Being Martha

In my quest to fully understand who Martha Stewart is, I was drawn to her hometown of Nutley, New Jersey. I took Martha’s sister Laura, who had not been back there in fifteen years, as my guide. Driving through town in May 2005, Laura was amazed at how the town had changed and how it has stayed the same.

“There’s the pond we used to skate on during cold winters,” said Laura as we wound our way through the streets lined with elm and oak trees. “And there’s the high school where we all graduated—the library is in the back. That’s where Martha used to hang out. And there is our house! Number 86. Look, my father’s wisteria is in full bloom! You see the big walkway up to the front door? We used to sit on the steps in the summertime eating ice cream and watermelon. And look—my mother’s laundry line is still in the backyard. Glad to see it’s being put to good use.” Laura took a deep breath. “I can still smell all those tomato plants and see the red fruit hanging from green stems. It was quite a sight.”

Laura can see the influence of their growing-up years in all her siblings, especially Martha. Laura says:

My father was never quick to compliment; he was much better at criticizing. When I was a senior in high school, I took public speaking and debate and did very well in both. My teacher asked me to speak to the parents at back-to-school night and tell them about the trips we were taking in high school—we did some fun things like going into the city to St. John the Divine and walking up in the domes. I told the parents all about the places we had visited. I was looking around at them and everybody was beaming and my mother was sitting there smiling, and I looked at my father and he was sitting there as rigid as could be with this stern look on his face and I thought, Oh my God!

Afterward everybody said what a nice speech I gave and thank you so much. In the car on the way home my father said, “Laura, when you speak in public it would be wonderful if you could lower your voice into your chest.” I remember the feeling of devastation. Why couldn’t he have said something nice? I’m so careful with my own kids.

So that’s the way it was. Much as she tried, my mother wasn’t able to make up for it. One of her favorite expressions when I was growing up was, “Well, you shouldn’t feel that way.”

Every Sunday morning in Nutley the Kostyra family had a ritual. First, they would pile into the family car and go to the Polish Catholic church around the corner, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and pray. The kids dressed in their finest clothes—shirt and tie for the boys, dresses for the girls. There were six kids and each was separated by three years from the next. The oldest was Eric, then came Martha, Frank, Kathy, and George. Laura was the youngest.

Waiting for them on the open carport was Dad’s other car, the company car—a majestic and intimidating 1950 steel-gray Chevy Bel Air. Ed Kostyra was a salesman for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, and every two years his company would give Ed a new car. He liked to keep it looking sharp. Among the chores assigned to the kids each week, washing Dad’s car was perhaps the toughest. He held high standards and was not an easy critic with any task you did, even if you were just a kid.

Martha and her brothers and sisters would scrub and rinse and shine the outside of the car until they could see their reflections when they peered at their faces on the trunk. While Mom was in the kitchen making cabbage-filled pierogis for lunch, the children would carefully wash down the car’s interior, wiping away the sticky fingerprints from the dashboard and windows.

So the kids would go at it again as he watched and pointed out the water lines illuminated by the noonday sun. There was nothing like perfection. George told me:

It was inbred in us. Both my parents were into clean. My father was brutal about it. My father wanted us to be better than anyone in the neighborhood. We had to have the nicest yard, the nicest house, the nicest garden. The lawn had to be mowed in a certain way in a special pattern like Wimbledon, up and down, up and down. The gardens had to be tilled every spring in a special way, and the edging and weeding had to be done, and it was expected that we would all learn how to do it.

In our house growing up, if there was anything on the floor—if you walked on the floor and you heard any grit—you’d grab the broom and sweep. That came from my mother. My mother would hear the crunching and she would go in the other room, grab the broom, and push it all aside. It would be all in one corner till the end of the day and then it would get swept up.

I have the clean trait in me even today. So does Martha. She’s a clean freak. She likes things very, very spotless.

Laura remembers their parents encouraging all of them to be handy around the house. “My parents never prevented us from being around kitchen utilities. Carpentry tools were playthings. I actually built a bed from scratch for my Barbie doll using wood, a saw, a hammer, and nails found in our toolshed. I had a Barbie, but we didn’t have the money for all that came with it. All of us knew how to use our dad’s tools.”

If the kids showed up at the breakfast table wearing a shirt or pair of pants with a missing button, an uneven hem, or an unraveling bit of thread, Mrs. Kostyra would send them back to their rooms to change and would make a mental note to mend the unsuitable garment that night after the kids were asleep.

