GUARDIAN OF THE QUAYLE IMAGE

"I can't help him now," she told a longtime friend over lunch. Marilyn Quayle, the friend said, "was at her wits' end" as news accounts continued to portray Quayle as not up to the job. "Her husband was being pounded into the ground and she knew she had to back away. . . . The more she helped, the worse it got."

Marilyn Quayle recalled, "It became apparent that enough of a myth had been drawn up that it was detrimental." The myth, she said, was that she "ran the campaign because Dan was too weak" or that she was some sort of "magic manipulator" of her husband. All untrue, "unfair and ridiculous," she said. "It was frustrating, very frustrating because . . . Dan and I were used to operating in a certain way."

Since their marriage in 1972, through his campaigns and terms in the House and Senate, and during the 1988 vice presidential race, they always had operated as a team. Immersed in his career, she approved all campaign brochures, pictures, newsletters and commercials. She received daily packets containing his schedule, legislative calendars, drafts of proposed legislation and staff memos.

Her exile from his offices lasted only until attention shifted away. By early last year, she had moved into a six-office suite in the Old Executive Office Building -- twice the size of the one occupied by Barbara Bush when she was Second Lady -- just across the hall from the vice presidential office. The proximity makes for more involvement, she said. The Quayles talk "three or four times a day," and always have. "Our relationship is such that if I want to get ahold of him for anything, I'll call him and right then. . . . He had them put in a drop line so that he can just push a button and he's got me if I'm in my office . . . as I will do with him."

Once again, she said, she is her husband's "eyes and ears" with his staff and his chief political adviser.

Marilyn Tucker Quayle, 42, described herself as part of a new generation of political spouses who have "a professional role as opposed to kind of backdoor."

It is not necessarily the profession she would have chosen, and part of her story is of the frustrations of an intelligent woman who has abandoned the legal career for which she trained, and which she deeply wanted, and taken a back seat to the ambitions of the man she married.

But it is a role she has thrown herself into wholeheartedly -- at times in a way that has infuriated those she has encountered along the way. One of Dan Quayle's close associates calls her the "hard half" of the Quayle partnership. Political colleagues of her husband's described their surprise, and sometimes pained amusement, at her level of involvement as his more disciplined, professional alter ego. Stories of her angry outbursts and intimidation of others are sufficiently widespread that she has divided his staff over whether she is an asset or a liability to him.

From interviews with Marilyn Quayle and a number of her closest friends, as well as with Dan Quayle and associates of one or both of them, a portrait emerges of a complicated, bright, strong-willed woman who demands perfection of herself and others. Many agree that if he ever became president, she could be the most influential First Lady in American history.

While Dan Quayle's style is marked by informality -- "radiant nice-guyism," in the words of one of his associates -- Marilyn Quayle has a definite imperious side. Those who are in her favor praise her generosity and warmth. But many who have come into contact with her say they have found it a chilling experience. There have been a number of incidents, verified for this report, in which Dan Quayle associates or staff members -- senior and junior -- felt snubbed or belittled by Marilyn Quayle.

One Navy steward assigned to the vice presidential residence was sufficiently concerned about his future after he refused to iron the family's clothing -- a task that Barbara Bush paid extra to have done when she was Second Lady -- that he wrote to President Bush to make sure his career was not damaged. Bush wrote back and reassured him.

A number of Dan Quayle's aides said they felt unwelcome and uncomfortable in Marilyn Quayle's presence or office. There is a palpable lightening of mood during trips on Air Force Two when she is not along.

All this has little apparent effect on Dan Quayle, according to even Marilyn Quayle's severest critics. When they fly together on Air Force Two, the Quayles spend hours talking alone to each other; in Washington, he instantly takes every telephone call from her during the day; he expresses approval and glee when some of her mischievous statements -- such as her critical comments for these articles about Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Bush's 1988 campaign manager whom she blames for some of the miscues that caused Quayle problems during the race -- are reported to him.

During seven hours of interviews for these articles, Marilyn Quayle frequently ascribed to herself the very characteristics and work habits that others often find lacking in Dan Quayle -- doing her homework, mastering subjects, rarely making a public mistake.

Despite the criticism and frustration, retreat is not her style. Her approach to her favorite recreation -- horseback riding -- provides an apt metaphor. "I ride hard, I ride fast," she said. "There is no room for error. And if there is error, you hurt yourself very bad." 'Always a Serious Person'

Marilyn and Dan Quayle married after they had dated for 10 weeks, while students at Indiana University Law School in 1972. The daughter of two southern Indiana physicians, she described herself as "always a serious person," who was given music, dancing and horseback riding lessons, and was expected to do well in school. "I was rather rebellious and decided early on that I would be a lawyer instead of a doctor, but there was no question that I would . . . be something professional."

