Ridiculous, Clooney said. He didn’t have that kind of money.

A few weeks later, the man lowered the price. This time, Clooney said what the hell—he bought it. He had never even been inside. He figured he’d have fun there for a year, then sell it at a profit. Next thing he knows, there he is sitting by the pool, alone, at his house in Italy. He looked out the window that first evening and saw a few construction workers walking home after work, orange vests, bellies sticking out, hard hats cocked on their heads. They pulled hunks off a loaf of bread and passed a bottle of wine as they walked, and they were singing.

Singing!

Clooney, who was making the leap from being pretty famous to being

Jacket, vest, and trousers by Huntsman; shirt by Turnbull & Asser; tie by Charvet.

A tented buffet is spread out on the lawn next to a table set for a dozen or so people—the incoming cousins and aunts and uncles. Clooney plays host, lifting the metal lids off the serving trays one at a time and announcing: “Okay, lemon pasta! Chicken and . . . chicken! And these tomatoes are from the garden.”

“And lucky for you, I didn’t cook any of it,” Amal says.

“Ella, Alexander!” Clooney shouts to the kids over on the grass. “If Mama cooks, what happens?”

In unison: “We all die!”

3:10 p.m.

He hunches over his plate on the coffee table, poking his fork in the air as he chews a tomato ravioli. He’s talking about his excellent head trip of a new film, Jay Kelly, in which he plays an aging movie star whose life might not be as great as he thinks it is.

Clooney’s parents are in their late eighties and early nineties, back home in Augusta, Kentucky. His dad still goes to the pub in the evening, gets some dinner, throws back a little whiskey. George and Amal are trying to figure if they can somehow get his folks here to Lake Como one last time—he thinks it would be the last time. There’s urgency there. He thinks it might have to be this year.

Is he handy? “I’m so handy,” Clooney says. He once made a fan belt from a pair of Amal’s stockings.

Home. Funny word. This place feels like a kind of home—Ella and Alexander will remember it that way, because the places we spend a few weeks in the summer occupy a disproportionate part of our memory. Los Angeles was home for a long time—now he just keeps an apartment there for work. France, that’s home now.

Clooney? He’s suspended between youth and age. His wife is forty-seven. His father’s ninety-one. His children are eight. Nick, his dad, was a TV news anchor and talk-show host in Cincinnati. Clooney thought about that as a career, but the work of it, the asking questions of others, didn’t much interest him, nor did being compared with his father, local celebrity Nick Clooney.

He worries about having kids who will forever be the children of famous parents. As he sometimes does in serious moments, he makes an unfunny point in a funny way. He says, “The only thing I feel lucky about is that I’m so much older that the idea that my son would be compared to me is pretty unlikely, because by the time he actually will have done anything, I’m gonna be gumming my bread.”

There’s a mountain here in Como, Mount Bisbino, elevation about 4,350 feet. Clooney bikes up it once every summer, “just to make sure I’m not too old.” He wears a baseball hat and trains his eyes on the road six feet in front of him.

Just get to that. Now just get to that. Now just get to that.

3:30 p.m.

The screaming from outside begins when he’s mid-sentence. Clooney is saying, “And the Democrats are gonna have to get their act together—”

That’s when the screaming starts. He doesn’t notice it, or maybe he does but it doesn’t occur to him that anything might be wrong, because what possible harm or fear could pierce the unrelenting happiness of this place? Giovanni, his avuncular director of security, is around, always on duty. Clooney is here in the guesthouse, sequestered from the picnic to do the interview for a couple hours. Two empty espresso cups sit on the ornate coffee table by his knee, and he’s got one sandaled foot crossed over the opposite leg. His toes are tan—all ten, intact and uniformly caramel colored. His thin, hairless, elegant ankles too. Tan. It’s weirdly hard to take your eyes off his tan ankles and toes.

This is what he is saying:

“I do believe we get through these things, and if you think back to the times that have been really bad in the country—we’ve had them. I think ’68 was as bad as we could have had. Every city in the United States was on fire and rioting, and the capital was surrounded by armed guards to protect themselves. We killed Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy that year. There was the Tet Offensive.”

We killed college students.