George Clooney: The Last Movie Star

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It's becoming clear to me already that somehow this guy, even in my house, really is a movie star. Maybe the only one we have now. There are plenty of huge box-office draws (Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Johnny Depp) and even more famous celebrities (Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lopez, Lindsay Lohan), but no one besides Clooney is so gracefully both. After an actor achieves media saturation, there's actually an inverse relation between fame and box-office receipts: people aren't going to pay for what they can get for free. "There are so many media outlets and this enormous suck on information about you, it's hard to maintain any kind of aura of specialness and mystery about the work itself, which is trying to be other people," says director Tony Gilroy. "It was a lot easier to be Bill Holden than it is to be George Clooney." Or as Clooney says, "Clark Gable wouldn't have been Clark Gable if there was Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight."

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His strategy for being a movie star is pretty simple, if counterintuitive: he makes fun of himself. It's the by-product of every successful person's strategy, which is to figure out what the other person is thinking. "Before they could kill me on Batman & Robin, I said, 'It's a bad film, and I'm the worst thing in it.' You try to defend an indefensible position, you'll look like a schmuck. The guys I dig don't do that. Look at Winston Churchill. He said, 'These are our shortcomings. Now let's get past it,'" Clooney says. He thinks that's all Cruise needs to do. "I talked to him the other day, and he's a good egg. There's nothing self-serving about what he's saying. He has to turn it into a way to make fun of himself."

Clooney also preempts situations that might earn him ridicule later. So he has either turned down every gift bag he's been offered or has put them up on eBay for charity. "I've been smart about that. Rich famous people getting free s___ looks bad. You look greedy. And I don't need a cell phone with sparkles on it," he says. He sends handwritten apology letters to the directors whose scenes he ripped off in the movies he directed—Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet, Sydney Pollack. He drives an electric car and a Lexus hybrid but won't be a spokesman for the environment because he flies a private jet. He feels passionately about Barack Obama but refuses his pleas to campaign for him—other than an introduction in late February in Cincinnati, Ohio—because he doesn't want it to backfire into a Hollywood-vs.-the-heartland attack. And he downplays and occasionally jokes about his problems, which include a bad back and some short-term memory loss he sustained when working on Syriana, quiet. "I know what pisses people off about fame," Clooney says. "It's when famous people whine about it."

It may look as if he is an effortless movie star, but he has actually given the job a lot of thought. He's not manipulative, but he is calculating, following the rules he learned from his family. When his aunt Rosemary Clooney went from being on the cover of this magazine to seeing her fame burst because musical tastes changed, she battled depression and took pills for much of her life. He knows random luck will eventually take fame away, just as random luck made him a star. If NBC had put ER on Fridays instead of Thursdays, I might have had Jonathan Silverman over for dinner. And while Clooney didn't get famous until his 30s, when ER hit, he had kind of always been famous because of his dad, a popular news anchor in Cincinnati. "From the moment I was born, I was watched by other people. I was taught to use the right fork. I was groomed for that in a weird way," Clooney says. "You give enough. You play completely. You don't say, I don't talk about my personal life. People say they won't talk about their personal life. And then they do. And even when the tabloids say really crappy things and it pisses you off and you know it's not true, you have to at least publicly have a sense of humor about it."