Every Thursday night at 10, another dizzying half-dozen gurney loads of broken patients come banging through the doors on ER, and it's usually not long before George Clooney appears as Dr. Doug Ross to bark out the show's trademark heavy-duty medication orders like some kind of scrub-suited bartender: Atropine! Dopamine! Adenosine, six milligrams IV push! Three hundred cc's saline! Throat swab! Stat!

But on this Wednesday morning, as sunshine permeates the multi-windowed living room of Clooney's expansive new Tudor-style home in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley, TV's reigning hunky, hard-drinking physician is healing himself. Never mind the unpronounceable chemicals--the actor's chosen remedies are more holistic than high-tech.

"Me and my herbs now," he says, unzipping a tidy little pale-green travel case. Out come two neatly stacked rows of eight multicolored vials, from which he shakes tablets in rapid succession. Rattle, gulp, rattle, gulp--he swallows enough herbal remedies to give Dr. Ross' once-suicidal ex-squeeze, Carol Hathaway, an OD flashback.

"I grew up with a very meat-and-potatoes kind of upbringing in Kentucky, so I'm not Mr. Hocus-Pocus," Clooney explains, watching for his listener's reaction as he does that head-down, eyebrows-up thing that's so familiar from TV. He seems at once courtly and cagey, fine-tuning his welcome-to-my-world patter depending on how he judges it to be going over. "I don't believe in ESP, or ghosts, or--gulp--you know, literally anything. I tried acupuncturists to get rid of things, and it didn't work. Don't believe in--mmmph--chiropractors, either."

Settling into an overstuffed couch, Clooney, 34, looks slighter and more hunched in person, clad in black T-shirt and jeans, than he does in ER's green scrubs. But even at rest, he's got the coiled bearing of an ex-athlete--which in fact he is, having failed to win his dream slot as a center fielder for the Cincinnati Reds in his late teens. And if there were ever a Super Bowl of acting, George Clooney would be the second-string quarterback who, pretty late in the big game, accidentally gets the football and figures he's got exactly one chance to get it aaaaaall the way down the field.

"So anyway," he resumes, "I went to this guy who does herbs and he looked in my eyes and told me what I'd had wrong with me over the years. Okay, I was a little bit impressed by that. Then he gave me these herbs and about three months later I got rid of an ulcer I had for two years. I figure, Good enough, I'm a believer."

Of course, Clooney's herbalist may simply have caught his client at a felicitous moment. After all, ER's status as television's No. 1 show has made him the white-hot TV performer of the moment and paved the way for a burgeoning film career; Clooney's brief stop at home comes just a week before the nationwide opening of his new movie, Miramax's jailbreak-road-trip flick-cum-vampire thriller, From Dusk Till Dawn.

That's good enough news to soothe anybody's gastric juices, but it's only the beginning, it seems. Even as he's up to his stethoscope in script pages for ER, he's just signed for two more films to shoot during his series hiatus. He'll reportedly pull down $3 million to play opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in One Fine Day, a single-parent romantic comedy. And by all accounts, he'll receive about the same amount to anchor DreamWorks SKG's The Peacemaker, an action spectacle in which he'll chase black-market nuclear materials around the globe. Steven Spielberg himself made the pitch. "He sent me a note," says Clooney, grinning. "It said, 'This is our first project at DreamWorks, and you're my first choice to do it.'" Indeed, Spielberg even got Clooney out of his semi-binding commitment to make Universal's The Green Hornet, which the actor had planned to star in with Jason Scott Lee for...yep, a reported $3 million.

Clooney won this windfall of offers before his first major movie had even opened. While editing From Dusk Till Dawn, director Robert Rodriguez assembled a trailer showcasing the actor, complete with fake reviews he says some agents were gullible enough to believe authentic. "I told George, All we need to do is send bootleg footage around town and people will want to see it and we'll get everybody stirred up about you," says Rodriguez. "You'll be a millionaire before the movie even comes out. I did the same thing with Antonio Banderas right after we wrapped Desperado, and that's how he got Assassins." Clooney viewed Dawn, which also stars Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, and its screenwriter, Quentin Tarantino, as "an ensemble piece, and that's what you want your first up. When I was doing Roseanne with Laurie Metcalf, I'd watch her go off and do small parts in Internal Affairs and JFK and I thought, That's the perfect way to go, because eventually the TV series goes away. You need to fall back on something, and that's what my plan was."

