Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 17, 1994 TAG: 9410180068
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JILL GERSTON NEW YORK TIMES WESTPORT, Conn.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Or maybe it's because she has forgotten that she is wearing a hidden microphone.
Whatever the reason, Stewart, who has inspired legions of women to tie leek ribbons around their lamb chops and dip chocolate truffles in gold leaf, is drolly parodying her image as Our Lady of Gracious Living.
``If you really want to be an obnoxious house guest, take your hostess a pie kit,'' she deadpans, displaying a basket of fresh peaches, a porcelain pie dish, a rolling pin, a frozen pie crust and a handwritten recipe card an assistant arranges before her. ``It will force her to bake you a pie.'' The crew cracks up.
Don't expect such levity on Stewart's weekly syndicated how-to show, ``Martha Stewart Living,'' which began its second season last month (the show does not air in the Roanoke area). On camera she is an earnest, omnicompetent perfectionist who reassures viewers that with just a little effort and a lot of time, they, too, can make sugared rose petals.
But, then, Stewart seems supremely accomplished in virtually all she undertakes, with the market for her life-style empire burgeoning as robustly as her 125 varieties of roses.
Her magazine, Martha Stewart Living, with its circulation of 800,000, recently switched from 6 to 10 issues a year. ``We get about 500 subscription requests a week from viewers who phone the 800 number given on the show,'' marvels Eric Thorkilsen, the magazine's publisher, who oversees all Martha Stewart Living projects at Time Inc. Ventures. ``The show and the magazine are incredibly complementary.''
That's not all. Stewart's 11 sumptuously illustrated books have sold more than 2.8 million copies, and a new one, ``Menus for Entertaining,'' is due later this month. She appears every other week on the ``Today'' show demonstrating topics from her magazine to a bemused Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel.
K Mart, which sells her collections of sheets and towels, recently renewed her consulting contract. American Express tapped her to do the first commercial for their Optima True Grace card. Never mind that Stewart's fans include domestically challenged multitudes who are dumbstruck at the thought of making topiary Easter baskets, the numbers are impressive indeed.
Yet it is the television series that is perhaps her most potent marketing medium. Just what are the ingredients in each half-hour episode?
Guidance on how to do everything - cut a grapefruit, build a trellis, bake a rhubarb crisp, plant succulents in a wall garden - offered with the flair and perfection you would expect from a woman who once catered parties for Ralph Lauren and Paloma Picasso.
``My viewer absolutely knows I'm using a delicious fresh-roasted espresso for my ice cubes and not some awful coffee,'' she says, discussing a segment on making flavored ice cubes. ``Not that you can taste it over television, but you can imagine that it tastes really good. It's not just the how-to tip but the way it's done.''
And the way it looks. The series is shot primarily on location at Stewart's renovated 1805 ``farmette,'' a lush six-acre spread in Westport that includes fruit orchards, gardens, a croquet lawn, a pool, a barn and a ``palais des poulets'' for her exotic Araucana chickens, which lay pastel-blue eggs. ``We could never duplicate this place as a set,'' says Leslie McNeil, the executive producer of the show.
Nor could they duplicate Stewart, 53, whose outdoorsy, tawny blond looks, preppy clothes and finishing-school voice make her the consummate guide to the world of upper-middle-class suburban ``homekeeping.''
For the lure of ``Martha Stewart Living'' isn't learning to construct a gingerbread mansion with a copper-leaf mansard roof or grilling Cornish game hens in a marinade of Grand Marnier and orange juice.
Instead it is the fascination of watching Martha - devotees call her Martha, never Stewart - enact her perfectly fabulous ``Martha Stewart Living'' life.
Watch Martha clean her vast collection of copper pots. Watch Martha, dressed as a rare bird with a little nest of twigs and faux quail eggs on her head, ride a hay wagon to a Halloween party.
