Beyond the Ego

Zap! With one jolt from his cigarette lighter-ray gun, James Coburn became the roguish superspy in Our Man Flint. Zap! Zap! And the near-impossible switch from heavy to heartthrob was complete. It was Coburn's first leading role, but Flint made him a star, which means, among other things, that everybody wants him. They can get him too -- for only $500,000, plus a slice of the profits.

Producers are now furiously trying to groom new Coburn types, but his seamy-faced, hard-guy specifications are so disproportionate that it is a bit like trying to build a giraffe out of a Tinkertoy. He is 38, though his croppy thatch of sandy hair makes him look like a delinquent graduate student. A lean 6 ft. 2 in., he is a rangy tangle of angular limbs; in action, karate-chopping his way through a thicket of villains, he suggests Ichabod Crane doing the jerk.

There is a whiff of the diabolical about him. He has razor-slit eyes, a maniacal cackle, and the toothy grin of a cougar at feeding time. Above all, in the role of the flip, fearless roue, he exudes a musky eau de Coburn that women find exhilarating. "Funky, groovy," is the way Camilla Sparv, his co-star in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, describes his appeal; "mysterious" is the verdict of Julie Andrews, who appeared with him in The Americanization of Emily.

Illogical Logic. The groovy side of Coburn was cut in Compton, Calif., where he played drums in the school orchestra and "had such a good time that it took me five years to get out of high school and 3 1/2 years to get out of junior college." After a hitch with the Army in Germany, where an attack of "fun fatigue" caused him to swear off liquor forever, he studied acting at Los Angeles City College, eventually migrated to Manhattan. There, between appearances on TV shaving commercials, he cultivated the mysterious side of his nature. He became a vegetarian to help "clear up my mental vibrations," studied yoga and Zen, which he describes as "that silence between the left side and the right side of your ego, the illogical logic that has to work in you."

Returning to Hollywood in 1958, Coburn saddled up for a Randolph Scott western called Ride Lonesome, which type-cast him as a heavy for the next seven years. In The Magnificent Seven, he spoke only 14 words, but his chilling portrayal of a sadistic, knife-throwing cowboy won him meatier roles, and eventually a chance to be Flint--both off-screen and on. The one thing he cannot abide, however, is the amorous women who are always sidling up to him in the street. "They don't see me--they see a guy named Flint. That isn't me; I'm just old Jim."

Gong Guru. Old Jim swings in other ways. He took LSD before it was fashionable. He digs for relics in Yucatan, goes on three-day fasts. Wearing wrap-around shades on his eyes, and with a cigarette holder between his teeth, he drives his silver Ferrari "as fast as I can everywhere I go, playing little tunes on the gears." For solace, he retreats to his 22-room Spanish villa atop Beverly Hills, sits cross-legged on a leopard-skin pillow, drops his head, closes his eyes, and bongs away on four Japanese gongs and a large hollow log from Mexico. "My gong guru and I," he recalls, "used to go out in the desert and take some peyote and just hit it. Wild vibrations, man! Overlapping!"

When the "strange loneliness" of his sudden success begins to bug him, he takes his wife Beverly to a spa and "meditation center" in the Big Sur. "You sit in those baths," he says, "steaming and watching the stars fall and relating to yourself and to other people. Or you stand next to a tree that you know has been there for 3,000 years. Its age puts you in perspective, tells you where you are."

"Beyond the ego" is where Coburn wants to be. He is currently co-producing and starring in The President's Analyst, but that, he allows, is just to satisfy the outer man. "We must be here for some reason, not just to make movies and lie in the sun. Man can't be finished. The cat is. The gorilla is. We must be here for a self-evolution, a development of the mind." Zap!

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