Marc Maron had George Clooney on his podcast not too long ago and tried to ask Clooney about being the movie-star-style leading man, like a Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart—actors who are always kind of the same in each role. Clooney says he is always still Clooney-ish in his roles because he lacks the talent to lose himself in a character. Clooney's humility, which Maron called out as bullshit, often produced unsatisfying conversation. (But how do you describe star quality? A star is born.) The unsatisfying interview moved me to reread Truman Capote's short sketch of Humphrey Bogart.
If one listens attentively to any man’s vocabulary, it will be noticed that certain key-to-character words recur. With Bogart, whose pungent personal thesaurus was by and large unspeakably unprintable, “bum” and “professional” were two such verbal signposts. A most moral—by a bit exaggerating you might say “prim”—man, he employed “professional” as a platinum medal to be distributed among persons whose behavior he sanctioned; “bum,” the reverse of an accolade, conveyed, when spoken by him, almost scarifying displeasure. “My old man,” he once remarked of his father, who had been a reputable New York doctor, “died ten thousand dollars in debt, and I had to pay off every cent. A guy who doesn’t leave his wife and kids provided for, he’s a bum.” Bums, too, were guys who cheated on their wives, cheated on their taxes, and all whiners, gossipists, most politicians, most writers, women who Drank, women who were scornful of men who Drank; but the bum true-blue was any fellow who shirked his job, was not, in meticulous style, a “pro” in his work. God knows he was. Never mind that he might play poker until dawn and swallow a brandy before breakfast; he was always on time on the set, in make-up and letter-perfect in his part (forever the same part, to be sure, still there is nothing more difficult to interestingly sustain than repetition). No, there was never a mite of bum-hokum about Bogart; he was an actor without theories (well, one: that he should be highly paid), without temper but not without temperament; and because he understood that discipline was the better part of artistic survival, he lasted, he left his mark.
