The Man Inside the Man from U.N.C.LE.

The man steps into a stall shower and gets ready to sing. What comes jetting down upon him, however, is not water but streams of deadly gas. He tries to turn it off. Impossible. He tries the door. It is locked and batterproof. It appears that he will surely die. But he quickly wraps a shaving-cream bomb in a towel, wedges it against the door, sprinkles it with after-shave lotion, and touches the flame of a cigarette lighter to this ingenious subnuclear device. The blazing lotion heats the shaving cream until it explodes volcanically, and Napoleon Solo--the man in the shower-staggers out into his hotel room.

Who, after witnessing a scene like that, could be captious enough to ask why Solo took a cigarette lighter in there with him in the first place? Certainly not any of the 20 million steady fans who watch Napoleon Solo on NBC. For he is The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the most popular new hero on the television scene, and he whirls across the world as a special agent for an organization that quells the forces of evil. U.N.C.L.E. stands for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, and it is actually a private FBI. Its producers, in fact, refer to Solo's boss as "J. Edgar Hoover."

Black Cherry. Napoleon Solo, the hero, has his prototype too. He has been called 0061, because he is TV's approximation of James Bond. Bond is not hard to copy, however, and--given the mass audience of television--the actor who plays Solo may soon be even more celebrated than Sean Connery, who plays Bond in the movies. The U.N.C.L.E. man's real name is Robert Vaughn. He is 32, and he is on his way to his first million. Impoverished a couple of years ago, he now has increasing herds of livestock and several gas wells.

There is much about Vaughn that recalls both Bond and Solo. Off the screen, he is a swinging bachelor who drives around in a Lincoln Continental convertible, which he insists is not maroon in color but "black cherry." The car has a telephone and a monaural tape machine; it will soon have two telephones, a TV set, a stereo tape recorder, an icemaking midget refrigerator and a walnut-paneled bar. He is a wine lover and a gourmet too.

However fulfilling this one dimension may seem, Vaughn does have another. Like many TV and movie actors who hit it big, he speaks with a faraway look about the "basic conflict between my need for artistic fulfillment and my love of luxury." In most cases, this sort of statement is mere calisthenics for the lower lip. But Robert Vaughn is different. He is well on his way toward his doctorate, in a remarkable department at the University of Southern California that bridges the fields of journalism, political science, drama, cinema, radio and television.

No Apologies. Born to show business, he considers Minneapolis his home town, but he spent his early youth ranging the country with his parents. His father was a radio actor (Gangbusters, Crime Doctor), and his mother was a character actress on Broadway (Dracula).

He makes no apologies for his now fatted life. "I don't feel guilty," he says. "I've knocked around for a lot of years, collected a lot of unemployment checks, and I worked very hard. I feel I have earned whatever I got." The show? "I have nothing against it. In fact, it's a rather good charade, and nobody is pretending that it is more than that. The show is all right, if you realize it is a massive put-on."

It would be difficult not to. The show has involved a man who was chewed to death by a savage Chihuahua. It has also presented a mad scientist who kept the long-dead cadaver of a bygone dictator in his laboratory. Strapping Solo to an operating table, the scientist attempted to revive the dictator by exchanging Solo's blood for the stiff's brine. The scientist was foiled when the dictator's long green arm reached up and grabbed him by the throat. And only last week, when Solo and his assistant Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum) were invading an underground vault, Solo was confronted with the need to avoid electrocution while crossing the "electroporous grating" of an "electrostatic floor." Solo reached into his apparently bottomless pockets and came up with a self-inflating, full-sized rubber landing craft, which hissed and swelled into the perfect vessel on which to sail across the electroconvulsive sea.

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