Martha shared a bedroom with her younger sister Kathy in their three-bedroom home on Elm Place. The two slept on a double bed and divvied up one closet, one chair, and one chest of drawers between them. “Martha had the habit of grabbing the hem of her nightgown and dusting the top of her dresser with it,” recalls Mrs. Kostyra with a laugh. “She tried to teach this to one of her girlfriends but when the girl tried it at home, her mother yelled at her!”

The house was decorated simply. “My mother was not a sophisticated decorator,” says Laura. “The furniture was arranged all on the perimeter. Although the furniture changed over the years, for better or worse, there was always a sofa and about three upholstered chairs. We had a broken-down upright player piano for a while, which was replaced with a small grand. My mother sewed heavy drapes, which were taken down in the springtime, making the room barren all summer long, especially since the walls and ceiling were painted white. Martha got her decorating skills elsewhere!”

“My parents taught us independence,” says George. “If you wanted to paint your room you could. Any color you wanted—to a point. And we were taught the correct way to paint the room. First you’ve got to fix the cracks in the plaster—gouge it out, put the spackle in, and fill it in.”

Once the color was picked, the painting had to be done “the right way.” Mr. Kostyra instructed the kids on how to hold the brush and how to paint the corners exactly one-quarter inch out. That was his way and that was the right way and that’s the way it had to be done, he’d say. And if you messed it up you’d have to go back and fix it. If you got paint on the glass, forget it! You were supposed to trim that window with masking tape.

“If you wanted to go and play, you had to finish the project first, so we learned how to do it the right way,” says George. “If you didn’t do it right, it would be hanging over your head. The old man would say, ‘You didn’t do it the right way.’ I got very fast at everything I did. It was instilled in me, in all of us. It always had to be perfect.”

George says, “We were brought up in an environment where you didn’t curse, you didn’t kiss, and you washed your hands a lot. When we were growing up there was a lot of finger-pointing. It was always, ‘Who did this?’ The finger would be there and I would say, ‘Not me!’ It would just be down the pecking order. We called this ‘Ed-itis.’ How do you get rid of that? We grew up in it and it’s prevalent in our family. Martha’s got it—we all have it to some extent. To turn it around, to learn the in-between, is very difficult, and to exercise it is even harder. So it’s either smiling or ripping the heck out of you.”

Mrs. Kostyra cooked hearty and savory dishes like sauerbraten, tongue, and galumpkies (stuffed cabbage), and she encouraged Martha and her sisters to learn to cook. “Martha was constantly baking various kinds of bread, experimenting with different ingredients, always asking the family to sample this or that,” she says.

They grew roses behind the house on part of a two-level garden. On the top level, beside the roses, Ed planted vegetables: tomatoes, zucchini, beans, onions, and whatever else caught his fancy when it was the right time to plant. On the lower level were trees: fig and apple, from which Martha’s mom would make preserves and jam after stewing the fruit in a big copper pot on the stove all day, with the kids stealing tastes of the sweet concoctions using the stirring spoon. Mr. Kostyra protected the fig trees in the winter by bending their supple branches over and burying the tree in the mulch.

“Oh, he was always in competition with the neighbor next door to see who could grow the longest string beans and the biggest tomatoes,” says Martha Senior. “He planted something like ninety tomato plants every year. Like we needed them!” Whatever they didn’t eat they’d jar or give away to the neighbors.

The Kostyra parents instilled in the kids a healthy competition, says George. When they became old enough to sew, each of the girls would lay out their dress patterns in different rooms of the house and crank up the sewing machine. They’d get out the scissors and pins and do their handiwork in private. “My mother would run between all of them helping them do the buttons,” says George.

Then there was the final unveiling of the frocks and the friendly couture contest. The reward was that everybody had a new dress and they’d go to church and wear it. “This is what Martha has instilled in her business, a sort of friendly competition. It came from our family,” George says.

Games were big in the house. Sometimes the games lasted hours. The Scrabble board was always about. Martha’s dad was so into Scrabble competition that “if Eddie didn’t have anyone to play with, he played against himself,” says Mrs. Kostyra. When Martha’s aunt and grandmother came to visit, Martha’s father would get out the cards and they would all play pinochle.

