“Want anything? Quaaludes? Acid?” he jokes. His office is decorated with a bike, a putter, votive candles, and framed pictures of himself on magazine covers. “People sent me those,” he explains.
“Where are you from?” he wants to know, and the topic turns to Maysville and his aunt Rosemary. It was from her that he learned his first lesson about fame at the age of seven, when she went from being the hottest thing going to not, and ended up in a mental hospital. His uncle George, his namesake and favorite relative, who taught him about class and style. Uncle George was a roguish, dashing guy with an alcohol addiction who dated all the beauties in Kentucky but never married, regaled little George with stories of his days as a bomber pilot in World War II, and on his deathbed, looked up at his nephew and summed up his life: “What a waste,” he said, then passed away.
Maysville, says Clooney, is where the Clooneys get buried. “We’re all buried in the Maysville cemetery.” But he says he won’t be. “I don’t like the idea of being in the ground somewhere for people to come by.… I want to get cremated. Sprinkled over somebody’s omelet or something. The ultimate final prank.”
In fact he spent his formative years not in Maysville but fifteen miles down the river in Augusta, an even smaller town (population 1,400), where his family moved when he was thirteen, and where his parents still live in the same house. Until then, he lived in five different cities in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, as his father moved from job to job.
Clooney’s father, Nick, was, and is, his role model. A man whom Clooney once described as “the Johnny Carson of Cincinnati,” who made his career in live TV. (And still works, at 66, as a radio-show host in Cincinnati.) “My father was as big as you can be in a local market.” He was a TV journalist, the host of numerous shows, and a man who would quit his job and move his family before he would let himself be compromised by some snot-nosed TV executive. Clooney was raised with the belief that you do the right thing, no matter what the cost. Sometimes, when his father quit a job on principle, they’d end up moving from “a mansion to a trailer—literally, a trailer.” But Nick would always end up back on top again.
Clooney’s mother, Nina, a runner-up in the Miss Kentucky pageant of 1959, met her husband when he was emceeing the Miss Lexington contest. He was 24; she was nineteen.
When George was thirteen, his family settled in Augusta. A few months later, he got Bell’s palsy, a disorder with strokelike symptoms. The left side of his face became paralyzed. “It scared the hell out of me,” says Clooney, 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, about Lou Gehrig and his struggle with the disease that came to be named for him. Clooney sobbed as the bat fell out of Gary Cooper’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.” Then they went to Frisch’s Big Boy, as they always did after Mass, 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.”
