Celebutards Page 4
“No, I’m gay, gay,” George cheerfully said. “The third gay, that was pushing it.”
But movie tough guy Clooney went soft when addressing a 2007 shoving match in a Los Angeles restaurant with cover model and “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” pitch man Fabio. Clooney had asked a member of Fabio’s party to refrain from taking his picture. But Fabio insisted he was merely hosting a charity event when a drunken Clooney flipped the bird and insulted Fabio’s female guests.
“He has no class,” Fabio huffed to OK magazine. “You have to be a low-class scumbag to start calling a woman a name. If you’re a man, you should never. You should be a gentleman. These women were with me and as a man I defend them. He was lucky he ran out of the restaurant. He’s not even half a man.”
Clooney agreed the Italian-born model and romance novelist could beat him up.
“Yeah, that’s probably true,” said Clooney. “He’s a big guy.”
Before his TV success, Clooney was married from 1989 to 1993 to actress Talia Balsam. More recently he’s developed a reputation as a consummate bachelor. Nicole Kidman and Michelle Pfeiffer once bet him $10,000 that he’d have kids by age forty. But when he hit forty-one and still had failed to reproduce, Clooney confessed, Kidman sent him a big check. But the star sent it back, betting double or nothing he’d be childless by age fifty.
And why not? At a glitzy 2007 Hollywood AIDS benefit, Sharon Stone put Clooney on the auction block along with his Ocean’s Thirteen co-stars Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Andy Garcia and Ellen Barkin, with the high bidder winning a kiss from the bachelor of his or her choice. Sorry, Matt, Andy, Don and Ellen, there never was any contest. Some bazillionaire bid $350,000 to watch Clooney kiss his girlfriend on the mouth, proving that the “celebrity list” is alive and well. When you’re the sexiest mammal alive, kisses don’t come cheap or private.
He has held on tightly to his confirmed bachelorhood. Standing next to girlfriend Sarah Larson in New York in 2007, he said, “I’m never at home and every woman gets sick of it. If I was them, I wouldn’t put up with me for too long.”
BUT IT WAS CLOONEY who didn’t put up with Larson for long. After a year of togetherness, he dumped the former cocktail waitress in May 2008, leaving his Los Angeles mansion for a time so Larson, twenty-nine, could gather her stuff. “George is relieved to be single again,” a friend of Clooney’s reportedly said. “He thinks Sarah is sweet [yee-ouch!] and that is why it is so hard to break up with her.” Larson was said to be completely devastated. Clooney had just celebrated his forty-seventh birthday with her. She was his Oscars date. She thought he was about to propose marriage. Instead, those pesky gay rumors returned, full-force.
Twice voted People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” Clooney is a former TV heartthrob (he catapulted to stardom playing hunky Dr. Doug Ross in ER) who clawed his way to the top of the celebrity acting game with his deadpan delivery, full head of hair and air of inaccessibility. But somewhere along the line, Clooney translated his public adulation into an annoying willingness to express whatever offensive or inane liberal patter crosses his graying head.
“I’m going to keep saying ‘liberal’ as loud as I can and as often as I can,” Clooney told Newsweek magazine. Somehow, he was talking about his film Good Night, and Good Luck.
Clooney does a pretty good impersonation of a guy who doesn’t care about dough (he earned a paltry $350,000 and a best-supporting actor Oscar for Syriana). But then he rakes in $10 million, $15 million, even $20 million for a mainstream flick that pays for his money-losing political diatribes. As he’s risen in prominence, and, unbelievably, influence—some folks have urged him to run for office in his native Kentucky—Clooney has come down with an acute case of Clooney’s Disease, a disorder that occurs when actors begin to believe their own hype.
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Clooney has come down with an acute case of Clooney’s Disease, a disorder that occurs when actors begin to believe their own hype. The afflicted are deluded into thinking fame makes them smarter and their opinions more important than those of ordinary mortals.
