On a sultry February evening in Los Angeles, Alyssa Milano is sweetly explaining that life on the set of the hit WB show Charmed is not the catfight the tabloids predicted. Even though Charmed's story line - three sisters (Milano, Shannen Doherty and Holly Marie Combs) move in together, discover they have witch powers, and then have witch adventures - cries out for hex jokes and "rhymes with bitch" headlines, she assures me that there is absolutely no evil-eye voodoo going on.
     "I was just totally nervous when I started, but about two hours into our first workday I felt really close to both Shannen and Holly," Alyssa says. "It sounds like such a cliché and bullshit, I know, but it's like a 14-hour slumber party every day."
     I look around. No pillow fights or panty raids - I'm not convinced. I corner the director. Tell me something about Alyssa that's shocking, I prod. He spills: "Well, there was that thing about the venereal disease." I'm scribbling it down furiously. Then I look up.
     He's kidding. "Make sure to write something nice," he says, smiling.
     Meanwhile, Alyssa - clad in a red velvet dress that clings to all the places I wouldn't mind clinging to - prepares for her first scene. I wander over to the now-empty chairs where the actors idle between shots. On the backs of the seats belonging to Doherty and Combs, someone has stuck strips of masking tape with a message scrawled across them: "Lesbian Lovers."
     This is much better than a catfight.
     I point out the graffiti to Alyssa, who shouts, "Someone get me some tape." A crew member brings over a roll and she instructs him to write "Third Wheel" on a strip and plaster it on her chair. "Those two were best friends before the shoot," she says, a touch of sadness in her voice, and for a moment, it seems she's feeling abandoned by the lovin' coven.
     Just then her co-stars pull up. Doherty, who's back from taping an appearance on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno hops down from the van, crowing, "I told him my New York lesbian stories!" Alyssa shows Combs what she's stuck to the back of her chair, and the willowy actress immediately pulls Alyssa in for a hug.
     "Oh, honey," she coos. "We're a threesome; you know that."

THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS about Alyssa Milano are completely false: She digs chicks. She is perennially single and desperate. She exercises naked. She's a fueled-up former child star and a real-life witch, locked in a battle to the death with her Charmed co-star Shannen Doherty.
     If only. Here's the truth about Alyssa Milano: She's Brooklyn-born and loves her Italian parents, her little brother, her dog, her rock-star husband, and, yes, all of her co-stars. She is a Catholic whose Hollywood Hills home is filled with Virgin Mary statues. She calls people she just met "honey." She drives a Volvo. The worst thing she ever did was stalk a guy for exactly one night. She is the Good Witch of the East who moved out West at the age of ll, when she landed the role of Tony Danza's wisecracking Brooklyn Italian daughter in Who's the Boss. But none of this changes the unwavering fact:
     She is active-volcano hot.

ALYSSA MILANO IS talking about the lesbian option. "It's weird, because I've had conversations with people about this," she says, pulling on the first of many American Spirit cigarettes. Curled up on an overstuffed chair in her cavernous living room, the tiny actress, dressed down in a breast-hugging black tank top, tight green cords, and black army boots, appears even tinier. "It's like I'm so into being the girl and being feminine and little, and the thought of someone's skin being as soft as mine freaks me out." She adds, "I've always noticed boys in that way."
     At 26, she's had more comebacks than Bill Clinton. She's done TV, an exercise video, cheesy movies of the week, soft-core cable fodder, and a couple of decent movies, but no matter what she's doing, boys have always noticed Alyssa Milano in that way. Aaron Spelling, who's hired her twice - first as the backstabbing Jennifer Mancini for a season on Melrose Place, and then as good witch Phoebe on Charmed - thinks he knows why. "Sexuality is women with huge silicone breasts sticking up," he explains. "Alyssa has something else - virginal sensuality."
     When Alyssa was about 4, she walked into her parents' bedroom. They were... busy. She asked what they were doing. Ninety-seven percent of Catholic parents would have spontaneously combusted, but not Alyssa's. "My dad looked at me and said,'Making love to your mother,'" she recalls. "They didn't get freaked out or shout, 'Get out!' I was like, 'Oh, okay, I get it.'" In one stroke, he'd created a guilt-free, uninhibited woman-one who would eventually bare her body with the carefree abandon of a Mardi Gras reveler. "I think we're in a time when everyone's afraid to have sex," Alyssa says. "But I was raised with it being beautiful and healthy."
     That's why I can talk easily with her, despite having spent the past 24 hours viewing some of the raciest highlights of her oeuvre: Poison Ivy 2: Lily (three topless scenes, one booty close-up, and sex all over the place), Deadly Sins (lesbian and nudie action), and Embrace of the Vampire (an all-out Alyssa nudity fest). That's why I can glance at the Kama Sutra Weekender Kit sitting so casually on her living-room table and not feel the slightest bit uncomfortable. If she's at ease, then so am I. In fact, the only note of anxiety comes from her German shepherd, Pinto, who's barking outside the door, just itching to get his fangs in my ass.
     "Nein! Nein!" Alyssa calls to him fetchingly. German is the only language the dog understands.
     I ask if she's ever been stalked. "I've had some scary situations," Alyssa admits. "But I have people who go through all my fan mail and alert me if I have to be careful. I've always been very safety-conscious. Hence the killer dog."
     Child stars have always been pervert-magnets. And child stars who've done lots of B-movie nudity? Please. Surf through alt.fan.alyssa-milano, and you'll find all kinds of suave messages. For example: "Any guys out there want to get together for the next Charmed episode and masturbate?"

