Catherine Bach is standing very still on an enormous sheet of green paper, a look of bemused complicity on her face. Behind her, a man wielding an office stapler with the deftness of a surgeon is carefully stapling her T-shirt together in the back to make it fit with the appropriate snugness. Only in America.

"See what goes on," she says, her smile as potent as a nuclear meltdown. "This isn't unusual, this is the norm. You writers lead such pure lives. You just don't know."

If anyone does know what it takes to be what her publicist calls "a hot young TV lady," it is Catherine Bach. Just back from appearing at the Indianapolis 500, just signed to a substantial poster contract, she is spending one of her days off posing for the cover of a racquet-ball magazine. The extent of her interest in the sport is questionable, but what isn't is the tangible magnetism she brings to the photo session. "When she walks into a room, people immediately focus their attention on her," says manager Steve Binder. "Cathy sort of pops out at you in a crowd."

The crowd Catherine Bach is popping out of these days consists of the fightin', fussin', fun-lovin' Duke clan of CBS's The Dukes of Hazzard, where car crashes and CBs are a way of life, with an occasional dynamiting thrown in to keep everybody honest.

Bach plays cousin Daisy, a truck-stop queen who aspires to better things but is content to wait for them in costumes so abbreviated that Hazzard's hot-tempered sheriff can be forgiven for mangling the language and calling her "a half-naked female woman."

"When I go back to the South, the first thing people ask me is 'How do you wreck so many cars?' and the second is 'How can I meet Catherine Bach?' " says Gy Waldron, the show's creator and co-producer. "I imagine her picture is hanging in more garages than pictures of transmission parts."

If so, those pictures will soon be bordered with crepe as word gets around that Bach has been married for three years to David Shaw, who is a theatrical agent turned house builder and the stepson of actress Angela Lansbury.

"I met him right on the beach in Malibu," she says, beaming at the memory. "His golden retriever, George, came up to me and David was upstairs in his house and he yelled, 'hey why don't you come up to my apartment?' I thought, 'Absolutely not,' but then I looked closer and he looked kind of cute. When I got a really good look at him, I knew I'd met the man I was going to spend a lot of time with. I always go on my gut feelings, and I just knew he was the guy."

And in a coincidence startling enough to unnerve Hercule Poirot, it was another chance meeting on that same beach that got Bach her shot at being Daisy Duke.

Bob Clark, a screenwriter who was between assignments, was hired by David Shaw to paint a house Shaw was remodeling. He met Bach at the couple's beach house but thought no more about her until two years later when he was hanging around The Dukes of Hazzard office after turning in a story outline.

"It was panic time," he remembers. "This series was started with its back to the wall. It was like when the network gave them the go-ahead, they should have started shooting yesterday; and then they had problems casting Daisy, which no one foresaw. They'd gone everywhere, looked at literally hundreds of girls and had absolutely run out of steam. I was sitting there listening to all this, and Cathy popped into my mind."

"I thought Bob was just calling as a favor to David," Bach says now. "It was so casual - I just went in and did a reading. The next day they took me to CBS. There were all these people in the room, and I did another reading." She leans forward here, brimming with excitement. "And do you know something that was just wonderful? They offered me a contract that same night. It happened so fast, it was just like in my dreams."

Those dreams started 18 years ago at age 8 when Bach saw her uncle, actor Tony Verdugo, on stage in Los Angeles and decided "this is what I want to do." Her parents had been divorced the year before, and Cathy split her early childhood between her Mexican mother in L.A. and her German father in Faith, S.D., a small hamlet outside Rapid City.

Her high-school years, though, were spent entirely in South Dakota because "my parents got together and decided, 'L.A.'s a little too racy for our kids. Get 'em on the ranch and make sure they got those values'."

Bach's German father was not so keen on her acting ambitions - "he wanted a strong, stable, straight-ahead life for me" - but she decided that a life spent in South Dakota would not be to her liking. Carefully squirreling away money earned behind the Woolworth soda fountain in Rapid City, where she then lived, she saved enough for a plane ticket to Los Angeles. She left right right after she finished high school.

There followed years of acting and dancing lessons, a variety of secretarial and waitress jobs, and occasional TV and film appearances in vehicles like "The Midnight Man," "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" and "Hustle" before The Dukes of Hazzard came into her life.

Though she claims she doesn't try to "sound sunny side up," no one would mistake Catherine Bach for Don Rickles. She seems not to have a contrary bone in her body and manages a good word for everyone, even the critics who devastated The Dukes.

"I didn't get upset. I'm glad the press is there. They ask some good questions."

And while a jaundiced viewer might be forgiven for feeling there isn't all that much to choose between Daisy Duke and the rest of TV's crop of ravishing young women, Bach sees a clear and ever-present difference. "Daisy is kind of awkward, sometimes she's pretty dumb. She's not Superwoman by any means," the actress says.

"When I was growing up, the only girls you saw on TV were like Father Knows Best. Now we've finally got a girl who wears jeans, T-shirts and boots and I think that's neat. We're very careful that all the clothes and shoes Daisy wears can be bought at places like Sears and Penney's. There's no $500 makeup jobs here, Daisy's very....accessible. I was going to say touchable, but you won't get that out of me."

If Bach won't say it, others around her will, noting that quality of approachability both in her and in Daisy Duke. Another characteristic gets mentioned frequently, and that is ingenuousness, not in the sense of naivete so much as frankness and candor.

"Cathy has an open quality that totally keeps you off balance," Gy Waldron explains. "Ingenuous people have a genius for making you underestimate them. If you meet Cathy and think, 'This girl is a dingbat,' boy, are you wrong."

As for Bach, she is so tickled to have made it to her own series that nothing seriously disturbs her, not 12-hour working days, not an absence of time off, not the fear of being typecast, not even the thought that many viewers of The Dukes of Hazzard appear to be as interested in her abbreviated outfits as they are in her dramatic ability.

"I wouldn't mind that at all, I'd think it was cute," she says of life in the body shop, before adding (what else but) ingenuously, "But people wouldn't turn on the show just because Cathy Bach is wearing a pair of shorts."

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