By Karen Sandstrom | Cleveland Plain Dealer

Patricia Heaton is talented, famous and verrrrrry well paid. She shimmies into one of those designer sheaths to accept her latest acting award (sigh) and looks like a million. 

Even as the stressed housewife on "Everybody Loves Raymond," she looks like at least 300-grand. Is this fair?

Nope. But to find out how she danced her way off the Bay High School Rockettes' drill-team line in the 1970s and onto the small-but-extremely-powerful screen, check out "Motherhood & Hollywood" (Villard, $22.95), which lands in bookstores Tuesday.

While the memoir fails to tell us "how to get a job like mine," as the subtitle promises, it does reveal the lowly jobs and lowlier apartments Heaton endured on her way to a kind of success the rest of us only can froth about. It considers the perils of a healthy Midwestern upbringing and coins the phrase "staunch Presbyterian."

The book also acknowledges how great is the gap between a suburban Cleveland childhood, with its firefly-catching summers, and a Hollywood adulthood, in which tabloids speculate on a person's reproductive future.

Just before a recent telephone interview from her home in Los Angeles, for instance, Heaton said she was paging through the latest edition of The Star, which printed a small item announcing that she and her husband, David Hunt, were consulting a shrink about whether to have another child. Parents of four young boys, the couple is still holding out for a girl - or so says the article.

"They take one little grain of truth and blow it out of proportion," said Heaton, who went on to admit that it was her own joke on "Entertainment Tonight" that gave The Star its bit. Heaton didn't sound especially mad. She knows that the Hollywood reality gap is weird on both sides of the fence - though at least on her side there's a pool, a nanny and a personal trainer.

Too much exposure to "Entertainment Tonight" and celeb magazines can give the anonymous masses the idea that actors always look great, their lives are blissful and their marriages perfect - at least until they dissolve into a thousand humiliating pieces for some photographer to capture from his spot behind the bougainvillea.

"Motherhood & Hollywood" attacks the myths with humor, beginning on the cover. Spiffed out in a sleek gown and a vaguely Jennifer Aniston hairstyle, Heaton strikes a pose next to a little red convertible. Notice, however, her rubber gloves and scrub brush, hinting at a less-celebrated side of her - the inner housecleaning demon.

The back cover shows the same image from behind, revealing the tape-and-clamp job that holds her dress together. The hair is pinned at unfortunate angles, and a towheaded toddler stands on the car's leather seats.

"I feel sort of an obligation to moms everywhere to let them know that what's projected about celebrities, at least in my life, ain't what everyday life is like," she said. "I just came back this morning from my 5-year-old's kindergarten orientation, and I was the worst-looking one there."

If the book is intended as mostly entertainment, it also conveys a sense of the actress's work ethic and attitudes about family. Her children's pediatrician suggested she write it after he heard Heaton give a speech to a group of his colleagues. When she sat down to write, Heaton was surprised to find how much she had to say.

"Everything came pretty easily," she said.

It was made easier, she acknowledged, because of help from her brother, Plain Dealer reporter Michael Heaton.

He was a natural as a ghost- writer.

"We grew up together, in the same house, in the same city, in the same family," Michael Heaton said. "We both lived in New York City at the same time and shared all those intense, first-time-living-away-from-home experiences. Then we both got married and had kids around the same time as well."

Their shared experiences and working collaboration shaped the jokes and anecdotes that went into the book.

"We'd decide on themes for essays, divide them up, write them, exchange them and revise each other's work," Michael said. "I came up with the title, she came up with the idea for the three cities as three sections."

One of the recurring themes is "survival jobs." In the two decades since she graduated from Ohio State University, Patricia Heaton has worked as a waitress in New York and Cleveland, as a copywriter for a party-planning company, as a shoe model and as a clerk at People magazine (she credits Michael for helping her get that job, too).

"I couldn't believe, as I was writing, that I had had so many jobs," Heaton said. "There are all of those kinds of things to write about. When you have the life of an actor, or are someone pursuing acting, it takes you on all kinds of journeys."

Heaton writes about her father, retired Plain Dealer sportswriter Chuck Heaton; her mother, Pat, who died when she was 12; what it was like to be a kid in Bay Village in the 1960s; and what it was like to win her first Emmy Award in 2000. She writes hilariously about the plastic surgery that got her postpartum body ("It wasn't even a stomach anymore, really. It was more like a big old wrinkly suede bag . . .") into shape.

Yet the book stops short of sacrificing privacy - Heaton's or anyone else's. When she mentions other actors, she tends to be complimentary. "I don't want to bad-mouth anyone directly," Heaton said. "I like to slander people in groups, not individually."

She writes candidly about the realities of modern marriage. She and Hunt were wed in 1989, and their Hollywood marriage sounds full of love, laughter, fights, frustrations, tedium and Mars-versus-Venus views about what qualifies as "enough" sex.

Heaton suspects that Hollywood marriages tend to fail so often because commonplace fantasies about sex and romance become even more outlandish in a town where artifice is the most highly valued commodity.

Famous or not, women often glide to the altar thinking they're in for decades of bliss with Mr. Right. "Then you wake up, and Mr. You'll-Do is still there," Heaton said. "You've got to contend with that once all the romance wears off.

"A lot of talk shows and therapies are all about how you feel. It didn't used to be that way in our parents' day. It was about commitment, your actions and your willingness to hang in. That's what creates stability."

If "Motherhood & Hollywood" contains some profanity, and occasionally can't resist the crass quip, Heaton conveys a reverence for family and the value of hard work. In writing about all the lean years and bad jobs it took before she hit it big with "Raymond," she demonstrates why doggedness is a desirable quality.

"I just took a ton of hits from people, and at auditions. I wondered why I would keep going. There's just something in me that needed to prove myself to all those people," she said.

"People can be really mean in this business. You're just some poor dumb actor trying to get a job, but people need to humiliate you. But what that does is make me angry. It makes me want to stay in there all the longer and prove that I can do it. It worked for me."