June 8, 2007

Kevin Can Wait
By Fred Schruers, July & August 2007

If Kevin Costner seems like one of us—despite the stardom, the Santa Barbara spread, and the eight-figure paydays—maybe it’s because he’s gotten to this point thanks to one good old-fashioned virtue: patience

Kevin Costner’s smile is familiar—a little sly, edged with boyish exuberance. There’s still some innocence in it, along with a touch of “it’s good to be king.” Being a movie star agrees with him: he unconsciously deploys the film-star package that hooked us (and Susan Sarandon) in Bull Durham—the lanky frame that’s still his despite a dislike for gyms and jogging, the suntanned good looks, the sideways glance that hints just you two are in on the secret. His charmed life is no secret, though. His wife of almost three years, Christine Baumgartner, has a golf swing almost as mean as his; their baby should arrive just about the time this magazine does. His new movie, Mr. Brooks, opens in June. And if he walks a few steps beachward from his sun-drenched deck, he can see the shoreline fronting his 17-acre estate on the Pacific Ocean. Taking this in, you could feel awe or envy or disdain for Hollywood excess. Or you could think, this guy really is the embodiment of the American dream.

Costner wasn’t born rich or privileged. He spent his first seven years in the working-class city of Compton, California, near Watts. His father, Bill, a Southern California Edison line service worker, and mom, Sharon, moved their two sons (a third died at birth) around southern California so often that Kevin attended 12 different schools. He did not measure his happiness by the acre. Nor does he now. “Every place is a kingdom for a kid,” Costner says, perched on a lounge chair with his back to the ocean. “It doesn’t matter where they grow up. Because, believe me, I thought my little backyard in Compton was a kingdom.”

Though his backyard today is bigger, his head is not, perhaps because his kingdom was years in the making. “Kev didn’t have an extra twenty bucks growing up,” laughs his longtime friend Tim Hoctor. “But he’s the same—the loyalty, the passion for work. A good soul.”

“Listen, I was a worker,” Costner says. “I framed houses, I drove trucks. I was a deck hand on a fishing boat, or I wore a nail bag around my waist. As it turned out, I discovered acting and really began to do it. So I feel really lucky.”

After starring in 41 films over 25 years, Costner, 52, still ranks as one of Hollywood’s more bankable actors. His legacy is secure as both a movie star and an American icon, starting with three memorable films that plumb the heart of what baseball means to this country (Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, and For Love of the Game). He revitalized the western genre with his Oscar-winning Dances With Wolves. Though he is grateful for the financial rewards fame has brought him, he is uneasy with much of the attention that accompanies that fame. His way of sidestepping Hollywood’s traps is to stick with the company of his oldest pals, camped out here just a few miles from where he spent his maturing years, just over the hills in upper Ojai.

“The only thing that you can do is be who you are and try to live a fearless life,” he says—a credo he drew on to take a career risk with Mr. Brooks, a thriller that turns the all-American dream on its head. It’s a quirky, violent look inside the psyche of a serial murderer called the Thumbprint Killer, by day a respected business owner with a steadfast wife (Marg Helgenberger) and a college-age daughter (Danielle Panabaker). By night Earl Brooks is a compulsive killer with a manipulative alter ego, played by William Hurt.

Currently sporting a “jazz spot” beard that makes him look a bit of a pirate, Costner had no qualms about playing such a despicable character. “It wasn’t scary to me,” he says. “I did not think, for instance, that I was reinventing myself. I hate that notion. It is absolutely in step with what I’ve done my whole career.” When Costner does the hero thing on film, he can pull down a reported $15 million. But with Mr. Brooks he deferred his salary and will make money only if the movie is a hit—a gamble he was willing to make because he loved the screenplay.

“If you look at films like A Perfect World and what he and Joan Allen did in The Upside of Anger, Kevin’s a great actor,” says his Mr. Brooks costar, Helgenberger. For their first meeting he took her and their screen daughter, Panabaker, to lunch at The Polo Lounge in The Beverly Hills Hotel, where they had an earnest (“He’s an intense guy!” says Helgenberger) discussion of the work they’d be doing. At one point she watched in amusement as Costner carefully loaded a large helping of sugar into his iced tea, then became mildly alarmed when the waitress moved to top off his glass. “No, no, no, no!” he said. Then he explained to his tablemates in a conspiratorial whisper, “I got it just the way I like it.”

“My level of excitement and wonder was always big,” says Costner, the father of three grown children with ex-wife Cindy Silva. (He also acknowledges the paternity of a son, Liam, ten, by former girlfriend Bridget Rooney.) Smitten with the grandeur of America ever since his parents took him as a boy to see How the West Was Won, Costner worried friends and relatives with his penchant for afterschool forays into the mountain forests. “My formative years were catching lizards and snakes,” he recalls. His mother, with whom he sang in the church choir, indulged his unfettered outdoor wanderings. “I love her forever for that,” he says. “She said, ‘Kevin is too much of the land to keep him in.’ ” From his father, he says, he inherited a “quiet toughness.”

His unpretentious upbringing shaped his own parenting style. “My vacations were with my parents in canvas tents up in the High Sierras, in South Lake, right out of Bishop,” he says. “Those experiences completely defined me. I’m probably a mountain person. Those smells, that Coleman stove—those things are prime examples to me that you didn’t have to have a lot as a parent in order to give your kids a lot.”

On this particular day Costner is eager to show off his new land. “With my family expanding, I just felt like I needed a place with grass under my feet,” he says. En route we wander through his house—airy, sleek, and modern, but understated. “That’s not food,” he instructs a Labrador retriever sniffing around a bucket. “Those are cleaning products.” We get into his low-slung BMW sports car; he drives dawdlingly down the sun-dappled lane and opens a gate. “I think I will live the rest of my life here in Santa Barbara and in Aspen [where he owns a 165-acre ranch].”