Of course, Clooney would have had no plan at all had ER's executive producer, John Wells, not agreed to work around Dawn's shoot. But Clooney's growing movie career has led to speculation about his future on ER. "I did 80 TV interviews last Saturday for Dusk, and David [Caruso]'s name must have come up in 70 of them," he says. "Everyone keeps coming up to me asking, Are you going to pull a David Caruso? And you say, Guys, in the history of television there's been really one major star of a hot show to leave abruptly, and that's David, to 'do movies,' and I'm not so sure he did leave for movies alone. [NYPD Blue creator Steven] Bochco is a very controlling, strong character, and David is too. From everything I hear, they didn't get along. I have left shows because of fights, so I understand truly creative differences."

But Clooney's conundrum isn't nearly so dire as Caruso's was: He's lucky enough to be the breakout star on a show he doesn't have to carry. "We have a large ensemble in which the work is evenly split," says Wells. "If George is on a movie set Tuesday through Saturday, we can slot his stuff for Mondays, at least for a while. I think I'm more reasonable accommodating George because I was actually able to be more reasonable. George is not the central figure Caruso was for NYPD Blue."

In fact, Clooney may be the one compromising most--and what he's agreed to forfeit is rest, domestic downtime, and female companionship. "What relationship could I possibly have right now?" he asks in absolute earnest. "I worked seven days a week for over 40 days, doing both ER and then finishing at 3 in the morning sometimes for Dusk, then making a 6 a.m. call again in L.A. But you know, I figure, if I am going to get a shot, it won't come twice."

If you ask George's dad, Nick, a seasoned local anchor and talk-show host for years in Cincinnati and now a daytime presence on cable's AMC channel, the boy ought to take care that success doesn't undo him. "George understands, perhaps even too well, that he has a short window of opportunity," he says, radiating a nice-guy charm that George, in a slightly more wiseacre cast, has clearly inherited. "He has primed himself for this all his life, and he is going to do...everything. The other side of that is, is he working too hard? The first question that always comes out of my mouth or his mother's mouth is, How are you physically? How are your sinuses? How is your knee? Are you getting any rest?"

Clooney the younger just shrugs and smiles at his dad's concerns. "I've worked a very long time to get to this position, and I have seen that it will go away. You ever watch Ralph Edwards do This Is Your Life with guys like Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton sitting on that couch? These guys owned the world, and look what happened. These guys were kings, and then tragedy struck. Tragedy is always going to strike."

He knows it sounds almost ungratefully dour, but success puts Clooney, who was raised in an Irish Catholic clan, in fear of comeuppance. He's seen "the payback" happen to his aunt Rosemary, who was "as big a star as you can be" as a pop singer in the '50s, then suddenly found herself out of favor. (She's now a first-rank jazz singer and occasional ER guest star.) "She unfortunately believed people when they said, You are a goddess. So when that got taken away, and the same people said, It's your fault, she believed them then, too, and it destroyed her. It took her a long while to get back on her feet." Then there's George's dad, who alternated successful gigs with spells of unemployment that bounced his wife, Nina, as well as George and his older sister, Ada, all over the map.

It's easy to see, then, why Clooney looks at careers the way Dr. Ross looks at terminal patients: You can pump and push and prod them, but sooner or later they're all going to die. "Nobody's Paul Newman," he broods. "Nobody has 30-year runs."

It's not a bad attitude for a former Warner Bros. TV contract player who spent nearly 10 years keeping himself what he calls "the world's richest unknown actor." Between 1984 and 1993, Clooney racked up some 15 no-go pilots between unexceptional series roles, including stints on The Facts of Life, Sisters, Roseanne (for the first season, as Roseanne's boss), a CBS sitcom called E/R, and Baby Talk, a Look Who's Talking adaptation. "I was lucky enough never to get really famous from any earlier show," he says--perhaps, he admits, because he deliberately had a total hair makeover on every one of them, as camouflage. He grew it "really long" to play Chic Chesbro (yes, Chic Chesbro) on ABC's abortive cop show Sunset Beat, which ran two episodes, then slicked it back for the crime drama Bodies of Evidence. "Just call me a hair actor and proud of it." When it came time to film ER's pilot, though, Clooney wanted to bid farewell to the "pretty boy" locks. He went for a cropped, combed-forward, short 'do but grudgingly agreed to keep it longer for the first season. With some pushing, Clooney got clearance last spring to chop the ringlets off. "I just like my hair short better; it's just easier," he says. "But there's something else to it. I'm now at a point in my life, when it's cut this way, that when I look in the mirror I see an older guy than I used to be. I think, 'I look beat up. What happened to me?' And that's perfect for playing Doug Ross."