Back when the whole online thing was catching on, a naked Alyssa Milano - along with Lois & Clark's curvaceous Teri Hatcher - ruled the Net. Many of the much-downloaded photos were stills from her movies, but a number of the sites also featured images with Milano's head pasted on someone else's body. "There was one picture with my head on a naked girl's body doing a leg lift," she says. "It's ludicrous, and I could easily have said, 'Well, whatever. People are crazy.' But the fact that they were making 30 grand a month off of it drove me nuts."
     Finally when her then-12-year-old brother did a search on her name and was confronted with thousands of hot pics, Alyssa went tactical-nuclear. She and her mother/personal manager, Lin, filed seven lawsuits: six were settled out of court, with the websites agreeing to remove the pictures; one, against nudecelebrity.com, went to trial, and Milano won $230,000. Lin (whom Alyssa proudly calls a "ballbuster") even started a company called CyberTrackers, which monitors the Web and "harasses" companies that use unauthorized nude shots of celebrities.
     At her official website, alyssa.com, you can find the other Alyssa - the authorized version. Think pastels, hearts, and news about the actress's recent "traumatic" haircut. There's a link to the website of Alyssa's favorite poet (Edna St. Vincent Millay) and free alyssa.com wallpaper, which depicts Alyssa as an angel floating among sweet-faced women. It's as if she's the leader of a cult - a cult of nice, pretty people.

AS A FORMER child star, Alyssa Milano has the God-given right to be a miserable bitch. But she doesn't feel any camaraderie with the sitcom-bred monsters of the world. "If I saw Danny Bonaduce at a club, I'd run," she laughs. "The first time I got drunk was when I was 19. And when I go out now, it's the same exact people who are still there doing exactly the same shit that they were doing then."
     While some of her peers were already on the road to self-destruction, the hard-driving Alyssa was touring in a road production of Annie at 8. Four years later, in 1984, she landed the role of Boss's Samantha and became an instant celebrity. "Oh God, it's hard enough to go through puberty let alone in front of millions of people. And then put the '80s on top of all that pressure!" she says. "Everyone's embarrassed about their youth, but it just happens that the '80s were particularly disgusting. Flock of Seagulls is not cool."
     In the "just say no" era, Alyssa said yes to across-the-board fame. Not only was she a TV icon and magazine columnist ("From Alyssa With Love" in Teen Machine magazine), she also became the high school version of Jane Fonda, releasing the workout video Teen Steam. "It was my first brainstorm ever," she says. "I could look back on it and say, 'Wow, that was a really cheesy thing,' but it was a really cheesy era. It did a lot of good, and it sold huge."
     Alyssa also made five albums, which sold huge in Japan. She actually played Budokan, singing of teen lust and puppy love in front of a crowd of 40,000 fans who stared at her in eerily silent adoration. "It was probably one of the most frightening experiences of my life," she says now. So why didn't Alyssa pull a Tiffany stateside and rake in millions by releasing her records here? "I don't think actors and actresses are taken seriously as musicians and singers," she says. "And besides, I felt like people in this country had enough to give me shit about."
     By 1992, it seemed the country just didn't give a shit. Who's the Boss went off the air, and 20-year-old Alyssa's teens had run out of steam. To Hollywood, she was "that sitcom kid," so she did the only thing possible - ditched the sweet-girl image and took on the role of the Long Island Lolita. Though her Amy was the nastiest of 1993's three Fisher flicks, Casualties of Love: The Amy Fisher Story failed to reignite her career. Desperate to keep working, Alyssa did a string of forgettable, virtually straight-to-video movies, only managing a brief ascent from B-actress hell with 1996's Fear (a kind of Fatal Attraction for teens). Her memorable performance as an out-of-control girlfriend (opposite Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon) finally earned Alyssa some serious acting cred - and helped land her most challenging role to date, in 1997's tauntingly funny Hugo Pool.
     "She's a combination of an old soul and a young sprite," says Hugo director Robert Downey Sr. "And she's fun. When I first met her I told her I'd never even seen Who's the Boss, and she said, 'Please don't.' I thought that was cute." Milano won renewed attention at Sundance for her sexy turn as a sweet-natured pool cleaner, but getting an up-close view of co-star Robert Downey Jr. - who was in the midst of his battle with drugs and despair - shook her to the core. "He sat down and played a guitar one day and I was like, 'Holy shit.' Like, the guy just has talent in his pinky toe," she says, her voice dropping nearly to a whisper. "He broke my heart. I don't mean in a romantic sense - I mean just seeing this beautiful human being caught up in something so destructive."

