6
Doing Everything
There was nothing else on television that looked like that.
—LISA WAGNER
Martha Stewart has been branded a lot of nasty names—most of all the overused b-word. One day when she was doing a television appearance, one of her hairstylists, Kelly, was wearing a novelty T-shirt. Kelly rushed up to Martha to give her hair a quick spritz as the cameras began to roll. Martha looked at Kelly’s T-shirt and burst out laughing. She stopped the cameras and called over a photographer, then insisted that Kelly pose with her in a photo for her Web site. Martha put her arm around Kelly, and, as the photographer snapped away, she proudly displayed Kelly’s T-shirt, on the front of which, in big, bold letters, were the words I WANT TO BE MARTHA STEWART BECAUSE THE BITCH CAN DO EVERYTHING.
“It was such a great thing,” says John Hanson, who worked for Martha. “Every now and then we would bring in these parody books like Martha Stewart’s Better Than You Are at Entertaining, Is Martha Stewart Living? and Martha Stewart’s Excruciatingly Perfect Weddings, and she loved all that stuff, because to her it was the sincerest form of flattery. She loved the Saturday Night Live parodies as well. She didn’t take it seriously.”
Nasty names didn’t bother Martha one bit. Her successes were swirling about her, so what did she care? She had other worries—namely, her husband. After his grand prediction about their future success together, both Martha and Lexi were blind-sided by Andy Stewart’s decision to leave his wife in 1987 and pursue a relationship with one of Martha’s assistants, Robyn.
“Many think she let her work interfere too much with her marriage,” says Martha’s mother. Her brother George has other explanations:
Martha used to have migraines. I remember her saying, “I can’t believe it. I’ve had this headache for four weeks.” It was incessant. Physically, she was climbing the walls. I think that was one of the reasons Andy was driven away. She was just in constant excruciating pain.
Then there’s the fine line between love and hate and all the things that happen in a relationship. One minute you wake up and you kiss someone good morning and in the next moment you’re screaming at them or they’re screaming at you. Things are coming at you from all sides from many fronts. You go literally insane.
I think Martha has probably been there and back many, many times, but look at the stakes she’s got. They’re bigger than anything we’ll ever see, that’s for sure.
One thing all friends and family will attest to is that even though Martha has never been one to put her heart on her sleeve—she didn’t speak of Andy at all after he left—it was obvious she was in pain.
“It was very tough on her when Andy left,” says Necy Fernandez, “very tough. She was very surprised, and she loved him, I know that. I was the one person who was always around them. The only time I saw Martha crying was when he left her. He was very sad, too. Andy was the type of man who needs time for himself and most of the time Martha kept him so busy.”
Sarah Gross also saw the deep sadness in Martha. She had left Martha’s employment the day Andy made his fateful big-as-McDonald’s speech but had since patched things up with Martha. She started her own catering business, and had been hired by Martha to do some catering.
Sarah was excited to be back at Turkey Hill. “I took a walk around the gardens,” she says, “and everything looked really different to me. I had had this magical picture of what it was like back when I was eighteen, nineteen years old. But now it felt so different. The garden felt overgrown—it just felt kind of mangled. It was a surreal experience to go back years later, after not being there at all. I said to Martha how different everything looked, and she looked at me and said, ‘Well, Sarah, that’s the evolution of a garden.’”
Martha walked back into the house, and Sarah stood still for a few moments before getting back into her van. “I drove away and started crying,” says Sarah. “I saw this inner sadness and emptiness in Martha. The outside was looking great—she had created this experience around her—but on the inside there seemed to be a void.”
Some friends take a tougher view of Martha’s tears. “Sure, Martha was surprised when Andy left,” says one friend. “Martha lost something. She doesn’t like to lose anything. And she lost big-time. But I think the divorce was the real catalyst that pushed Martha and Lexi together. I think they both needed each other terribly.”
Meanwhile, Andy took an apartment in Manhattan in the West Village, a few blocks from Omar Honeyman. “It was a cute, tiny apartment,” says Omar, who bumped into Andy soon after Andy moved in. “I asked how Lexi was. He said, ‘I don’t know; we don’t talk much.’”
It didn’t take long for Martha to approach the divorce with businesslike briskness—at least on the outside. Corey Tippin remembers:
She’d walk through the kitchen, holding papers in her hands having to do with Andy and their separation, the divorce papers, saying, “Corey, look at this! Look what he wants from me now!” I was supersensitive about it because I had just broken up with my partner after a long relationship. I was a wreck and I felt like I was literally going crazy. I was going around moaning, “How long am I going to be in pain? I’m losing my mind. What am I going to do?”
