Well, there’s no turning back now. The bride has found her gown (or was photographed at an elite wedding dressmaker’s shop, anyway). A former mayor of Rome has been confirmed as the officiant. And the groom — a man famously tight-lipped about his personal life — is bucking all the secrecy standards of VIP nuptials to gush about his happy day.
“I will be marrying in Italy soon, in a couple of weeks — in Venice, of all places,” he announced at a gala in Florence on September 7. “To my bride-to-be, Amal, I love you very much, and I can’t wait to be your husband.”
If marriage is a leap of faith, then George Clooney is hurtling down the diving board at this moment, a split-second from his plunge.
In the next few days, according to numerous reports, the Oscar winner and legendary lady-killer, 53, will tie the knot with Amal Alamuddin, an accomplished 36-year-old human-rights lawyer and world-class beauty, after two decades as the most notorious bachelor on the planet.
Although the Clooney wedding feels like an epochal moment — a mighty Arctic shelf collapsing into the sea — this world has been thawing for some time now. Everyone has got married. The gays, sure, and Angelina Jolie, but more to the point, virtually every straight man you thought would never get married: the international playboys, the chronic modelisers, the zillionaire loners. Maybe even your ex-boyfriend. Maybe even yourself. Or did you miss the memo about it being time to grow up?
Justin Timberlake got married. Prince Albert of Monaco got married. Mark Zuckerberg — who still looks like a junior barista on his day off and not like anybody’s husband — got married, and so did his rakish fellow Facebook billionaire Sean Parker, who everyone thought was having too much fun to get married.
LeBron James got hitched, finally, to his high school sweetheart. Jerry Brown, California’s futon-sleeping, Linda Ronstadt-dating bachelor governor of the 1970s, woke up one morning in the new century and decided to make it official with his longtime sig-other. Now in his second go-round as governor, he has a first lady, and it still seems strange. Dwyane Wade really did go and marry Gabrielle Union this month.
Hilariously, both Matthew McConaughey and Adam Levine are married (to leggy supermodels, but still). Jeremy Renner, whose deal you could never quite figure out other than that he just reeked of single, acknowledged this week that he quietly married his baby’s mother some time ago.
Dig deep
These days, when Town & Country attempts a “50 most eligible bachelors” ranking, it’s forced to dig deep, padding out the list with peach-fuzzed Kennedy cousins you’ve never heard of. People magazine hands its “Hottest Bachelor” award to — who? The fifth-billed guy on that cancelled HBO series? (Joe Manganiello of True Blood.)
When they dynamite the cliffs for the Bachelor Mount Rushmore, who is left to take Clooney’s place alongside Prince Harry, Leo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson — Diddy? Owen Wilson? Bradley Cooper, for crying out loud? (We’d nominate Mike Bloomberg, but his girlfriend of many years probably wouldn’t approve.)
So, what makes a man enjoying a longtime unattached lifestyle give it all up in middle age? We couldn’t get Clooney on the line (busy week, you know) so we tried his friend and fellow globe-trotting humanitarian activist John Prendergast, who got married in 2011 at age 48 — one of several high-profile Washington bachelors to change their status recently. The Enough Project founder cut such a dashing figure in his single days that a freelance writer once followed him to Uganda under the pretence of doing a story, but secretly hoping she could score a date.
“For me, it was simple,” Prendergast wrote in an email. “I found the woman of my dreams” — law professor Sia Sanneh - “and I wasn’t gonna let her slip away.”
Hmpf. That’s what they all say. It’s somehow never a satisfactory answer.
Before Clooney, the reigning bachelor was John F. Kennedy Jr. When he wed Carolyn Bessette in 1996, after high-profile relationships with Darryl Hannah and Sarah Jessica Parker, the pop-culture shrinks tied themselves in knots over why her/why now? (Was she a wily Rules Girl who tantalised him with her aloofness? Did he need a wife so he could run for office?)
Before Kennedy, it was Bill Gates, who reportedly had a long line of conquests in the tech world before proposing to Microsoft employee Melinda French in 1993. Why her, Playboy asked? The World’s Richest Man uttered some words like “smart” and “independent” before saying: “She made me feel like getting married.”
