BYLINE: MARGALIT FOX. Margalit Fox is a regular contributor to this newspaper.

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A HUSH FALLS on the set of "Guiding Light" at the start of a dress rehearsal one recent afternoon. Eleni, the lovely young wife, is in a fury. The object of her rage is Julie, the sultry live-in babysitter she believes has seduced her husband.

   "We gave you a home, a family, and in return you tried to destroy us," Eleni cries. She wrenches open Julie's bureau drawers and proceeds to hurl her lingerie out the window as the raven-haired temptress looks on, stunned.

   And what of Frank, the handsome, philandering husband? That's one scene from this TV soap opera that won't be coming to your television screen anytime soon.  As the two women tear into each other on the set, the actor who plays him is busy tearing back and forth on the sidelines, grinning broadly, whacking everyone in reach with a stuffed cloth dinosaur.

   It's just another day at Camp Guiding Light. That's the affectionate in-house nickname for the community of more than 160 behind the venerable soap - from producers, directors and cast members to makeup artists, cameramen and carpenters.

   "Guiding Light," which airs on CBS each weekday from 3 to 4 p.m., chronicles the lives and loves of five extended families in the fictional midwestern city of Springfield. But as a recent week-long visit to the set reveals, there is another community here that "GL" viewers never get to see: the town behind the camera, with a cast of characters as captivating as in any daytime drama.

   Where life in Springfield is defined by assassination attempts, raging court battles and torrid love affairs, life for the inhabitants of Camp Guiding Light is described by practical jokes, minor squabbles and ordinary affections. "It's like family," says Jean Carol, who plays Frank's mother, Nadine Cooper.  "Sometimes we have disagreements and stuff, but it always works out. At least we're real."

   These days, there is much cause for celebration in the town-behind-the-town:  "Guiding Light" has been honored with 16 Daytime Emmy Award nominations -  including one for outstanding drama series - topping the list for daytime

programs. (The awards ceremony will be broadcast Wednesday from 9 to 11 p.m. on ABC.) It's the collective hope of the "GL" community that this critical recognition will bolster viewership of the show, which currently fluctuates between sixth and eighth place in the ratings among TV's 10 daytime dramas.

   The hidden town comes to life on Monday just past dawn. At 6:30 a.m., the first group of actors arrives for makeup, hairstyling and a rehearsal at the East 44th Street building where the soap - one of six taped in New York City - rents office and studio space. The town won't go to sleep until 2 or 3 the next morning, when the last crew member finishes readying the sets for the coming day.

   It goes on like this every weekday, 52 weeks a year, all to get 45 minutes of footage on the air. "It's like an organism," says cameraman Michael Jarocki. "It's breathing. There are people working here twenty hours a day."

   Jarocki, a slender, dark-haired young man, is eating supper Monday night at the Wheels and Meals diner, a popular spot with "GL" cast and crew. It's a typical Greek eatery, crowded with patrons at 7 p.m. There's a Formica counter with a row of chrome stools and cakes displayed under clear plastic covers.  Nearby, customers squeeze into the half-dozen red vinyl booths. The walls are hung with a Heimlich poster, a rather garish painting of the Acropolis and menu boards touting gyros, souvlaki and moussaka.

   But the homey-looking diner is nothing more than a set in Studio B on the building's sixth floor. The cast and crew members on their dinner break are wolfing down takeout Chinese food straight from the cartons. Behind the counter, props man Michael Boucher, an affable, stocky man with light-brown hair and a moustache, is busy cleaning out the diner's Pyrex coffeepots. Irene Pace, a slender woman with short blonde hair who is directing today's episode, slips into a booth alongside several cast members to give them their notes for the show, which will air two weeks later.

   A portly man saunters over to Jarocki's booth. He is the stage manager, Locke Wallace, white-haired and bearded, with a mellifluous voice redolent of his southern boyhood. If you were going to make a movie of his life, you'd cast Burl Ives.  A 26-year veteran of "Guiding Light," Wallace also is a songwriter in his spare time; to know him for five minutes is to come away with a cassette tape of his anthem, "I Believe in the Mets," in your pocket. He slides companionably into the booth, singing "I snuck a piece of cake," in a rich baritone.

