HOLLYWOOD (NBA). - At most Hollywood get-togethers, the conversation invariably gets around to one question: Who will be the next big star?



These days, the consensus is that the two girls with the best shot at major stardom are Joanna
Cassidy and Lindsay Wagner. Miss Cassidy just finished a meaty role in "The Outfit", so watch for her.



Lindsay Wagner is a tall, exceptionally beautiful girl and you can see her opposite Peter Fonda in "Two People". She is under contract to Universal.



She hopes she won't follow in the footsteps of other Universal stars-to-be. That studio has uncovered a couple in recent years — Katharine Ross and Carrie Snodgress — who made it big and then got tangled up in their emotions and personal lives and virtually dropped out.



Chances are that won't happen with Lindsay. She's more ambitious than the other girls were and seems more level-headed. She wants to be a star and that's half the battle.



Her name, which sounds like somebody decided to name her after New York City's last two mayors, is real. She says her father wanted a boy, to carry on a family football-playing tradition, and called her Lindsay when she came along.



"I didn't like the name as a little girl," she says, "but it had its compensations. When I went
to college (University of Oregon) I was invited to the freshman men's athletic luncheon — they saw my name and thought I was a boy. I put on a pair of pants, combed my hair back and went."



She's a Los Angeles girl and she says her childhood was a strange one. Her parents split up. Her mother, who was very young when Lindsay was born, had never really "lived," and she began living and Lindsay says the result was "a very informal childhood." When Lindsay was 15, her mother remarried and had a child and Lindsay practically raised the baby.



She always was pretty and, at 13, an MGM scout wanted to sign her for a TV series. She decided against it but, from then on, she was frequently discovered" and offered contracts, among other things.



"I kept resisting," she says.



A neighbor, Pete Terranova, of Universal's talent department, kept after her to let him arrange a test. She kept saying she wasn't ready. She modeled, she lived a little. Finally, one day she felt she was ready and called Terranova.



Two days later, she was playing a nurse on a Marcus Welby episode. She went right from that into a Night Gallery and an Adam-12 and a few weeks later she was playing the lead on Marcus Welby.



That was only a bit more than two years ago. For her, getting started in the business has been
no struggle.



Last fall she married a writer-photographer named Allan Rider. Because of his profession, he can accompany her when she goes on location, as she was on "Two People". She thinks that's a good thing.



"Too many actresses," she says "have temptations with their leading men (and vice-versa). But if I go home at night and Allan is there, whatever temptation I may have felt leaves me, if it ever existed at all."



Allan better stick around — Lindsay, chances are, will be having lots of leading men from here on.

Dick Kleiner