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Clooney says he had words with Fabio alone and didn't argue with the women. "Not my style," he told Radar in an e-mail. Though the women are on record saying Clooney was speaking to them, the actor's dining partner that night, Ben Weiss, backs his account. "George never said anything to those women. He's not like that," vouched Weiss, who is a member of Clooney's inner circle, known as The Boys. "There is nobody nicer to people when they ask for photographs," he added, explaining that the middle finger came after Clooney endured flashbulbs throughout dinner. According to Weiss, it was only when Fabio "aggressively" took a seat at their table that Clooney pushed him and told him to "get the fuck out of here."

The big kiss-off is a Clooney trademark. He walked away from decent gigs on The Facts of Life, Roseanne, and even ER once he felt he'd outgrown themClooney may owe his sinking reputation, like so many pop cultural phenomena, to South Park. Ironically, he was a friend of the show and a longtime fan. Back in 1997, he personally called up creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to offer his services. He wound up in one of the first episodes, playing Stan's gay dog, Sparky. He also took part in Bigger, Longer & Uncut. But Parker and Stone know a plump target when they see one: They parodied the actor in Team America: World Police, and pounced again after Clooney's 2006 Oscar acceptance speech for Syriana. "We are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while," the actor proclaimed. "I think it's probably a good thing. We're the ones who talked about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular."

In the 2006 South Park episode, the speech gives rise to a cloud of smugness that, combined with the emissions of hybrid cars, ultimately endangers the nation. It is, says a local weatherman, "the perfect storm of self-satisfaction."

George Clooney was born (grinning, no doubt) on May 6, 1961, in Lexington, Kentucky, the second child of a beauty queen mother, Nina, and newscaster father, Nick. Pop, it seems, was a bit of a renegade, always making trouble by standing up for his beliefs, and George seems to have modeled his own righteous stances, consciously or not, on his father's. As children, George and his sister, Ada, were fixtures around the news desk, where George picked up a taste for the spotlight. In 1982, he drove to Hollywood in what he called the "Danger Car," with a mere $300 in his pocket, according to Kimberly Potts' biography. The family was uneasy about his decision, especially Nick, who had made his own go at showbiz and come up empty. It didn't help that George's aunt, singer Rosemary Clooney, had become a star only to fall from fame into the depths of drug addiction and severe depression following her divorce from Oscar-winning actor José Ferrer. But when, by the grace of God, Clooney's rusted Monte Carlo made it to Los Angeles, it was in the driveway of Aunt Rosemary that its cargo was unloaded. According to Clooney legend—he's told the story so many times it must be true—Rosemary couldn't stand to have the unsightly car around, so young George was made to bicycle to auditions.

He was, from the outset, relentlessly ambitious. "Actors go into auditions thinking, 'Oh God, they're going to hate me,'" Clooney told Playboy in July 2000. "I started to come in selling confidence, not even selling my acting skills. The best actor never gets the job. ... Never."

The strategy began paying dividends when Clooney landed the part of a hunky handyman on The Facts of Life, and then the cocky boss on Roseanne. He also starred in an impressive number of failed shows before finally nabbing his first starring role, on ER, in 1994. Along the way, he became known for his collegiality and good humor on the set—he was a lovable cut-up whose practical jokes put everyone at ease. One favorite gag involved Clooney secretly borrowing a colleague's camera and photographing his own backside, then waiting for the howls of laughter when the pictures were developed.

Despite his hijinks, Clooney became known as a mensch who would display real moral grit when the right situation presented itself. In 1991, he was cast to play the male lead in the short-lived sitcom Baby Talk (based on the John Travolta film Look Who's Talking), which was being produced by the legendary writer/producer Ed Weinberger (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, The Cosby Show). The story goes that Weinberger was a tyrant to the cast and crew, and after he fired an actress without warning, Clooney snapped.

"Ed, that's enough. You don't pull that shit," Clooney told him, according to Andy Dougan's book The Biography of George Clooney. In Weinberger's account to the New York Times, though, it went down a bit differently: Clooney had bristled at the firing of the actress, according to the producer, but the last straw had come later when the twin babies had to be replaced.