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The afflicted are deluded into thinking fame makes them smarter and their opinions more important than those of ordinary mortals. In 2003, as Clooney received a special filmmaking achievement award from the National Board of Reviews, he joked, cruelly, “Charleston Heston announced again today that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s.” Turns out Clooney is active in gun control, but what that has to do with a filmmaking award exists only in his frazzled head. Clooney defended his remark to columnist Liz Smith. “I don’t care. Charlton Heston is the head of the National Rifle Association. He deserves what anyone says about him.”
Replied Heston, “It just goes to show that sometimes class does skip a generation,” referring to Clooney’s elegant late aunt, Rosemary Clooney.
Perhaps Clooney thought he was too cute to be an idiot, a theme that crops up repeatedly in his life and work. But George Clooney proved something unintentional with the Heston remark: Good-looking people, even more than Alzheimer’s patients, have an inverse ability to be stupendously dumb.
George Timothy Clooney was born May 6, 1961, in Lexington, Kentucky, to Nick Clooney, a journalist, TV anchorman, game show host, host of TV’s American Movie Classics, and failed Democratic congressional candidate, and Nina Bruce, a former beauty pageant queen. His cousins include actor Miguel Ferrer, the son of Rosemary and Jose Ferrer.
“I spent the first part of my life being referred to as Rosemary Clooney’s brother, and now I am spending the last part of my life being referred to as George Clooney’s dad,” his father famously said, with a touch of bitterness.
Clooney attended Northern Kentucky University and briefly the University of Cincinnati, but did not graduate. I sense a trend—why do those with the silliest, loudest mouths tend to be the least educated? He turned to acting only after he failed a tryout with the Cincinnati Reds.
While still appearing on ER, Clooney began starring in feature films. These included 1997’s Batman and Robin, in which he played the conflicted bat, a role he said he hated. He told Barbara Walters that, in his rubber suit and pert nipples, he also played Batman gay.
It seems Clooney quickly forgot that, as a struggling, young actor living under Aunt Rosemary’s roof, he couldn’t get arrested to get his picture taken by that breed of photographer known as paparazzi. Or “stalkerazzi,” as he called some of the most aggressive shutterbugs. Once a star in 1996, he organized a boycott by fellow celebs of Entertainment Tonight because its parent company owned Hard Copy, which he considered the worst invader of celebrity privacy.
Clooney objected to photographers (A) yelling comments such as “Who’s the fat chick?” about a woman he was with to get his reaction, and (B) shooting over the top of his stall in a men’s room, which happened in Australia. In that incident, Clooney grabbed the peeping shooter’s film from his camera, which prompted police to begin an investigation into Clooney’s alleged photographic assault. But the probe was dropped once cops saw the pictures, which Clooney then destroyed. The episode leaves me wondering what Clooney found so objectionable about the sight of his presumably naked body in the loo.
A year later, Princess Diana was killed, and Clooney, loudly and unfairly, blamed the photographers who chased her into a Paris tunnel. His criticism grew so shrill that those who make their living bringing Clooney fame and fortune had enough of his whining. At the New York premiere of his film, The Peacemaker, photographers stood quietly together, put down their cameras, and refused to shoot.
After Diana’s death, Steve Coz, editor of the National Enquirer, called for all tabloids to boycott “motorcycle paparazzi”—the breed that chases its prey from the backs of bikes. Oddly, despite the unprecedented self-censorship, Clooney singled out Coz for condemnation. “The Princess of Wales is dead, and you [Coz] have gone on television, and you have washed your hands, and you have deflected responsibility, and yet I wonder how you sleep at night. You sho
uld be ashamed.” Perhaps Clooney failed to actually read the loathed tabloids.
But in 2005, Clooney suddenly came out against anti-celebrity stalking laws championed by fellow thespians such as Reese Witherspoon.
“These guys can be real jerks, these paparazzi, they’re not trying to catch me doing something stupid, which I’ll have to take hits for—they’re trying to create you doing something stupid. They walk through the airport and go, ‘Who’s that fat chick you’re with?’
“I’ll take all of those hits in lieu of trying to restrict it, because the dangers of restricting it, or getting into those dangers, [is] like burning the first book. I get that they do some rotten things…It’s a drag for me…[But] as a guy who believes in the free press, I think that some of these hits we have to take in order to not mess with freedom of speech.”
