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Halfway through the run of Martha, the new Netflix documentary about the former domestic goddess-turned-Sports Illustrated cover star, Martha Stewart lingers over the moment in 2004 when she received a guilty verdict at the end of her high-profile insider trading trial.
Stewart’s lips purse viciously with disgust. She rolls her eyes. “Guilty guilty guilty on all these charges,” she says. “The New York Post lady was there, just looking so smug.”
Stewart, now 83, pauses reflectively. “She’s dead now,” she adds. “Thank goodness. Nobody has to put up with all that crap that she was writing all the time.”
The past few years have seen a small boom in documentaries about the many wronged women of the ’90s and 2000s: Framing Britney Spears; Pamela, a Love Story; Lorena. Martha, directed by R.J. Cutler, is a different animal. It is not an apologia for its subject. It does not suggest that the public and its obsession with her foibles and legal troubles ruined her life.
Martha Stewart does not admit to ever having her life ruined. Martha Stewart disdains self-pity. Martha Stewart refuses to be a victim.
“Some people revel in this self-pity, etc., etc.,” Stewart remarks to the camera, when asked to reminisce about her divorce from the husband she describes as “a piece of shit” for having cheated. (Her own affairs, she explains to the camera in a now-viral clip, don’t count because her husband didn’t know about them.) She herself is different, she continues: “I just don’t.” She wouldn’t know how to wallow.
Martha Stewart is, in other words, exactly as much of a hardass as you always thought she was. She is exactly the mean perfectionist control freak all the tabloids used to claim she was.
What a perfectionist, what a control freak, what a mean lady.
Cutler, who conducts the documentary’s single talking-head interview with its subject, interlaces it with plenty of archival footage. (In a neat touch, all the other interviews for the film are audio-only, so that Stewart’s face is the only one we see in the present.) As the interview evolves, Cutler seems to revel in needling Stewart. He repeatedly asks her the kinds of questions she clearly finds annoying — personal questions on subjects that deal with moments where she perceives herself as having failed. He pauses mid-interview, leaving her to sigh heavily as she waits for the questions to keep going. He brings out her Martha-ness, her irritability, her impatience, her dislike at being at someone else’s mercy, under circumstances that are not precisely under her control.
Those are all the things that used to make people hate Martha Stewart. What a perfectionist, what a control freak, what a mean lady. In Martha, they become the thing that makes her the most likable. They are human flaws, messy and endearing, in a woman who has worked for decades to try to make herself appear perfect.
Stewart traces her perfectionism back to her upbringing. She was born in 1941, just on the far side of the Depression, to parents who couldn’t afford to feed their family. They set their six children to work tending the garden and beat them when they made mistakes.
Her father was exacting, an alcoholic whose fine tweed suits and leather shoes had to be pressed and shined just so. Stewart’s face lights up when she says she was the only one he trusted to tend to them, but she allows that the man himself was “mean, mean, mean.”
She got out of that house every chance she saw: first by modeling as a teenager, then by going to college, then by marrying publishing executive Andrew Stewart. Characteristically, once she was married, Stewart tackled every ambition with ferocious discipline and took each failure as a personal crisis. She spent years as a successful stockbroker until one of her recommendations tanked, at which point she quit finance and moved her family to the farthest suburbs of Connecticut so she could remodel a house that was falling apart.
Eventually, Stewart parlayed her highly refined skills at homemaking and party-hosting into a career as an upscale caterer for her well-heeled friends. From catering came the lifestyle guide Entertaining in 1982, and then more books, and then a magazine, and then a TV show. By the 1990s, Stewart was the center of a multimedia empire, the embodiment of a massively lucrative brand that was all centered on a lifestyle so elevated that no one besides Stewart herself could ever possibly achieve it.
Martha Stewart thought snow peas individually stuffed with cream cheese made an elegant dinner party side. Martha Stewart modeled her fruit bowl displays off the paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Martha Stewart, like the cleaning influencers of today, wanted to store her laundry detergent in an aesthetically pleasing container.
All this could be a lot to swallow, both when Stewart was coming up and now. It’s easy to roll your eyes and wonder who has the time and energy to think that much about their laundry room.
“She got under men’s hair,” Flanagan says, “this idea that you could be a homemaking expert who’s a bitch.”
But Martha Stewart is a lot more interesting, it turns out, when she is presented to you not as someone you should aspire to be like but as a very strange and specific psychological case study.
Cutler presents Stewart to the audience as a portrait of a perfectionist scrabbling madly for something, anything, to mold in her own image, and then lashing out furiously at anyone she perceives as getting in her way. You don’t necessarily want to be her, but there’s something so compelling about watching her twist herself around to become this impossible-to-please empress of all she beholds.
