‘Filing bankruptcy is just not in my family heritage.’

“That machine and I are mortal enemies,” Edie Adams said of her word processor.

But it is an enemy she must embrace if she is to finish “this damned . . . this wonderful book” by her deadline this spring.

“There’s so much stuff here,” she said. “I’ve been leading about seven different lives. This book is a lion I’m fighting every day.”

The one-time Muriel Cigar girl whose face--and other dimensions--were once as recognizable as any on television, Adams, 60, has endured triumph and tragedy with remarkable equanimity.

“When they ask me if I play trivia, I answer that I am trivia,” she joked.

After signing to pitch the stogies in 1959, she began delivering her sultry, “Why don’t you pick one up and smoke it sometime?”--remaining regularly on the air until 1979, when she was replaced by Susan Anton.

“They still pay me--until 1994,” Adams said. “That’s longer than Jack Benny and Jell-O.”

Handled Debts Herself

After her husband, pioneering television funnyman Ernie Kovacs, was killed in an auto crash in 1962, Adams absolutely rejected the idea of his show business pals holding benefits to pay off his more than $500,000 in debts. (Twenty years later, her daughter by Kovacs, Mia Susan, also was killed in an auto accident.)

“A half a million dollars was a lot of money then,” she said. “It sure was . . . and filing bankruptcy is just not in my family heritage.”

A Juilliard graduate who won a Tony Award in 1956 for her role in “L’il Abner,” she worked virtually nonstop in television, movies and Las Vegas to settle her beloved “mad Hungarian’s” debts--wiping out the bills and becoming a millionaire in her own right.

Along the way, she developed a cosmetics line, a chain of beauty salons, designer clothing. She even sold her Beverly Hills home to buy a 160-acre almond ranch in Bakersfield, developed an “almond diet” and toured the country touting its benefits.

Lost the Farm

The farm has since gone belly up (“It was the wrong time to get into farming”), but Adams remains a one-woman cottage industry.

Now living with her son, Joshua Mills, 21, atop Mulholland Drive, where she can look out across Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, Adams still spends much of the year on the road.

This summer she did “The Odd Couple” in Montclair, N.J., and “The Old Dick,” a cable television movie for Home Box Office and worked a cruise ship on a 10-day crossing from Barcelona to New York.

She also picked up an award “for being a legend” at Disney World and played several weeks on Florida’s “Condo Circuit.”

“It has replaced the Catskills,” she said. “Some of these retirement places are incredible. I had never heard of them until I began playing them about six years ago.”

Meanwhile, she has made an offer to Mae West’s estate to revive West’s stage show, “Diamond Lil,” and she is repackaging Kovacs’ television shows--shot on 35 millimeter film--for syndication.

And if that were not enough, her dog had three puppies.

“I was the midwife, and I was not ready for that,” she said. “I can take care of sick kids. But I am not an earth mother. I used to tell feminists that I was looking for a kitchen all those years I was on the road. Being 100% head of household and 100% mommy doesn’t work.”