Customers sample their invisible women like dishes at a smorgasbord.

Alonely Marine one recent Sunday afternoon dialed a phone number seeking the long-legged goddess he had seen in an ad in a girlie magazine. He thought he was speaking with Blondie, one of those silky women with blonde hair and fat in all the right places who glide through men’s fantasies.

But the fair-haired damsel of the serviceman’s dreams doesn’t exist, except as a picture bought from a modeling agency.

Blondie was portrayed on the phone by Molly Silverman, a bald, 50-year-old Van Nuys housewife who is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer that has taken her left breast and riddled her liver.

Molly and her husband, Lou, whose names have been changed here at their request, estimate that in the five years before Molly became ill, she entertained more than 100,000 telephone callers from the kitchen table of her townhouse near the San Diego Freeway.

Now tugging on her wig to keep it from slipping further down her lined forehead, Molly took the first of the three calls she is able to handle a day.

“A Marine, my God, I’m in deep lust,” she said huskily. She picked up a pencil from an Early American table and idly drew triangles and flower petals on a set of instructions for hooking up cable TV.

“What do I look like? Well, I’m five-seven with green eyes and a real great body.”

With her 5-foot-2 body straining at the seams of her housedress, Molly quickly directed the conversation into the unprintable, punctuated by throaty gasps, moans and kisses into the receiver. She gave the Marine a frank description of her fanciful body and gazed absently at a lamp whose bronzed base is a youth playing a lyre.

Molly’s three-story townhouse contains a number of such objects, including an ebony replica of Rodin’s thinker, a gum-ball machine and a white china lion keeping guard on the balcony.

Six minutes after the conversation began, Molly wished the satisfied Marine a happy Fourth of July weekend and told him her “special number,” one of three lines in the townhouse hooked up to a Los Angeles switchboard.

A caller must be over 18 and must provide his date of birth, Social Security number, bank guarantee and credit card numbers before Molly’s employer will permit her to call back, collect. Aside from that, all that’s needed is about $40 and a telephone to reach out and pretend to touch someone.

In addition to Blondie, Molly plays, among others, Julie, a large black woman; Marie, a flirtatious French maid, and Ginger, a sultry Southern belle. She’s good with accents, which she says helps in a business whose customers sample their invisible women like dishes at a smorgasbord.

The couple say Molly made about $100,000 on the phone last year by working as many as 36 hours at a stretch.

She’s usually extremely secretive about how she makes a living, not because she is ashamed, she said, but because most people regard it as a “sleaze business.” Her six children, aged 24 to 32, know what their mother does, but everyone else thinks she is a telephone solicitor--the kind that sells magazine subscriptions, not pleasure, through fiber optics.

Lou says Molly is always imagining that acquaintances in the tree-lined neighborhood are among her callers.

“When I first started out I did it all--bestiality, incest, rape, violence against children,” Molly says. “But it made me sick, so most of the calls I take now are from successful men in stressful jobs who want to take a break and be dominated.”

“I told her, ‘Let’s face it. What you really are is a phone hooker,’ ” Lou said. “She can get a corpse excited. But that kind of talk doesn’t do a thing for me.”

“He’s a big help. He has a vivid imagination,” Molly said, casting Lou an adoring look. “The first time I did it he wrote me a script, and he coaches me now to make sure I don’t get stale. You can get into a rut doing this.”

At first it was fun, Molly says, but now she gets tired.

She brought out a picture of herself taken four months ago at her daughter’s wedding, before the cancer made her hollow-eyed and sallow. The woman in the snapshot is wearing a low-cut peach gown that sets off her dark hair, glossy skin and full figure.

Even a glowing Molly bears little resemblance to most of the characters she plays. The only exception, she says, is the weekly call she gets from a man in New York whose dream woman is middle-aged.

Lou is a retired pizza parlor owner whom she supports while he tries to make it as an actor. He says she’s a frustrated actress who has found herself in her work.

Once a housewife and helper in the family business, Molly became a phone sex operator to escape boredom after the couple retired and moved to Los Angeles.

“I saw an ad in the LA Weekly that said make money from your home,” Molly said in her natural nasal voice. “I called, and they said you had to be very explicit and talk sex. I said, ‘I’m from New York. Talking dirty doesn’t bother me.’ ”