It was his old friend Hoctor who acted as go-between after Costner spotted Baumgartner (who today is off running errands) at the opening of an Orange County restaurant in which he had co-invested. Hoctor invited the athletic blond to a round of golf with Costner. The marriage was held on the Aspen ranch, and now, Costner says, grinning with satisfaction, “I’m having a baby here. It’s kind of cool.”

Costner’s fairy tale has not been without sadness. He and his first wife, his college sweetheart Cindy Silva, divorced after 17 years of marriage, in 1994. Though it was painful for the children, Costner says, “ideally what came out of it was their appreciation of their mom’s true character, and who I was—they got to see us both maybe the way we really could be.”

He plans to raise his new child in the same fashion as his older kids. “My first three, I took them everywhere,” he says. “I always feel that they’re welcome to my world. And this child will have the same thing.”

Son Joe, 19, lives in a deluxe log cabin on wheels overlooking the ocean on his dad’s property. “He’s a beautiful songwriter,” says Costner, who enjoys sitting with his guitar on Joe’s porch, picking and grinning with his son. Lily, 20, is a student and a fledgling country and western singer. And at 23, Anne has graduated from Brown with a degree in Spanish and works in Manhattan.

When he graduated from high school in Villa Park, California, Costner was an unlikely candidate for future stardom: although always a nimble athlete, he was five feet two and a late bloomer with the girls. He dabbled in acting while at Cal State Fullerton, where he auditioned for an off-campus theater production of Rumpelstiltskin. Although he didn’t get a part, he was hooked. After graduation he went to work for a marketing firm—until a chance, airborne encounter with the legendary Richard Burton, who told him that if he really wanted to act, he needed to throw himself into it full-time.

The ensuing years of hard work led to one of Hollywood’s great leading-man runs, including Silverado, The Untouchables, JFK, Waterworld, Tin Cup, Message in a Bottle, Thirteen Days, and last year’s The Guardian. He distinguished himself as a director with his Oscar-winning Dances With Wolves and 2003’s strong western, Open Range. “A lot of people look at your perceived success and they don’t look at it in reverse,” Costner says. “They just see that you have all these things, and they don’t think about the nights that you decided to stay up until three or four in the morning because you couldn’t get a scene right. My life has been filled with those kinds of nights.”

Though he’s had creative differences with studios, and suffered some critical and box-office disappointments (Wyatt Earp, The Postman), his most excruciating pain comes from seeing treasured scenes end up on the cutting-room floor. “I think that’s the only thing in life where I feel weak and vulnerable, almost like a baby,” he says. “Barbra Streisand and I were talking about something, and I felt so akin to her. She started talking about a movie where something wasn’t there, and I saw her heartbreak over a detail. So in those cases I’m haunted for the audience. Haunted for myself.”

Those ghosts disappear when Costner picks up his acoustic guitar to play with his six-piece Kevin Costner Band. He writes the band’s original country-rock songs, with themes ranging from our government’s abandonment of Hurricane Katrina’s victims (“Five Minutes to America”) to a man’s need to apologize to his lady (“Every Intention”).

With idealistic brio and large chunks of his own change, Costner has also dabbled in entrepreneurship, with sometimes costly results. He sank a bundle into a South Dakota casino—based on a Dances With Wolves theme—and ended up in a bitter conflict with the Lakota Sioux tribe, which had embraced him after the film was released (he tabled the casino plan in favor of a learning center). He poured another $40 million into two doomed projects: the search for a cleaner way to clean up oil spills, and a project to store energy on flywheel batteries.

“There’s nothing to show for that $40 million,” he says, squinting into the sun. “I would have been better off”—he gestures to an array of homes that hug the shoreline of the bay to the south—“picking off fifteen of these and making that $40 million into $500 million. So I’m not the shrewdest businessman. I’m more of a dreamer. I’m a ‘What if’ person. I’ve always felt that failure was a completely underrated experience.”

As speckles of late-afternoon sun now bounce off the ocean tide, Costner’s mood becomes more reflective. He’s no longer Costner the Hollywood movie star or Costner the real-estate mogul but Costner the all-American dad, Costner your neighborhood baseball buddy. “There are so many ways to measure a person, you know, but what’s most important is how we measure ourselves, and you hope your children find their way,” he says. “I’ve been lucky enough to find my way. And my hope is that they find that thing that allows them to feel good about themselves. We don’t really rest if we think our kids are drifting, or we don’t think they have the right work ethic. It drives us crazy. Because we ultimately want them to succeed, and until they do, I think that we feel in some way that something is not complete.”

And what he hopes he has passed on is a sense of responsibility to spread around their good fortune. “They know the life of private airplanes,” he says, “and limousines, and a fantastic property with toys. How do you share it and not throw a fence around it? Transfer our good luck into opportunities for other people?” Costner’s way has been to surround himself with old pals, some on the payroll. “Ed, who is a handyman here, was on my Little League team.”

We walk past an open beachside shelter, a palapa, that son Joe has twisted together out of native plants (“Exactly the kind of stuff I did when I was his age,” Costner says.) Now, we’re a few feet from the surf that beats, quietly today, against his shoreline. On calm days the actor will don a wetsuit and go swimming. Today he puts his back into disentangling a palm frond that’s lodged amid driftwood and tumbled rock near the path up to his property.

“I don’t think I’ve changed one bit, to be honest—what I think about movies, or how I am,” Costner confesses. “I’ve taken blows; I’ve had high moments. I don’t think the blows have ever hardened me, you know? I’m aware of the world, but”—there’s a flash of that crooked, inclusive grin—“my enthusiasms are still big.”

Fred Schruers is a freelance writer based in Venice, California.