I am eating cold asparagus in Martha Stewart’s plate-glass corner office with its sweeping views over the Hudson River. This is an odd mid-morning snack but these are special vegetables, asparagus supermodels, 10in long, tender to the very end of the stem. Martha picked them herself this morning in her garden at Cantitoe Farm, in Bedford, upstate New York and, steamed by a minion, they are offered on a white platter with antique silver tongs, cruet and tiny jug of melted herb butter.
It sounds sweet and homely, the billionaire head of a media corporation bringing in a basket of home-grown produce. But the asparagus is a parable of how business is done the Martha Stewart way. “When I went out to pick them today I noticed that we hadn’t composted the asparagus as we should have,” she says, waggling a stalk. “So I called John, who works in my garden, and we talked about getting it right. And that is not being critical of the asparagus patch. That is helping the asparagus patch to be better next year.”
Even what appears already perfect can always be improved. And that mantra applies as much to her home — or homes, since she owns eight — as to her business empire. But then the two are melded in a head-spinning synergy. That asparagus could end up as an exquisitely photographed cookery or gardening spread in her 2 million-selling magazine, Martha Stewart Living, along with the wall-lights she designed for her daughter’s cottage, the refurb of her dining room, the paint effect on her wicker chairs . . . Or it might feature on her daytime TV programme Martha, her radio show or in her next book. Maybe the trug in which she carried the asparagus will inspire a product for her new merchandise in Macy’s department store: she also has lucrative lines such as towels and bed linen in the cheapo supermarket Kmart, plus a bunch of fancy paints and faux colonial furniture for her richer customers.
Stewart’s life is a laboratory for her work: her work prescribes how millions of Americans live. She is that creepiest of corporate phenomena, a living brand. There is simply no British counterpart on her scale. Nigella — or “what’s-her-name who married the Saatchi” as Stewart calls her, while knowing her potential rival’s every move — has an empire that extends only to TV/books/cookware. But Martha Stewart is Nigella meets Terence Conran, Cath Kidston, Alan Titchmarsh and the National Magazine Company. And now, we should add, meets Sir Alan Sugar, since The Apprentice: Martha Stewart airs in Britain tonight.
But don’t expect Martha to finger-wag and cry “You’re fired!” Instead she says: “I’m sorry, you don’t fit in,” then takes a sheet of bonded paper and writes a regretful missive to the departed candidate. American critics dubbed it boring, scorned the softer tasks (marketing wedding cakes and writing children’s stories), the ratings were so-so (about six million) and Donald Trump, the originator of the US Apprentice, sent Stewart a scorching critique: “Your performance . . . lacked mood, temperament and just about everything a show needs for success . . . As soon as I saw it I knew it would fail.”
But Stewart isn’t bothered about The Donald. She had a bigger reason for doing The Apprentice, to rehabilitate herself and her brand with the American people. After a two-year legal battle against charges of insider trading and lying to Federal officials, Stewart was convicted and served five months in prison with a further five under house arrest. As satirists mocked and a nation enjoyed the delicious Schadenfreude of “Miss Prissy Perfect Huffy Bitchy Whatever” — as she characterises her critics’ view of her — having to eat prison chow with common criminals, her stocks tumbled, her shows were cancelled, advertisers fled and Stewart was forced to stand down as chief executive. But throughout her exile and disgrace, her one thought was how she would rebuild the company she began 25 years ago as a party caterer working from her own kitchen.
The woman sitting across the desk in a mannish brown Hermes trouser suit and chunky gold jewellery is harder-edged and more terse than her relaxed, unthreatening daytime persona. Stewart is a large woman, broad-beamed and 5ft 9in (1.52m) even without her 4in heels (also Hermès), which make her loom over her dainty staff. With her fine skin and thick hair, she looks younger than her age — 64 — but older than her airbrushed or cleverly lit public self.
In fact Martha Stewart looks tired, weary even. “It is exhausting,” says the human brand. “I live in this perpetual state of being busy.” And the past two years have clearly taken their toll. Moreover, she is famously insomniac, rising today at 5am. Although later, passing a TV editing suite, she says: “I fall asleep the moment I go in there: it’s being in a dark room.” Which makes me wonder, since she sleeps always with the light on, whether she deliberately keeps herself awake. Or if billionaire bravado means you must pretend to be a four-hours-max superhuman. “Some people sleep all weekend to catch up,” she says. “But actually, they’re just lazy, don’t you think?”
What amounts to laziness in Martha Stewart’s world is not living up to what most mortal women would consider impossible ideals. In her magazine’s latest issue we are advised to clean our light fittings, keep plates chilling in the fridge so salad doesn’t wilt at the table, find time to hand-paint a chest and construct elaborate layered desserts. I ask if she’s seen Desperate Housewives and what she thinks of the brittle, manically house-proud Bree. She replies without humour or irony that Marcia Cross, who plays her, came on Martha and messed up frying an egg. But what about the character? “She’s not modelled on me!” Stewart snaps and adds, unexpectedly, that someone like Bree, sent half-mad by a mismatched plate, “should go get a life!”
Anyway, hasn’t the tide changed towards a domestic mantra of “making peace with imperfection”? This makes Stewart furious. “There are too many magazines which say ‘Oh, just let that be’,” she rages. “But if you’re going to have a lawn full of crabgrass you might as well not have a lawn. That’s my attitude. Why do you want it around you? So dig it out, treat it, it’ll grow really well and look luscious and beautiful. I can make suggestions like that instead of just ‘let it be’. That’s lazy, and I don’t think people should be lazy.”
