LILY TOMLIN JUST VANISHED.

The actress was here a second ago—sitting in this San Francisco restaurant, tall and lean and all in black, her only ornamentation a zipper that hung like a necklace from the top of her turtleneck sweater.

But now that elegant creature is gone, and in her place sits Ernestine, the snorting, petty tyrant of the old Bell System.

The adenoidal operator is scheduling a telephone repair visit: “Will you be home between April and November?” she asks with menace.

And then, just as suddenly, the actress returns to her body. Tomlin continues the story she had been telling. And Ernestine—the character who rocketed Tomlin to stardom in 1969 on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In—retreats to the place where she spends most of her time: waiting, with dozens of other souls, just beneath the surface of Lily Tomlin’s skin.

Tomlin has been doing this vanishing act all of her working life. At 62, the actress—who plays an overworked guidance counselor in the new comedy Orange County—has spent four decades becoming a series of complex characters.

Not all are likable. Think of five-year-old Edith Ann in her huge rocking chair, who “protected” the soft spot on her baby brother’s head by X-ing it with a ballpoint pen. But from her to Trudy, the bag lady with a direct line to aliens, all of Tomlin’s characters are portrayed with a compassion that her audiences feel, too. As The New Yorker recently put it, the people who inhabit Tomlin’s body are “inspired reminders that everybody was once somebody’s baby.”

And Tomlin’s tenderness is not reserved for her characters alone. In fact, at this lunch just a few days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the actress is urging compassion for the people of Afghanistan. Stunned and mourning along with the rest of the nation, Tomlin does not join in the general cry for retaliation against the country that harbored the attackers. She has a different vision.

“The wild dream is the first step to reality,” Tomlin says, quoting the writer Norman Cousins. Recalling the passengers who resolved to storm their captors on United Airlines Flight 93, she wishes that the American public would resolve to rise up and overwhelm any move toward war. She says the U.S. could win Afghan support by feeding the famine-stricken country instead. “[The terrorists] committed an act that is so unimaginable,” continues Tomlin, leaning forward for emphasis. “That was their wild dream. Why can’t we have a wild dream that is just as profound and outrageous, but in another way? Why can’t we flood Afghanistan with money?”

Tomlin is well aware that most Americans, if they even paused to consider her suggestion, would scorn it. In fact, Tomlin almost seems to define herself in opposition to such scorn: “The sensibility in this culture is so hard-edged, so brutal, so ridiculing, and so dismissive. I think the most radical thing you can do now is to be tender. That’s really pushing the envelope.

“Wanting something higher, for the species, is considered—well, you’re just stupid. You’re an imbecile for that.” Maybe this is one reason Tomlin finds it so easy to disappear into other people. “Sometimes I think I invent characters to create a society that’s more acceptable to me,” she says.

Lily Tomlin started disappearing early. At Cass Technical High School in Detroit, she estimates she skipped a total of one year out of three. “I’d stay out 12, 13 days in a row if my hair didn’t turn out right,” says Tomlin, whose given name is Mary Jean. When she smiles, her narrow blue-gray eyes disappear into merry slits.

While in school, Tomlin began trying on roles. “I was so socially mobile,” she recalls. “I could be arty, wear an old dirty trench coat and beat-up sneakers, or I could wear a plaid skirt and a Shetland sweater and ballet shoes, or hose with black seams and heels and a pink skirt. It must be a sense of theater—or a dissociative personality.”

Tomlin hung around with her father, a drinker who worked at a factory. “I went to the bars and the bookie joints with him. I went to the track with him,” she recalls. Guy Tomlin died at 57. Her mother, Lillie Mae—a quickwitted charmer whose name the actress adopted—now lives in Palm Springs, California, as does Lily’s younger brother, Richard.

After high school, Tomlin entered college, but she eventually quit to study mime in New York. (Studying acting “wasn’t artistic enough” for her bohemian aspirations, she once said wryly.) Still, soon enough, she was vanishing into her characters in nightclubs, which led to work on television variety shows, and eventually to her big break on Laugh-In.

