Summer reading: Behind the groomed facade of Martha Stewart

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Christopher Byron: Martha Inc

John Wiley & Sons

$63.95

Westport, Connecticut, is a place where rich Americans play at village life. Or a sort of village life.

The New England community is where the famous frolic. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald drank and fought here. But for the most part the frolics are rather more genteel.

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward live here. So do Keith Richards and Robert Redford. Such celebrities are given the sort of semi-seclusion that the rich give the very rich and famous.

A sort of snobbery attaches to such places. To acknowledge celebrity in one's midst would be very low-rent behaviour indeed. To talk to outsiders, especially media outsiders, about the celebrities in one's midst is certain to have you cut dead at the country club.

On Turkey Hill Rd in Westport lives Wesport's- and perhaps America's - unlikeliest celebrity.

Martha Stewart is the woman with the all-American looks and the all-American name who has built a multimillion-dollar empire out of selling American women a fantasy.

That fantasy is of a world in which every woman is the perfect homemaker, able to whip up the perfect sponge cake in between making a centrepiece for her table out of pine cones and discarded ribbons, maintaining a bug-free cottage garden and running her own business.

The Martha Stewart woman knows how to co-ordinate her bed linens and keep her baking tins full; she makes her own Christmas cards and light-switch covers.

Her children are clever and quiet and can wear white while eating chocolate ice cream (home-made, of course.) And, should an accident occur, a Martha Stewart woman knows how to get those nasty stains out.

Stewart sells this fantasy through her Martha Stewart range stocked in KMart stores, through her monthly magazine which features Martha's tips and recipes and homilies, a weekly one-hour syndicated television show, newspaper columns, radio, and a catalogue internet business.

Her company is called Martha Stewart Omnimedia.

Inside Martha Stewart land, all is bright and sparkling and organised and executed with love.

Her catch phrase is "It's a good thing".

This year has not been a good thing for Stewart. She has been investigated for insider trading after she sold shares in the ImClone biotech firm a day before the Food and Drug Administration announcement that it was not going to approve an anti-cancer drug IMClone had in development.

Former IMClone chief executive Sam Waksal was a friend of Stewart. He has since pleaded guilty to charges including securities fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice.

And then there was the neighbour who did the dirty on nice clean Martha - and wrote about it. Martha Inc, by fellow Westport resident Christopher Byron, went inside Martha Stewart land and found cobwebs in the corners and a shrew in the kitchen.

Tsk tsk. Not very Westport. But Stewart had long ago alienated her neighbours. Up on Turkey Hill Rd, the rumours ran rife. The woman who sold sweetness and light screamed like a banshee, said the neighbours and reported by Byron, when a kid on the hill accidentally threw a ball onto Martha's manicured lawn.

(An eye.net parody, Martha Stewart Disease, describes acute symptoms of such an ailment. You know you've got the Stewart sickness when "all the grass on your front lawn is braided".)

A Westport store set up a bulletin board where locals could post messages moaning about Martha.

And moan they did. About the time Martha cut to the head of a queue at a sale, the time she was rude to a local merchant, the time she failed to pay a bill.

All of which seems like pretty low grade nastiness. But if you think that, you're missing the point of Martha.

In any case it does get nastier. Down at the Viaduct this America's Cup season is a sleek, white racing yacht called Unfurled, owned by Harry Macklowe, a New York real estate magnate who fought a bitter feud with Martha over shrubberies and lighting on land dividing their properties in The Hamptons, an exclusive district of Long Island where Martha has her second home.

Stewart sued after Macklowe's gardener publicly accused her of abusing him and using her car to pin him against a security gate control box.

New Zealand doesn't have a Martha. But we could possibly make one up from composite parts -a pinch of Paula Ryan, a little Jo Seagar, a bit of Jude Dobson ... no, it just doesn't work.

Stewart is so all-American the term might have been invented to describe her.

Take the beginnings of the empire that puffed up like perfect flaky pastry. It's pure mom and apple pie, straight out of America circa 1950.

That empire started in Westport in the mid-1970s, outside a shop in a collection of shops with the quaint name The Common Market.