Hers is an epic American life: daughter of poor Polish immigrants living in New Jersey becomes the first self-made woman billionaire. Her various early careers — model, stockbroker, caterer — plus her marriage to Alan Stewart, a lawyer-publisher (divorced, they have one daughter, Alexis) all helped her to create the Martha media monolith.
Later she shows me around her 150,000 sq ft empire, a vast Wonka-ish factory peopled with neat, pert young women. Stewart comes alive as she fingers fabric swatches, chats to photographers, carpenters building furniture, cookery writers testing cookie recipes in industrial kitchens. Her staff seem relaxed, but some flush pink or gulp with relief after she sweeps off. I doubt this is someone who sacks staff by billet-doux.
In the cake department, ceiling-high cupboards contain sprinkles in every hue, silver balls in every size. Stacked high above us are towering confections preserved in Cellophane. An intense discussion is under way about icing piped in the style of basket-work. “Make me this one!” Stewart tells the cake editor, pointing to a 19th-century etching of a sugar cornucopia. And it strikes me that Stewart doesn’t care whether readers actually cook these cakes. They are culinary cathedrals to admire for their awesome beauty: “In chicken breeding they use the term ‘standards of perfection’,” she says, “and that is a very good way to put what we do.”
I’d been advised not to dwell on her time in Alderson minimum security prison, nick-named Camp Cupcake by the US media, where Martha taught yoga to inmates, devised recipes such as salad of dandelion leaves picked in the grounds (which, inevitably, she later published) and decorated the prison Christmas tree. But actually she seems happy to discuss jail. She thinks often about the inmates. Stewart’s best prison friend, a magazine publisher, was recently released: Stewart longs to help her but, since she is forbidden to contact other felons, can only do so through friends.
“I’ve also heard that the prison is much worse than when I was there because of budget cuts,” she says. “I was in a cute little cottage and we had a little dormitory room. But now everyone is in these two giant pens. No privacy. The food is much much worse. No exercise. It’s horrible. All this happened just after I left. I couldn’t have gone at a better time!” She roars with laughter: “Oh, Gahd!” Prison might seem a ghastly punishment for a woman who has eliminated everything ugly and second-rate from her life, a world-class control freak who allows only black animals on her farm to tone with her grey-stained buildings.
Yet since she is a doer, not much given to angst or introspection, she thrived. “You could mope around and be miserable and depressed. Or you get through the time and you try to help the other people who need it more than you do. And then you get on and think. I had a great time thinking what else we could do when I got back here. I wrote infinite numbers of notes to myself. I kept a diary.”
I wonder if prison wasn’t a respite from being Martha Stewart, human brand? “Sometimes I wish I could go back!” she says with a throaty, masculine laugh. “I read so many books. I got hundreds sent to me! Sometimes I threaten I’ll go back there!” She left Alderson wearing a poncho knitted by an inmate friend and returned to her 153-acre Bedford estate with an electronic tag strapped to her leg. Her home confinement meant that she was allowed beyond her front porch only 48 hours a week and forbidden to conduct business, restrictions that irked her sorely.
She threw a dinner party to celebrate her liberation: “A friend who owns a very famous old goldsmith brought over these 17th-century scissors and we were going to try to use them to cut it off. But they wouldn’t work. So we had to use a pair of metal shears.”
Yet she will never accept the guilty verdict. She was acquitted of selling shares in the ImClone drug company, of which her close friend Sam Waksal was CEO, a day before bad news was announced about its new cancer drug. Her conviction was for lying to investigators that she had an agreement with her broker to dump this stock if it fell below $60. Selling the shares made her $229,500, a piffling amount for a billionaire, but many think she was unlucky that her case came amid the Enron farrago and a national mood that corporate greed must be punished. Besides, she was a woman, and America doesn’t like its tough broads to get too uppity (see Hillary Clinton).
And throughout the trial, Stewart refused to look humbled or cowed, brashly toting her $20,000 vintage Birkin handbag to court. “It is the only pocket book I had at the time,” she says, unbelievably. “But I have never worn it since. It has been retired to the closet. I look at it and I don’t even like it any more. My daughter says it is the ugliest bag she ever saw.” She may auction it for the right cause.
But now her redemption is under way. The Apprentice, she says, showed her company as an “admirable place to work”. She turned her prison notes into a bestselling business book, The Martha Rules, the TV networks and advertisers returned, and the Macy’s deal, plus another to build a Wisteria Lane-esque housing estate, caused her stock to rise. MSO is almost back to where it was before her fall.
Although maybe there are signs that she wants her corporation to be less vulnerable to the viscissitudes of her own celebrity and reputation. The launch of Blueprint this month, a lifestyle magazine for 25 to 45-year-olds, bears little Martha branding. Yet this remains a uniquely personal corporation. Mid-conversation, she stops to admire the June issue of Martha Stewart Living, a cover shot of an exquisite bouquet of summer flowers. “These are my roses,” she says dreamily. “I can’t be so terrible if I can grow roses like that.”
The second episode of The Apprentice: Martha Stewart is on Discovery Home & Health tonight at 10pm. The first episode is repeated at 9pm