For two years they shared offices in Huntington, Ind., while he worked at his father's newspaper and she practiced law. Over the next 12 years, she played major roles in his political campaigns and the offices he held -- representative (1977-81) and senator (1981-89) -- and raised their three children.

She was determined that her position and influence continue after his election as vice president.

Two days after the inauguration in 1989, she tackled head-on what she felt was one of the most important tasks her husband faced in taking over from George Bush. For the eight years Quayle had been senator from Indiana and Bush had been vice president, Bush's Capitol office had been run by his longtime personal aide, Jennifer Fitzgerald, who had a reputation for guarding the premises -- and access to Bush -- with fierce protectiveness.

Marilyn Quayle knew that her gregarious husband -- eager to be Bush's representative on the Hill and the administration's top lobbyist -- wanted and needed to see many more people in his congressional office. "She said she very much wanted it to be a . . . working office, accessible, open, serviceable," said William J. Gribbin, Vice President Quayle's congressional liaison chief.

Furniture was rearranged, new desks and extra phones were installed, and staff members were instructed to make it comfortable and easy for White House and departmental lobbyists, senators and their aides to feel they could hold informal meetings there, get their work done and nurture their links to the vice president.

"It was obvious this was not a congressional spouse off on her own," Gribbin recalled. "I realized after that first meeting that what I had on my hands was a tremendous asset -- somebody who knew this business as well as I did, or better, and came in here knowing exactly what kind of adjustments had to be made."

The signs of her influence show up in large and small ways. Because of her interest in cancer detection and treatment -- one of the causes she has championed as Second Lady -- the President's Council on Competitiveness, which Dan Quayle chairs, sent out a letter over his signature requesting a study of cancer's economic costs. Quayle's staff said she made suggestions about the civil justice reform effort and attack on the legal establishment that he launched last summer, and she comments frequently on his political agenda.

She said she believes his staff finds "an ease of coming in and discussing concerns with me, whether it's the direction things are going or whatever they don't want to bother Dan with." Staff members also check "if I think it's important enough to bring it up to Dan," she said. If it's not, "they let me make that decision instead." People in Indiana or out on the campaign trail, she says, have a "feeling of being closer if it goes through me, things they don't want to discuss with staff."

She declined to elaborate further on her role, but it is obvious that she has Dan Quayle's total confidence. "Marilyn, she knows what's going on and she has a very definite opinion about the way things should or should not happen," he said. "She has a sense of what I'm doing, and if she thinks that we ought to be doing something else, she tells me."

She said, "I still get a packet every night" of information about his schedule and substantive decisions being considered. Maintaining Appearances

In no role is Marilyn Quayle more dedicated than as the keeper of Dan Quayle's image. His former congressional staff members tell of trying to get a formal photograph of him back in 1977 when he was first in Congress. They kept sending proofs to her and she kept rejecting them. "She was very attuned to pictures of him and his image, and retained approval right," said one former staff member who dealt directly with her.

By 1986, when Quayle was reelected to the Senate, Roger Ailes, the Bush media consultant, was his official image-maker.

Ailes wanted a freeze-frame of Quayle to end the commercials he was making. "Dan had absolutely no concern" about which picture was used, recalled Ailes. "But Marilyn did." After she rejected at least 15 possibilities he had sent her, an exasperated Ailes allowed her to come to his editing studio in New York, something he said he never has permitted another noncandidate to do. Finally, they agreed on one of Quayle in an open shirt standing informally in front of some trees. But that was not the end of it.

"She thought {a} branch was coming out of his head," Ailes said, and she said it looked like antlers. "Why . . . I still don't know. . . . I never quite understood that, but she was very interested in it." Finally, Ailes's staff air-brushed out the branch.

The final product, Marilyn Quayle recalled, was "great. . . . I'm a perfectionist and {Ailes} was putting out a product and I expected it to be perfect. I was there to make sure it was done perfectly."

"I swear to God, my whole staff and I still joke about it," said Ailes. "When I see Marilyn I say, 'I saw a shot of Dan, he really looked ugly. You'd better get to work.' I still don't know what the hell she's talking about."

Her concern about her husband's image was more dramatically displayed one morning last year, when she visited the small suite of offices her husband maintains in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. On the wall was a large photograph of him finishing a golf swing. His shirt had gathered and filled at his stomach, suggesting a paunch.

"You can't have that up there," Marilyn Quayle said she remembers saying. "It's terrible. . . . Take it down. . . . Look at that stomach!"

