By Ellen Mitchell | Newsday 

Last week Patricia Heaton had a lot on her plate. Heaton, who plays the warm-hearted and wise- cracking wife on the highly rated CBS-TV sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond," was busy on the set filming for the show's seventh season. She was awaiting word on whether she would be a three-peat Emmy winner (she wasn't, but her co-stars cleaned up). Her first book was making its debut in bookstores from coast to coast ... and she was trying to figure out how to make a birdhouse out of a milk carton.

Heaton enters millions of homes nationwide each Monday night as Debra Barone, TV wife to Ray Romano's Ray Barone, mother of his three children and daughter-in- law to Ray's omnipresent and overbearing parents, who live just across the street. The whole semi-normal, semi-dysfunctional scene is set in Lynbrook, where Ray toils as a Newsday sportswriter and Debra is the glue that holds the household together.

In reality, Heaton is the wife of David Hunt, an actor and producer with whom she has formed a production company to produce feature films and a TV series. In their 13 years of marriage, the couple also has produced four sons, ages 3 to 9. Their whole highly normal, highly functional scene is set in Los Angeles, where Patricia and David form the glue that holds the household together.

To that end, Heaton has just signed on as den mother for her son's second-grade Cub Scout pack, which explains the milk carton-birdhouse.

"It's the most frightening thing. Thinking up a craft to do with them every week scares me," said the actress, who pulls down $250,000 an episode for her starring role in the hit series.

Just how she does it all and manages to remain sane is spelled out in her just published memoir, "Motherhood and Hollywood - How to Get a Job Like Mine," published by Villard. Heaton will sign copies of her book at Barnes and Noble on Walt Whitman Road in Huntington Sunday at 2 p.m.

The cover of the book features a glamorous Heaton, sleek and sophisticated in a black strapless gown and pearl choker, standing before an expensive sports car. She holds a scrub brush in one hand and wears bright yellow rubber work gloves. The car is her neighbor's, but Heaton is no stranger to wielding a scrub brush. She tends to her own household and her own kids with the help of a Monday-through- Friday nanny.

"The first thing I do when I break for hiatus from the show is clean. I redo the linen closets, my closets, the kids' closets. I vacuum everything. I sort the Legos by color into little plastic bags. I'm a maniac. But it gives me a sense of accomplishment that's different and more immediate than being a TV funnywoman," she said.

And at the end of the day she puts it all into proper perspective when she offers this prime piece of advice: "Go hug your nearest family member. Life is so precious."

"She tells it like it is; she's a down-to-earth, strong person," said Romano, her co-star and friend. "We've always gotten along. We each have four kids and we swap the woes and joys of parenthood stories, so we bond in that way. She's kind of like my real wife in that she doesn't take any crap from me, and she knows I'm basically a dunce," he said.

Romano, who won his first Emmy Sunday night, had yet to read Heaton's book, as it had just come off the presses last week, but he did get a chance to glance through an advance copy.

"I saw where my name was mentioned and I highlighted it," he quipped.

Heaton was born 44 years ago, one of five siblings in a devout Roman Catholic family growing up in Bay Village, an idyllic suburb of Cleveland. Her father, Chuck Heaton, was a well-known, highly respected sportswriter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a newspaper for which her brother Michael now writes a column. Michael helped her with the book.

"I would send Michael my essays and he would suggest changes, bump it up with jokes and put in some of the childhood stuff I had forgotten," Heaton said.

Much of Heaton's straightforward attitude and her way of lining up her priorities likely derive from the fact that her mother died of a brain aneurysm when Patricia was 12.

"It's a bit rough getting a mortality wake-up call at that age," Heaton said.

But the close-knit family, under the guidance of "the dad that did the right thing," held fast and supported each other with a bond formed of love and humor that today is reflected in Heaton's own watchwords of family first.

That's not to say, however, that Heaton doesn't get a great kick out of being a celebrity and having the perks of stardom. She struggled to get there, as she details in the book, and no one is going to take that away from her.

From her elementary school years onward, Heaton has always worked. She started out addressing envelopes for a neighbor's business, moved on to a volunteer job at a school for kids with Down syndrome, then to a job at Halle's Department Store. Ever in need of extra cash, Heaton worked in the dorm commissary while attending Ohio State University. She donned a Day-Glo vest and directed campus traffic and occasionally sold her blood plasma to earn a quick $25. She majored in journalism for lack of a better plan, but a summer internship spent developing and editing footage for a local television station quickly convinced her that the news business was not to be her life's work.

