For Adrienne Barbeau, a Broadway actress without a TV credit to her name, the message to call CBS conjured up two possibilities. "I assumed they wanted me for extra work," she says, recalling that moment in the spring '72. "Or maybe, at best, they wanted me for a soap opera."

Instead, at the black fortress that houses CBS in Manhattan, she was asked to audition for a new series--Maude. They were casting about, on both Coasts, for an actress to play Maude's divorced daughter.

Ultimately, from a field of over a hundred, Miss Barbeau was tapped for the role. "At first I thought, 'No, she's too young'," says producer Norman Lear. "But the more girls we saw, the more I kept thinking back to Adrienne. There was something so special about her, mainly those damned wise-hearted eyes of hers, through which you can read deeply."

"I remember the first time I saw her walk onto the set," says Beatrice Arthur, the commanding Everest of a woman who stars as Maude. "I said to myself, 'So that's Adrienne Barbeau? Heavens, she's so young and pretty!' She turned out also, I learned, to be warm, bright, talented and compassionate."

"Adrienne's an ace chick," sums up Bill Macy, the breezy-hip New Yorker who portrays Maude's fourth husband and, therefore, her daughter's stepfather on the show.

The foregoing assessments reveal at least part of the story of Adrienne Barbeau, whose appearance off-camera reinforces a line delivered by Maude with grand imperiousness in one of the early episodes. "It's all my fault," cried Maude as she resignedly contemplated her daughter's appeal to men. "You're stacked--just like me!"

On this day, Miss Barbeau was doing spectacular things to a black pantsuit with a red flower pattern and cut low in front. It was the time of the electricians' strike against CBS; production on the taped shows had been temporarily halted and she could indulge in the luxury of a leisurely afternoon of talk and reflection.

She is 27 years old. "I don't mind being 27," she says. "I've worked hard to be 27. It took me a long time to get myself together. I still have my insecurities but I know my own worth now. It's good being 27, which just happens to be the age of the girl I play. Maude's daughter is 27, divorced, independent. Outside of the fact that I would never live at home under those circumstances and that I've never been married, we're very much alike. The daughter, Carol, obviously likes Maude. She's amused by Maude. But you know she won't grow into a Maude.

"I guess they needed somebody to stand up to Maude," she theorizes, "and that's where I come in. I have strength myself, both personally and in the character of Carol, but I usually don't like the overly strong women. But Maude I like because of the way Bea Arthur plays her, with a touch of vulnerability. As for my own role..."

Here she stops and perplexity makes inroads into her pretty, precise-boned features. "I know I'm never going to have any of the funny lines. I'm there, usually, to advance the story line, to supply necessary bits of information. We're still discovering who this girl is. It's such a...difficult role. It hasn't taken on its colorations. It hasn't solidifed or come alive. I still haven't come to terms with it, and it distresses me."

Norman Lear, who created Maude as an outgrowth of his phenomenally successful All in the Family, recognizes her concern and its legitimacy. "At the start, the same thing was true of Sally Struthers playing the daughter in Family," Lear says. "It takes time for a series role to develop. We've had to concentrate so much on Maude and Walter, her husband, that we haven't been able to expand Adrienne's part as well as we might.

"I don't think we've come up with the writing, either, to enable Adrienne to hit her stride. It's our fault and certainly not hers. We owe it to Adrienne to do some fleshing out of the part. But it will come, and when it does, I guarantee she'll fly with it."

Although he had never seen her act, Lear had confidence in Adrienne from the beginning. She had one of the top roles in "Grease," a hit Broadway musical, and glowing reports had filtered back to Lear. "We asked her, one day last June, to miss a performance and fly out to the Coast to audition," Lear recalls. "We gave her three scenes to read for us. She asked if she could come back in an hour, and she did, with every word committed to memory. In contrast to the other girls trying out, she didn't merely give a reading--she gave a performance."

Adrienne grew up in San Jose, Cal., the second daughter of a French-Canadian father and an Armenian mother. Her parents divorced when she was 12. "It wasn't easy, getting over the pain of my father leaving," she says. "Only when I went into analysis and group therapy was I able to reclaim those emotions I had at 12; the anger, the bitterness, the hurt. When I was able to re-experience the pain, I was able finally to cope with it."

Raised by her mother in an Armenian atmosphere, spending her summers on the farm with her grape-growing Armenian relatives, Adrienne says she feels a much stronger kinship to her Armenian side, with its warm, familial memories.

Throughout her childhood, at her mother's insistence, Adrienne studied dancing and singing, and she became active in San Jose high school and community theater. For a year, she attended near-by Foothills Junior College. At 19, she went with the San Jose Light Opera troupe, on a Federal grant, to entertain servicemen in the Pacific.

On her return, dissatisfaction set in. "I remember looking around the termite-control office where I was working," she says, "and I knew that wasn't for me anymore."

She set out for New York, with visions of storming Broadway. By day she studied acting, and auditioned for theater roles; at night she worked a variety of jobs, often menial. For a while, she worked as a go-go dancer in New Jersey, in tough, factory towns like Secaucus and Elizabeth.

"Many's the night I'd be sitting alone in the ladies room, studying my books on acting. I'd do my little dance number and then it was back to the books. It was real male Middle America out there, sitting around the bar. You can't explain to them that you're an actress taking a job to stay alive and you're not for sale. So you ignore the suggestive comments and the offers and maybe even slap a few faces."

In time, the parts began coming her way in musical stock and off-Broadway. In 1968, she made it to Broadway as the second daughter in "Fiddler on the Roof," singing the plaintive "Far from the Home I Love." She was with the show two and a half years--a time, she recalls, that found her conversastion increasingly peppered with Yiddish phrases. "Actually," she says, "I stayed too long in 'Fiddler.' There just wasn't anything more I could find in the role. But to leave a job on the Broadway stage, that would be meshuga."

By the winter of 1971-72, she was being featured in "Grease," a musical concerned with the music and styles of the 1950s. Playing the leader of a girls gang, complete with bouffant hair-do, saddle shoes and angora sweater, Adrienne scored with her big song, "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee." Her performance won her a Tony nomination and a Theatre World Award as the season's most promising actress.

Originally, in the spin-off episode of All in the Family, the role of Maude's daughter was taken by Marcia Rodd, a New York actress. When the series emerged, however, she elected to remain with her family instead of moving out to Hollywood. "When I heard that the role of the daughter was open, I had strange, almost mystical feelings," Adrienne says. "I knew it was absolutely right for me. A part of me felt that it as mine, that it couldn't possibly go to anyone else. But when I did get it, another part of me was stunned with surprise.

"For years, it was hard for me to admit to being ambitious, because if you tell yourself you want success, then you admit also to the chance of failing. I still think alot about all my old friends back in New York, the ones still struggling, still eking out a bare existence, living on dreams. I just hope they don't give up. I know now that if you believe in yourself strongly enough, it'll happen. How can I not believe that? It happened to me.

*article from TV Guide, February 10-16, 1973