Martha was going through her pain, too, but she came up to me and stuck her finger on my chest and said, “Five years, Corey, five years, it’s going to take you five years to get over this.”
I said, “Thank you. Thank you for putting a time limit on it, I can deal with that.” When she said five years, everything was suddenly better. I had been in therapy for a while, but it took Martha to say that for me to snap out of it.
As always, Martha moved on. Friends and family, though, would sometimes see the sadness she carried around about losing her first love.
Eva Scrivo, who was brought in as Martha’s hip young hairstylist and makeup artist, remembers a moment only a few years ago in the kitchen at Turkey Hill when Martha was rummaging through papers. She came across some old letters. “Martha saves everything, everything is precious to her—mementos and pictures,” says Eva. “She pulled out a letter her husband had written to her when they were first married. She read me the letter out loud and I could see the tears in her eyes. I felt so much the love that she had once had for somebody.”
Whatever heartbreak Martha endured, she poured the energy into her work. When her magazine,
Martha Stewart Living, debuted in 1991, Martha was back to herself—sharp minded and sharp witted. John explains:
She was all about having fun with what we were doing. We had such a good time. I remember once at Thanksgiving time, I was doing a mirror and the frame was made out of pecans. I got a fifty-pound bag of nuts and I came up in the elevator with the bag. Martha got on the elevator and looked at me and said, “What are you doing with all of these nuts?” I told her I was making a mirror and she said, “Well, why did you have to go buy nuts? We have plenty of nuts working here.”
Her mind was very quick, and either she liked your idea or she didn’t. It saved a lot of time, and Martha was always short on time. Her comments weren’t just black or white; she would suggest modifications. But most of the time she loved everything we did, which was really great. Martha would have meetings with us and they were always extremely productive. She would ask us countless questions and was thorough in every respect. If she scolded us, she wasn’t trying to humiliate us or trying to make us cower. She assumed we were as strong as she was and that we could take it. She just wanted to get our attention, and that she did.
She was approachable, too. Talking to Martha wasn’t like talking to a movie star—it was more like talking to your aunt or talking to a friend. But it was also talking to someone who had done all of the projects herself at one time or another, and who knew exactly what it entailed. Martha was always questioning things—she was always challenging us to come up with new and better ideas. It kept me on top of my game.
She was funny too. I’d be sitting there eating M&M’s and she’d walk up and hold her hand out. I thought Martha was very cool. She was always there to guide and cheer us on. She even insisted on eating lunch with us. Having lunch together was important to her.
The caterers who provided lunch for the staff would try to outdo themselves each day, serving succulent prime rib one day and sirloin steaks in heavy French sauces made of butter, cream, and egg yolks the next. I think they were bringing out all this rich food because they were trying to impress her because this was a person you wanted to try to impress.
After a few months of high-calorie feasts, Martha pulled aside one of her staff and said, “You know, you’ve got to tell them to stop this. Just because I am Martha Stewart doesn’t mean I want to die of high cholesterol!”
Not long after, Martha had a gym installed. It was open for everyone to use—and she wanted us to use it. She wanted all of us to be fit and healthy. What she preached in the magazine she conveyed to us and followed in her own life.
With her magazine, Martha wanted to take everything she knew and everything she learned and spread it to as many people as she could. She feels it is her mission in life to make the world a more beautiful place.
“Everyone always asks me, ‘What’s it like to have Martha as a sister? Did you know she’d be famous?” says her brother George. “The expectation that she would actually be famous never really approached my conscious level of thinking. I always thought she’ll be what she will be and if she gets famous, great. But the quest to perfection can lead to insanity—I drive myself crazy trying to make things be a certain way. It eats at you, and if you’ve got fifty things going on all at once that all have to be perfect, you can go over the edge really easily.”
George would listen in on the frenzied powwows Martha would have in her kitchen with the magazine editorial team as they discussed new ideas for feature stories. “Someone brought up a topic. Martha said, ‘Oh, I know, if you go up to 84th Street to this little store and talk to Jacob, and tell him what you want—but don’t let him show you anything in the front, make him take you to the back room and you’ll find some really nice stuff that will go with some other stuff that you’ll find down in the East Village in another little shop—and put all of that stuff together with some stuff from my basement and we’ll get a really great article!’ I listened in and thought, Huh? In New York City there was this tiny room in the back of a little store where Martha could go and grab things—who could remember all that stuff? But she could categorize everything in her mind, from shop to shop, from article to article.”
