George Clooney in Esquire magazine ~ December 2013 Edition

He is fifty-two years old. He is wearing a black hoodie zipped to the neck, blue jeans, and boots laced so assertively they squeak when he flexes his ankles. He has a long neck, upon which his long head, adorned by long ears, wobbles like a tulip. Everything is to scale with him. Many people have long eyelashes; he has lashes as long on the bottom as they are on the top. His eyes look like they’ve been caught by Venus flytraps. He is going gray, yes, but if you took a population sample of his hair, there is no doubt that any analysis would reveal that the numbers of black and gray hairs are evenly distributed and have achieved equipoise. He has recently showered, and a careful modicum of product lifts his hair off his forehead. He has surprisingly fine hands. He smells like soap.

ginga wrote:I really loved the headline on the cover "whatever happens America, we'll always have Clooney"  . I thought it's great. that it captured the way I (and probably many others) feel

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Tom Junod on why celebrity profiles matter, even when they don't

Tom Junod’s dog died on Sept. 22.

This was a beloved family pet that the prolific magazine writer had had to put down, and it had taken something out of him.

But he was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles that night on assignment for Esquire. Figuring that there wasn’t much else to do at home, Junod got on the plane.

And so when he arrived at George Clooney’s Hollywood home, and Clooney told him the one about the time he rubbed himself down with turkey bacon to win over a rescue dog he hoped to adopt, Junod could be forgiven for being charmed. A couple of salty dogs talking about their dogs. Even later, when he was writing, and found out that this anecdote was a well-worn Clooney tale, the off-tackle sweep in the actor's magazine-interview playbook, Junod was still sufficiently attached to it to lead with it in the magazine’s December cover story as an example of, well, the star’s inborn need to charm.

“He has told this story before,” Junod wrote. “He has even told it to Esquire before.”

One wonders: Is there anything left to do with the magazine celebrity profile that hasn't been done? And especially these days, when what qualifies for full access to your celebrity story subject is increasingly slim, and, thanks to sales symbios, very little ever seems to be on the line for either the journalist or the subject. Does anyone, assigning editors included, have a right to hope that any writer at all can wring anything out of the form anymore?

Junod has some recent authority on the topic.

“It was kind of portrayed as, ‘OK you can come up with something about modern fame’ or whatever,” he said this week recalling editor David Granger’s idea that he spend a portion of the year interviewing three of the biggest male leads on the planet -- Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon -- for consecutive cover stories. Clooney was an end of the year value-add.

“I definitely did it with some hesitation,” said the two-time National Magazine Award winner and regular nominee. “When I went out to see Leonardo Dicaprio, I had it in my head that ‘OK. Statement on modern fame. Statement on modern fame.’ And then you know, you walk into the hotel conference room and you wait for the guy to come and you have two hours to talk to him and you’re like, ‘Oh wait a second. This is a...this is a celebrity profile.”

There was a time in the late 1990s when Junod cranked this sort of thing out regularly. He is particulary proud of a piece he wrote on Tony Curtis, then 70 years old and profane as ever, for GQ in 1996. In a 2001 piece on Michael Stipe, meant to be his swan song in the genre, Junod gleefully manufactured whole scenes -- fictitously placing the R.E.M. singer on a five-hour limo ride to the Hoover Dam and habitually eating granulated sugar. Granger ran it with his blessing, and a winking dek that read, in part, "...it's almost as if you have to make half the story up." The editor defended the piece during the inevitable controversy, citing the magazine's need to "amuse and entertain our audience."

Junod returned to the well for a 2007 cover story on Angelina Jolie that included an extensive riff on the nature of fame post Sept. 11. Writing on Slate that year, Ron Rosenbaum asked if it was the worst celebrity profile ever written. "I don't think, in some puritanical Trowvian way, that there's anything wrong with people being interested in celebrities," Rosenbaum wrote, referring to the late New Yorker writer George T.S. Trow. "There's just something condescending in the way certain magazines think they can put one over on the reader with these transparently insincere intellectual rationales for caring about celebs."

Junod laughed when he recalled that episode.

So, having returned for a few more months on Olympus and writing a collection of pieces that run nearly 26,000 words in total, did he find that there is anything left to do with the form?

“I don’t even know,” he laughed.“I’ve just written four of them and I can’t even really answer that question.”

“I’ve done everything you can possibly do except sleep with them,” Junod said later. He noted the Stipe piece and a story on the Atlanta hip hop mogul Jermaine Dupri that Junod constructed entirely in rhyme.

So what is the reader getting out of it at this point?

“It does not feel like you’re in a particularly privileged position when you’re in it, but if you tell people about, it certainly sounds like a privileged position to them,” he said. “‘Oh I spent three hours at George Clooney’s house.’ That’s not something that people shrug off. So I think in general that you probably shouldn’t shrug it off either. I think that what people want from celebrity profiles is a feeling of what it’s like to be in the room with Leo, Brad, Matt or George. If George is being charming, they want to be charmed.”

Maybe just make way for George, in other words. Junod said as much responding to a follow-up email.

"...a celebrity profile, if it’s any good, can be *delightful," he wrote. "That’s because the celebrities, themselves, are sometimes delightful. I mean, the people who have been complimenting me for the George Clooney piece are not complimenting me because I broke new ground, or even news; they’re complimenting me because for a half hour they felt themselves to be in Clooney’s company, and enjoyed themselves. Journalism doesn’t provide a lot of occasion for enjoyment, much less delight. Celebrity profiles sometimes do. That’s not reason enough to take them seriously; but it’s reason enough to do them, or, in my case, to do four in a row."

Junod demurred when asked what his next assignment was after all this.

But, a little later, he sent a DM on Twitter. He had neglected to point out that he had another article in the Clooney issue that was not yet online.

“It's not about celebrity,” he wrote. “It's about cancer. It's co-written, and it's unlike anything I've done before.”

party animal - not! wrote:Has it got a lake too?

"Because this man did not just appear on this earth with silver hair" George Clooney Through the Ages [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] via [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

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Nicky80 wrote:I love the interview. It was done very nice.
 
Don't know what I like most...when he talkes about intruders dressing up as trees it was funny or when the reporter wrote about his long eye lashes or that George smells like Soap LOL
 
It is mentioned that the interview was done one day after the memorial service from his uncle (Rosemary's husband) Didn't he die in July? Remember we head a thread about that. So he was at his side when he died. I thought he died alone in a hospitz. Interesting.
 
Interesteing that he said he didn't love his parents for a period of time. I guess we all had a time like that  
 
What I don't understand is this:
 
[b]He is the president of a club of famous people he doesn’t consider assholes, and he convenes it every time he makes a movie. He has made movies with Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Don Cheadle, Julia Roberts, and Cate Blanchett. He has never been in a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio or Russell Crowe.[/b]
 
Does he wanted to say Russel and Leo are assholes????
 
Yeah I got the same impression Ocean that George cared about that Leonardo has the wrong friends.
 
Really nice Interview to read.