It was Clooney's newly restored "little Nero look," as Tarantino calls it, that helped bounce him into the role of thief Seth Gecko in From Dusk Till Dawn. With Tarantino already cast as Seth's brother, Richard, the question was, who could look as though he were actually Quentin's sibling? Rodriguez considered Robert Blake, Dennis Quaid, and "lots of older guys you'd seen do these types of roles before." Then Clooney's face appeared on a magazine cover, looking vaguely Quentinish around the mouth, chin, and forehead. "I was so proud that Robert thought people might buy me as looking like George!" gushes Tarantino. "Of course, Jay Leno looks like me too."

When the Dusk team formally offered Clooney the role in early ay, several other studios, some of which had turned Clooney down even for tiny parts, suddenly declared they wanted him. "I got an offer for a million bucks to do another movie, which will remain nameless," recalls Clooney. "It starred someone else who was on television, and I looked at it and I thought, You know, my biggest danger right now is to end up doing what guys like Richard Grieco and Caruso did. Went for the big payday, got a lot of attention, and then went into a bad film."

While shooting Dusk in the desert near Barstow, Calif., Clooney "felt welcome enough" to engage in some characteristic on-set horseplay with industrial-size water pistols (favorite target: costar Salma Hayek). But Rodriguez thinks the class-cutup stories about his star are overplayed. "George knew this was his big shot, and he wasn't going to blow it. He was dead serious on takes. He didn't play any jokes on me, either, because he knew I was the editor." Nor did Clooney's schedule permit a lot of time for fooling around; shuttling between Dusk and ER, he'd learn his lines while making the two-hour trip behind the wheel of his Ford Bronco. "Driving for me is therapy," he says. "That's my one place where I won't be hassled. You kind of need to get away from everybody telling you how good things are. You've got to get by yourself and go, All right, now, what is this, really? What's this really amounting to?'"

Upstairs, Clooney is trying to pack. He'll fly to Chicago this afternoon to shoot an emotional semi-reconciliation scene for ER with James Farentino, who'll play Dr. Ross' longestranged dad. "Heavy stuff," Clooney says, padding into the white-carpeted bedroom that Barbara Walters found empty a few months ago, now furnished in masculine fashion. An enormous black-and-white blowup from Clooney's showcase episode of ER, in which he rescued a trapped boy in a lightning-torn downpour, adorns the wall just next to his sturdy, blond-wood-framed bed. Downstairs, the handsomely paneled library Clooney guided Walters into now showcases a somewhat less studious centerpiece: a giant Foosball table. But aside from trundling in a few other sports games and a grand piano in the otherwise empty front parlor, Clooney clearly hasn't had a moment to think about turning the place into a home. It's more like a way station.

"A couple of my buddies are living here downstairs, because they're, uh, they're both going through divorces," Clooney says, wincing. The expression pretty much forestalls any discussion of actress Talia Balsam, Clooney's own ex, from whom he split in 1992 after three years of marriage. Waving toward the tennis court, the fountains that lead to a larger pool, and the multi-vehicular garage, Clooney declares, "This is like my compound, you know? Because the world has changed for me. Suddenly people find your address, and they're all around."

And suddenly, people you've never met feel free to make you the object of their sexual fantasies. Case in point: the fan whose letter hangs framed in Clooney's upstairs hallway. "Dear George Clooney," it reads. "You are my favorite star. I love you. I love homosexual men. I love homosexual actors. On your movies I'd like to see you do..." The writer goes on to list a number of explicit sex acts, then ends with "Would you please send me an autographed picture signed by you in your white shirt and tie."

Clooney's pals drop by at all hours, for beers, for small talk, for ease--and for a respite from women. Is this a sort of rehab clinic for thirtysomething guys on the rebound from failed relationships? "Sure," Clooney grins. "It's like Free Willy, you know--get him on his feet and back to the ocean."

If you ask George's dad, this is all bluster. "There will be some young woman who is going to come and knock George's socks off, and that will be the end of all of his great plans never to do this or that--'I will not marry, I will not have children.' Those make marvelous quotes, and I'm sure they have great logic behind them. But certain things do not follow the lines of logic."

Strolling to the end of the driveway, Nick and Nina Clooney's only son approaches the one being in his life he can truly call a partner: his moist-snouted, big-bellied pig, Max. "I put him out here in his holding pen 'cause there's too much company today," says Clooney. The little fenced-in paddock contains a red-and-green-garlanded doghouse for Max to slumber in. "Look at that fatso," Clooney laughs. "He'll looove the bath I'll give him." A big movie star still does that? "Oh, yeah. Well, there's certain responsibilities you can't give up." He grins. "It's also fun because Max yells and cries like a baby." Chicago medicine's resident imp smiles an eye-crinklingly broad smile, contemplating poor Max's distress at having his belly scrubbed. Geo