And before Gates it was Warren Beatty, whose three decades as an international womaniser without parallel (Natalie Wood, Julie Christie, Joan Collins, Diane Keaton, Carly Simon, Madonna, etc., etc., etc.) left cultural critics so cynical they couldn’t comprehend his 1991 settling-down with Annette Bening: A publicity stunt for their movie Bugsy? Or an ambitious young actress latching onto a fading A-lister for the sake of her career?
Let the record reflect that, four children and nearly a quarter-century later, they are still together.
Everyone forgets this, but Clooney wasn’t always single. In 1989, when he was still a little-known supporting player from Roseanne and Facts of Life, he wed actress Talia Balsam.
Moment of clarity
But the marriage was over by the time he launched to fame on ER in 1994, and the single-guy mystique fed much of the Next Great Movie Star hype that surrounded him even before his movies started making any money. He was heralded for a gravitas (deep voice, heavy-lidded gaze, salt-and-peppering hair) that set him apart from all the baby-faced Matt Damon types of the day, but fawned over in the celebrity press for his endless-summer way of life: Motorcycle trips and zany pranks with the boys, the pot-bellied pig he kept as a pet, Rat-Packy weekends with Hollywood pals at his villa on Italy’s Lake Como — and of course, all the women.
Beatty may have had a longer run, but Clooney seemed to have it down to a science. Only a few of his girlfriends had fame of their own (Renee Zellweger); most were young, lovely, obscure. They cycled through his life with almost clocklike scheduling: A French law student, a British model, a Vegas cocktail waitress, an Italian TV personality, and finally, a former WWE vixen and Dancing with the Stars contestant, Baltimore-born Stacy Keibler, from whom he parted in summer 2013, just months before he was first seen out with Amal.
With options like that — well, no wonder he was in no hurry to get married, huh? But Mark Ein argues that we might be too quick to assume rich, successful bachelors skew commitment-phobic.
“Just because you’re not married,” said the Washington venture capitalist, who wed for the first time last fall at 48, to policy analyst Sally Stiebel, “doesn’t mean you don’t want to be married.”
Washington, the nation’s capital of overaged singles, has recently seen many of its VIP bachelors topple after good long runs: Ein, Prendergast, former Rep Patrick Kennedy and Mike Feldman, 45, the Al Gore adviser and PR guy who was something of a man-about-town until he connected with Today anchor Savannah Guthrie. The longtime host of a legendary late-night White House Correspondents after-after party, Feldman suddenly stopped the festivities a few years ago around the time he met a lady who had to be somewhere early in the morning. They wed in March and welcomed their first child last month.
Why did he stay single so long?
“You spend an awful lot of your formative years focused on what you’re doing for a living, focusing on yourself,” said Feldman. “For me, having spent eight years between 24 and 32 at the White House, there wasn’t room for a whole lot more…The years would pass and I would think, ‘I thought I would be married now.’ I wasn’t really disappointed by that. But you do think, where did those ten years go?”
And sure, there’s that moment of clarity, realising that it was time to grow up and get serious about relationships: “You realise that life is the thing that’s happening when you’re focused on what comes next,” said Feldman. But then? Finding the right woman (yes, that line again) might not be so easy, especially for driven high-achievers, applying the same standards to their relationships as their careers.
“It’s not that they don’t want to get married, but they want to find someone that’s right,” Ein said — which is how 40-year-old uber-bachelors suddenly find themselves 50-year-old uber-bachelors. “The longer you go, the less one year or another makes much difference.”
In Amal, we seem to have a textbook case of the Woman Worth Waiting For. Gorgeous, like the others, but with her own power base (a prominent Lebanese family), a dazzling pedigree (Oxford, NYU Law), a high-powered career (assignments to multiple UN commissions), sharing Clooney’s interest in international conflict-resolution and humanitarian work.
No wonder he chose her? Ha — maybe it’s better to ask why she chose him.
“It’s not just about finding your dream person,” noted Ein. “You have to mutually figure out if you are each other’s dream person. And that can take a while, too.”
