Martha Stewart’s American Dream
By Lilah Ramzi
October 30, 2024
Let’s play a game: What do you think of when you think of Martha Stewart? Her unlikely friendship with Snoop Dogg? A pre-#tradwife trad wife? A daytime television personality who served jail time? Something else entirely?
Well, did the fact that she’s the world’s first self-made woman billionaire cross your mind? R.J. Cutler’s new documentary, Martha (streaming now on Netflix), interrogates all those identities.
The film starts with Stewart, tireless at 83, zipping around the grounds of her 153-acre property in Bedford, New York, in what appears to be a souped-up golf cart, surveying her gardens and orchards as groundskeepers prepare them for winter. Such inspections allow her to ensure that everything is done properly; her garden is a perennial source of joy.
Later, sitting down with Cutler (the documentarian behind The September Issue), she quotes a Dutch proverb: “If you want to be happy for a day, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a year, get married. But if you want to be happy forever, plant a garden.” Though we’ll go on to hear from her associates and family in voiceover, Stewart herself is the only interviewee we see onscreen, her conversation with Cutler spliced with ample footage from a life and career that has spawned four TV shows, two magazines, and more than 100 books.
And the documentary goes there, no holds barred. Cutler asks Stewart about her personal life, public scrutiny, and her path to spending five months at Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia. (In 2004, Stewart was famously found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators relating to the sale of ImClone Systems stock in late 2001.) And he keeps things fair. Amid Stewart’s recollection of her husband’s infidelity, Cutler reminds Stewart that she had also strayed—and she did it first. The resulting exchange is highly amusing.
Stewart tells of her childhood in working-class Nutley, New Jersey, where her domineering father, a salesman in the garment manufacturing industry, encouraged his children to garden to help put food on the table—though Stewart’s good looks would eventually lead to modeling jobs with paydays that went further. Still, she cites those grueling hours in the garden as seminal to the foundation of her famous grit and work ethic.
After going to Barnard and putting two years in as one of Benton & Company’s first female stockbrokers, Stewart and her first husband moved to Turkey Hill—a colonial-style farmhouse in the town of Westport, Connecticut, that would serve as the HQ for her catering company. Climbing a ladder that she was also building herself, Stewart eventually ascended from local go-to caterer to sought-after culinary visionary for million-dollar parties, cookbook author, media personality, daytime television host (Martha Stewart Living), magazine editor (also Martha Stewart Living), product designer for Kmart, and finally CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
The film references a profile of Stewart by Joan Didion published in February 2000, mere months after Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia went public and earned Stewart the title of the world’s first self-made woman billionaire. Though Didion’s words predated Stewart’s fall from grace, she homed in on the curious unease that Stewart’s success inspired in people.
“There remains, both in the bond she makes and in the outrage she provokes, something unaddressed, something pitched, like a dog whistle, too high for traditional textual analysis,” Didion wrote. “The outrage, which reaches sometimes startling levels, centers on the misconception that she has somehow tricked her admirers into not noticing the ambition that brought her to their attention.” She concluded: “This is not a story about a woman who made the best of traditional skills. This is a story about a woman who did her own IPO…. The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”
Reflecting on the actions that led to her prison sentence—which she alleges involved a punishment of 24 hours in solitary confinement with no food or water (the Federal Bureau of Prisons has disputed those claims)—Stewart maintains that she did nothing wrong; to this day, it’s her belief that the case was brought by a ruthlessly ambitious district attorney looking to make his name. The trade earned her about $250,000 but cost her everything—her TV show, her position at a company she had built from the ground up, and the good graces of much of the American public. It was a sad irony, given Stewart’s relentless championing of the American Everyman and Everywoman: In the film, a clip from her 1989 appearance on Late Night With David Letterman shows Stewart’s reaction to Letterman’s distasteful insinuation that working with Kmart was beneath her. “Everybody who shops at Kmart, and there’s about 77 million people a month, they want beautiful things,” she replied. “I’m trying to get really gorgeous things into the store.”
Other parts of Martha are pure, juicy fun: the revelation that Stewart kissed a stranger on her honeymoon, for example (so overtaken was she by the beauty of the Florence Cathedral), or scenes from the Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber in 2015 that marked the unlikely start of her comeback. At the time, both Stewart and Bieber were in need of a little PR rehab, and their agents thought comedy was the way to go. In addition to surprising the audience by showing no trace of the bitter, uptight woman she was made out to be, Stewart happened to be seated next to Snoop Dogg—and the two more than hit it off. Among her many got-nothing-to-lose jokes: “Justin, I’m here to tell you that you can’t just buy your way out of everything. Just ask my former stockbroker.”
Though it’s Stewart who sits for Cutler’s camera, the great weight of public opinion comes into view too. The main takeaway? We didn’t know how good we had it when Stewart was on top.
