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She calls herself Camille, just Camille, and always wanted to be a Hedy Lamarr or a Marlene Dietrich or something, but admits there are some physical limitations, like being 20 or 30 pounds overweight and wearing those high, clumpy heels to make 5-foot-2.

"A pinup girl I'm not," she said before going to work the other morning.

"So, why the stage?"

"I was told it was the only road to immortality," she said with a straight face.  After the laugh she added, "I love theater.  This is not hard if you are dedicated to success and money."

She also says of herself, "I am a great singer of songs.  I have sung solo for so many years, but solo that no one ever heard.  This tiny, fullypacked powerhouse - not an inch of space is wasted - is an enigma.  She is way ahead of her time, but that is only because her clock is slow.  Sometimes it isn't running at all."

Funny girl.  But she does have a unique voice, big, deep, wide-ranged;  it can hit a high A.  Camille calls it a cross between a thundering evangelist and a Jewish cantor.  "Not many people want to take a chance on it."

James Rado did, happily.  She's playing mother and Rainbeam in Rainbow, for which Rado wrote the music and lyrics and collaborated on the book with his brother Ted.  It's now previewing at the Orpheum, off-Broadway, and opens December 18.  Rado and Gerome Ragni were responsible for the book and lyrics of Hair.

"There are 38 songs in Rainbow," Camille said.  "A great score.  How do I know?  Four companies want to record it."

Her entire name is Camellia Saviola.  She's a native New Yorker, but prefers an apartment in West New York, N.J. "where it's clean, clear and unhurried, where it's like Riverside Drive without the dogs and what they leave behind.  And the river is right near me, so if things get too much I can end it."

She never had a doll collection, but insists she can cook, sew a straight line, and back in grade school she fought for and won the right to have girls play softball and punchball.

"Thanks to me," Camille boasted, "all the women in the sixth grade at P.S. 35 in the Bronx were liberated."

She's 22 and has been trying to be a working actress since 16, when she was graduated from the High School of Music and Art and got into a stock company in Buffalo, singing in the chorus, not the chorus line.  After which she hurried back here to answer a cast call for "George M!" by running right past the stage manager and singing before anyone could stop her.  They called her back three times.

"But who the hell could tap dance?" she said.  "They wanted that too.  And I wore saddle shoes.  No, I didn't feel rejected.  It was their loss.  If they just cut a few of the dances, I could have had Joel Grey's part."

For more times than she wants to remember she was on the audition route, making demo records of other people's songs, singing the songs she wrote in tank town clubs.

"They either liked the voice very much or hated it," Camille said.  "I picked up a way of singing when I used to bicycle past a synagogue in the Bronx and heard a cantor sing and went in and listened.  He let me come to the service.  I loved that soulful cry, the reaching quality.  Subconsciously I began using it."

In between trying she held a series of "straight" jobs, so she could eat.  Receptionist, checker in a supermarket, office worker in the garment center, in bedding and rugs in a discount store, and she even drove a cab.

"Very briefly," Camille said.  "I'd be driving and suddenly 16 bars of music would pop into my head and I'd get lost singing them.  Dangerous.  I respect other people's lives, not to mention my own.  So I turned in my card."

Her first real stage job was in Joseph Papp's "Iphigrnia", understudying five roles, which got her on stage often.  When she sang a showstopping blues number, she decided she was ready for a band of her own.

She had six, with names like A Sky, Beal Street Blues, Black Forest Road, Sister.  The last was an all female contingent.  They played high-school dances and sometimes colleges.

"We did about 15 gigs all told," Camille said.  "The band career lasted about 15 months, on and off, mostly off."

In six years of trying Camille figures she worked about a year as a singer and actress.  She may have started steadier employment a few months ago when she hurried to a casting call for "Rainbow", and delivered James Taylor's "Lo and Behold" not as a country song, the way it was written.

"I made it into a gutsy rock-blues," she said.  "It stunned them.  They called me back four times.  And I didn't have to do any tap dancing."

There's a reported $150,000 invested in Rainbow, a lot for an off-Broadway show.  Camille is paid $125 a week and works for every penny of it.

"But think of the glory if it goes," she hoped.  "If it does, it could bring a day when it's $125 a minute."
 

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