Martha Stewart’s new Netflix documentary, Martha, explores her rise, fall, and redemption at 83.
Stewart, the first self-made female billionaire, faced a five-month prison sentence in 2004.
Despite her comeback, Stewart's brand remains diminished, highlighting the challenges of personal branding.
There is no British Martha Stewart. Threatened with a five-month jail sentence, you might describe some combination of Delia Smith, Laura Ashley and Joanna Lumley, but even this fragrant Cerberus does not do Stewart justice. She is the all-conquering polymath of American lifestyle, a household name for halfa century, one of those figures, like Oprah or Elvis, for whom only America seems big enough.
She has been a teenage model, an unlikely stockbroker, a creator of recipes and tablescapes and interiors and gardens for America’s aspirational middle classes, a writer, a TV personality, a wife, a mother, a self-made billionaire, a friend to politicians and rappers and, for five months in 2004 and 2005, an inmate at Federal Prison Camp Alderson, West Virginia.
She spent five months in a West Virginia prison for obstructing justice.
A new Netflix documentary, Martha, shows that at 83, Stewart remains capable of a few surprises. The two-hour film charts her rise, fall and redemption, using archive footage and interviews with friends and family, as well as a sit-down at home with the woman herself, an “aspirational force to millions of people”, as the streamer bills her.
“I’m always trying to fill a void, something that doesn’t exist, something that people need and want and don’t have,” she says, in an early clip. She was remarkably successful, not just at filling voids but creating them. Who, before Stewart told them to, served dips inside cabbages, or colour-co-ordinated spice jars, or matched their dish towels to the season?
Discover the highs, lows, and legacy of Martha Stewart in her new Netflix documentary, Martha.
She’s an “intolerable perfectionist, a control freak,” says one contributor. But in her words, she was a “modern feminist”. The documentary asks the question: what is the price of perfection?
The director, RJ Cutler, who has previously made films about Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney and Anna Wintour, evidently has a taste for industrious, selectively charming and occasionally ornery public figures. Throughout the film it is evident that even in her ninth decade Stewart remains industrious, unapologetic and in complete control of her story, giving and withholding information as she pleases. One scoop she throws Cutler is that during her marriage to the serially unfaithful Andy Stewart (whose surname she would use to build her empire), she had “a very brief affair with a very attractive Irish man”.
“Young women, listen to my advice: If you’re married and your husband starts to cheat on you, he’s a piece of s***,” Stewart says. “Get out of that marriage.”
“Didn’t you have an affair early on?” Stewart is asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t think Andy ever knew about that,” Stewart replies, before disclosing her Irish fling. The lesson is clear; when you are Martha Stewart, the rules do not apply. It is the philosophy that has propelled her to stardom and brought her low.
Martha Kostyra was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in August 1941, the second of six children of Polish heritage. Her father, Edward, was a pharmaceutical salesman; her mother – also Martha – a schoolteacher who struggled to show affection. “He said, ‘You can do anything,’ which was very positive advice for a girl at that time,” Stewart once said. “Instead of suggesting that I become a secretary or maybe a teacher, he told me to set my sights high.” In the film, she says Edward was a handsome perfectionist with a keen sense of aesthetics, who dressed well and made each of his children learn how to garden, but started every day with a glass of wine and could be physically abusive to his children.
When Martha was 3 the family moved to Nutley, a few kilometres west of Jersey City. As a teenager, she babysat for several of the New York Yankees baseball players, including Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle, who lived nearby. A clever, pretty and ambitious teenager, Stewart worked as a model, including a summer shooting for Chanel while Coco Chanel was still in charge, and used the money to support her family and put herself through college. She studied at Barnard, the women’s liberal arts college within Columbia University in New York, where she met Andrew, a law student who went on to be a successful publisher. The two married in 1961, when Stewart was 19, and quickly had a daughter, Alexis. On a trip around Europe Stewart kissed a handsome stranger in a Florentine cathedral, so moved by the beauty all around her. “It was neither naughty nor infidelity,” she says in the film.
