Hollywood Rediscovers Romance

By Denise Worrell

A sleek limousine glides through empty nighttime streets, circling the illuminated monuments of Washington. In the back seat, a clean-cut naval officer and a dark-haired beauty stare at each other a moment. Then they kiss, furiously. She flings herself on him. He gropes for the zipper of her strapless black-and-gold sheath. There is a flash of a man's hand on a creamy thigh, the pull of a black garter. Afterward, the officer and his friend relax into opposite corners of the limo and survey the damage. "My name is Tom," he says with a smile to end all smiles.

His real name is Kevin Costner, and this backseat sizzler with Sean Young from the hit political thriller No Way Out has people lining up at movie theaters across the country. With a startlingly different look as the intrepid crime crusader Eliot Ness, Costner is also drawing crowds to The Untouchables. < These bookend summer successes have cinched his status as Hollywood's new romantic leading man. With his tall, rangy good looks and cool American strength, Costner, 32, is an old-fashioned movie hero. Like such stars as Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart, he can fill the screen with what Director Billy Wilder has called "flesh impact."

Costner is a little bewildered by his romantic image. "I don't think of myself as classically handsome," he says. "How sexy can you be? I don't have enough buttons to get everybody aroused. The limo scene in No Way Out was very difficult for me. I felt there was a certain clumsiness to it. I wondered if I was doing things right." Maybe the clumsy feeling came from his own past. As a sophomore in high school he was only 5 ft. 2 in. tall. "I didn't get my growth until college," he says. "I'm 6 ft. 1 in. now, but I never got over being short. I never even dated."

He almost never acted either. Costner was born in Compton, a working-class neighborhood in South Los Angeles. His father, part Cherokee Indian, serviced electrical lines for Southern California Edison. His mother worked for the state welfare department. When Kevin was six, his father was promoted and began moving the family around California. "I was always on the outside," he says. "I didn't feel 'there' until the end of the year, and then we'd move again." He found a niche in high school basketball and baseball. "I had the exhibitionism knocked out of me, though," he says. "During one basketball game I was knocked into the lap of a real pretty girl. She was drinking a Coke, and I took a sip. There was a rousing cheer. Later my dad told me, 'You're out there to play.' "

The pragmatist in Costner beat out the performer, and he enrolled at Cal State-Fullerton to study marketing and finance. By his senior year he was bored. "I picked up a copy of the college daily paper and saw an ad for Rumpelstiltskin auditions," he recalls. "I didn't get a part, but my creative spirit was pounding."

After graduating, Costner married his college sweetheart, Cindy Silva, a former Snow White at Disneyland and the only woman he had ever really dated. He also took a marketing job in Orange County. "It was a disgusting thing," he says. "I quit after 30 days. Cindy said to me, 'What are you going to do now?' 'Act!' I said. 'What else?' she asked. 'I'm working on a screenplay. I'm a writer,' I said. 'A writer!' she screamed. 'You can't even spell!' She cleared the table, and papers flew up in the air like in a cartoon."

He found a job as a stage manager at Raleigh Studios in Los Angeles and spent the next six years learning how to act in small workshops. He didn't rely on sending resumes or 8-by-10 glossies of himself to casting directors. In fact, says Costner, "I'd walk out of their offices with my fingers in my ears so I wouldn't have to hear someone who didn't know as much as I did telling me what to do."

After a few small roles, Costner got a break in Writer-Director Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill, even though his performance was completely cut except for a five-second cameo as a corpse. It didn't matter. The Big Chill was his promised land. "I had been wandering, wandering, wandering," he says. "Acting had always been holy to me, and finally I found people who felt as I did." The word got out that there was a new kid in town. Kasdan cast Costner as the goofy, gunslinging Jake in Silverado, and he stole the show.

He discovers his characters in the details. "When I act I don't get caught lying very often," says Costner. In Silverado there's a child in his hotshot cowboy who climbs the bars of a jail cell as if it were a jungle gym. In The Untouchables he reveals Eliot Ness the tender father in a single moment when he gives his daughter both an Eskimo and a butterfly bedtime kiss. In No Way Out his driven, double-edged adventurer stands in a speeding convertible to pick bugs off the windshield for a snack.

Costner naps often during a movie shoot, he says, to keep the character alive in his dreams. Perhaps more than just in dreams. He identifies with Ness, a law-abiding family man who turns violent when pushed too far. But Costner also sees himself in Tom Farrell, No Way Out's sexy Navy officer. Says he: "I'm more like Farrell than you'd think. Likable, but full of secrets." Costner doesn't analyze his onscreen appeal. "It's an Indian thing," he says. "I try not to get into my medicine at all." All he will say about his next movie, Bull Durham, is that it is for anyone who likes baseball.

The Costners have two children, Anne, 3, and Lily, 1, with another on the way. They live near Pasadena and often escape to their four-bedroom condo in the California Sierras, where Costner fishes, hunts and tears around in his Bronco. He has built himself two canoes and loves to paddle along mountain rivers. "If acting ever stopped satisfying me, I would walk away. I would probably end up in the Pacific Northwest. I'm at peace up there. In many ways I always was a loner. I still am." Spoken like a true romantic American hero.

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles