On a dreary overcast morning, George Clooney was nowhere to be found. His canary-colored mansion on Lake Como was only viewable from the water and we saw just one person on the terrace.
“That’s probably someone on the cleaning staff,” said our tour guide, as we zipped past the mansion in a small tourist skipper, the chilly wind against our scarf-clad faces, all six of us. Due to the cloud cover, the temperature felt barely above freezing.
We were present far outside the tourist season, when Clooney usually arrived. A few other boats lilted on the water, but there wasn’t much activity.
Our gazes remained on the mansion, which together with a tall cypress tree, a mix of laurels and broadleaf evergreens, cast a shimmering zig-zag pastiche of yellow and green reflections on the water, as if our group had sailed straight into an oil painting. With my phone, I snapped a dozen photos.
Clooney purchased the villa more than 20 years earlier. Back then, not many foreign celebrities gallivanted around these parts. He invested a few million to fix up the place and triggered a generation of sightseers. According to gossip from the locals, Clooney was now sick of people sneaking photos from the lake. I couldn’t blame him.
While others in our group swiveled their heads to scan the landscape surrounding Clooney’s home, I instead fixated on the reflections and gave thanks, not just for the sheer privilege of a business trip to Como, but also for shaking off the paparazzi impulse I once had, around 2010, when I saw photographers hounding Clooney’s then-partner while she waltzed out of LAX.
That was a different business trip, a different me.
Yet there on Lake Como, the memory came right back.
After returning from a long trip overseas and landing that day at LAX, I slumped at the back of an inter-terminal bus on a 90-degree afternoon. Hordes of sweaty passengers crammed their way through the doors, all struggling with various sizes of luggage. Everybody seemed miserable.
Out in front, on the road, we saw a woman stride confidently across the sun-baked asphalt, but with something draped over most of her head. A small mob of photographers encircled her as she walked, capturing images in rapid-fire fashion from every direction as she approached the garage. Unfazed, she ignored them all, not giving an inch.
After the woman disappeared, the paparazzi dispersed and a few of them boarded the bus. One sat next to me, spreading across two seats when he only needed one. A camera hung over his shoulder while he flipped through photos on a second camera.
“Who was it?” I asked him.
“George Clooney’s girlfriend,” he said, without looking up.
As the bus lurched its way forward through the mess of traffic, with sounds of shifting transmissions and horns outside, a toxic thought came to me. My travel writing career was circling the drain. I would never make any real money and I was going broke. I could land assignments that took me far away, but I rarely got to write anything interesting or elevate the stories of marginalized people the way I really wanted.
Watching the paparazzi, I thought, maybe I could do this. I could be one of these jerks. Get into the business for a few months, make a quick fortune peddling photos, then bail. Done.
After a few seconds, maybe a few minutes, the idea dissolved. Luckily. But for a brief spell, after witnessing those guys, I actually thought about it. I really did. In a life of bad decisions, that would have been a bad decision.
Now with killer shots of the reflections on Lake Como, I’d happily give away the photo on social media. My journalism career was still adrift, but I’d managed to plug the drain for a few more years. Thankfully, I never turned into one of those paparazzi creeps.
As we zoomed past the villa, the person on the terrace shuffled back into the building. I didn’t care either way if Clooney was around. I had my artsy photo of the water and I felt fantastic.
With the reflections now behind me, I turned around for one last glimpse of Clooney’s mansion. I heard the motor of the boat and nothing else but pure, pristine water rippling in the wind.