After Clooney and Sarah Larson were injured in a 2007 motorcycle accident in New Jersey, more than two-dozen hospital staffers were suspended for peeking at his medical records. But Clooney, undergoing a change of heart over invasions of privacy, said they should not be punished.
Mr. Free Speech must have been terribly disappointed when DNA evidence was presented in the case of Diana’s death. It was final proof that Diana was killed not by the hated shutterbugs, but by her alcohol and pill-popping driver, Henri Paul.
Clooney quickly switched his political blathering from photographers to liberal politics. As was evident with his Charlton Heston comments, he simply did not care, or did not recognize, how offensive, or even hurtful, his words can sound.
“What did Bush do on 9/11? He ran away and hid,” he told Britain’s left-leaning Guardian newspaper. “Even Reagan knew more about leadership than that, and he was as bad a symbol of America as I can think of, off-hand. But at least he’s been in enough cowboy movies to know he had to come out and stand on top of the rubble and be seen shaking his fist or something.”
He went on, “They tell us we’re going to war and no one’s saying ‘Bullsh*t’ loud enough. And the language! Listen to the language! ‘Evil.’ ‘Evil’? ‘Nexus of evil’?,” Clooney said, mangling the phrase, “axis of evil.”
“‘Evil-doer’? That’s my favorite, ‘evil-doer’! What’s wrong with their vocabulary: couldn’t they come up with ‘schmuck’?” railed Clooney.
Clooney told GQ magazine that he keeps a photo of his fellow celebutard, ex-President Jimmy Carter, visiting the ER set on display in his bathroom. He also thinks Mario Cuomo should be president, and compared Newt Gingrich to a dinosaur. “The man has no arms,” he laughed.
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Clooney told GQ magazine that he keeps a photo of his fellow celebutard, ex-President Jimmy Carter, visiting the ER set on display in his bathroom.
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“The problem is we elected a manager, and we need a leader,” Clooney told the magazine. “Let’s face it: Bush is just dim.”
Pot, kettle? One who demonstrates his own dimness so promiscuously probably should avoid such terms. But I’d never sleep if I allowed myself to take regular offense at the ravings of celebutards. And yet, it’s hard to gloss over this classic Clooneyism, which he spilled to German TV: “You can’t beat your enemy anymore through wars; instead you create an entire generation of people revenge-seeking. These days, it only matters who’s in charge. Right now that’s us—for a while at least. Our opponents are going to resort to car bombs and suicide attacks because they have no other way to win.”
Did I read that right? Is Clooney suggesting that we and our allies simply stop defending ourselves, so as not to encourage “revenge-seeking”? With these words, Clooney mindlessly excuses the dastardly work of suicide bombers and terrorists, while making us into the bad guys. He grandly espouses what’s known as a “rape mentality”—a way of thinking that says, “If you attack me, it’s my fault!”
Clooney has brought his lack of intellectual seriousness into such labors of love as Good Night and Good Luck, which received generally glowing reviews and bagged six Oscar nominations, including one for best picture and best director, but won nothing on Oscar night. His story that lionizes TV journalist Edward R. Murrow as the guy who took down Commie hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy is historically flawed. In fact, Murrow was decidedly late to the dump-McCarthy party. See how Jack Shafer of Slate eviscerated Clooney’s movie: “If Jesus Christ no longer satisfies your desire to worship a man as God, I suggest you buy a ticket for Good Night and Good Luck, the new movie about legendary CBS News broadcaster Edward R. Murrow…. Of course, Murrow was no god. Point of fact, he shouldn’t be regarded as the patron saint of broadcast news his fans, among them Good Night and Good Luck director George Clooney, make him out to be.”
And then there’s Syriana. That movie takes a book about an attempt by an assassin, played by Clooney, to kill Saddam Hussein—inarguably a very bad man—and changes it into a story about Clooney’s attempt to knock off a liberal prince. A good man.