Always in her growing years there was a passion for the movies and an intrigue with the community theater where her older sister Alice performed. These experiences "slowly must have implanted the idea in my mind that acting was something I could do," said Heaton.

Eventually, she changed her major to drama and never looked back. She graduated and moved to New York City to pursue an acting career.

"Nothing could have prepared me for the sensory-overload experience of my first month in New York City in 1980," she writes. She calls the city her "first love."

"Everybody in Manhattan seems to be Major League. Even if they're Major League jerks. It's The Show."

But what followed were seven lean years trying to make ends meet and very few acting roles. There was one short, "ill-considered" marriage and by the time she was 28, Heaton felt that "the polish was off the Big Apple."

With her mother's death heavy on her mind in those bleak days, Heaton applied to the Catholic Big Sisters in Manhattan, hoping to perhaps help out another depressed soul. The agency connected her with Carmen Vargas, a 16- year-old from Spanish Harlem, who had also lost her mother and was interested in an acting career.

Their relationship has weathered thick and thin. As Heaton eventually moved up in the acting profession and so to stardom in California, so Vargas has moved along at her side, working first as a production assistant for "Everybody Loves Raymond" and today as a stand-in for the actors and actresses during rehearsals.

"She's been great in my life, a great friend," Vargas said. "I think of her as a sister in so many ways. When I first knew Patty and she was a struggling actress in New York, I never doubted she was going to make it big, because she had the talent. Now here she is working on a number one show with me kind of riding behind her coattails and still looking up to her. It really hasn't changed. She's still the same person, a little busier, of course, but every time I need her, she's really there.

"Patty has always advised me on everything from little things like what to wear to big things like relationships. And she's still giving advice and putting her two cents in. Like whenever I'm dating somebody she says she's got to meet the guy."

Heaton's big break came after a series of small starts on Broadway and in several television feature films. Her eventual role of Debra Barone was sealed with a kiss.

"I was the only actress who would kiss him," recalled Heaton. "I walked into the audition and I said, 'OK, who's this Ray Romano who's the star of the show?' And it was him. I was like, 'Oh, my God, I'm not going to count on this show to go.' He doesn't immediately strike you as a charismatic, vivacious person. But now, having worked with him for seven years, he's very bright and funny and a hugely nice guy."

Romano remembered that perhaps 100 actresses had been interviewed for the part and he personally had seen about 50 of them.

"Then she came in and Phil [producer Phil Rosenthal] and I thought this is it, this is her. Not only do I think she bought it, but the scene calls for the actress to kiss me and she was the only one who kissed me on the lips. So I said, 'She's in, she's dedicated,'" Romano said.

Now fully absorbed in life in Hollywood, Heaton is not about to relinquish her fame and fortune to the ravages of time and four pregnancies. She fights back with plastic surgery.

"I don't worry about getting older, but I'm certainly fighting the inevitable breakdown of our bodies. Once you hit a certain age it's all down hill and everything starts to fall apart. But I've never been in better shape than I am now. I don't exercise. I had plastic surgery. That stomach had to go.

"And what a difference it has made for those evening gown fittings!" she writes in the book, "Not only can I skip the girdle, I can skip underwear altogether! Yahoo!"

As for her mental outlook, has she had therapy along the way?

"Oh, all along the way," she said without a moment's hesitation.

In her book she added, "You want to blame someone for me being an attention-starved, 'Look at me, look at me,' messed-up, sociopathically needy showbiz person? The buck stops here, my friend."

Aside from that incredible candor, there is the strong anchor of home and family.

Heaton's kids often come on the set with her, but they are not television addicts. In fact, the rule at the Hunt/Heaton homestead is no television after 4 p.m.

"They get plenty of time to watch stuff on weekends. Our thing is basically in order to get through the day and get all their homework done and have some time together, we can't have anybody watching any television," Heaton said.

A strange decree from a mom who makes her living as a television star, but then Patricia Heaton is neither your run-of- the-mill comedy actress nor your run-of-the-mill mom.