Oppenheimer construes this purloined memo or mission statement as sinister, of a piece with the Guyana Kool-Aid massacre (“From its wording, some wondered whether Martha’s world was more gentrified Jonestown than happy homemaker”), but in fact it remains an unexceptionable, and quite accurate, assessment of what makes the enterprise go. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia L.L.C. connects on a level that transcends the absurdly labor-intensive and in many cases prohibitively expensive table settings and decorating touches (the “poinsettia wreath made entirely of ribbon” featured on one December show would require of even a diligent maker, Martha herself allowed, “a couple of hours” and, “if you use the very best ribbon, two or three hundred dollars”) over which its chairman toils six mornings a week on CBS. Nor is the connection about her recipes, which are the recipes of Sunbelt Junior League cookbooks (Grapefruit Mimosas, Apple Cheddar Turnovers, and Southwestern Style S’Mores are a few from the most recent issue of Martha Stewart Entertaining), reflecting American middle-class home cooking as it has existed pretty much through the postwar years. There is in a Martha Stewart recipe none of, say, Elizabeth David’s transforming logic and assurance, none of Julia Child’s mastery of technique.
What there is instead is “Martha,” full focus, establishing “personal communication” with the viewer or reader, showing, telling, leading, teaching, “loving it” when the simplest possible shaken-in-a-jar vinaigrette emulsifies right there onscreen. She presents herself not as an authority but as the friend who has “figured it out,” the enterprising if occasionally manic neighbor who will waste no opportunity to share an educational footnote. “True,” or “Ceylon,” cinnamon, the reader of Martha Stewart Living will learn, “originally came from the island now called Sri Lanka,” and “by the time of the Roman Empire . . . was valued at fifteen times its weight in silver.” In a television segment about how to serve champagne, Martha will advise her viewers that the largest champagne bottle, the Balthazar, was named after the king of Babylon, “555 to 539 B.C.” While explaining how to decorate the house for the holidays around the theme “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” Martha will slip in this doubtful but nonetheless useful gloss, a way for the decorator to perceive herself as doing something more significant than painting pressed-paper eggs with two or three coats of white semi-gloss acrylic paint, followed by another two or three coats of yellow-tinted acrylic varnish, and finishing the result with ribbon and beads: “With the egg so clearly associated with new life, it is not surprising that the six geese a-laying represented the six days of Creation in the carol.”
The message Martha is actually sending, the reason large numbers of American women count watching her a comforting and obscurely inspirational experience, seems not very well understood. There has been a flurry of academic work done on the cultural meaning of her success (in the summer of 1998, the New York Times reported that “about two dozen scholars across the United States and Canada” were producing such studies as “A Look at Linen Closets: Liminality, Structure and Anti-Structure in Martha Stewart Living” and locating “the fear of transgression” in the magazine’s “recurrent images of fences, hedges and garden walls”), but 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. 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. To her critics, she seems to represent a fraud to be exposed, a wrong to be righted. “She’s a shark,” one declares in Salon. “However much she’s got, Martha wants more. And she wants it her way and in her world, not in the balls-out boys’ club realms of real estate or technology, but in the delicate land of doily hearts and wedding cakes.”
“I can’t believe people don’t see the irony in the fact that this ‘ultimate homemaker’ has made a multi-million dollar empire out of baking cookies and selling bed sheets,” a posting reads in Salon’s “ongoing discussion” of Martha. “I read an interview in Wired where she said she gets home at 11pm most days, which means she’s obviously too busy to be the perfect mom/wife/homemaker—a role which many women feel like they have to live up to because of the image MS projects.” Another reader cuts to the chase: “Wasn’t there some buzz a while back about Martha stealing her daughter’s BF?” The answer: “I thought that was Erica Kane. You know, when she stole Kendra’s BF. I think you’re getting them confused. Actually, why would any man want to date MS? She is so frigid looking that my television actually gets cold when she’s on.” “The trouble is that Stewart is about as genuine as Hollywood,” a writer in The Scotsman charges. “Hers may seem to be a nostalgic siren call for a return to Fifties-style homemaking with an updated elegance, but is she in fact sending out a fraudulent message—putting pressure on American women to achieve impossible perfection in yet another sphere, one in which, unlike ordinary women, Stewart herself has legions of helpers?”
This entire notion of “the perfect mom/wife/homemaker,” of the “nostalgic siren call for a return to Fifties-style homemaking,” is a considerable misunderstanding of what Martha Stewart actually transmits, the promise she makes her readers and viewers, which is that know-how in the house will translate to can-do outside it. What she offers, and what more strictly professional shelter and food magazines and shows do not, is the promise of transferred manna, transferred luck. She projects a level of taste that transforms the often pointlessly ornamented details of what she is actually doing. The possibility of moving out of the perfected house and into the headier ether of executive action, of doing as Martha does, is clearly presented: “Now I, as a single human being, have six personal fax numbers, fourteen personal phone numbers, seven car-phone numbers, and two cell-phone numbers,” as she told readers of Martha Stewart Living. On October 19th, the evening of her triumphant I.P.O., she explained, on “The Charlie Rose Show,” the genesis of the enterprise. “I was serving a desire—not only mine, but every homemaker’s desire, to elevate that job of homemaker,” she said. “It was floundering, I think. And we all wanted to escape it, to get out of the house, get that high-paying job and pay somebody else to do everything that we didn’t think was really worthy of our attention. And all of a sudden I realized: it was terribly worthy of our attention.”