Despite the competition and hard work, Martha’s mother says the family got along well. She bristles at the books that depict her husband, who passed away in 1979, badly. Ed Kostyra certainly was tough. He loved his kids the way a commander loves his troops and demanded a lot from them. He may have had a hard time expressing his love for them, but he did feel it, Mrs. Kostyra says.

“These people didn’t know my husband,” she asserts, shaking her head. “He was a good man. I was married to him for forty-two years and I never saw my husband drunk. One writer accuses him of being a drunk, of being a bully. Well, he was a bully like Martha. They are both just strong-willed. My husband was first of all very bright and well read. He was eloquent. Maybe he didn’t have patience with certain things, but he was not unreasonable. He was musical—he played violin by ear.”

Outside the Kostyra home, the sidewalks were consistently marked up with yellow and pink chalk for hopscotch. Martha and her friends jumped rope and rode bikes up and down the street, while under shade trees in the front lawn the boys played games of marbles. “Martha had lots of girlfriends, many of whom she has kept in touch with through the years,” says Mrs. Kostyra.

In the winter, the kids would go sledding on side streets and skate on the pond in Kingsland Park. In the spring, one of Martha’s favorite family outings was the annual Cherry Blossom Festival in Branch Brook Park, next door to Nutley. All the families in the neighborhood went with their kids and took pictures. While the other kids horsed around in the playgrounds and played horseshoes, Martha furthered her education in nature and spent the afternoons comparing the dozens of varied cherry trees.

In the summer the Kostyra family often visited good friends who had a bungalow in Babylon, New York, on Long Island. They would pack picnic lunches and go clamming on the seashore. “We’d stand in the shallow water and dig down with our toes in the sand looking for clams,” says Martha Senior. “The kids just loved it! They all loved the seashore.”

All the Kostyra kids grew up on Rutt’s hot dogs. Rutt’s Hut is a hot dog stand in Clifton, New Jersey, but it is more than that—they sell beer, famous chili, cheese fries, and onion rings. When Martha was a child, it was a hangout. It wasn’t unusual for many families to plan an outing over at Rutt’s. From the outside, the building looks somewhat like a log cabin. Inside it has big beams and door frames of dark wood that look as if they had been crudely shaped with a hand tool.

Martha’s mother told me, “One time we took my mother-in-law, who lived down the street, to Rutt’s for a hot dog and a bowl of chili. We were sitting in the car and Ed took the bowls and walked them back in to the restaurant, and I started the car. I got halfway down the road when his mother said, ‘You forgot Eddie! You left Eddie behind!’ I said, ‘Oh my God, I forgot all about him.’ It was so funny. Here he was trotting along the road behind us.”

As a teenager, Martha never seemed to go through a rebellious or awkward phase. She was beautiful, but that wasn’t really something the family focused on at all. Hard work was valued in the household, not good looks. Mrs. Kostyra recalls:

Martha never rebelled. She was too busy to think about rebelling. She was very studious. She spent a lot of time at the library, so much so that I think they were going to name a room after her. She read a lot, did her homework, was on the committees, worked on the prom—she was an all-around student who tried to excel. She was always on the honor roll and we never needed to encourage her to study. Eric and Martha—I didn’t have to pay too much attention to them because they just took care of themselves. They knew what to do. They were self-motivated. And if she wasn’t concentrating on school, she was busy making money babysitting.

Martha was so busy with school that she didn’t have too many dates. I don’t think she intimidated boys—we had a football breakfast at the house once, and there was always mention of this boy or that boy—but I think maybe she put romance on the back burner.

Whether Martha took much note of the boys or not, they took notice of her. She was pretty, but she didn’t fuss over her looks. She wasn’t the type to put curlers in her hair or anything, says her mother, but she had an eye for fashion. After she had finished reading the Sunday Times, Martha would flip through the pages of Glamour magazine.

“She liked to look nice in a dress. In those days you wore dresses,” says her mother. “Martha went to a high school ball with a date and he pushed her to enter the prom competition. She was going to Nutley while he was attending Xavier in Manhattan, and she became Queen of the Ball at Xavier High School. We made her a pretty blue taffeta dress. I wish you could have seen her.”

In her senior year Martha worked on the yearbook committee, on the book that bore her now notorious quote “I do what I please, and I do it with ease.” Martha participated in extracurricular activities—handball, basketball, the drama club, and swimming—“but not with any great degree of seriousness,” says her mother.