Loretta Coupland, a five-year veteran of Quayle's staff, removed the 18-by-24-inch photo, pasted on thick cardboard in a wooden frame without glass, from the wall.

"That's just awful," Marilyn Quayle told Coupland and two other staff members in the office that day. She picked up a pen and began scribbling out her husband's image with deep, heavy strokes, first the midsection and then the rest of him. "I made it so you couldn't see who it was," she recalled.

At first, said one of the women who witnessed the incident, "We took it pretty much as a joke . . . but it got very intense. . . . It did flash through my mind: She's taking a lot out on that picture."

Once she had finished the scribbling, Marilyn Quayle said, it crossed her mind that she had compounded the problem. "I realized somebody could take that and . . . say, 'Oh . . . what's she been doing?'. . . . And I realized that would be bad, you know: 'The vice president's wife did that.' "

"Loretta," she said she told Coupland, "you still will hang it back up and you'll say: 'Look at what Mrs. Quayle did to that.' "

An eyewitness said that Marilyn Quayle then placed the picture on the floor and, "She kicked it."

"I do not recall kicking it," said Marilyn Quayle, "but if I did, it was to get it out of the frame, no other reason." Once the picture was dislodged from its frame, "I just peeled it off the cardboard and told Loretta to send the frame and the cardboard back here . . . so they could use it again," she said. "And I just tore it up into pieces and threw it in the wastebasket."

Her final words, all agreed, were, "I don't want to ever see this again."

In contemporaneous accounts of the incident, the three women described it to others as bizarre and troubling. In an interview, one of the eyewitnesses said, "To do it in front of all of us. I've seen some pretty goofy things, but nothing like this. . . . Human behavior is a strange thing."

Coupland said, "I don't feel at liberty to talk about that."

At least one account reached the vice president, himself. Quayle said he asked his wife if she had kicked the picture. "I forget exactly what her response was," he said, "and she sort of laughed."

But the symbolic import of her actions, and the reactions of others, apparently weigh on Marilyn Quayle. In a final half-hour interview for these articles in which she spoke about the picture incident and other matters, she described it as a "lark," and a joke that had been misinterpreted.

But during the interview, she became alternately distraught and indignant over the prospect of the incident becoming public. At several points, her voice quavered and she became tearful.

"I don't lose my temper very often," she said. "I am not violent." 'Putting the Fear Into People'

Greg Zoeller, a former member of Quayle's Senate staff, said he had "always gotten along with Mrs. Quayle, and I . . . think I'll kind of burst the bubble of her kind of being the witch of the office.

"Around the Senate she was very clever about saying a few things at certain times that would become legend. And she does have a way of kind of putting the fear into people. It's up front. Even in the vice president's office, she's dropped a couple of things . . . the word of mouth makes them into legend that she's just crucified some poor junior staff member."

According to Zoeller, she deliberately has created a myth around herself that "she can be cruel and just cutthroat."

"It's kind of a lesson that everybody can understand. You do something that looks like it hurts the vice president, you're going to get in trouble with Mrs. Quayle," Zoeller said. "Because Dan will never get mad at anybody. He'll be disappointed, but he never gets mad."

Marilyn Quayle has, on occasion, fired members of her husband's staff, including Diane Weinstein, Quayle's first legal counsel as vice president. "She was in a position where I had good expertise and had to deal with it," Marilyn Quayle said. "And I must say the decision was treated by the rest of the staff with relief."

Dan Quayle said that his staff should not worry about his wife. "They shouldn't be intimidated. I've heard that, but they shouldn't be."

But several close associates of the vice president's, projecting his wife as a potential First Lady, made a perhaps inevitable comparison.

"I think she'd be another Nancy Reagan," said Richard Fishering, an assistant county Republican chairman in Indiana who worked closely with Marilyn Quayle on her husband's first congressional race in 1976.

"I wouldn't want her to get the idea she was president of the United States," said Orvas Beers, who has been the GOP chairman of Allen County, Ind., for 30 years and gave Quayle his start in Indiana politics.

Said one current close Quayle associate, "If she got to be First Lady, the public would soon forget about Nancy Reagan. Nancy would soon be considered a woman of the people."

Asked directly about the comparison to Nancy Reagan, Marilyn Quayle said, "I'm definitely not a manipulator. I look at our relationship more as a collegial relationship than mommy taking care of her little boy, which is the way the press portrayed" Nancy Reagan.

The difference between the Quayles and most married couples, Dan Quayle said, is not that his wife is deeply involved in his career, but that they are willing "to acknowledge {it} up front." Asked if Bess Truman, for example, was as involved when her husband was vice president in the 1940s, Quayle said, "I imagine she had a lot to say about it. Oh I bet, you'd better bet your bottom dollar she did."

