Thursday April 18th 2024

AMERICAN IDOL
George Clooney has been making pulses race ever since his days as Dr. Ross. But there’s much more to this intense, outspoken actor/director/writer/producer than meets the eye
	George Clooney, dressed in trainers and a black t-shirt, is upbeat, despite recovering from recent spinal surgery. “I was down for a bit,” he says. “I had terrible headaches and nobody knew what it was, so I got quite worried. I was thinking ‘what the hell is going on in my head?’ The doctors would tell me to rest. Finally, they realized what it was and I was operated on.” He points to a pink vertical scar at the nape of his neck. “I’m gettin’ old, fallin’ apart,” he says glibly. Things hurt me now. My knees hurt, my back hurts. But your head still thinks it’s 23. I was in a bar and I said to a friend, ‘You know, we’ve become those [middle-aged] guys we used to look at and say, ‘Isn’t it sad?’” Don’t feel too sad for Mr. Clooney. He’s on the mend after a second surgery and is still a star of the first magnitude, having generated over $126 million in box office receipts in 2004, with a career total estimated at over $1.2 billion. Not bad for a guy who once starred on “The Facts of Life” as Tootie’s crush. While Hollywood is panicking about a huge downturn in movie attendance, George Clooney can still pack ’em in. He has been favorably compared to Clark Gable and Cary Grant for his combination of elegance and virility. True, George may be one of Hollywood’s irrepressible good-time guys. He has a rakish wit and is a compulsive practical jokester whose pranks are often quite elaborate. But the former TV actor has managed to achieve both commercial success and artistic credibility without becoming egomaniacal, pretentious or jaded. He’s still the most approachable movie star around, eager to share the fruits of his success with those who have been his friends for decades. An outspoken liberal, Clooney even garners the praise of conservative TV evangelist Pat Robertson, who lauds George’s hard work to raise money to combat global poverty and effuses “he’s a good guy. I like him.” Early affliction shaped his destiny Born on May 6, 1961 in Maysville, Kentucky, to parents Nick and Nina, George Timothy Clooney and his family moved around a lot when he was a child, living in five different cities in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, where he attended eight different schools. Beginning at age five, George helped out on his dad’s local Cincinnati talk show, by pitching products and playing sketch characters like a leprechaun or Easter Bunny. He later served as the floor manager. But something that happened when he was 12 was to influence his personality and the way he coped with the world. George got Bell’s Palsy, a disorder with stroke-like symptoms, thatparalyzed the left side of his face. “It scared the hell out of me,” he admits, and made him the butt of jokes at his new school. Just days before the illness struck he and his dad were watching a Saturday matinee — “The Pride of the Yankees” — in which Gary Cooper portrayed Lou Gehrig and his struggle with the disease that came to be named for him. Clooney sobbed as the bat fell out of Gehrig’s hands in the movie. The next day, the Clooneys were in church. “We were up in the balcony, and suddenly my tongue got numb,” he shudders. Then they went out to eat and when he tried to drink a glass of milk, it poured out of the side of his mouth. “I was convinced I had Lou Gehrig’s disease,” he admits. The illness lasted for a year, during which George learned to cope with the taunts of classmates by employing humor and acting daft. “That’s my 12- year-old self,” he says. “If I live up to your expectations, will you let me be me? I’ll be anyone you want and I’ll go on being him ’til I can be who I really am.” George specialized in Nat King Cole impersonations and providing the punchlines to his father’s more risqué jokes. “Rather poignant, don’t you think?” he asks dryly. When he was 16, he tried out for the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, but was rejected. “I only lacked skill,” he laughs. “That was the only thing holding me back.” George’s mother was also a big influence in his life. “The best lesson my mom taught me was how to be scrappy,” he comments. “She was a beauty queen and had her own television show. But for her birthday, she’d buy herself a table saw. She put a roof on our house. My father — great as he was — couldn’t pick up a hammer. It was my mom who was up there pounding the shingles in.” It wasn’t until his cousin Miguel Ferrer (Aunt Rosemary Clooney’s son) was in town shooting a movie that never got released that Clooney, then 19, realized his true calling. In 1982, when he was 21, he worked cutting tobacco to earn enough money to buy an old beat-up Monte Carlo, which he drove to l.a. in the hope of becoming an actor. His aunt Rosey let him camp out in her house. He worked as her handyman and chauffeur, driving her and co-stars Martha Raye, Helen O’Connell and Margaret Whiting around the u.s. when the four legendary singers toured in “4 Girls 4.” “There was nothing sweet and subtle about driving those broads around,” he says, his eyes flashing mischevously. “In the backseat, Martha Rae would shout, ‘Georgie, pull the car over, I have to take a leak!’” He remembers standing in the wings with the great Helen O’Connell, holding a tall glass of Smirnoff, and hearing the announcer introducing her. She’d take the vodka from him, down it straight, glug-glug-glug, and on she’d go, this really beautiful, slender, 70-year-old songstress. “Tangerine... Does a lady proud...” He sings it quietly into his Coca-Cola. “One of her greatest hits,” he says. “You know it?” Every night it was the same. Knock back the vodka, do her three numbers, then back into the green room until Rosemary Clooney came on to finish the show and Helen came back into the wings to watch her. It was a mark of respect, he always thought. George recalls asking his aunt one night, “how come you can still do it? How come you’re better than ever?” And she told him it was because she couldn’t do the vocal gymnastics any more, couldn’t hit the notes the way she used to, so she wasn’t showing off. “Just singing the song, George, just singing the song,” she explained. That was his first acting lesson. Don’t show off. Let the song sing itself. “Like someone whispers,” he says, “and everyone leans towards them.” To read more of this four-page article from the latest issue of Midwest Today, click here to: SUBSCRIBE NOW!