Even then, Martha’s flair for sprucing up a dull room was evident when she took charge of decorating the gym for the school prom. She wasn’t going out with anybody, says her mother, but Martha went with a local boy as her date anyway, and she basked in her transformation of the sweaty gym into a wonder-land of balloons, crepe paper, and painted signs.

In her last year of high school, Martha also began to do a bit of modeling for local stores like Bonwit Teller. Mrs. Kostyra remembers:

There was a girl across the street who was a model, and Martha and Dad and I thought that Martha had possibilities to pursue a modeling career to get money for college. I don’t know how she got the address of this agency, but she found out soon enough that she had to go directly to an agency and not to any old modeling or photography studio that may advertise, because they’re out just to make money.

So she went to an agency in New York. She was sent to have her picture taken and she was sent on go-sees, and that’s how she got into modeling. She did lots of jobs. I have a whole portfolio of pictures of her as a model.

She landed a spot on the Groucho Marx show. She was supposed to be smoking, but she never smoked; she just faked it. It might have been Tareyton cigarettes. Every time they showed the ad, Martha made money. So she did okay with that.

When Martha did modeling jobs during the summers while living at home, her mother always waited up for her. One night she waited until well past midnight and began to worry. When Martha finally showed up at home, she explained that she’d been so tired that she fell asleep on the bus. The driver went to the end of his route, turned around to head back to Manhattan, and dropped Martha off on the corner near home.

When the time came for college, Martha had been such a good student that New York University offered her a full scholarship. Mrs. Kostyra remembers meeting with the Nutley High School principal: “Martha had been accepted to Barnard, and her principal advised us that Barnard would be the better school for her.” Scholarship or no scholarship, that was the school Martha would attend. “Well, she had to work,” her mother said in her matter-of-fact tone.

Even though that arrangement ended after only one year, it was in that apartment on Fifth Avenue that Martha became acquainted with Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking , a book that changed her life. She pored over the recipes and learned her first lessons in French haute cuisine—the right cuts of meat for braising, the secret of the herb bouquet, the value of sautéing the garnish of onions and mushrooms separately.

“Maybe she was too young; I don’t know,” says her mother. “But Martha always seemed so mature, and you hesitated to give her any advice because she thought she knew it all. She fell like a ton of bricks. He had a lot of exposure; he was worldly, his father was a stockbroker, and his mother taught Martha a lot about antiques. Everybody loved him. He was someone who could fit right in. I remember one weekend during the early courtship when I was making yeast dough for a babka cake, and he just washed his hands and jumped right in and mixed it. He liked to fit in and please. You had the feeling that he related to you, and he did. No airs.”

Martha and Andy connected so well partly because they were both smart and disciplined. Says Martha Senior: “Andy was attracted to her intelligence and the fact that she wasn’t afraid of hard work, for one thing. And Martha liked it that Andy was romantic. I don’t know if he had a girlfriend before her or not. We didn’t have any objection even though Andy was Jewish. His mother was a Christian Scientist and his father was Jewish but not observant. They were very nice people and they accepted us too even though we were different. They also accepted Martha and regarded her highly. Too bad it didn’t work out. Everything was there to make it work.”

George remembers:

When Martha brought Andy home to meet the family in New Jersey, it was a rather interesting situation. Andy wore denim coveralls. He was a preppie, but he liked to work the fields, use his hands, do things, mow lawns. It was a great fit, because that’s the way we were. We were the same as everybody else on the street—working families—but somehow my father thought we had an aristocratic background, even though our great-grandparents were probably farmers in Poland.

Martha was doing some sort of project at Barnard and she and my father went to the library together and did a family tree all the way back to the fourteenth century. They came back home with a picture of a coat of arms traced back to the Isle of Kos off the Greek coast. They somehow devised a pattern of immigration into the heartland of Europe, into Poland. My father said our ancestors were horse people who rode for the king. They created this mythology for our family background, and I think Martha really believed it.

I remember Andy asking my father for my sister’s hand in marriage. We were all huddled in the kitchen with our ears to the door wondering what was going on. And then that whole thing with the diamond ring—it’s been reported that the first one wasn’t large enough and he had to go back to Harry Winston and get a larger one. But really all Martha wanted was a setting more befitting her hand.

Despite her dad’s concerns, “Andy fit right in, he was really so nice,” says Martha’s mother. “We would have the eggs blessed at Easter time and we’d wish each other good luck and good health and he was right there like the member of the family that he was. Martha was rather young compared to today’s brides, but I always had the feeling that she knew what she was doing.”