Silverado

"One thing I'd like the public to know is that I'm not too cool for all this," he says, enthusiastically waving his arm to indicate the Hollywood hoedown. "Cindy and I used to get together with friends who were all getting promotions and buying their second houses. We'd have these long drives home at the end of the night, and I'd say, 'What am I dong? I don't have a BMW. I don't have a lawn with dichondra.' But I called myself an actor, and I knew that someday this would all happen."

Optimism is Costner's shtick. If the man knows the meaning of irony, he keeps that knowledge well hidden. At 30, Costner is the sort who says of his struggling-actor years, "It was a school of hard knocks, but I watched and learned and the rest is history."

With four film roles behind him (including one as the suicide in The Big Chill that became a cutting-room casualty) Costner can afford a bit of hubris. He stars in the current American Flyers and this fall in a segment of Steven Spielberg's TV series Amazing Stories. Critics are enthusiastic about his performance as a winsome white hat in Silverado, and a studio exec notes, "Everybody wants him--in their movie and in their bedroom."

Costner, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in L.A., can now afford the accoutrements of stardom--such must-haves as a condo in Mammoth Lakes and a four-wheel-drive Bronco for tooling around Pasadena, where he keeps a small house. "I think I'll know things about publicity and lawyers and studios next year that I don't know now," he says. With an attitude like that, the dichondra is right around the corner.