ABRUPTLY, the easy calm evaporates as Pace calls for the next scene. Wallace props a small slate on his ample middle and faces one of the three hulking video cameras. "This is 'Guiding Light,' episode eleven thousand, eight-eighty-nine, scene three-C," he intones. "Very quiet, please." The action begins, as Nadine sneaks into the converted firehouse where her ex-husband, Buzz, lives to search for $ 100,000 in stolen money he's stashed there.

   Day after day, life on the "GL" set is regulated by this constant ebb and
flow. "In a given hour, you're standing around for forty minutes, and you're really only working for twenty minutes," says utility man Eric Shuttleworth, who assists the cameramen and sound men. "But you can't mess up during that twenty minutes, so there's always that tension."

   And it is in the fleeting lulls between scenes and takes that a backstage
visitor can glimpse the hidden town come momentarily to life and just as quickly disappear: Brigadoon in a TV studio.

   By 8 p.m. the last scene of the night is in the can. "We're out!" Wallace
cries, as is the custom after each completed scene. It sounds like "Rrrout!"  Everyone heads wearily for home, the actors with scripts under their arms to study tomorrow's lines.

   "Hour soaps are very rough to work," Wallace says. "That's a lot of material to put on the air every day. There's a constant push, watching the clock."

   He remembers simpler times. The longest-running daytime drama in TV history, "Guiding Light" bowed on radio in 1937 and on television in 1952. When Wallace came on board in 1968, the show was 15 minutes long and aired live. "There were no hairdressers," he recalls. "Actors did their own hair. There was no recorded music. There was an organist in the corner behind a flat, and he would play for whatever was going on."

   The show expanded to 30 minutes later that year and went to its present hour-long format in 1977. "Now," Wallace recalls, "we can go out and shoot big explosions and car chases that would've been unheard of in 1968, when it was just two people sitting at a table drinking coffee and saying, 'You know, Papa's been drinking again.' "

   On Tuesday morning, the show's relentless cycle starts anew. Cast members trickle in to the fifth-floor rehearsal room, clutching scripts and cardboard cups of coffee. Several of the women sport fat pink curlers, courtesy of the hair department across the hall. Today's director is Bruce Barry, a tall, curly haired man with a ready laugh, who alternates in the director's chair with Pace and two others. (The show's 13 writers work at home, gathering at 44th Street for a weekly story meeting.)

   "Guiding Light" has about 35 regular characters, but this week the plot
focuses heavily on the Cooper family: Frank and his Greek wife, Eleni; Nadine and Buzz; Buzz' elegant English lover, Jenna. Melina Kanakaredes, who plays Eleni, is here this morning, as are Frank Dicopoulos, who plays Frank, and Rick Hearst, who plays Eleni's ex-husband, the wealthy Alan-Michael Spaulding. Practically everyone in Springfield has been married to everyone else at least once.

   The rehearsal gets under way, with performers still reading from scripts.
There are many flubbed lines. If this were a play with six weeks to open, it wouldn't be surprising. But this is the only rehearsal the actors will get
before they hit the studio for the morning taping. Somehow, everything will come out all right for the cameras, without the aid of a single TelePrompTer.

   "It's somewhat improvisational," says Emmy nominee Kanakaredes, who, like Dicopoulos, grew up in a Greek-American family in Akron, Ohio. "The thing we have is the consistency: You've been playing the same character for a long time.  Perhaps the words aren't perfect, but they come to you, because you know that character so well."

   At 9:30, Barry and the cast troop up to Studio A for the morning taping
session. The studio is a cool, echoing cavern the size of an airplane hangar.

A forest of lights hangs overhead; the floor is a tangle of cables, ropes and
ladders. A half-dozen furnished sets are crammed into the darkened space. Today, these include a bedroom with adjoining bath belonging to the lawyer Ross Marler; Frank and Eleni's bedroom, dominated by the double bed into which the lovesick Julie stole yesterday while Frank slept; and the Towers Terrace, an elegant al fresco restaurant whose round tables are set for lunch. (As in a movie shoot, all the scenes on a given set are taped back-to-back. The following day, editors cut them together in the correct narrative sequence.)

