Is Alyssa Milano really charmed? Recently, one of her cats jumped off a second-floor balcony in her Benedict Canyon house and sailed 20 feet to the atrium floor, shrieking like a hellcat en route. "She made this horrifying sound, like I've never heard before," says Milano. Kitty didn't land on its feet as expected, so Milano swooped down (the stairs) after her and picked up the sprawled feline, ready to administer last rites. "But she started purring seconds later, and I thought, 'This is a special cat.' "
     In the WB's cult occult hit Charmed, Milano plays Phoebe, who, along with sisters Prue and Piper, finds she's possessed of magical powers and (like the WB's other unlikely heroine, Buffy) spends her days and nights warding off satanic demons. Milano's character is the wackiest Wiccan of the three, the one most likely to use her powers foolishly. But the off-screen Milano is delightfully grounded and levelheaded, and tends to use her star power wisely. After growing up in front of our eyes for eight seasons as Tony Danza's adorable daughter, Samantha, on ABC's Who's the Boss?, Milano busted out, literally, as a sex icon, the girl most often entertaining young men in their bedrooms via the Internet. But four years ago, she'd had enough of electronic pornographers getting rich illegally off of her, ahem, charms, and did something about it. In an ironic turn of events, she sued the pants off them. Now she's warding off demons off-screen, as well.
     She's reading the Los Angeles Times and sipping coffee when I meet her at a deli in Bel Air at 9 a.m., 90 minutes before she has to be on the set of Charmed. She's so pretty and, yes, charming that it's hard to believe she once portrayed the harsh Long Island Lolita in a television movie about Amy Fisher.
     "Let's not talk about your TV series," I say, "since by all reports it's a veritable lovefest on the set."
     "We have a really fun time," she says.

     Her: My little brother, Cory, who was 12 at the time, went on the Internet and typed in my name and found me on a lot of porn sites. He was devastated. It was a major family dilemma. My lawyer said that, even if the pictures were legitimate, they couldn't use my likeness for their income without permission. Those people were making 30 grand a month off me.
     Me: And your mother get involved.
     Her: She started a company called CyberTrackers that sent harassing e-mails to pornmasters to make them take down Internet pictures of her celebrity clients. Threatening them was mostly successful, but lawsuits came about because of those who wouldn't cooperate. We settled 15 cases out of court and one went to trial and won us $250,000.
     Me: Which I understand you thought of as filthy lucre.
     Her: I thought, 'Oh, shit, this is karmicly wrong and I'm going to hell!' So we decided to use the money to start this search engine and network that would be porn-free and eventually have original programming safesearching.com.
     Me: Do you make money from it, you little Webmistress?
     Her: Oh, yeah. I completely own it with my mother.
     Me: Do you make 30 grand a month?
     Her: I make more than that. And we're gonna go public soon.
     Me: Can I buy in?
     Her: Yeah! It's a very nice way to make extra money.
     Me: Actually, that would be my income.
     Her: I'll give you another good stock tip: MP3. I just made someone $5,000 in three hours. It's 42 bucks a share right now. 'MP3' just surpassed 'sex' as the most frequently searched-for word on the Web.
     Me: I checked out safesearching.com the other day and it's very entertaining in a wholesomely prurient sort of way. I got to watch the very-hot-indeed version of your Candie's perfume commercial that's nearly impossible to find on TV. Do you like being a sex object?
     Her: Yeah, I like it to an extent. I grew up in such a well-rounded family; my parents were obviously having sex. They probably continue to, although now it makes me a little ill to think about it. [Laughs] My parents had a healthy attitude toward sex; it wasn't a dirty, evil thing. So I like appearing sexy to people.
     Me: It doesn't bother you that boys are jerking off to your image?
     Her: I don't think about that.
     Me: But you know it's....
     Her: I don't think about that.
     Me: Okay. But if you did think about it, would it freak you out?
     Her: I don't want to think about it.

     Milano was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in December 1972. In 1976, a shooting in the neighborhood while little Alyssa was playing on the Milanos' front lawn prompted the family to move to boringly safe Staten Island. "I grew up in such a creative house," says Milano. Mom was a fashion designer with two boutiques in Brooklyn; Dad was a struggling musician (he now edits music for films in Hollywood). They were not a typical suburban family. "We didn't sit down and watch TV together. When my dad came home, we'd have dinner and then he played piano, my mom would sit with her sketchbook, and I would play with my dolls and make up scenes." Early on, she had taken singing and dancing classes and, at age seven, after seeing the musical Annie on Broadway, tried out for and won a part in the touring company. "It was so easy," she says. It was no hard-knock life for her.

     Her: I did that for a year and a half. When I got back from Annie, I did theater work, some plays and a low-budget movie called Old Enough, with Danny Aiello. It was great starting out like that because it was like my acting class, you know. Then I got the pilot for Who's the Boss? when I was 11, and we moved to Los Angeles.
     Me: You spent your entire formative years in the living rooms of America.
     Her: I went from 11 to 19: prepuberty, puberty, adolescence, adulthood. It was probably the best way for me to grow up in this business because it meant stability. It was seeing the same people every day. I know a lot of child actors who have major abandonment issues because they became friends with a movie crew for three months or bonded with the cast of a play for a year and then never talked to any of those people again. But when it came time for Who's the Boss? to end after eight years, I was old enough to understand that.
     Me: Certain other kid actors grew up on television and wound up addicts and bank robbers. How were you spared that fate?
     Her: Because I had two incredibly normal parents who loved each other and provided a strong family foundation. In fact, my parents never came on the set of the show; my mom hired a guardian to be with me. It was important to her to have her own life and also to have dinner ready when I got home. And having a brother who's ten years younger is incredibly grounding. It was always very evident to me what life is supposed to be about.
     Me: Did Tony Danza protect you in a controlling, macho Italian kind of way?
     Her: I have Italian parents, so it was relative to my world. I had uncles and cousins who did the same thing.
     Me: But I remember talk at the time that he wasn't letting you grow up, that he was restricting your necklines and hemlines.
     Her: But that was my life with my family, so it wasn't weird to me at all. It was weird to other people. He wasn't any more parental than my father was. I was with him for eight years. He's Italian, and that's what they do. [Laughs]
     Me: Who's the Boss? went off the air in 1992 and you posed nude for Bikini magazine's premiere issue that year.
     Her: I didn't pose nude for Bikini. I posed nude for a coffee-table book about celebrities and their tattoos, and the money was going to go to pediatric AIDS. But the book never came out and the photographer sold the pictures to Bikini without telling me. I could do nothing because the photographer owned the rights to the pictures.