Think about this. Here was a woman who had elevated “that job of homemaker” to a level where even her G.M.C. Suburban came equipped with a Sony MZ-B3 Minidisc Recorder for dictation and a Sony ICD-50 Recorder for short messages and a Watchman FDL-PT22 TV set, plus phones, plus PowerBook. Here was a woman whose idea of how to dress for “that job of homemaker” involved Jil Sander. “Jil’s responded to the needs of people like me,” she is quoted as having said on “The UNOFFICIAL Site!” “I’m busy; I travel a lot; I want to look great in a picture.” Here was a woman who had that very October morning been driven down to the big board to dispense brioches and fresh-squeezed orange juice from a striped tent while Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Merrill Lynch and Bear, Stearns and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette and Banc of America Securities increased the value of her personal stock in the company she personally invented to $614 million. This does not play into any “nostalgic siren call” for a return to the kind of “homemaking” that seized America during those postwar years when the conversion of industry to peacetime production mandated the creation of a market for Kelvinators, yet Martha was the first to share the moment with her readers.
“The mood was festive, the business community receptive, and the stock began trading with the new symbol MSO,” she confided in her “Letter from Martha” in the December Martha Stewart Living, and there between the lines was the promise from the mission statement: It is easy to do. Martha has already “figured it out.” She will personally take us by the hand and show us how to do it. What she will show us how to do, it turns out, is a little more invigorating than your average poinsettia-wreath project: “The process was extremely interesting, from deciding exactly what the company was (an ‘integrated multimedia company’ with promising internet capabilities) to creating a complicated and lengthy prospectus that was vetted and revetted (only to be vetted again by the Securities and Exchange Commission) to selling the company with a road show that took us to more than twenty cities in fourteen days (as far off as Europe).” This is getting out of the house with a vengeance, and on your own terms, the secret dream of any woman who has ever made a success of a PTA cake sale. “You could bottle that chili sauce,” neighbors say to home cooks all over America. “You could make a fortune on those date bars.” You could bottle it, you could sell it, you can survive when all else fails: I myself believed for most of my adult life that I could support myself and my family, in the catastrophic absence of all other income sources, by catering.
The “cultural meaning” of Martha Stewart’s success, in other words, lies deep in the success itself, which is why even her troubles and strivings are part of the message, not detrimental but integral to the brand. She has branded herself not as Superwoman but as Everywoman, a distinction that seems to remain unclear to her critics. Martha herself gets it, and talks about herself in print as if catching up her oldest friend. “I sacrificed family, husband,” she said in a 1996 Fortune conversation with Charlotte Beers, the former C.E.O. of Ogilvy & Mather and a member of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s board of directors, and Darla Moore, the president of Richard Rainwater’s investment firm and the inventor of “debtor in possession” financing for companies in bankruptcy. The tone of this conversation was odd, considerably more confessional than the average dialogue among senior executives who know they are being taped by Fortune. “Not my choice,” Martha confided about her divorce. “His choice. Now, I’m so happy that it happened. It took a long time for me to realize that it freed me to do more things. I don’t think I would have accomplished what I have if I had stayed married. No way. And it allowed me to make friends that I know I never would have had.”
Martha’s readers understand her divorce, both its pain and its upside. They saw her through it, just as they saw her through her dealings with the S.E.C., her twenty-city road show, her triumph on Wall Street. This relationship between Martha and her readers is a good deal more complicated than the many parodies of and jokes about it would allow. “While fans don’t grow on fruit trees (well, some do), they can be found all over America: in malls, and Kmarts, in tract houses and trailer parks, in raised ranches, Tudor condos and Winnebagos,” the parody Martha is made to say in HarperCollins’ “Martha Stuart’s Better Than You at Entertaining.” “Wherever there are women dissatisfied with how they live, with who they are and who they are not, that is where you’ll find potential fans of mine.” These parodies are themselves interesting: 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.
Something here is perceived as threatening, and a glance at “The UNOFFICIAL Site!,” the subliminal focus of which is somewhere other than on homemaking skills, suggests what it is. What makes Martha “a good role model in many ways,” one contributor writes, is that “she’s a strong woman who’s in charge, and she has indeed changed the way our country, if not the world, views what used to be called ‘women’s work.’ ” From an eleven-year-old: “Being successful is important in life. . . . It is fun to say ‘When I become Martha Stewart I’m going to have all the things Martha has.’ ” Even a contributor who admits to an “essentially anti-Martha persona” admires her “intelligence” and “drive,” the way in which this “supreme chef, baker, gardener, decorator, artist, and entrepreneur” showed what it took “to get where she is, where most men aren’t and can’t. . . . She owns her own corporation in her own name, her own magazine, her own show.”
A keen interest in and admiration for business acumen pervades the site. “I know people are threatened by Martha and Time Warner Inc. is going to blow a very ‘good thing’ if they let Martha and her empire walk in the near future,” a contributor to “The UNOFFICIAL Site!” wrote at the time Stewart was trying to buy herself out of Time Warner. “I support Martha in everything she does and I would bet if a man wanted to attach his name to all he did . . . this wouldn’t be a question.” Their own words tell the story these readers and viewers take from Martha: Martha is in charge, Martha is where most men aren’t and can’t, Martha has her own magazine, Martha has her own show, Martha not only has her own corporation but has it in her own name.
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 I.P.O. This is the “woman’s pluck” story, the dust-bowl story, the burying-your-child-on-the-trail story, the I-will-never-go-hungry-again story, the Mildred Pierce story, the story about how the sheer nerve of even professionally unskilled women can prevail, show the men; the story that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men. 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. ♦
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