Somebody Has to Be in Control.(George Clooney)(Brief biography)

George Clooney was at home in Los Angeles one afternoon in mid-January, a few days before he flew to Sudan in his new role as a United Nations "Messenger of Peace" (an appointment that overlooked reports of a recent public scuffle with Fabio, the leonine model). Clooney, who is unusual in being both very famous and, apparently, at ease with the fact--he can sometimes look like a spokesman for celebrity itself--was sitting on a long pale sofa, alongside Sarah Larson, his girlfriend. Bowls of chopped salad were on the coffee table in front of them: when Clooney's electronic pepper grinder was activated, it sent a beam of light shining down onto the lettuce, like a police helicopter.

It was the "for your consideration" season--the run-up to the Oscars, when film studios lobby for the votes of Academy members, using means of varying subtlety. For some days, Clooney had been driven here and there in the back of a black Mercedes, and his presence at promotional cocktail parties had served as an advertisement for "Michael Clayton," last year's chilly corruption drama, in which he starred. (The film went on to be nominated in seven categories, including Best Actor; it received one Oscar, for Tilda Swinton, in a supporting part.) I had seen Clooney that morning, still in the role of candidate, in front of a bright-pink curtain on the stage of a theatre at the Hammer Museum, in Westwood, taking part in an Oscar-related panel discussion about acting and filmmaking, with Angelina Jolie, Daniel Day-Lewis, James McAvoy, and others. The event, organized by Newsweek, was leisurely, designed to encourage a degree of selfanalysis, but Clooney (looking about as skinny as a young Sinatra, his sunglasses hooked over the opening of his collar) seemed to have set himself the task of resisting group drift toward actorly grandeur or celebrity griping. He was unremittingly affable. "We have time for one more question," he said, after taking his seat. He traded running jokes with McAvoy, and made mock-scornful comments about Day-Lewis's exalted reputation. ("You just kill it for the rest of us; we'll take care of you, pal.") He capped a conversation about paparazzi intrusions with a politic acknowledgment of the privileges of fame. His manner--nonchalance underpinned, it seemed, by vigilance and self-scrutiny--carried the suggestion that almost any divergence from banter was unforgivable artsy narcissism.

This is probably the performance for which Clooney, now forty-six, is still best known, even as he has become a Hollywood emperor, not to mention a left-leaning activist and a friend of Senator Barack Obama's. Clooney is America's national flirt, a pitchman on talk shows and red carpets who, against the background hum of the world's lust and envy, is lightly ironic, clever, and self-deprecating, with furrowed brow and bobbing head, and a gyration in the lower jaw suggesting something being moved around under his tongue. This busy charm--a man on his way out to a party, feeling pretty good about his hair--was profitably packaged in "Ocean's Eleven" and its two sequels, films that, more than anything, seemed to be oblique views of the A-list esprit de corps, real or imagined, that went into making them; they were fictions yearning to be "making of" documentaries. (Together, they earned more than a billion dollars.) And that charm was largely withheld, to effect, in the downbeat roles that Clooney took in "Syriana" and "Michael Clayton." There he played hurting, unanchored men. In both cases, he was assigned a romantic partner--played by Greta Scacchi and Jennifer Ehle, in turn--who was edited out of the movie, with Clooney's blessing. (Referring to his "Clayton" character--a back-room fixer in a New York law firm--Clooney explained to me, "If he's loved, then he has a buffer, and somehow it isn't as awful.")

If these roles revealed some private, mournful corner of Clooney's psyche, that corner has remained firmly private. In public, he has always seemed eager to please, even ebullient; and although his stardom has had an air of earlier, pre-therapeutic times--here is a man with a tidy small-town boyhood and a reported offscreen life of water-balloon fights and guys around the grill--some part of that eagerness has undermined the comparisons that are often made to another smoothie with a strong chin. There may be similarities between Clooney and Cary Grant, but the comparison falters at the level of physical movement. In one's memory of Grant, he leans back a little. Clooney leans forward. Clooney's masculinity is ambitious: he is a pickup artist, a flicker of locker-room towels. (Clooney, in 2005, speaking about suicide bombers: "But, really, who wants seventy virgins? I want eight pros.") Cary Grant once advised a young actor who hoped to emulate him to wear silk underwear; Clooney's appeal is less sleek and submerged--he is the fellow at the end of the bar, who, on a scale running from James Stewart to Jack Nicholson, has found an enviable midpoint of courteous roguishness.

I was introduced to Clooney after the panel discussion; his handshake became a shoulder squeeze, and he apologized for the thing taking so long. We got into his car. He was wearing jeans and a thin black sweater and high-laced black work boots. He looked tanned and a little worn, and my mind turned for a moment to "Leatherheads"--his latest film, a comedy about nineteen-twenties football, which he also directed--where it's sometimes hard to see where his face ends and his beautifully thin brown leather jacket begins. He had a headache, the legacy of a gruesome spinal injury incurred in 2004, while filming a torture scene for "Syriana." (He hit his head on a concrete floor; not long afterward, cerebrospinal fluid began to leak out of his nose.) His discomfort, which is fairly persistent, was today at the level of "eating ice cream too fast." The panel discussion had lasted two hours, but he kept talking anyway, in a quiet, dry voice--about a guest saying "Listen, you've got my vote" at a "Michael Clayton" Oscar party ("That's saying out loud what you were pretending wasn't happening," he told me, laughing), and a recent night out at a bar in Santa Monica after an award-giving event, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Javier Bardem, Benicio Del Toro, and Sean Penn, during which "we got hammered and we all came to the conclusion we wanted to be Javier Bardem." He then carefully made the point that none of his closest friends are movie stars. "There are people you spend a lot of time with, and people you enjoy seeing at the office party," he said--the office party, in this context, being the Venice Film Festival. Speaking of his "Ocean's" co-stars Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, he said, "Brad and I talk, and Matt and I talk, on a fairly regular basis--text each other, give each other shit." But, he continued, "I have my friends, nine guys for twenty-five years; they're the guys I see every Sunday."

We drove toward his house, which is on a steep, wooded lot in a prosperous but not quite movie-star neighborhood on the Valley side of the Hollywood Hills. It was a sunny Saturday, and as the car turned into Clooney's gated drive local residents were marching up the street toward the hiking trails at the top. He called out to Sarah Larson as he walked in; she was sitting in front of a laptop in the living room.

He bought this house in 1995, at the end of the first season of "E.R."--the kinetic NBC hospital drama that allowed him to become something more than Tony Danza--and he never upgraded to a full Beverly Hills mansion. One can regard that as restraint, but only after acknowledging the eighteenth-century villa he owns on the shores of Lake Como, in Italy, where he spends several months a year, and the cliff-top home under construction in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Clooney lived and worked elsewhere for much of last year, and, in that time, the L.A. house was largely remodelled by Rande Gerber, a longtime friend, who is the owner and operator of many fancy bars, and the husband of Cindy Crawford, the model. The result is not extravagant, but it carries the hint of a hotel steakhouse under bold new ...