Hating Martha

I wrote this essay about Martha Stewart four years ago in a writing class. I had intended to shop it around for publication somewhere, but my daughter was born a month later and I never got around to it. Not knowing much about Ms. Stewart and her empire, but seeing that she made a lot of people angry, I wanted to know more about her. An excerpt:
Feminists probably think of Martha Stewart the way capitalists think of pawnshops – the seedy side of their ideology, unsightly yet unavoidable. She may be a success on her own terms, but that success is compromised by her subject matter. It’s all right to be a rich corporate lawyer, but to become wealthy by telling people how to give parties, well, that’s so very…domestic.

Hating Martha
Eric Johnson
May 2, 2000
In the Bible, Jesus gently rebuked Martha for worrying about cooking instead of listening to his teachings. There is no shortage of people who wish to rebuke our modern-day Martha, Martha Stewart, for her own household perfectionism, yet there is nothing gentle in their voices.
A satirical article in The Washington Post last December refers to Martha as “crazy,” denouncing as “madness” her 20-page article on constructing the gifts of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” That’s a typical potshot – some of America’s most prominent magazines have published similar pieces. There are at least three popular books lampooning her magazine and her many publications.
The World Wide Web, the playground of the id, is a veritable hotbed of Martha-haters. An official Amazon.com review refers to her as “Mothra.” (In fairness, the real Mothra was Godzilla’s enemy, and his only method of decorating a home was to stomp it flat.) The “Martha Stuart on Condom Minimum Living And Decorating” site is exactly what it sounds like, with tasteless how-to instructions for decorating with prophylactics.
Other sites are quite extensive, with dozens of pages and hundreds of “humorous” images. There at two major sites devoted to smearing her, both of which are quite heavy-handed. The authors obviously devoted scores of hours to editing photos, writing text, and creating the pages for the sites. Ironically, one of their constant complaints about their target is that she is “obsessive.” Kinda like people who spend their spare time developing attack Web sites against celebrities who have done them no harm. (None of her detractors responded to interview requests.)
Generally, the would-be parodists are not funny because although they try to use the old reductio ad absurdum technique on Martha, it doesn’t work for a woman who constantly teeters on the edge of absurdity. If you have never been exposed to any emanation from Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Inc., her publicly traded media conglomerate, you are one of the few. Her television show reaches millions of households, and at one point her magazine, Martha Stewart Living, reached a circulation of 1.3 million. Not to mention the radio show and the Web site (www.marthastewart.com), which was so popular it crashed for several days after it launched on Sept. 1.
Even the blue-light-special set knows her from K-Mart advertising circulars, one of the duties she performs for a $5 million annual consulting fee. Howard Stern crowned himself “King of All Media” a few years back, but all he has to his credit is a popular radio show, an unpopular TV show, and a lousy movie. Stewart makes him look like a college deejay.
As her magazine’s title suggests, Martha is in the business of selling “living,” or more precisely, “lifestyle.” Born Martha Kostyra on August 3, 1941, to a New Jersey family, she is yet another story of American re-invention. Though her roots were modest, she escaped New Jersey to New York City, where she put herself through Barnard College with a partial scholarship and modeling jobs on the side. Stewart studied art, European history, and architectural history at Barnard, all of which would come in handy later.
By 1967, she devoted her energies to a new career as a stockbroker. Six years later, having left the field because of an economic downturn, she and her husband, Andrew Stewart, moved to a large Connecticut farmhouse built in 1805. It was in that building that the salable Martha gestated. She learned restoration firsthand, and began running a catering business out of her home. After that, her business expanded, she opened a store and started writing for the New York Times and House Beautiful.
Her first book, Entertaining, catapulted her into stardom. It has all the marks of the author: meticulous detail, haughtiness, and an unerring sense of style. There are few innovations in her books; indeed, one of the keys to her appeal is that she simply re-presents traditional practices that have almost died out.
“I think what a lot of my peers get out of [Martha Stewart] are things that have slipped through the cracks,” said Kerry Ogata, speaking for the children of two-income parents. “We never had anyone who told you how to make napkins, or do laundry, or how to cook.” Ogata created the now-defunct “Unofficial Martha Stewart Site” on the Web before there was an official site, and Stewart’s lawyers once threatened her with a lawsuit if she didn’t remove an image of Martha from her site, oblivious to the free publicity she was generating for Omnimedia.
“It’s kinda like a ‘Beanie Baby’ phenomenon,” says Shari Zerobnick, who took over the “Unofficial” site from Ogata. She explains that once you start to like one thing Martha does, you start liking everything Martha does.
Though she has a reputation for stomping on little people such as employees and fans, she attracts a zealous following. Sarah, an account representative for one of the companies that works on Stewart’s site, reports that everyone at her Manhattan headquarters loves her and dutifully follows her teachings. “It was like a cult,” she says, with no hint of disapproval in her voice. “The office has four test kitchens, and all of them are laid out exactly the same way. Even the containers look exactly the same and are in the same place.”
“She really has a way of putting style back into everyday life,” opines Trystan Bass, whose “Gothic Martha Stewart” site is a creative hybrid of Martha’s meticulousness and dark-hued, post-punk Gothic fashion (www.toreadors.com/martha).
“While she seems like a crazy perfectionist, her magazines and TV shows really do feature simple little ways to make otherwise boring domestic details lovely and appealing,” Bass continues. “Like dishwashing liquid — she keeps it by the sink in an elegant glass bottle with a spout on the top. So much more attractive than the old plastic bottle it comes in. And this isn’t hard for anyone to [prepare] the bottle, and the spout can be bought for a few dollars. A minimal investment for a very eye-pleasing accent.”
Why do so many people hate Martha, when her work is so unassuming? And why is the hatred so burning and visceral? She is a woman educated in actual academic subjects, and has multiple, discernable talents, unlike Kathy Lee Gifford. Her trade is in food and decoration, not weapons of mass destruction. How does one get from glass bottles filled with dishwashing liquid to accusations of mental illness and insinuations about Nazi sympathies?
Stewart’s life, though it began four years prior to the official commencement of the baby boom, is a true yuppie drama. Instead of the eight children her mother had, she had one. Her husband ran off with one of her assistants who was 20 years his junior (to the ecstatic delight of her detractors). Like so many boomers, she harbors nostalgia and contempt for her parents, especially her mother. Take this passage from Martha’s “Remembering” column in the May 2000 Martha Stewart Living:

Mom was always dressed in the morning, her hair was always combed, and her apron was always ironed and fresh. She did don those wraparound housedresses that I dislike, but every mom on the street and every grandmother wore similar dresses. Any such piece of clothing was forever banned from my house – forever! – but just two years ago I bought some dresses in northern India that reminded me of what Mother had worn, and I gave them to a few of my younger friends, whose mothers had never worn them…Even my daughter wore hers, but more as a joke because she had listened to me rant for years about those housedresses.

She never bothers to explain why these dresses inspired her wrath. Like villains in second-rate movies, we are supposed to accept they are bad and ask no further questions. Many people have memories of family members’ slightly irritating habits, but how many of them “rant for years” about them? She moved out of her parents’ home four decades ago. Time to move past the dresses, Martha.
Aside from her personal crotchets, it’s easy to see how people can take Martha’s thoroughness as a sign of mental instability. The current issue of Living also features an article on ganache, a simple, rich concoction of chocolate, cream, and various flavorings. Not counting the glossy ads, which are plentiful throughout the magazine, this article runs to eight pages, including the near-pornographic pictures of truffles and glazes made from the ganache. By contrast, The Joy of Cooking’s ganache recipe takes up one column of a two-column page, and it’s still scrumptious.
On television, Stewart’s main fault is her failure to project niceness. Niceness can shield a celebrity from any criticism, no matter how serious; a lack of niceness opens one up to invective, however unfair. Her vocal inflections are flat, though not quite monotonous. Watching her make food with Bryant Gumbel is like watching two rocks smack against each other. Gumbel must have been ecstatic that after playing the straight man for Willard Scott all those years, he finally can play off of someone more stiff than he is.
The animosity toward Stewart goes even deeper than objections to her style. Whatever her faults, Stewart filled a market niche that no one had identified when she wrote Entertaining in 1982. Her drive and tenacity has transformed her name into a brand name. One would think that feminists would rush to the defense of a tremendously prosperous businesswoman who made it on her own, moving on from divorce to even greater heights of achievement.
Feminists probably think of Martha Stewart the way capitalists think of pawnshops – the seedy side of their ideology, unsightly yet unavoidable. She may be a success on her own terms, but that success is compromised by her subject matter. It’s all right to be a rich corporate lawyer, but to become wealthy by telling people how to give parties, well, that’s so very…domestic.
Martha Stewart’s popularity and notoriety flow from the same cause. Modern women, still trying to find the elusive “balance” between having a career and a wholesome home life, find in her either a kindred spirit or an enemy. That is, she is a provider of good ideas for making life more pleasant and cute. Or else she’s a harpy whose constant presence reminds women that they don’t have time to make homemade bread when they come home at 7:15 p.m., and that Pizza Hut makes more of their family’s meals than they do.