Profile Martha Stewart Martha Stewart's style directives never included the best way to serve a subpoena, but a spell in jail might give her food for thought, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor
Poking fun at the perfectionist of style for America's middle class has been a cottage industry for years. Now that Martha Stewart is facing jail for lying about a stock sale, there are countless new jokes about Martha in prison on the Internet and on air.
A spoof cover of Martha Stewart Living magazine promotes articles on "Polishing Leg Irons" and "Removing Pesky Bloodstains from Prison Garb". Conan O'Brien, a comic talk-show host, quips that Stewart recommends "a subpoena should be served with a nice appetiser". Her latest recipe gives instructions on how to put a hacksaw in a cake. In cartoons she is shown in a tastefully decorated prison cell, wearing designer stripes.
The reality is not so funny. When she is admitted to prison she will be strip-searched and told to squat naked and cough, then given black steel-toed shoes and starched khaki shirts. She will likely be assigned to Danbury prison in Connecticut, the nearest minimum security jail to her home in Turkey Hill, Westport, where she lives with her chow-chows called Paw Paw and Chin Chin, her Himalayan cats Teeny, Weeny, Mozart, Verdi, Vivaldi, Berlioz and Bartók, and about 30 song canaries. She will not be able to take them, or her chiffon scarves and Robert Piquet perfume, with her.
The plain concrete walls of the cells cannot be decorated, though she may arrange four photographs, tastefully of course, on her locker door. The 62-year-old housekeeping guru will have to share a toilet and a cell, and will be given the bottom bunk in keeping with a policy of not putting women over 50 on the top. As Danbury is currently full, she might even be sent to a tougher federal penetentiary where she could be given an orange jumpsuit and embedded with murderers and child molesters. Unless her lawyers pull off something very quickly now, Stewart faces a year inside when she comes up for sentencing on July 16th for lying to federal agents about a stock sale tip from an insider.
How did it come to this? Martha Stewart didn't need the $30,000 or so (estimates vary) that she saved from her tip-off. She had risen from a modest background in New Jersey to be numbered among America's richest executives and hailed by Fortune magazine as one of the world's 50 most powerful women.
Born Martha Kostyra on August 3rd, 1941, in New Jersey, she was the second of six children in a Polish family of modest income. Her frugal parents taught her the crafts of dress-making and gardening that she developed in later years. Aged 20 she married Yale law student Andy Stewart. They lived first in New York where she worked as a model and a stockbroker, before the couple moved to Connecticut. There she discovered her real talents when remodelling a derelict two-century-old farmhouse they bought in Westport.
In 1975 she opened a baked-foods co-operative for local women, which evolved into a gourmet catering business. In 1982 she published the first of her 14 books, called Entertaining, which emphasises dinner table etiquette and rustic ingenuity and is a bestseller to this day. Her magazine, Martha Stewart Living, launched in 1990, soared to a circulation of over one million. She started a syndicated TV show that attracted an audience of five million people, eager to be told how to make cookies and what to wear at a cocktail party. Her product designs were sold in K-Mart stores across the US. In 1997 she concentrated all her ventures into Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, a hugely successful company that went public two years later and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2002 it recorded revenues of $295 million.
By then, Stewart had become America's infallible guide to house-keeping, an expert on everything around the properly-kept house, from making hors d'oeuvres and hanging curtains to decanting washing-up liquid and managing herb gardens. This made her a domestic goddess to some, but unbearable to others who saw pretention rather than genius. Stories circulated about how she could be as vinegary in private as she was sugary in public. She reportedly swore like a sailor at neighbours and underlings, and put down her husband in public. He eventually moved out of Turkey Hill and got a court order to keep Martha away before their bitter divorce was finalised in 1990. A scorching book, Just Desserts by Jerry Oppenheimer, depicted her as shrewd and shrewish.
An insomniac who sleeps only three to four hours a night, her energy was phenomenal. She also, it seems, developed a strong sense of entitlement, a privileged celebrity who lived by different rules. On her way to a holiday trip in Mexico on her private jet in December 2001, she called her New York broker and was told that her friend Sam Waksal, head of the biotechnology company, ImClone Systems, was dumping his shares. Stewart ordered the broker to sell her 4,000 ImClone shares immediately. ImClone shares plummeted next day when it came out that the government had turned down the firm's new cancer drug, something Waksal had known in advance.
When the Securities and Exchange Commission later started sniffing around, Stewart lied to them, saying her transaction was triggered by a standing order to sell if the share price fell to a certain point. In those post-Enron days, it was open season on corporate malfeasance and when it came out that Stewart was under investigation, she was savaged by the media. She was forced to resign as chairwoman and chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. She lost hundreds of millions of dollars in net worth as her company's stock plummeted. CBS dropped her from a regular TV programme after refusing her demand not to raise the scandal on air. In her last appearance, she chopped savagely at a cabbage when the topic came up, saying "I will be exonerated of any ridiculousness . . . I want to focus on my salad, because that's why we're here." Rejecting a plea bargain that would most likely have kept her from prison, she went to court to fight. She was, however, done in by the stockbroker's assistant who confessed all, and by a travelling companion and former friend, Mariana Pasternak, who testified about Martha's gleeful reaction to getting the tip from the stockbroker (who is also up for sentencing).
Since then, Stewart has avoided the media, though before the trial she gave a revealing interview to the New Yorker writer, Jeffrey Toobin, over lunch of Sechuan-style chicken. After he admired the silver chopsticks, Toobin wrote, Stewart remarked that in China, the thinner the chopsticks, the higher the social status. "Of course, I got the thinnest I could find," she said. "That's why people hate me."
However, Stewart has many defenders, particularly on Wall Street. But, as the novelist Scott Turow pointed out in a New York Times op-ed article in May, those who take Stewart's side ignore the fact "that there was some poor schmo (or schmoes) out there who bought her shares of ImClone", which made it a rip-off as fraudulent as if she had sold silk sheets that were synthetic. But if she is down, Stewart is by no means out. People still buy her books and model their gardens and patios according to her tastes. Her TV programme has been picked up by the Style Network. She has put on a brave face, ignoring the schadenfreude of crowing critics and appearing at recent celebrity events such as the daytime Emmy Awards, the New York première of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and the Hampton Designer Showhouse. She even went roller-blading in the Hamptons last weekend. And, by the way, she was wearing skintight Spandex along with matching knee and wrist pads.
The Stewart File
Who is she?
America's style goddess
Why is she in the news?
She is facing jail in a shares scandal
Most appealing characteristic
Obsessed with perfection
Least appealing characteristic
Obsessed with perfection
Most likely to say
Why can't I have a single cell with a queen-size bed?
Least likely to say
What lovely stripes!