WONDERLAND • The Ultimate Wonder Woman Site

IF you read the national magazine cover story on "Wonder Woman" Lynda Carter and her husband/manager Ron Samuels, you may have gotten the impression she's a man-made success - that he's the Wonder Man responsible for all she's achieved, for all she ever hopes to achieve.

However, if you speak to Lynda Carter you get the distinct impression she's solely responsible for having made the leap - ZAP! POW! - from being Miss World U. S. A. beauty winner of 1973 to star in one of TV's popular prime-time kid-vid series. With only three bit television acting parts in the interim.

"People have referred to Ron as my Svengali before," concedes the statuesque brown-haired, blue-eyed beauty. "I try not to let it bother me, though."

She tries to keep in mind that, "Some people just have to find a way to justify a woman's success.

And so they tend to say, 'The reason she's accomplished this is because she's being manipulated by someone else.' That's easier for them than facing the realization that a woman can make it in this male-dominated business. The simplest thing for them to believe is that whatever she does is a direct cause of the man in her life."

Lynda met the man in her life long after ABC had signed her to star in a series of "Wonder Woman" specials - but long before that network dropped the show the end of last season. It was just about the time, in fact, when Ron and Lynda were planning their wedding that he was negotiating with CBS to pick up "Wonder Woman" last fall for a full 26 episodes - that will reportedly earn his bride $1 million.

Lynda's celebrity status has also earned her such star-like accoutrements as a chauffeur-driven limousine. And a motor home/dressing room of such impressive proportions that when Oscar-winner Louise Fletcher was on the Warner Bros. lot filming "The Cheap Detective," it caused her to comment, "Makes me wonder why I studied so long and hard to become an actress."

But Lynda doesn't let barbs like that - or about her relationship with Ron - faze her. People are going to talk, she realizes, and she keeps reminding herself, "They'll say what they want, anyway - and that's their problem, not mine. It'll just hurt me if I sit up at night and worry about it." . Now that she's deep into her new season of weekly series work, she explains, it's all the more important that she not allow small concerns to affect her.

"We're working a lot of 14-hour days - on location five days a week and shooting at the studio one day." In addition, she's been working on an album for release in April. She's also preparing for her Las Vegas debut at Caesars Palace scheduled for the end of June.

Coming off as poised, gracious, erudite, she makes the point that she refuses to worry about the longevity of her series, "because "every show has a certain life, none go on forever." But, she adds with a Pollyanna note, "'Wonder Woman' has existed for 40 years as a comic strip - and that's encouraging."

The 25-year-old Wonder Woman says she's approached life from a positive attitude since she was a tot growing up in Phoenix, Ariz. That even then, "When others in my family would get worried about something, I would tell them, 'Why get upset? Worrying certainly isn't going to change anything.'

"People make their own bad frame of mind. Some don't seem to realize that pointing a finger and laying blame on others is a waste. Only you are responsible for what you feel like."

Lynda has laid the blame on her beauty pageant background for not getting even further faster in show business.

According to her, "Agents and studios automatically think beauty contest winners have no talent." And the reason for that, she analyzes, is that the beauty pageant promoters actually foster such beliefs "by failing to stress the intelligence of contestants."

It seems very important to Lynda Carter that we get the picture there's nothing empty-headed about her. And that, beautiful or plain, with Ron Samuels or without - she would have become a Wonder Woman of show business.