Determined to keep making her own money, Martha went to work at Pearlberg, Monness, a New York stockbroker. It was a crash course in hustle, where she was a woman in a world of cut-throat men. In the film, she says that “stuff that went on in the back seat of taxis I’m not even going to talk about”.
Stewart once worked as a model, including a summer shoot for Chanel. Photo / Netflix
“Money managers at that time were just like they are in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street,” she has said. “There were very, very few women, and I was very young – but everyone in the company was young. We were all like-minded, in our twenties, we wanted to make money, we wanted to do a very, very good job, and we did. One of the first things I was told was ‘every day starts at zero’. You had to figure out how to make some money that day.” Andy Monness says she was making “a quarter of a million a year,” and clients were making “money hand over fist”.
At the time of the stock market crash in 1973-1974, buffeted by the uncertainties of a job where not everything was within her control, Stewart quit. She, Andrew and their young daughter moved out to Turkey Hill, a rundown farmhouse in Westport, rural Connecticut. There the vision for the Martha Stewart Empire began to take shape. She took the lessons from Wall Street to heart. Starting with gardening and running a smallholding, she discovered that she loved making a home and hosting, which led to a million-dollar catering business, doing events in New York and outside, for celebrities including Paul Newman. The looks, the house, the husband, the food. In her catchphrase, her life was full of “very good things”.
Her “very good things” catchphrase represents her brand’s high-quality lifestyle ethos. Photo / Netflix
Lloyd Allen, a friend, says Stewart “was the first woman to see the marketability of her personal life. She was the first influencer”. As her empire expanded into books and TV, so did her reputation for being ruthlessly exacting. She was “a great white shark,” says one interviewee. “A bitch,” says another. Business success came at a personal cost. Her marriage failed. She won’t talk about it on camera, but the documentary includes letters Martha wrote to Andy around that time. She rages at him, pleads for another chance, threatens to burn down their home. “I’m 45 years old, worried and lonely, alone, hopeless,” she writes. She and Andy got divorced in 1990 and haven’t spoken for 20 years.
Stewart’s empire started with a catering business from her Connecticut farmhouse. Photo / Netflix
She lost herself in work, determined not to be a “has-been housewife”, launching a range with K-Mart, a low-end supermarket, a hit magazine, Martha Stewart Living (Conde Nast and Rupert Murdoch passed on it before she got a deal with Time Publishing Ventures) and a TV show. Eventually, she took control of her own business, listing Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia on the stock exchange, giving her a net worth of $1.2 billion by 1999, the first self-made female billionaire in American history. In 2000 Joan Didion profiled her in the New Yorker. “This is a billion-dollar company,” Didion wrote. “The only real product of which, in other words, is Martha Stewart herself.” (Didion is not the only serious writer to have shown Stewart to be a one-woman marketing tool: the social critic Camille Paglia said she was “someone who has done a tremendous service for ordinary women – women who identify with the roles of wife, mother and homemaker”.)
In the face of her success, however, media sniping at Stewart intensified.
“I’ve always been baffled by the degree of hatred that people have,” says Isolde Motley, a former editor of Martha Stewart Living, in the film. “I sometimes think it’s because she does something that theoretically all of us could do, she does it way better.”
This growing criticism meant her eventual fall came with lashings of schadenfreude. Allegations started swirling around a sale she had made of stock in ImClone Systems, a pharmaceutical company, after a tip-off. She stood down from running her companies. In 2003, James Comey, an ambitious young attorney who would go on to run the FBI, announced he was prosecuting her for obstruction of justice, but not insider trading, and did so by lying about the trade. The press feasted on it. In the film, of one hostile reporter, Stewart says, “She’s dead now, thank goodness.”
Martha Stewart was the first self-made female billionaire in America. Photo / Netflix
“I was a trophy for these idiots,’ she says of her sentence. “Those prosecutors should’ve been put in a Cuisinart [blender] and turned on high”.