Alyssa Milano is very familiar with the other kind of heartbreak, too. At least that's what she says. "My first crush was this guy in grammar school. I kissed him - and he punched me so hard I had a black eye." Years later, she suffered another cruel rejection, but in a foreshadowing of her performance as Amy Fisher, she reacted by fueling up the car, calling in a girlfriend for backup, and tracking her ex, hoping to catch him with the other woman. The mission failed, and Alyssa's conscience tore into her. "I felt so bad I actually considered going to confession," she says now. And when her six-month engagement to Scott Wolf, star of Charmed's main competition, Party of Five, ended in 1994, it was an "awful heartbreak."
     If she really had witch powers, I ask, would she be up late at night tormenting a Scott voodoo doll? Alyssa smiles a secret smile and says only. "Oh, no, we're good witches."
     Of course.
     Alyssa's epic search for the right guy ended when she met Cinjun Tate, lead singer of the rising rock band Remy Zero (none other than Courtney Love called their Villa Elaine "one of the best albums of 1998"). After knowing each other only 10 months, the two married on New Year's Day in Louisiana. Like most newlyweds, she is disconcertingly happy - showing me the wedding album (including shots of Shannen Doherty screaming with laughter), reliving the entire affair from wardrobe to cake-on-face smearing, and even calling Cinjun's tour bus every few hours for some gooey conversation.
     I ask if she's worried that Tate might become as famous as say, Mick Jagger, and for once, she seems not so nice. "That's a bad example," Alyssa says, cutting me off, her eyes blazing. This is one rock wife who's not about to become the next Jerry Hall.

AARON SPELLING WANTS to know why the media feel the need to manufacture controversy about his well-mannered witches. "I don't need that kind of electricity on the set," he says. "If they were feuding, why would Shannen go to Alyssa's wedding? The only thing Shannen's said is that Alyssa works too hard - which she does."
     On the Charmed set, Alyssa is working hard, knocking out scenes in one or two shots like the sort of person who's been on TV since she was 11. In this episode, Phoebe has been possessed by an evil spirit, "the woogie man." Standing in the doorway of their Victorian house, she screams at her sisters: "You don't live here anymore! He does."
     Tonight the only histrionics are the kind the script calls for. I've managed to elicit tepid complaints about the long hours and the WB's lousy on-set food, but that's it. It's like an Up With People concert around here - with one exception: A local resident isn't happy about the TV crew invading his neighborhood, and when the cameras roll, he bangs and scrapes on pots to screw up the sound mix. Milano is unperturbed.
     "When he knows his house is going to be in the shot, he sits on the front lawn and refuses to move," she says with a shrug. "What can you do?"
     I decide to test Alyssa Milano's superhuman goodness one last time.
     "Can't Spelling have him killed?" I ask casually.
     "You know," she says, her eyes lighting up, "he probably could."
     See, that's how it is with these nice types: You've got to give them ideas.