When Martha’s TV show Martha Stewart Living debuted in 1993, it was a whole new forum for her to create perfection. The show was shot on Martha’s own turf—her house at Turkey Hill.
One of her former assistants, Lisa Wagner, remembers early on in the show when the crew attempted to bring camera cables and other equipment across the yard. “Martha started yelling, ‘They are walking all over the moss!’ We had to build a platform. And in the house, it was always, ‘Take your shoes off!’ ”
I remember from the days when my wife, Leslie, worked in TV commercials that it was a known fact that the camera crew will often trash your house within seconds of their arrival.
In the afternoons, Martha’s dogs would run through the kitchen and all over the set. Invariably, right in the middle of a shoot, they’d need to eat. “Oops, the dogs have to be fed!” Martha would say, and someone would peel a boiled egg and crumble it into the dog food bowl so they’d quiet down.
John remembers when a friend of his was hired to faux-paint the kitchen floor of Martha’s TV studio to resemble her wood-grained floor at Turkey Hill. When the work was done, Martha inspected the job. “She said, as only she could, ‘Oh, this doesn’t look exactly like the other floor,’ and my friend happily redid the whole thing because she knew that if it had Martha’s seal of approval it really meant something. This particular level of craftsmanship, and the drive needed to execute it, is hard for most people to understand.”
Eva explains Martha’s sensitivity to her surroundings: “Martha is like an artist—she creates beautiful things, she fixes things, and she knows how to create a beautiful world. How can you not have sensitivity? She’s hypersensitive; she is so aware of everything going on. She feels things very deeply.”
On her first day at Martha’s, Eva not only took off her shoes, she wiped her feet on a towel. They got to work in Martha’s pristine bathroom when they heard what sounded like a bulldozer in the front yard. Martha glanced out the window to see a procession of trucks barreling onto her beautifully raked stone driveway.
“Martha looked at me sweetly and said, ‘Excuse me, dearie,’ and then opened the window and poked her head out and yelled, ‘Get the hell off my driveway!’ ” Eva recalls with a laugh. “Everybody looked up, and I thought to myself, God, she is right. These trucks are ruining all of this beautiful stonework! She closed the window and said, ‘Okay, back to work.’ It was so funny. It really broke the ice because I saw her be a real person.”
Eva still works for Martha after a decade of traveling around the world with her. Eva thinks that Martha is the ultimate trouper. Her favorite example is a TV shoot they did on Hogg’s Island, a small island off the coast of San Francisco. For the show, Martha wanted to do a segment about the local fishermen who harvest oysters using big vats. They were to show the audience how to catch oysters, shuck them, and cook them on the barbecue.
The day of the shoot was beautiful—dazzling skies and crisp, cool air. As the crew set up the cameras on shore, Martha donned a pair of waterproof hip boots and hopped on board with the men to go oyster hunting. Eva recalls, “When she came back, her hair was really matted and there was dirt and sand all over her face, but she looked beautiful. She walked toward me and stepped on a wire that was separated from what it was plugged into. Unbeknownst to us, she had half an inch of water in her boots and she was shocked. The shock threw her back five feet and she fell on her back. We all rushed to her and picked her up, and she said, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, don’t worry.’”
They started shooting immediately after. About five minutes into it Martha started scratching her foot. She kept reaching down to scratch and finally took her boot off. “We all saw what looked like a large red hole in her foot. And she said, ‘Oh my God, is there an insect around here? Something bit me. Is this a snake bite?’”
Martha insisted on finishing the segment because the sun was about to set, and if they stopped it would have ruined a hundred-thousand-dollar shoot day. An hour later, the crew rushed her to the hospital, where a doctor examined her foot and told her that the red hole was actually an exit wound: a bolt of electricity had gone up the left side of her body, bypassed her heart, and left via the right side of her body through her right foot.
“Now if this wasn’t a test of strength,” says Eva, “of how strong this woman is and what a professional she is!”
But the day wasn’t over yet. They had one more shoot to do before sundown. Their next pit stop was a nearby bakery that made the best cinnamon rolls in town. “Martha showed up on crutches and she couldn’t put any weight on the right side of her body,” says Eva. “When she was about to film, she asked me to take the crutches away and she did the entire segment standing on one leg.”