"The audience hated those first babies," Weinberger said. "We had to get cuter ones. The babies didn't know they were being fired. But George blamed me."

"I remember him calling up and saying Weinberger warned him he'd never work in that town again," Nick Clooney told the Times, "and he said, 'Pop, maybe he means it.'"

Is it possible Clooney simply thought the show stunk, and saw a golden opportunity to walk? Perhaps, but the actor marks the incident as a turning point in his life, the moment he learned to champion the underdog, whatever the cost. "I think that's when I grew up," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. "I believed I was ending my career. ... I was living in a house I couldn't afford. ... I had a bleeding ulcer, and I was putting on weight. Everything was kind of colliding at once. And I thought, If I'm a man, if I'm a guy, I have to draw a line here. And from that point on, I was fearless."

The big kiss-off is something of a Clooney trademark. He walked away from decent gigs on The Facts of Life and later Roseanne once he felt he'd outgrown them. Even a starring role on TV's highest-rated show couldn't contain him; he famously bowed out of the show immediately after completing his five-year contract.

It's ironic that what are to many observers Clooney's most appealing qualities—his bad-boy penchant for practical jokes and his sense of moral indignation—seem to have curdled as his star has risen. Certainly he wouldn't be the first celebrity to find his winning personality warped by the pressures and perquisites of fame. It was widely felt that Clooney's self-righteousness got the better of him, for instance, during his infamous 2002 dispute with his longtime agent at CAA, Michael Gruber. The conflict involved Clooney's purchase of Villa Oleandra, on the shore of Lake Como. Gruber, who helped steer the actor from prime-time television to his first blockbuster hit, The Perfect Storm, introduced the sellers to Clooney, and contemplated pocketing a $250,000 finder's fee for his efforts. "I introduced friends to George," Gruber later told Variety. "While a finder's fee was discussed, and disclosed to Clooney, it was never expected, and it was never received."

When Clooney heard about the proposed payment, he went ballistic, apparently making such an issue over the incident that Gruber was forced to leave CAA. "He ruined that guy in this town," claims a well-placed source with a major talent agency. "Maybe Gruber was an idiot to try it, but get over it! Change agents, move on! It's enough that he lost his job. But that wasn't enough for George. He just had to ruin his career. He had to kill him." (Clooney declined to comment.)

Before running afoul of Clooney, Gruber repped the likes of Brett Ratner and Ice Cube. After a brief return to agency work at ICM in 2005, he's currently working in the nightclub business.

"George has a whopping temper. I mean volcanic," asserts a well-placed studio executive who has worked with Clooney in the past, adding that alcohol often helps bring out the beast in him.The executive points to Clooney's dustup with Good Night, and Good Luck producer Simon Franks at an afterparty for the film's London premiere at the Floridita nightclub on November 3, 2005.

"Depending on who you believe," says the studio exec, who spoke with a number of witnesses to the event, "it was either that Simon Franks was trying to pick up Clooney's girlfriend, or that Clooney was mad because he went outside to get his limo in the back alley and it wasn't there, or that somebody just looked at somebody the wrong way and he went off. It was a late-night—maybe not a brawl—but a good, solid fistfight."

Various accounts of the fight were reported in the UK tabloids, most of which pegged Clooney as the aggressor.

"George was livid and trying to knock the living daylights out of the other guy," a witness told the London Sun. Clooney's publicist, Stan Rosenfield, explained things this way: It had "to do with someone being unkind to a woman. No punches were thrown, [but] George told the person to knock it off."

Clooney himself released a statement the following day, declaring, "I won't stand by while someone is being insulted and maligned."

Whatever the truth, the event apparently so rankled Clooney that three months later, he was still holding a grudge, according to the Daily Telegraph, which claimed the actor had Franks barred from Harvey Weinstein's glitzy BAFTA party at London nightclub The Hospital.



This article is from the March issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here