With its confusing plot concentrating on the evil United States government and greedy, amoral oil companies, columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized the movie’s distinctly anti-American views. “Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction,” he wrote.
Perhaps Clooney should limit his activism to saving Darfur, a movement he brought to prominence on Oprah Winfrey’s TV talk show.
But this is not the last we have heard from Clooney, who fully intends to continue making political balderdash—interspersed with money-making movies.
Do I think George Clooney is the sexiest man alive?
As a straight woman with a healthy appetite for handsome men, but an even stronger hunger for thinking for myself, I find the dashing Mr. Clooney highly resistible.
5
They Put the Bull in Durham
SUSAN SARANDON and TIM ROBBINS
You’re so lucky in Ireland, England, and Spain. Everyone there already knows what it’s like to have inexplicable terrorist violence.
—Susan Sarandon, on the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
When I visit Susan I tread on eggs…. I was sitting at the breakfast table with Jack Henry, my then-thirteen-year-old grandson, and he looked over at me with the sweetest little smile on his face and said, ‘I hear you voted for Bush.’…And I thought, ‘I’m not going to discuss my politics with a thirteen-year-old who has been brainwashed!’
—Susan’s mother Lenora Tomalin to the Washington Post, March 2003
If you ever write about my family again, I will [bleeping] find you and I will [bleeping] hurt you.
—Tim Robbins to the Washington Post, March 2003
BEWARE THE PACIFISTS.
From the dawn of their unmarried union in 1988, actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have presented themselves as better informed and made of higher moral fiber than not only the public and, naturally, the government, but blood relatives and friends. As long as leftist causes have existed, the pair has been in the forefront, opposing the death penalty, approving of gay rights, of ending wars, and freeing cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. You might ask how this activity distinguishes them from the countless, mindless celebutards dotting the landscape. It doesn’t. But when they speak, the Robbins/Sarandons employ a grating urgency that says, “Shut up! We know better than you.” And Susan’s mom is a card-carrying Republican.
Something tells me national holidays must be gruesome affairs around the Robbins/Sarandon dinner table.
Susan Abigail Tomalin was born on October 4, 1946, the eldest of nine children of Lenora and Phillip Tomalin, an advertising executive, television producer and big band-era nightclub singer. The name Sarandon comes from the actress’s marriage to actor Chris Sarandon, which lasted from 1967 to 1979.
Timothy Francis Robbins followed Susan into the world twelve years later, on October 16, 1958, in West Covina, California, the son of Mary, an actress, and Gil Robbins, a musician and folk singer. Tim attended the State University of New York at Plattsburgh and finished studies at UCLA’s film school,
while Sarandon earned a bachelor of arts degree in drama from the Catholic University of America. Though the duo has never wed, their union has produced two sons, born in 1989 and 1992.
Early on, Sarandon was known for playing virginal Janet Weiss, who learns about bisexual lovemaking and naughty lingerie in the 1975 cult film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and for her groundbreaking onscreen sex scene with French actress Catherine Deneuve in the 1983 vampire flick, The Hunger.
But earnest activism would soon overshadow heavy breathing. Robbins’ and Sarandon’s public and private cause work can be traced at least as far back as the 1995 film Dead Man Walking. The anti-death penalty flick was directed by Robbins, and Susan won a best-actress Oscar starring as condemned convict Sean Penn’s nun and confessor, Sister Helen Prejean. But it was the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that unleashed the full fury of the Robbins/Sarandons.
In the tense days following, as most of America feared more attacks, President George W. Bush’s perhaps inartful declaration, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists,” was taken personally by the pair, who seemed more concerned with pacifying evil-doers than protecting our soil. They spoke out against the government to anyone who would listen. And then, something strange happened: Nothing.
The couple was geared up for a fight. But they did not find it. No goons came in the night to bop them on the noggin. No one locked them up, shut them up, or kept them under watch. The Hollywood sweethearts continued to find work and to prattle on, unmolested. In truth, they had little to whine about. But that didn’t stop them from claiming to be the victims of a vast conspiracy of censorship.