   Before long, a steamy scene is under way in Ross' bathroom. Elizabeth Keifer, who plays Ross' young fiancee, Blake, is in the shower, clad from the chest down in a flesh-colored body stocking that won't show on TV. As the cameras roll, she pulls her fully clothed lover (played by Jerry ver Dorn) under the spray and proceeds to peel off his sodden attire.

   The only sounds in the studio are the running water, the actors' voices and the soft pock-pock of crew members' rubber-soled shoes. But as soon as Adam Reist, the boyish-faced morning stage manager, cries "Rrrout," the room is awash in dozens of conversations. As the backstage town springs to life: "Should I have pizza or Chinese?" . . . "Without that knuckleball, Reardon's stuff looks good" . . . "It's a film noir in color, which is a contradiction in terms."

   Enid TurnBull, the show's wardrobe supervisor, and Arlene Konowitz, the
wardrobe assistant, step quickly forward and wrap the waterlogged actors in thick terrycloth robes. "My job is to keep 'em from getting pneumonia," Konowitz says. She is small and wiry, with reddish-brown hair and a Thelma Ritter voice. Her glasses are stuck by the earpiece through the weave of her pink sweater.

   It is the show's strong sense of community, company members say, that offers abundant compensation for the long, grueling days. Those community ties also extend to absent friends. At 4:30, cast and crew move to tiny Studio B for the afternoon taping. Buzz (played by Justin Deas) and Jenna (played by Fiona Hutchison) bewail the fate of the $ 100,000, which Nadine discovered and promptly flushed down the toilet. Julie (played by Jocelyn Seagrave) tells her best friend, Lucy (played by Sonia Satra) - who happens to be Frank's long-lost half-sister - that she's having an affair with Frank.

   During a lull, cameraman Jerry Gruen sits in a diner booth and speaks with quiet intensity about a softball game he and his wife are organizing to benefit Leonard Stabb. Stabb, who played Hart Jessup on the show, was seriously injured in a hang-gliding accident last summer.

   "He tried to do a loop-the-loop, one of the few who could do it," Gruen says in his Israeli-accented English. "He did a loop. He didn't do the second loop.  He went into a tree."

   The young actor remains in a New Jersey rehabilitation center. "He's in bad shape," Gruen says. "He can't walk, he can't talk, he just started
understanding."

"He was a big, strong, handsome guy," Jarocki puts in.

   "A young buck," Gruen says. Then Wallace announces the next scene, and Gruen ducks behind the camera, shaking his head sadly, to capture emotion and drama on videotape.

   The soap's small-town feel is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the hair and makeup rooms, the ritual first stop of the day. On Wednesday morning, makeup artists Joe Cola, Carlos Yeaggy and Sue Saccavino greet cast members with pecks on the cheek and set to work daubing on foundation and artfully concealing bags under tired eyes. With its barber chairs, lighted mirrors and long counter piled with cosmetics, the room looks like a neighborhood beauty parlor. In Saccavino's chair, Vincent Irizarry, who plays the young heir Nick Spaulding, talks animatedly about Verdi's "I Lombardi." Costume designer David Loveless drops in to pass around snapshots of his dog. From next door comes the gentle hum of blow dryers, as Carol Campbell, Robin Day, Joanne Cocuzza-Offenhartz and Linda Williams work in the hair room.

   "In film work, you make a lot of money, but in ten weeks, you're gone," Cola says. A slender man with brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he's worked on the show for 15 years. "You don't really get a chance to know people. Soap opera, even though it's a lot of work, is much more comfortable."

   There are tangible rewards, as well. While daytime salaries don't approach the stratospheric levels of nighttime TV and film, actors on some soaps can earn $ 700 to $ 5,000 an episode, appearing in an average of two shows a week, says "GL" executive producer Jill Farren Phelps. She adds the high-end figure exceeds the salaries paid to "GL" actors by Procter & Gamble, the show's producer.

   On Thursday morning the makeup room is again abuzz with chatter. Today the talk centers on Dicopoulos, a notorious prankster. "I once did a whole scene with something taped to my butt because Frank put something on the chair I sat in," says Kanakaredes, who has just come from washing her mane of brown ringlets. "But the best was when somebody glued all the things down in his dressing room."

   "Nobody knows who it was," says Cola as he works on the dark-haired Seagrave.

   "I would've paid money to be a fly on the wall when he tried to pick things up off the counter," Yeaggy says gleefully as he tweezes Kanakaredes' full eyebrows. "He had these special pens that he signed autographs with."