“She really hit the scene in a hot way,” recalls Tomlin’s life partner of the past 30 years, the writer and director Jane Wagner. “There was a tremendous buzz about Ernestine. I met her soon after that, and I expected to find a kind of showbiz patina. She had none of that. We had lots to talk about. We both wanted to use comedy to explore ideas and not just to ridicule.”

Working in tandem with Wagner, Tomlin followed Laugh-In with a string of television variety specials. And when Wagner began to write stage plays for Tomlin, it was the birth of a new genre: one performer, many souls. As Eric Bogosian, now considered a master of the form, told Newsweek recently, “Lily pretty much invented this particular type of solo piece.... It was a set of characters that came together in a play. It was new.” Wagner’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe—possibly the pair’s masterwork—opened on Broadway in 1985, with Tomlin in all of the roles. Trudy, the bag lady, ties together a show that also features such characters as Kate, shaken out of her perpetual boredom by a vicious asymmetrical haircut, and the employment-challenged Chrissy (“All my life, I’ve wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific”). Each character is seemingly adrift in her—or his—own angst, but their stories intersect and overlap in ways they don’t see but sometimes feel. The play is at turns hilarious and heartbreaking. Its message, Tomlin says, is about “consciousness.” Not surprisingly, Tomlin is something of an activist. Her issues are feminism and nonviolence.

She dearly misses the late Congresswoman Bella Abzug, a good friend, and has worked with disarmament groups such as Physicians for Social Responsibility. But here, too, the actress has been known to disappear. Rather than pontificate, Tomlin uses her celebrity to draw attention to the cause, but then she lets the experts do the talking. “There’s a certain limit to what you can achieve without having any real credentials,” explains Tomlin. “If you represent yourself as someone who knows everything, then you’re going to end up in a farce.”

Throughout her career, the actress has continued to do film and television work. She has won two Tony Awards and an armful of Emmys, and was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Nashville. But despite that success—and the daily physical demands of live theater—Tomlin keeps returning to the stage. Most recently, she revived The Search on Broadway, followed by a six-month run in San Francisco that ended in February. Tomlin says there’s nothing like live theater: Experiencing a play with a roomful of strangers is “a moment of affection, of communion, the collective experience at the end when we’re all on our feet applauding ourselves. It’s simple but it’s powerful.”

When she’s not onstage, Tomlin keeps herself fairly hidden away. She and Wagner both say they’d often rather stay at home in Los Angeles with their two cats than go out on the town. “Sometimes we’ll go to four or five movies a day,” Tomlin confesses.

Around the house, Jane cooks; Lily cleans up. (Tomlin has even gone on “gum patrol” at work, scraping clean the underside of theater seats before the audience arrives.) Wagner and Tomlin develop projects together, including an Edith Ann TV show. Their working style mimics their lifestyle: When Wagner writes, she leaves her notes lying around; Tomlin collects them. “I look through everything I can find,” the actress told Seattle’s The Stranger magazine. “I’ll find a notebook and it’ll have the most bizarre, random assortment of stuff in it, and then I’ll find some great little scene she’s written.”

Also at home, of course, the women have been watching a great deal of television news lately. Which, like many things in Tomlin’s life, leads to a funny story. One day while watching CNN, Tomlin was struck by her own resemblance to correspondent Christiane Amanpour. “Jane looks at me and absolutely knows what I’m thinking,” the actress recalls. The similarity became a joke—when Wagner entered a room, she would say, “What’s new, Christiane?”

One evening in San Francisco, the two women were standing outside the theater where The Search was playing. “We’re waiting for a cab,” says Tomlin, “and this lovely, middle-aged Asian woman sees me. And her face just lights up. I step graciously forward to greet her, with my hand outstretched. And she says, ‘Christiane Amanpour!’ ”

Tomlin bursts out laughing. “I was hysterical,” she says. “She knew she had made some kind of mistake; she hurried away.” Lily Tomlin is positively aglow with amusement. She may be the one celebrity on earth who does not mind being mistaken for somebody else.