More than being a trouper, Martha, Eva believes, is a champion of the entrepreneur in the way she has helped other women get ahead. Two weeks before President Bill Clinton moved out of the White House for the new administration to move in, Martha and Eva attended a party in the grand hallway. As Martha chatted with Hillary Clinton, she pulled Eva into the conversation. Eva says, “She told Hillary, ‘I want you to meet Eva. She is the best hair and makeup artist. You have to have her do your hair. She has a great salon in New York and you must go there.’ Meanwhile there were thirty people all standing around holding their hands looking at these two ladies, never daring to interrupt, waiting for them to get done. It was so funny; I was so embarrassed I just wanted to hide. She was trying to get Hillary Clinton as my client!”
The day Evelyn Lauder came to Turkey Hill to be interviewed on Martha’s show, Martha made sure Eva would be at the house. “She said, ‘She is really big, Evelyn Lauder. We have to talk to her about you doing her hair and makeup, and then I’ll introduce you. It was like she was plotting with me!”
Eva attributes her success to Martha. “It’s all because of Martha. I know Martha was put into my life for a reason. I came from very humble beginnings—my parents probably would have been thrilled if I made really good money waitressing and married a really nice guy—they would have thought I had done really well in my life. Meeting Martha woke me up, and I realized, oh my God, life can be this way, I can have so many things. She raised the bar for me and made me think big.”
Corey ended up coming back to work for Martha—(as many have over the years). He says working on the TV show was great fun, especially when Martha was in one of her mischievous moods.
Remember when the Miracle Bra came out? Victoria’s Secret was doing an advertising blitz and the bra was getting an extraordinary amount of press. One day around that time we were shooting in the Easter Field, a piece of land adjacent to Martha’s Turkey Hill property that has two splendid areas of cutting flowers.
Martha was waiting for the shot to be set up. I remember she was in a particularly good mood that morning. The production crew had a huge piece of equipment in the field, a platform lift that could ascend and descend three stories allowing for fantastic camera angles and an incredible view of Long Island Sound. The guys who operated the lift were taking me up and down, goofing around, and I was getting dizzier and dizzier.
Martha was sitting below in her folding chair talking on her cell phone, which at that time was brand-new technology. When I finally got down from the height of the lift, I couldn’t stop babbling about the superpowers of the Miracle Bra, but to the wrong audience—the female producer on the set. I went on and on how the bra didn’t just lift, separate, and enhance, but it could transform mousy librarians into femmes fatales. The producer went stone-faced.
Martha overheard my banter and became my willing accomplice. She announced to the whole crew that she herself was wearing a Miracle Bra and then asked the producer if she was wearing one, too. She continued asking other people, then she suggested that maybe she could get Victoria’s Secret to sponsor the show because yes, indeed, the bra did what it advertised—it had completely changed her life!
Corey remembers watching footage one day of Martha attempting to record sound bites for her show. It is sure to be used someday on some TV bloopers special. “Martha was saying; ‘This is Martha Stewart for WKPZ in Des Moines. Be sure to watch Martha Stewart Living at six A.M. today. Six A.M.! Damn it! Bleep! Bleep! Who the bleep is going to bleeping watch at six A.M.?’ Then a voice said, ‘Cut!’ and she would have to say these sound bites over and over again, cursing in between. It was so funny and a little bizarre at the same time.”
With both the magazine and her TV show to contend with—and the business aspects of her huge licensing deal with Kmart—the work schedule was grueling, even for Martha, who thrived on long hours.
The TV producers would try to get all the cooking segments out of the way first because they were the most difficult. Then they’d tackle crafts and “good things” and smaller projects. Some days, Martha would have to go on location and visit stores in Manhattan or an incredible garden in some other country. They all tried to keep sane at the insane pace with a dose of humor, says John. “I remember one time a plumber was fixing Martha’s shower,” he recalls. “She had a full working bathroom, because after she would finish on the set she wanted to shower off all the heavy makeup; also the lights were incredibly warm. The plumber left his tools all over the floor, and it was a bit of a mess. He went out to the truck to get a part or something. Martha went into the bathroom and came out roaring at the top of her lungs, ‘Who made this mess?’ I stood there, speechless. I didn’t know what to do. Then she just burst out laughing when she saw that she had scared me to death.”
Martha and Lexi share an off-kilter sense of humor that is sometimes misunderstood by people who don’t know them.
“Martha is human,” John says. “She had times when things were super-stressful. She was running three different companies: Martha by Mail, Martha Stewart Everyday for Kmart, and Martha Stewart Living. The dogs were outside fighting with each other, and she was inside trying to hold it together. Her mother was there talking away about something, and the secretary was saying, ‘You have a phone call on line six,’ and all six lines were blinking. It was a lot for any one person to handle, man or woman. Martha was always doing fifteen things at once and doing them perfectly.”