   And sure enough, as Eleni is busy flinging Julie's underwear out the window in Studio A a few hours later, there's Dicopoulos, flailing away with the prop dinosaur. The actor, who joined the show in 1987, has light-brown hair, square-jawed, all-American good looks and an unmistakable demonic gleam in his eye.

   A visitor asks about the mysterious glue attack on his dressing room, and the actor's eyes light up again. "You're a reporter," he says. "You find out who did it!"

   The crew sets up for the next scene, the exterior of Frank's house with
Julie's underclothes strewn about outside. Kanakaredes and prop man Boucher laughingly fling the slinky garments in the alley next to Frank's front porch. Then the voice of Jo Anne Sedwick, today's director, comes over the PA from the nearby control room. "Mike, is there some intimate apparel we can hang on the rail?"

   Boucher slings a brown brassiere over the porch railing. Wardrobe assistant Konowitz rushes forward. "We can get a nicer-looking bra than that," she says, pulling a black one from the jumbled pile of underwear and positioning it over the rail. As she walks off the set, Dicopoulos gives her a collegial pat on the back. When he removes his hand, there is a strip of wide yellow tape on her sweater.

   In the insular world of Camp Guiding Light, it can be easy to forget that
one's work extends beyond the studio to the millions of viewers who watch the show each day. Then something happens to bring it home. "There was a girl in her twenties who had brain cancer or something," Dicopoulos says later in a reflective moment. "I was her favorite character. I received this letter from her family saying she didn't have very much longer to live.

   "I sent her a red ribbon, the AIDS ribbon. For me, it also symbolizes hope," he continues. "I told her to pin it on her pillow and whenever she got weak, to touch it. And I sent her four or five photos, each with a different message. She died the next week. From what I understand, they buried my pictures and all the stuff with her. That was probably one of the longest cries I've had in a long time. It really made me aware of what we do for people."

   On Friday afternoon, it is Kanakaredes who is crying. Over the course of five back-to-back scenes, a sobbing Eleni pours out her tale of marital woe to ex-husband Alan-Michael. With the on-set dress rehearsals, tapings and retakes, the actress is forced to cry steadily for nearly an hour. Tears roll down her cheeks, her nose reddens and great, heaving sobs break loose from her body. During a lull between takes, Hearst cradles her on a couch. Coordinating producer Cathy Maher Smith stops by and gives her a hug. When the last sob is finally sobbed, cameraman Gruen walks onto the set, puts a fatherly arm around Kanakaredes and plants a kiss on her forehead.

   Everyone moves into studio B for the final scenes of the evening, including a Christmas fantasy sequence in which Frank, Eleni and their family gather in the diner, wearing ridiculous red stocking caps. The actors are exhausted from the long week. A faint note of hysteria is detectable in their group rendition of "Deck the Halls."

   With the weekend looming, company members are relishing the chance to step back into their own lives. The Emmy-nominated actress Hutchison still remembers the sense of unrelieved strain when she began her soap-opera career on "One Life to Live" six years ago. "The terror that is instilled in you, where you wake up going, 'What's the next line?' " says Hutchison, a former ballet dancer with chiseled features and waist-length brown hair. "You're not sleeping, you're not  eating, and then you realize you've got to take care of yourself, because you're starting not to look good on camera. And if you don't look good on camera, your job's over."

   The trick, she discovered, is not to let the role consume you. "Bake your cakes, go to your parties, have your fights, make love and in the morning" - she snaps her fingers - "Jenna's world again."

   At 9:06 p.m., Wallace cries "Rrrout!" for the last time. A week's worth of shows is now in the can. Crew members begin dismantling the sets. Actors change back into their street clothes and head for home, Monday's scripts in tow. When they return next week, Buzz will leave Jenna at the altar, Frank will plead to save his marriage and Alan-Michael will show a renewed interest in Eleni. And maybe, in a stolen moment away from the cameras, Dicopoulos will find out who took the glue to his dressing-room table.

GRAPHIC: Newsday Color Photos by John Paraskevas-1) In a romantic scene, Fiona Hutchison, who plays Jenna, dances with Justin Deas, who plays Buzz.

 Copyright 1994 Newsday