She used to lunch at the exclusive Four Seasons. Now, the best-selling author jokes that she’s inviting friends to Taco Bell. Call it gallows humor, but Alexandra Penney has just lost her life’s savings.

She invested every penny with accused Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff. Penney thought she had weathered the bear market just fine, since Madoff put her money in super-safe Treasuries. Then, on December 11, she received a call from her best friend.

“She said, ‘I hope this is a rumor, but I’ve just heard Bernie Madoff’s been arrested,’ ” Penney recalls. “My other phone rang; it was my son. And he said, ‘Mom, sit down.’ He said, ‘Bernie Madoff’s been arrested.’ And I said, ‘For what?’ And he said, ‘He’s a crook.’ ”

Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme disrupted a fragile financial system, affecting hedge funds and well-heeled investors on Wall Street, Florida and Europe. In a Ponzi scheme, money from new investors is used to pay off early investors to create the appearance of legitimate returns.

Conservative with her money, Penney says she has been working and saving since she was a teenager. She admits that her biggest fear was losing everything and “becoming a bag lady.” About a decade ago, when Penney was in her late 40s, she shared her fears with a good friend, who steered her to Madoff, where she thought her money would always be safe.

Best known for the 1982 best-seller “How to Make Love to a Man” and as a former editor of Self magazine, Penney and her friend Evelyn Lauder were the first to use pink ribbons as a symbol for breast cancer awareness. Every success along the way meant more money, which was eventually invested with Madoff. She earned so much money that she was no longer writing and editing but living her dream as an artist.

Sitting in her artist’s studio in the SoHo area of New York, she recently said she will start writing again to pay the bills. And she has a few choice words about Madoff, who remains under house arrest in his Manhattan penthouse apartment, where he lives with his wife while the case proceeds.

“Repulsive is mild. Loathsome. It’s a visceral feeling. This is not humanity; this is not a human being. This is, again, it’s a sociopath,” Penney says. “I’m sincerely, and this is the understatement of the year, appalled that this man is not in prison.”

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