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He was the Man from U.N.C.L.E. Now he's the man from Hustle.

And as TV icon Robert Vaughn sees it, he — and they — are all the same guy(s).

"The day after I started shooting, I got bombarded with calls from the British press asking, 'What do you think of your character?' Well, I thought nothing of my character because I never had anything to think about."

He had taken the role of master grifter Albert Stroller on Hustle (which returns to AMC on Wednesday night) when the premiere episode was already six days into production.

"So I said: 'Suppose Napoleon Solo retired at the end of his years in the worldwide secret-agent business, living on his government pension, deciding he can't really live this way. He'd had girls, cars, money, fine hotels, first-class travel, and now it's not happening. What could he do that was worthwhile in terms of using his knowledge? He should become a con man. And he changes his name to Albert Stroller.'

"I made this up as I went along," Vaughn, 73, says genially. "From that point on, it's been repeated over and over again. That's how it happened," he says, smiling the smile of a born raconteur.

We're not buying it, though. Would the world-saving Man from U.N.C.L.E. really enter the business of fleecing people, no matter how deserving the greedy, wealthy marks on Hustle may be?

There's a nanosecond of hesitation but then Vaughn's smile becomes patient and indulging. "Well," he says, "Napoleon Solo's not a real person. There is no Napoleon Solo other than what I give him."

"I don't care what age you are, every guy wants to be as cool as Robert Vaughn," enthuses Rob Sorcher, AMC's programming and production vice president.

He's the last of The Magnificent Seven, for crying out loud — the ambivalent gunman Lee, still here long after equally cool Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and Yul Brynner have ridden into their final sunsets.

Vaughn, who lives with his wife of nearly 32 years, Linda Staab, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, says shooting the London-based series is "the best and most enjoyable experience I've ever had on a set."

Even more so than The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964-68), in which he and co-star David McCallum became rock-star famous playing tongue-in-cheek spies?

"Absolutely," Vaughn insists. "U.N.C.L.E. was set up so that in the beginning of each show, we go our separate ways, meet a new girl each week, and at the end come together. So David and I didn't work together that much personally. In the case of Hustle, all five of us work together all the time, and they're just so wonderfully talented — they all can sing and dance and do dialects and tell stories, and everything else. As an actor, they impress the hell out of me."

After U.N.C.L.E., Vaughn had returned to college, getting a Ph.D. in mass communications from the University of Southern California in 1970. G.P. Putnam's Sons published his critically lauded dissertation, "Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting," released as a paperback by Limelight in 1996.

One can't help but wonder how a guy so smart and successful — who with his wife adopted two kids and moved to Connecticut to raise them with non-Hollywood values — could have appeared in so many movies that he admits were "not so great. Of 120 (films and TV movies), I'd say maybe 10 were Okay." So why?

"They pay!" he says, smiling. "That's it. They pay the same thing as the big ones. I don't turn down movies. Well, I've turned down movies for reasons that have nothing to do with money — things I just thought were terrible movies. Many of the ones I've been in are terrible movies," he concedes, "but I thought they'd be good."

And Hustle, as it happens, actually is. Maybe Stroller and Solo are the same guy, maybe not. But the inveterately open Robert Vaughn, in the best sense of the phrase, isn't conning anybody.[[In-content Ad]]

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