Marilyn Quayle says she agrees the difference is her husband's willingness to speak publicly about her substantive role. "He's not embarrassed to say -- before, you know, your little wifey, you never admit your wife helps you. Even Barbara Bush has been in on just about everything her husband's done. Oh, yes, you're dreaming if you think she hasn't."

"I'm not going to comment on that," Dan Quayle said. Homework and High Praise

"She's not a scientist, but she is a brilliant woman," Sam Broder, director of the National Cancer Institute, said of Marilyn Quayle. " I very rarely use the word 'brilliant,' but she learns, she retains, she grasps in the way a few, very brilliant people can, even in a field that is not theirs."

After the 1988 election, when she contemplated life as the nation's Second Lady, "I thought, man, it's going to be tea and crumpets and I would just go nuts," Marilyn Quayle said. She decided to apply herself to cancer detection and disaster relief, and she has become a public advocate for both. She wins exceptionally high praise from government professionals, who marvel at her seriousness and technical comprehension of the subjects.

As a promoter of early detection and prompt treatment of breast cancer -- which claimed her mother's life in 1975 -- Marilyn Quayle "brings a great air of moral authority, credibility and clarity," Broder said. He said he has never encountered an official in Washington with a greater appetite for briefing materials, or greater skill in asking probing questions.

When Broder's comments were relayed to her, Marilyn Quayle responded with pride and relief. Her fear, she said, was that she would be regarded by such professionals as "just window dressing. . . . {I thought that} if I knew as much as I could possibly know, then I would be accepted and I could actually make a difference. And if you don't do your homework, you can't."

Similar praise came from Andrew S. Natsios, the U.S. Agency for International Development's director of foreign disaster assistance who traveled with her to Mexico and to Bangladesh. "She has never made a mistake," Natsios said. "She always says the right thing. . . . She could do my job."

Not only does she have a technician's understanding of the legal and logistical aspects of disaster preparedness, said Wallace E. Stickney, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency that handles domestic disasters, "I've never seen anyone who relates better to those people" who have suffered losses.

Marilyn Quayle keeps an active daily schedule but said she agrees to speak in public only at political events, or about cancer prevention and disaster relief. "I usually speak without any notes," she said, adding that "I pretty well speak my mind." When she reads a speech, she said, "I can pick up any text you give me and can pretty well get it right the first time with the right inflection."

The same thoroughness and energy are devoted to home and family. She invested countless hours in the restoration of the vice presidential residence on Massachusetts Avenue NW, lobbying successfully with the House and Senate Appropriations subcommittees for funds to supplement private donations to pay for the renovation, and inviting some of the members to tour the home with her.

"Took them top to bottom around the house," she recalled during an interview, "and I said, 'Guys, this is wrong. You got to help me on this.' . . . We don't have handicapped bathrooms, we don't have a ramp, we don't have a lift to get them up, because the house is all stairs. . . . It's a disgrace to the country."

Today, in addition to full accessibility for the disabled, the house has new wiring, a new pool house, flagstone decking and landscaping. "It's a charming, charming home," Marilyn Quayle said. "It's really an oasis. . . . It's one of the best-kept secrets in Washington. The grounds are fabulous. You really are private here. . . . We spend most of our time out on the veranda or out by the pool."

Marilyn Quayle also has spent the last 2 1/2 years writing a political thriller, centered on Cuba after the death of Fidel Castro, with her sister Nancy T. Northcott. Scheduled for publication this spring, the 320-page book is entitled "Embrace the Serpent."

By numerous accounts, Marilyn Quayle is a loving and attentive mother, taking time to coach a school soccer team and involving herself in the details of the lives of her three children -- Tucker, 17, Benjamin, 15, and Corinne, 12. The two boys attend Gonzaga College High School; Corinne is a student at the National Cathedral School for Girls.

Friends recall images of her, during Quayle's House and Senate years, in her van on the Beltway with kids packed in the back, heading to a soccer game. She made a point of being there for every school open house and play. When her children balked at eating vegetables, she got them interested by helping them start a garden in the back yard.

To the extent possible, the Quayles have tried to maintain a normal home atmosphere. William R. Neale, an old friend from Indianapolis, said that the Quayles "make a real effort to be sure that one of them, whenever possible, is there for breakfast with the kids -- and hopefully both of them. They will travel late at night to get home to be there, so they can talk about what's going to go on that day, what they're doing in school, in athletics, whatever it may be. . . . They strive hard to have a typical family life. It's hard . . . but they do a pretty darn good job of it."