One piece of archival footage shows Stewart lambasting an employee behind the scenes for using a paring knife to cut an orange for Easter brunch. “Well, isn’t that a stupid knife?” Stewart says impatiently, her tone sharp enough to cut the orange with voice alone.
In voiceover, the journalist Caitlin Flanagan explains the phenomenon that we’re watching. “She got under men’s hair,” Flanagan says, “this idea that you could be a homemaking expert who’s a bitch.”
In the 2000s, at the height of her empire, Stewart made an odd fit for the era. She was a woman with power in a moment misogynistic enough to humiliate powerful woman; a woman who made art and business out of home life in a moment just feminist enough to understand a focus on the home as regressive; a woman viciously committed to perfection in a moment that craved tabloid-friendly mess.
That was the fundamental paradox of Martha Stewart. On the one hand, she built her brand on presenting a vision of the home so exactingly idealized it was impossible for anyone to live up to it. She romanticized the domestic sphere that women had spent so many decades trying to escape. She was regressive, surely, a ’50s throwback who deserved to be mocked and ignored.
On the other hand, Stewart used all that domestic acumen to make herself the first female self-made billionaire in the world. She took homemaking seriously as an aesthetic pursuit when the rest of the culture was minimizing it as unimportant women’s work. She had power and she had swagger and she knew it, and it put a target on her back.
When Joan Didion wrote about Martha Stewart for the New Yorker in 2000, she noted that there was something telling about the way all those Martha Stewart parody books that flourished in the era were so bizarrely sexualized. The parodies, Didion wrote, were “too broad, misogynistic in a cartoon way (stripping Martha to her underwear has been a reliable motif of countless on-line parodies), curiously nervous (‘Keeping Razors Circumcision-Sharp’ is one feature in ‘Martha Stuart’s Better Than You at Entertaining’), oddly uncomfortable, a little too intent on marginalizing a rather considerable number of women by making light of their situations and their aspirations.” There was a vengeful, humiliating edge to all of it.
All that power, however, took quite a beating when Stewart was arrested for insider trading in 2002.
In 2004, Stewart was found “guilty guilty guilty,” not of fraud but of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and lying to federal investigators. She allegedly took an illicit tip from her stockbroker, perhaps in the same spirit with which she decided that her affairs didn’t count as infidelity. (The chief prosecutor against her was James Comey, of whom Stewart says in Martha, “Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high.”)
In Martha, Cutler lingers in detail on Stewart’s trial and her time in jail. In his hands, the media circus around her conviction becomes a portrait of what it is like for a woman who built her whole identity on her sense of control to find herself rendered completely powerless.
In archival footage of the period between her trial and her sentencing, Stewart explained her preparations for her sentencing to an interviewer in a chipper Snow White voice, as though explaining how to fold a fitted sheet. “Well, you know, you go to the dentist. You go to the gynecologist,” she said. “You just make sure you’re in as best shape as you possibly can to let your body and your mind take whatever comes!” In the diary she kept in prison, she instructed herself sternly to learn something new every day: the control freak doing her best to reap something of value from even the worst of experiences.
Stewart served five months in prison, and today, she insists it wasn’t a major inflection point in her life. The scandal that came with it, though, forced her to rebuild everything. She lost control of her fiercely guarded brand, lost her TV show, and lost what she estimates to be about $1 billion. Her first project after her release, the flashy NBC talk show The Martha Stewart Show, she dismisses now as a failure despite its seven seasons on the air: She wasn’t, she says, able to control it the way she wanted to.
Eventually, Stewart managed to rebuild herself as a sort of ironic celebrity. She’s built a clever brand for herself now as the nice grandma who knows everything there is to know about rose gardens but also has done hard time and is friends with Snoop. (Endearingly, their relationship appears to be both authentic and organic — they were seated next to each other on Comedy Central’s roast of Justin Bieber and apparently hit it off.) She’s not a billionaire anymore, but she’s made herself relevant to the public again while apparently refusing to change her own behavior or personality in any meaningful way. She still wants power, and she is still grabbing for it.
Stewart managed to rebuild herself as a sort of ironic celebrity.
In Didion’s essay, she suggests, in a passage Stewart describes as “very insightful” in the documentary, that it’s Stewart’s power that is attractive to her audience, not her unreachable exactitude.
“The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity,” Didion writes, “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.”
What Martha suggests is different from Didion’s idea. It offers us a Martha Stewart who is attractive not because she played and won, but because she played so hard each and every time, even when she lost. She’s a control freak, a perfectionist, unreasonably demanding, and vicious when crossed — and what’s more touchingly, imperfectly human than that?
Correction, November 4, 11:55 am: A quote in this story, originally published November 2, was misattributed. The journalist speaking was Caitlin Flanagan.
