RIGHT UP HER ALLEY

By CATHY BOOTH/BURBANK

It's 11 a.m., and all is quiet on Stage 25 of the Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank, Calif. Backstage, the bagels and breakfast makings are laid out for the cast and crew of NBC's new sitcom Veronica's Closet. But the star is nowhere to be seen. Kirstie Alley is in her trailer, squealing with laughter and slurping away on a juice concoction of white grapes and lemons. She is on Day 3 of a 40-day juice-and-fruit fast and proselytizing the cleansing merits of her diet. "Taste it!" says Alley, popping up from the sofa to pour a portion. "Isn't it great?"

In real life, Alley is just like that drink, which goes down sweet--until the lemon tang hits. Ted Danson, who played Sam the horny bartender to Alley's sexually frustrated Rebecca Howe on Cheers, affectionately calls her "the biker chick from hell." She will say and do anything for a laugh, as Americans learned in 1991, when she thanked her husband Parker Stevenson for "giving me the big one" as she picked up her Emmy for Cheers. Her Hollywood pals didn't know what to think recently when she publicly ribbed her buddy John Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston. "I said John had puppies' feet hidden in his freezer and that his wife drank breast milk for breakfast," she says, shaking her head in disbelief at the silliness. "I wanted to make him laugh, and I did. But it came out weirder than I thought it would. Jay Leno asked me if I'd been talking to Marlon Brando lately!"

Alley's new series, Veronica's Closet (NBC, Thursdays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.), promises more laughs. She stars as the glamorous Veronica ("Ronnie") Chase, a lingerie mogulette saddled with a philandering husband and cheeky employees who suggest she pose for the company's ads by having her head morphed onto someone else's body. As she did on Cheers, Alley mines the insecurities behind her character and herself. "Ronnie," she admits, "is an exaggerated version of me"--right down to the weight problems and the messy public divorce. Alley separated last year from Stevenson, her husband of 13 years, and Veronica's Closet will mine that subject thoroughly, along with dieting.

Nestled in NBC's coveted half-hour slot between Seinfeld and ER, it is the odds-on favorite to become the fall's new hit sitcom. But can Alley really succeed where other Cheers alums have failed? Though Kelsey Grammer's Frasier is a ratings hit for NBC, Ted Danson (Sam), Rhea Perlman (Carla) and George Wendt (Norm) have all bombed in series over the past year. NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield signed up Veronica's Closet for only 13 episodes, but he notes that Alley's producers, Kevin Bright, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, the creative team behind Friends, weren't just handed the precious post-Seinfeld time slot as a gift. "On other shows, producers drink wine and congratulate themselves after each take," he says. "Not these guys. They keep rewriting. The reason their shows are so satisfying is they are never satisfied."

Alley herself isn't easily satisfied. While most of her Cheers mates made a run at new TV shows, she ruminated and shopped for the right producers. "I made a decision I wasn't coming back to TV unless I could do as good a job--or better--than Cheers," she says. "I'd take a meeting with someone and come out and say, 'Ugh, life is too short.' They were all too serious." She knew she wanted to do another sitcom, and she had strong opinions about the kind of character she wanted to play. "I wanted Ronnie to be rich but a loser. I figured there had to be humor in that," she explains. "I wanted to do a woman who was struggling with life, struggling with love, struggling, struggling, struggling. That's what I do best, after all," she says, looking up, one black eyebrow arched in wry amusement.

Perlman, a friend since their Cheers days, describes Alley as "totally nuts, out of her mind. She's beautiful and wacked out at the same time." Alley's comedic strength, says Perlman, lies in her ability to play "a woman on the edge, about to fall apart, emotional yet with a sense of humor." Says Danson: "The more nervous she is, the more outrageous she gets. It's one thing to be terrified and stick your toe in the water but another to be doing a cannonball into the water. Kirstie does cannonballs."

That kind of enthusiasm has kept the actress busy in the four years since Cheers went off the air. She earned an Emmy for her dramatic work in 1994's TV movie David's Mother. On Oct. 5 she does a comedy turn in Toothless--a fantasy made for ABC's newly revived Wonderful World of Disney--playing a workaholic dentist turned tooth fairy. And at Christmastime, she will co-star in movies with two famous and funny Allens: Woody in Deconstructing Harry and Tim in For Richer or Poorer. The normally reticent Woody Allen, who had never seen Alley until he chanced upon an old Cheers rerun while surfing the TV for a baseball game last year, says he knew immediately he wanted her to play his neurotic psychiatrist ex-wife. "The character called for a kind of earth motherly, uh, what do I mean, voluptuous, well, not exactly voluptuous"--he laughs here, realizing that he is probably asking for trouble with this description--"but a buxom earth-mother type. She delivered in spades. She's exceptional in it--you'll see. A real standout."

Her personal life is equally fulfilling. She's in a thriving relationship with new flame James Wilder, 34, one of the ex-hunks from Melrose Place and her co-star in the yet unreleased film Nevada. She recently moved into his home in the Hollywood Hills, along with the two children she adopted with Stevenson (William True, soon to be 5, and Lillie Price, 3), and a menagerie of assorted cats, dogs and birds. "It's like Doctor Dolittle in the city," she says. "I can't believe a man would open his arms to this road show," she laughs.

Alley, now 46 (though she denies it), credits much of her good fortune to her participation in the controversial Church of Scientology. Growing up in Wichita, Kans., she dreamed of running off to Hollywood even though she was a daddy's girl (hence the large role of Robert Prosky, her dad on Cheers, as her fictional father in the new series). Sidetracked by cocaine and interior decorating, she dropped out of her acting studies at the University of Kansas. Then she read L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, which Alley believes changed her life by making her take responsibility for herself. "I thought, O.K., this is either the world's biggest scam or it's fabulous. I stopped working, quit my job, and I drove my car to California to be a Scientologist."

A member since age 26, she dismisses claims in the press that Scientology officials choose her roles--or approve her interviews. (The organization sued TIME in 1992 over a damning expose about the church's tactics; the lower court ruled in favor of TIME.) "Scientologists are not sheep. They buck the system," she argues. Earnings from the Look Who's Talking movies she made with Travolta, another famous church member, helped her open a Scientology mission in her Kansas hometown where nonmembers can learn to read. "People don't see the good," she says in disgust.

Twelve hours later, with midnight fast approaching, Alley and the cast are still on Stage 25 finishing up Episode No. 5, in which her top executive, Olive (Kathy Najimy), persuades Ronnie to be a role model for a new anatomically correct doll (its breasts sag, and its butt protrudes). By this time, everybody is getting punch-drunk tired. Alley starts singing "I am woman, I am role model, I am whore." No one seems to notice. She smiles. She's happy, really happy, to be back.