“If she wasn’t feeling attractive that day, or if she was unhappy, things always got misdirected at the people closest to her,” says Eva, “because in a family, that’s what happens. But with Martha, there was quick recovery time. She would say, ‘Oh, it’s not you . . . I’m just feeling x, y, and z today.’ She would always make it up to you.”
The unspoken rule on set was that you had to stay away from Martha toward the end of a shoot day—if you had something to ask her, do it in the morning. As one former colleague says, if you approached late in the day, “it was almost guaranteed she was going to throw a fit.”
“Humor was our only survival technique,” says the colleague. “We’d all be running around doing our stuff and the studio monitor would be on and you’d be thinking, oh my gosh, she’s going off again. It was like a soap opera. We would all get together and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry about it. The laughter was like a weird defense mechanism.”
Another former colleague puts it like this: “Martha can be either completely wonderful and charming or the biggest bitch in the entire world—you either get one or the other.”
“We cared—we tried to protect her from herself so many times,” one employee told me. “It’s like being in the Oval Office with the president of the United States going off on a temper tantrum and threatening to blow up the world. You’re just there to support her and put out fires. Martha puts so much pressure on herself and she doesn’t have to. But that’s her.”
Lexi doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about when she hears people complaining that her mother micromanages:
So what if it’s true? How are you going to start a business like that and not be controlling? She should walk into the office and say, “Do whatever you want, I don’t care”? Yeah, that would make a good magazine or TV show. You know what, “Here’s some toys, go play with them and we’ll take pictures.”
Find me another human being who runs a large company who isn’t controlling. How could she not be? She’d be an idiot if she weren’t. She wouldn’t be who she is and this all wouldn’t matter. I also find it quite sexist.
No one was ever chained down and made to stay. The press never goes to the people who have been with her for twenty years and asks them what it’s like to work with her. Those are the people who stuck it out, had something to offer, and helped her build a great brand.
Martha’s intentions were good. Her attempts to make the show perfect were for her fans. She didn’t want to talk down to her viewers, and she didn’t want to show them something that wasn’t done right; that wasn’t done the way
she herself would do it. Lisa observes:
People would say to her, “Martha, it’s television, you can’t see if the berries are slightly overripe or the knife is not sharp; no one will know it’s not a perfectly ripe apricot.” But she would know. It drove the TV people crazy. The other thing that drove them crazy was that whatever she was doing had to be completed. In television, you try to be as efficient as possible.
You didn’t need to roll out all the rest of those tart shells! We saw it, we know how to do it, someone else can do it later. No—she wanted the tart shells all rolled out perfectly so they would all be done. What she made had to be delicious, even though the TV audience couldn’t tell if it tasted good. TV producers would come in to the set from the outside and say, “Are you nuts! She rolls out two and we go on to the next step!”
It was funny, because you just knew that all Martha wanted was that finished tart shell for some lunch tomorrow. Why waste it? “I am having so and so for dinner tomorrow, and I want this for that, so we’re finishing it. No, we can’t move on to the next set.”
It was tough to get her to short-cut anything. We had directors come in and say, “You can’t spend this amount of time taping something; it’s going to be cut down to five minutes anyway. You have to short-cut it,” but she felt like she was cheating the audience if she did. She’d say, “I’m not dumbing it down.” Martha had such respect for her audience. She was going to give them what they wanted and she was going to show them every step.
Sometimes she was way too sophisticated. We balanced that with things that were simple, but then occasionally we’d have to show them how to make supercomplicated puff pastries and it would take half a day.
The end result was a gorgeous thing. There was nothing else on television that looked like that, that had that amount of care and time and money put into it. It was just beautiful, such a luxury. But it was also very tough. We would put it up and take it down; the show was in her house and things broke and it was difficult.
When we became a daily show, it was a huge undertaking, and then we had to do an hour because the stations needed to fill that block. That was a huge challenge, and we struggled to retain every bit of quality. No one wanted to give up, especially Martha.
Martha kept up her hectic pace by day, and at night attempted to wind down. John says, “She told me that at three in the morning she would get solace from ironing her linen or damask dinner napkins while watching TV. That was her peace. When she was especially exhausted, once in a while she’d be caught taking an unintentional catnap during a meeting with Kmart executives.”
Well, didn’t she deserve a nap?