Marilyn Quayle has a close group of professional women friends who share her interest in sports and provide a safe haven. Once a year, they escape to what they call "camp" at a remote location for several days without their husbands. "Marilyn's core group," as one called it, includes Rae Evans, a vice president of Hallmark Cards Inc.; Eva Kasten, a senior vice president and director of the Washington office of the Advertising Council and wife of Sen. Robert W. Kasten Jr. (R-Wis.); Mary Howell, a vice president of Textron Inc.; Carol Adelman, a senior official at the Agency for International Development; Deborah Dingell, a senior official at General Motors Inc. and wife of Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.); and Sheila Tate, president of Powell Tate, a Washington-based public relations firm and press secretary to Nancy Reagan when she was First Lady.

The friendships transcend party affiliation, Marilyn Quayle said. "Among political wives there is a basic understanding . . . that we're all going through the same thing." Adjusting After 1988 Election

Nineteen eighty-eight, when Dan Quayle was in the second year of his second Senate term, was supposed to be Marilyn Quayle's opportunity finally to commence her long-postponed legal career. Instead, she spent the year helping her husband catch George Bush's eye for the vice presidential nomination, then watching him be trashed on the campaign trail.

When the campaign was over, and Dan Quayle was elected vice president, she wanted to join a law firm or find a professional position for herself. Several firms were interested, she said, but financial disclosure rules requiring her to list law clients, and other political, legal and practical considerations -- including a round-the-clock Secret Service presence -- conspired to make it virtually impossible for her to take an outside job as Second Lady. Job offers from within federal departments and agencies also had to be declined.

Robert D. Orr, then governor of Indiana, confirmed that the Senate seat her husband vacated was hers for the asking. "It was mine if I wanted it," she said. "It was mine." But, she said, she could see that if she ever voted against the administration, she would create a "big story" that would be "hard on the president." So she said no.

She was inhibited, she recalled, not only by fear of political and legal conflicts, but by uncertainty about the time demands of being Second Lady. "The one thing I was afraid of is I would get in a position and . . . and then realize I really didn't have the time to do it. And I didn't want to be a failure. . . . That would be a bad precedent to set for anyone coming after me."

There were other adjustments as well, most notably the transformation in Dan Quayle's status. "The children and I had come to this {realization}," Marilyn Quayle said. "The vice president never can be just Dan Quayle, Dad." At sports events or traveling, "the family does have to, in public, pull aside."

The harshness of the 1988 campaign and the barriers to her own career she encountered as Second Lady came as a surprise, close friends said. "It was a roadblock that was not anticipated," said Eva Kasten. "It was not a little roadblock. It was cement."

Marilyn Quayle said she preferred to call them "yield signs here and there . . . you do keep hitting those yield signs, hitting the bends in the road." She repeatedly plays down the emotions.

Another friend said, "After the 1988 campaign, she kept it all in. I worried a little that an igloo was being erected around her and the last piece of ice would go in and she would freeze over permanently." Still another longtime friend said, "It has been a long dark journey, very, very painful."

Asked directly about these characterizations, Marilyn Quayle said, "They're not very close friends. That is definitely not my personality. I don't ever brood about anything." But the friends who are quoted were exclusively from a list provided by Marilyn Quayle herself. Pressed on the question, she said that she was "probably angry, pain not so much."

"I don't know how you resolve all these conflicts 100 percent," said Eva Kasten. "It's always there. One-hundred percent is not achievable. I would put her in the 90 percent category in terms of satisfaction and self-esteem. She's not bitter. . . . Bitterness is too strong a word. It implies a hardened woman with an emotional scar. She has strength. She can get through anything that life dishes out.

"She is very black and white. She makes judgments clearly, quickly and firmly and very vocally. She is very opinionated. She has a clear vision of what she wants," Kasten said. "I wish I had more of her qualities . . . directness, commitment and passion. I've never known Dan without Marilyn because Marilyn has been so participating. It has been a political career for the family as opposed to one just for Dan Quayle."

Added Rae Evans, "Truly the worst is over. The passage out of the worst in fact has been made. I don't think there is an incident that they would find impossible to manage."

"I look at the bright side of everything," Marilyn Quayle said, "I try to find the silver lining in everything." Political wives "do have to look over {their} shoulder at everything. . . . You really do have to make opportunities for yourself and you have to go the extra mile always. Or you sit back and you're not a part of your husband's life. You have a separate life."

She added, "What has ended up is I have the best of all worlds."

Researcher David Greenberg contributed to this report.

NEXT: in Sunday's editions: The man who could be president