't want to end up like the beloved great-uncle for whom he was named, an alcoholic but "a mentor." Clooney recalls: "As he was dying, I held his hand. He kept saying, 'What a waste' because he was a 65-year-old guy who had so much promise and didn't do anything with it. I thought: 'The only thing I won't allow myself to do is wake up at 65 and go, "What a waste." ' If I get hit by a bus now, everybody will go, 'Well, he jammed a lot in.' "

In a gregarious family, where "the olds," as Rosemary calls the senior generation, included the young in everything, George not surprisingly learned to be a big talker. He's witty and charming, often alluding to classic movies to illustrate points.

At work on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, he cheerily greets passers-by. The door to his unappointed trailer (dead flowers and a couple of basketballs are the only decoration) is literally always open. He introduces himself to blood-splattered ER extras as if they wouldn't know who he is. "Stick around long enough," he jokes, "and you'll see I'm the mayor of Warner Bros." It does rather feel as if he were running for something.

Nick says his son was always clever -- like Betty, the middle one of the elder Clooney siblings, who died of an aneurysm in 1976. She didn't tell jokes, but was a master of the wry remark. "I was the serious one. Betty was the funny one. Rosemary was the most intense. George loved anybody who was funny."

Says Rosemary: "His ambition was to be Don Rickles. He turned out to be Ty Power."

Hollywood is more complicated today than at midcentury, when the legendary Tyrone Power reigned. Still, all actors want what Power had: great roles. "I'm now in the position where I get the roles I want," Clooney says. "I've started to develop projects, and I get offers on projects I want to do. That's where you wanna be."

Note he's talking movies -- not TV -- even if he believes what's on the tube has never been better. "People talk about the Golden Age of Television. This is the Golden Age." So why be a movie star? "Because if you're an actor you want to keep trying new things. Because television is more temporary than movies. Because movies are immortal."

Lorrie Lynch is USA WEEKEND's "Who's News" columnist. Her last cover story was on Julia Roberts.