The Sexes: The New Housewife Blues

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probably do the trick as a starter." Marabel's readers have apparently followed these instructions to all sorts of conclusions. One woman greeted her husband in a costume of nothing but Saran Wrap bound up with a red ribbon. Another wanted to greet her husband "à la gypsy with beads, bangles and bare skin," but when she went to the door, she was surprised to confront an "equally surprised water-meter reader." Marabel admits, moreover, that she herself "looked foolish and felt even more so" the first time she dressed up in "pink baby-doll pajamas and white boots after my bubble bath." But the result was that "my quiet, reserved, nonexcitable husband took one look, dropped his briefcase on the doorstep, and chased me around the dining room table." And so Total Woman was born.

Like a kind of Miami version of some Fellini movie, the fantasies of Total Woman grew from the unhappinesses of Marabel Morgan's past. It is a success story, of course, and Marabel lives in a white eight-room house with a pool that abuts on Biscayne Bay. She painted the house herself, and everything in it is just so. There are vases of gladioli on the living room table, baskets of fruit on the kitchen counter. She looks tan and healthy, and she wears a long, flowing pink caftan as she sits on a lime-green sofa with TIME Correspondent Marion Knox and talks about her origins: "I never saw a happy marriage when I was young. I grew up amid a lot of fighting. My father left when I was three, and then my mother married a policeman who adopted me. I adored him. He tried very hard, but he also had to work long hours. We didn't have a car. We never had vacations. I don't ever remember coming home to a good meal. I never tasted steak until I was 18, when a boy friend took me out to dinner. I didn't like the feeling of my home."

To make up for all that, Marabel worked hard at school. "I was a very aggressive, competitive person, and I got good grades. Then when I was 14, my stepfather died of a heart attack, and I went into a shell. I could hardly bear to come home. I walked around school alone. I ate alone. I felt inadequate and shriveled up. Then I won a contest selling chrysanthemums, and that gave me confidence. I went to beautician school. I didn't like the work at the beauty shop, but I loved the people. I rinsed my women well. They'd come and tell me their problems, and as the years went on I made good money. I could buy cashmere sweaters. I had freedom."

Marabel spent a year and a half at Ohio State, majored in home economics, thought of becoming an interior designer, and brooded. "I wasn't happy and I didn't know why. I determined that I would find the truth, and every morning I'd get up at 6 a.m. and take a walk around the campus trying to figure out the secrets of life. In the springtime, when the buds would come out, every day they'd be a little bit bigger, and I'd think: 'Man! If I could just crack that secret!' "

Her savings ran out, and she had to return to the beauty shop, and "there, with the water running, I was born again. I had always been fascinated by God, but I had talked to him and had never got any answers. This time I asked him to take me and he took me. There was no bolt of lightning, only peace. I was tickled to death."