Seeing my father, through my cousin George

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Every icon has a person living inside. It’s true of famous people, and true of everyday icons, too — the idealized figures against which we hold the real people we love. When iconography and reality press close enough to break the skin of one another, things can get uncanny quickly. And things got really uncanny for me when I saw "The Descendants."

One reason for this is that my cousin is George Clooney. He’s older than I am, old enough to have fathered me if he’d really had to (he would have been a high school junior, but, hey, our family’s from Kentucky). I tell you he’s older only because I don’t want you to get the false sense that we grew up together. Rather, I grew up watching him. I was 8 and 9 and 10, for example, when George was on "The Facts of Life" (and believed, as only an 8- and 9- and 10-year-old girl might, that this was a good career move for him).

Salon.com > Mical Darley

Seeing my father, through my cousin George