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Marabel went to Miami on a vacation, stayed on to work for the Campus Crusade for Christ, and met Law Student Charles Morgan Jr. When he graduated in 1964, they married and moved to New York for a year. Says Marabel: "I played wife. It was fun cooking, having the apartment, folding his shirts, doing my little fairy tale stuff. Then we moved back to Miami, where he set up his practice, and he was very involved in his work, and the babies came, and ... I don't know how it happened, but I began to nag him."
"She was on a crusade to change me," adds Charlie Morgan from another sofa. "It was her life goal, and she worked at it for six years. She didn't have a bit of success, but that didn't discourage her."
"I really tried to insist on my rights and demand what I thought was due me," says Marabel. "I wanted him to take me in his arms and tell me he loved me, but he was focusing on his work, his sports."
I often worked until midnight, and home was more like a boardinghouse than a home," says Charlie. "We'd go to the Dolphins games, but Marabel thought I should do other things. She would schedule cultural activities on the afternoons of the games. Or when I was watching a good movie on television, she'd ask what else was on and switch the channel to the educational station."
Says Marabel: "A woman is looking to her husband to be the big daddy, the man who will take her in his arms. But a few months after the wedding, he's somebody with a stubbly beard and bad breath in the morning."
All unhappy families are different, as Tolstoy said, and perhaps Anna Karenina would never have thought of dressing up in baby-doll pajamas. Perhaps Karenin would not have been inspired to chase her around the table. But Marabel did, and Charlie was. Epiphany. Love was reborn. Charlie became romantic. Marabel stopped nagging. Charlie was happy. Marabel was happy. The children were happy.
Family life revived—with a vengeance. "She thought everybody should experience international cooking," Charlie recalls. "She served Greek dishes, North African couscous, Turkish goulash, and she and the kids would dress up in the costumes of the country of that evening, and I was supposed to read about it from the encyclopedia. The point was that I saw how hard she was trying, and I couldn't help but respond. Her efforts showed up my failures."
Friends noticed the difference in the Morgans and asked for advice. Groups were formed, luncheons held. Several of the Miami Dolphins' wives tried the Morgan method. Result: well-publicized bliss. Says Charlie: "It snowballed. At night women would call every half-hour until midnight. I was about to go up the wall."
In between bubble baths and raising the children, it took Marabel a year of "15-minute intervals" to finish Total Woman—"but I knew I had to do it." She read other marriage manuals and collected the sayings of various sages—Socrates, David Reuben, Shakespeare, Dale Carnegie. She scribbled her own views on yellow legal-size paper and then Scotch-taped the pages end to end. Says she: "I was told it should be geared to a fifth-grade reading level. I didn't have to worry about that. I'm a two-syllable person." She had so little