The Common Market housed Ralph Lauren and a shop stocking alligator belts. Outside Ralph Lauren, Martha Stewart set up a little stand selling homemade pies and cakes. She called her pie cart The Market Basket. It sounds hokey but a Martha Stewart cake sold for twenty bucks and, as Byron points out, she was ahead of the game even then. Her little arrangement foreshadowed the business strategy under which, 20 years later, Starbucks would set up shop in Barnes and Nobles book shops.

This was not Martha's first business venture. With her best friend, Norma Collier, Martha set up a home-catering business.

This was a canny move. The 70s ushered in a whole new era of American domestic relations. Women were in the workplace, feminism told them they could be and should be. The flipside was they now had to work and keep the homefires burning. They had, in other words, to be a Martha.

Collier and Stewart's business was called The Uncatered Affair and what it offered was unique - a catering service set up to make it look as though you had put in 10 hours at the stockbroking firm (as Martha did after her early modelling career came to nothing) before coming home to decorate the dining room table on which you were now going to serve a four-course dinner for eight.

As it turned out, Martha was doing a little work on the side - booking jobs and banking the proceeds without telling Collier. When Collier, who had put up with Martha belittling her publicly for months, quit the partnership, her former friend summoned her to a meeting. At that meeting, Martha threw Collier's personal belongings on to the street.

Byron talked to Collier for Martha Inc. She is predictably uncomplimentary: "She's a sociopath and a horrible woman and I never want to encounter her again ... as long as I live."



But the real reason for Collier's bitterness, writes Byron, was that Martha had the nous to recognise the business opportunities presented by Norma, "whereas Norma failed to recognise the dangers lurking in Martha".

Byron sets out the case against Martha. She shouted at her husband, Andy, in public and told him he was useless. So he left. She treats her employees like servants and her family like employees.

When she held an open garden day at Turkey Hill, her father was coerced into playing the role of the hired help and put on show. When Andy - Byron calls him Martha's "draft mule" - left, she hired a Brazilian gardener/car-washer/dog-walker to replace him.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about the cottage industry that grew and grew is not that it is built on a substance as stable as whipped egg whites, but that she seems to think it can go on without her.

When asked by a bunch of investment bankers what would happen when the unthinkable happened and little Ms Perfect went the way of all mortals, Martha replied that her magazine has been stockpiling "never before seen" photographs of her.

Now 61, Martha seems to believe she will be able to go on ruling her empire from the great kitchen in the sky. Not even Chairman Mao, writes Byron, "got away with that one".



This is the story, writes Byron, of "a little girl who never got over what life never gave her and wound up inventing for herself a past she had never known - a hologram of life so powerful that it not only convinced her personally but mesmerized the world."

In the way that all good biography does, Byron goes in search of the missing parts of the story.

Martha Stewart, born Martha Kostyra to a working-class family of Polish ancestry, grew up in Brooklyn.

In Martha's childhood, Byron finds a mother who was a "coldly disengaged housewife" and a narcissistic father who drank and raged and became a control freak. He rigged up an intercom so that he could boss his six kids around from wher-ever he happened to be in the house.

The great American dream eluded the family. They didn't have a car; they were the last house in the street to get TV.

Out of such neediness can grow a terrible yearning. What Martha wanted, more and more Martha would get. But it was never enough.

"This," writes Byron, "is a story of what was missing, why it was missing, and how she turned it into a billion dollars."

It is also a story of deals that have been pulled off with breathtaking acuity. Byron, a business journalist, can't help but admire Martha's business sense - while reeling at her audacity.

She got KMart to pay for a run-down house that she already owned so she could renovate it - and sell videotapes and books about the project. She was supposed to be a new face of KMart, promoting the store. Somehow it has worked out that KMart promotes Martha and her products.

And it is the story of an extraordinary feat of fortune-making based on a world which does not exist for any woman. It doesn't exist for Martha.

What, in the end, does Byron make of Martha?

He is as much fascinated as he is repelled. He relates that he once had a call from Martha thanking him for a column he'd written when her company was about to go public.

It was a flattering column, and in it Byron felt the need to reveal that he'd studied her "close up from behind on a Stairmaster (she works out at my gym.)"

In his opinion Martha was "a pretty good looking woman". She phoned him to thank him. But there was one little thing: "What do you mean by pretty good-looking?"

That little flirtation is now firmly over. In Westport, Byron might want to be very careful crossing the street.

* Tomorrow's summer reading: DNA and detective work reveal the true story behind Louis XVII, the lost boy king of France.