In archive footage from a film shot between her guilty verdict in March 2004 and her sentencing in July, we see her at her most frazzled, berating staff and snapping at cameramen. Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison. Inside, she experienced solitary confinement.
Stewart endured. “I had to climb out of a f****** hole,” she says. After she was released she went roaring back to work: homewares, TV, books, cooking shows. She joked about being free again, showed off her bare ankles when she had her security tag removed. But the brand was damaged. She no longer had the control she had enjoyed when she was chief executive.
A reinjection of cool came in 2015 when she was abrasively funny on a Comedy Central roast of the pop star Justin Bieber, which also led to a surprising friendship with the rapper Snoop Dogg. Unsurprisingly, for someone with such a genius for image, she mastered social media. In 2022, Stewart launched her inevitable podcast; Snoop was her first guest. At the Paris Olympics in August, they filmed a segment in matching dressage outfits. Last May, she was revealed as the oldest-ever swimsuit cover star for Sports Illustrated. When she cancelled a Thanksgiving event this time last year, it was a national media incident. She has endorsed Kamala Harris in the forthcoming presidential election.
But Debbie Millman, a writer and the host of Design Matters, an influential podcast, tells the Telegraph that although Stewart is a fixture in American homes again, she is a diminished force.
Martha Stewart and Snoop Dog – for Weekend.
“Culturally she has been forgiven,” she adds. “Martha the person has recovered. Martha the brand hasn’t.
“You can’t really be a person and a brand,” she adds. “You can own, manage and distribute a brand, but once you see yourself as a brand, it takes the messy, abstract soulfulness out of your being. Because of the pivot that Martha’s empire took post her jail time, it’s a cautionary tale for anybody that’s considered trying to be a personal brand. You end up having to manage your person in a way that forces you to be perfect. If you have to do that, it becomes a real trap for your whole life.”
The story Stewart has always told about herself is that she is a driven, exacting perfectionist, comfortable with the fact that her high standards have alienated people along the way. She doesn’t like talking about feelings, preferring people who think and do. She has succeeded in worlds ruled by men. The system punished her for being a woman who had made a fortune on her own terms.
“She’s the consummate American self-improver,” Guy Trebay, a veteran styles reporter and the chief menswear critic of the New York Times, tells the Telegraph. “That’s the part of her that’s most salient. Class ascension in any culture is more myth than reality. She embodies that. The perfectionism can seem a little daunting, but the goal is to elevate yourself in class terms. That is what she has done with herself and what she has proposed.”
Whereas in Britain our sense of good taste still tends to roll downhill from the aristocracy, in the US the field is more open.
“The stratification in the UK is more formalised,” Trebay says. “Here it’s blurrier. Like Ralph Lauren, she was a world builder who constructed this fantasia based on the folk ways of the upper middle and upper classes of the United States. She conjured worlds for people that they imagined they could inhabit through the medium of making a more perfect cake or having a cleaner kitchen.”
“Her entrepreneurial side is admirable by any standards. She’s a very interesting and adaptable human being and business person. Not that many people can come back from the things she was convicted for and served time for. Even in a country that loves a redemption narrative, she aced it.”
As Martha Stewart looks back, Netflix’s Martha offers a rare glimpse into the life of a cultural icon. Photo / Netflix
Martha concludes that Stewart is a “definitive American woman” who “changed the culture”. Like anyone who enjoys such outrageous success, however, Stewart benefited from a unique set of circumstances. She was just old enough to become a stockbroker, young enough to sell second-wave feminists on the idea that building a beautiful home could be empowering, fulfilling and enriching. Today there are a million aspirant Martha Stewarts on Instagram, selling different aspects of their lifestyle. Her fingerprints are all over Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand, the Kardashian versions, and countless others around the world. Every hot blonde “tradwife” urging women to prioritise homemaking labours in Stewart’s neat shadow.
It seems impossible any of these figures could enjoy the same monopoly on domestic taste and habit Stewart had at her peak. There is no British Martha Stewart, but America might never make another one either.