``Remember when those shows `Dallas' and `Dynasty' were really popular?'' Stewart says of the television series that epitomized the unembarrassed extravagance of the 1980s. ``People were living vicariously through them. I think my approach is so much more simple and so much nicer a life style. People understand.''
Understand? Crave is more like it. Stewart's followers swoon over her every piece of Depression glass, her every copper pudding mold. One besotted disciple requested the pedigree of Stewart's cats so she could buy the same.
In person Stewart is funny and vivacious and exudes an aura of brisk efficiency.
``I rarely, rarely sit down and do nothing,'' she says, over a salad at a Westport restaurant during a break from shooting. ``I hate to waste time,'' an assertion confirmed by Richard Z. Chesnoff, a senior correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, who has known Stewart for nearly 20 years.
``Once my wife and I were with Martha at her house in Easthampton, and I noticed her light was on very late at night,'' he says. ``She told me she keeps her light on all night so if she wakes up she can immediately read. It sounds obsessive, but it's not. It's just Martha's determination not to waste time.''
It's her superwoman image, along with her penchant for painstaking, time-consuming projects, that irritates Stewart's detractors.
``How do you manage to do all that gardening and still keep up with the other stuff, the writing, the editing, the designing, the TV shows, the lectures, the autograph sessions?'' wrote Diane White, a columnist for The Boston Globe, who has devoted several irreverent columns to Stewart. ``Have you had yourself cloned?''
Stewart shrugs off such grousing. ``I really can't be bothered by it,'' she says.
While Stewart's spectacular success may lead some to think she has lead a totally charmed life, her background reveals otherwise.
Born Martha Kostyra, the eldest daughter of a pharmaceuticals salesman and a schoolteacher, Stewart was raised in a large Polish-Catholic family in Nutley, N.J.
A straight-A student, she won a partial scholarship to Barnard College and worked as a model to help pay expenses.
At the end of her sophomore year, she married Andrew Stewart, a law student at Yale. She graduated from Barnard in 1963 and two years later gave birth to a daughter, Alexis (29 now and the owner of the Bridgehampton Motel, on Long Island).
For eight years Andrew Stewart worked as a stockbroker but quit Wall Street during the 1973 recession. In 1976 Martha Stewart, who learned how to cook as a child and catered her first party in high school, started a catering business with a friend. The partnership soon dissolved, but Stewart forged ahead, working out of her kitchen with a staff of assistants. Within a decade Martha Stewart Inc. had ballooned into a $1 million business.
In 1982 Stewart published ``Entertaining,'' a lavish coffee-table cookbook that launched the Martha craze. Quicker than you could say ``creme brulee,'' there appeared videos, lectures, seminars, dinner-music CDs, cable-television specials and more books.
But Stewart's frenetic business schedule took a toll on her private life. In 1987 while she was on a publicity tour for her book ``Weddings,'' her husband moved out of their Westport house after 26 years of marriage. The bitter breakup ended in divorce in 1989.
Alas, real life is never perfect. Roses wilt, roasts burn and marriages crumble. Does she like being single? ``Not necessarily,'' she replies tersely.
Who, then, does America's premier homemaker make a home for? ``I make a home for myself,'' she says evenly. ``I love my home.''
Homes, to be precise. In addition to her Westport residence, where she lives with her two chows and six Himalayan cats, Stewart has a three-story beach house in Easthampton.
There is also a New York pied-a-terre that she has owned for five years but in which she has never spent a night. And her 35-acre property near Fairfield, Conn., is, as she puts it, ``my major gardening project.''
Is there anything missing from her life?
``I wish I had had more kids, but I'm gratified that I have a lot of nieces and nephews,'' she says, glancing at her watch. Lunch is over. It's time to hurry back to shooting.
``I'm not an unhappy person,'' she adds, momentarily reflective. ``I wish people understood me better. I'd like to have my negotiations on all my business things be shorter. Silly things like that. But on the whole, I haven't had many disappointments. I've really been pretty lucky.''
by CNB