ROSEANNE BARR MAKING A SHOW-BIZ SUCCESS OUT OF JUST PLAYING HERSELF

Domestic goddess that she is, Roseanne Barr can't help but look at success from a homemaking point of view.

"I'm a better housekeeper now," she said during a press conference last summer. Then she added the kicker: "I have a maid."As a stand-up comedian, Barr paylayed her Utah upbringing and working class roots into national popularity and appearances on the "Tonight" show, her own HBO special and as the opening act for a concert tour by Julio Iglesias (or, as Barr calls him, "that Spanish guy.")

And now, as the star of one of the new television season's biggest comedy hits, ABC's aptly named "Roseanne," she's learning that show biz success has its privileges.

"We have the same values as we've always had,"she said of her family, which consists of herself, husband Bill Pentland and three children. "Only now we have money and can buy stuff."

Most of her life, however, has been similar to the reality portrayed on "Roseanne," a sitcom about a blue collar family that is constantly struggling to make ends meet. "When I was growing up in Salt Lake I took every minimum wage job I could get," she said. "I worked at the Jewish Community Center. I was a camp counselor. I was a waitress. I was a phone answerer.

"There were never any real rewards," she said. "You had to find your happiness in humor, family closeness, warmth and love because you couldn't afford to do anything else. Like my father always used to say, 'It's better to be rich and healty than sick and poor.'"

Adding to the difficulty of her early years in Utah was a constant feeling of being "real different."

"There aren't a lot of Jewish people in Salt Lake, and I was raised in a real orthodox Jewish family," she said during the press conference. "At times it was real difficult. I couldn't wait to get out of there."

So when she was 18 she took a trip to Colorado--ostensibly to visit a friend. "But I knew right then that I was never going back to Utah to live," she said. Indeed, she met and moved in with Pentland just days after leaving Salt Lake.

But the change of scenery didn't change her lifestyle much. The problem could be summed up in two words: dollar bills. Dollars were hard to come by; bills weren't.

"It's real hard to have everyone call you and tell you you're behind on the bills," she remembers of those days. "It's a hard way to live."

But her quick wit helped her become a popular cocktail waitress, which helped her become a popular stand-up comic in the Denver area, which helped her win a national reputation for comedy, which brought her a starring role in a TV comedy in which she plays - surprise! - a quick-witted woman with money problems.