It is good to be George Clooney

One of the reasons I’d like to write a novel is that it would improve my chances of getting a novel published, having a novel made into a movie, and having a novel made into a movie starring George Clooney. Maybe I should take the main character I have in mind and describe his as looking like George Clooney, rather than a cross between Denis Leary and Eamon deValera. That way, I might get to meet George Clooney. (I know enough Worcester guys already, so I think I can safely take a pass on Denis Leary. And Eamon deValera, well, he’s dead and I wouldn’t want to have met him, anyway. And George Clooney was an altar boy, so he is naturally qualified to play a priest, which is what the main character in my non-existent novel happens to be.)

George Clooney, George Clooney, George Clooney. Since the death of Paul Newman, George Clooney has to be the star who’s doing the best job aging. (I know he’s not that old, but he is closing in on sixty.) Oh, George Clooney will never quite have the macho sex-appeal Paul Newman, but he’s pretty darned good looking.

There’s always the possibility that he’s a jerk in real-life, but he seems like an okay enough guy to me. (Okay. If you google “George Clooney jerk” you do get over a half-million hits. But this proves nothing. After all, when you google “Maureen Rogers jerk”, you get over 58 million hits. These aren’t all that me-ish. One that comes up on page one is the obituary of Luther Rogers, who worked as a soda jerk, and had a daughter-in-law named Maureen. The George Clooney jerk ones I looked through were mostly people annoyed because he’s an out-there liberal. I don’t know. He seems to be nice enough to his parents and sister.)

Anyway, in addition to being a cutie-pie, and perhaps not a jerk, George Clooney is a big old movie star. And a big old movie producer. And he’s got two Academy Awards to prove it.

He’s rich. Plus he has lots of fabulous houses, including one on Lake Como – and who wouldn’t want a fabulous house on Lake Como?

As if this weren’t enough, he has an impossibly glam and accomplished wife – Amal -  and, most recently, twin babies.

So life, if you’re George Clooney, is pretty good.

And that pretty good life has just gotten even better.

It seems that a few years ago, he and a couple of his besties – one of who is Rande Gerber, whose personal fabulousness includes being married to Cindy Crawford – were hanging around drinking tequila in Mexico, where they’d just bought themselves fabulous.

There came a point where George said to me, ‘Why don’t we just make our own?’ ” Gerber told Entertainment Tonight. “It was never meant to be a business. . . . It started out just us drinking it for years, without anyone being able to buy a bottle.”

However, after a few years, the distillery that made the tequila raised questions.

“They said to us, we have a situation. In the past two years, we’ve sent you 1,000 bottles a year, so either you’re selling it or you’re drinking way too much. Either way, you need to get licensed and get legit for the situation.

“We didn’t want to stop drinking our own tequila,” Gerber said. (Source: Boston Globe)

I do wonder what these fellows did with 1,000 bottles of tequila a year. Surely, no one who looks as good and alive as George Clooney would be able to consume that much. But I’m sure that George Clooney has a lot of friends to gift. And, hey, after my unwritten novel about the priest gets made into the movie he stars in, I may well become one of them. Not that I want a bottle of tequila. I’m holding out for an invite to Lake Como and, personally, I don’t even care if George, Amal, and the kids are there. Although I wouldn’t mind some fashion tips from Amal if she could get beyond be tall, be thin, and be rich.

So, all of a sudden George Clooney is in the tequila business with Casamigos brand tequila. Which, all of a sudden, Diageo wants to acquire. Diageo has reportedly: 

…made an initial consideration of $700 million to be followed by a further potential $300 million based on a performance-linked earn-out over 10 years, according to Bloomberg News.

George’s cut could be about $250M, which is probably more than Paul Newman ever made from Newman’s Own spaghetti sauce, lemonade, and cookies. (Newman’s profits went to fund his charitable foundation, by the way. George Clooney, by the way, has a foundation of his own: The Clooney Foundation for Justice.)

Whatever the sale nets for Clooney, talk about icing on the cake of life.

Yep, it’s good to be George Clooney. Wonder how he’ll like Worcester when he comes to film on location?