Being Martha

“Martha walked into the huge crowd at the dinner,” Lisa Wagner recalls. “The crowd stood up and gave her a standing ovation. It was unbelievable.” After the awards, hundreds of fans who had gathered to catch a glimpse of celebrity went wild when they saw Martha. Lisa says, “They were crowding the sidewalks—women of every kind, cheering for Martha, yelling, ‘We love you! We’re behind you!’ It was so great because even though she didn’t win the award that night, she saw the people. And they loved her.”

Five months later, in October, Martha was preparing to leave for Alderson Federal Prison for Women. She had chosen to get her prison sentence over with sooner rather than later. The day before Martha left, Laura says, “There was no fear or trepidation in her voice. I got the distinct impression that she was just really annoyed that she had to report and waste so many months of her life.”

Meanwhile, the town of Alderson was abuzz with excitement over Martha’s impending arrival. As soon as word got out that Martha was on her way, business boomed. The media had arrived nearly two weeks earlier to set up cameras and camp out, taking over the tiny town’s one motel.

“You could feel that Martha was near,” says Betty Alderson, whose family is the namesake of the town and who owns the Alderson Store, a women’s clothing store. “Whatever it is about Martha and the aura she projected, her energy and her popularity came ahead of her.”

It’s not as though Alderson, which holds the distinction of being the first women’s prison in the United States and whose nickname is Camp Cupcake, hadn’t already seen its share of famous inmates. Billie Holiday spent one year at Alderson for a narcotics violation in 1947, and Manson clan member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme did time there for pointing a loaded pistol at President Gerald Ford. The cottages at Alderson were meant to re-create the feeling of home life; Alderson had been envisioned as a prison that would retrain its inmates rather than punish them.

Betty says, “My daughter called me when she heard Martha was coming to Alderson and said, ‘You’ve got to do T-shirts and sweatshirts, Mom!’” Betty’s daughter knew just what they should say. On the front of the shirt was printed WEST VIRGINIA LIVING, IT’S A GOOD THING. The sweatshirts said LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK, ALDERSON. Betty made an order for four dozen shirts, and within two days of their and Martha’s arrival, they sold out.

Martha’s clothes and valuables were removed and sent back to Turkey Hill. She was handed her new prison garb: a man’s military khaki shirt, a jacket, pants, a plain white T-shirt, and an oversized white cotton T-shirt and men’s thermal underwear to sleep in. She was now prisoner number 55170-054.

Other than being assigned a job in the prison kitchen or becoming an orderly, what was this obsessively overachieving fashion model-turned-stockbroker-turned-homemaker-turned-chief-executive-turned-convict supposed to do for the next five months? It was as if she’d hit a brick wall.

Soon after her first day there, Martha was already one of the popular inmates, and she began to form her own clique. Her first friend was a Catholic nun who was serving almost three years for involvement in a protest at a missile silo. Then she befriended the woman who ran the dining hall, “Mother Queenpin,” who had served twenty-two years of a thirty-year sentence. Then there was her favorite, Susan, who had been at Alderson for twelve years and who became a sort of pet project for Martha.

“She’s very attractive and smart, but completely terrified of human attachments,” Martha wrote in a letter. “She eats alone and gardens alone.” Martha gave Susan one of her own gardening books and Susan began to open up to her. “She read it front to back before talking to me. I also gave her Elliott Coleman’s book on organic gardening.”

Soon the two were sharing meals together. Martha said of Susan, “She’d pick wild greens from around the prison grounds—dandelions, sorrel, wild onions, and garlic—and share her harvest with me, once picking some strange round leaf that I found delightful.” These mixed greens helped supplement the inmates’ nothing-to-write-home-about prison food.

Inquisitive, observant, and calculating, Martha took everything in, asked questions, and listened carefully to her fellow inmates. This might have been the first time she ever had both the time and the desire to listen to girlfriends talking about their problems.

Most of the women were in prison because a friend or relative facing a harsh sentence had snitched on them. This did not sit well with Martha. She began firing off letters to a friend at the Wall Street Journal. She wrote the letters on the prison typewriter and sent them to her assistant, Julia Eisemann, who then transcribed them verbatim to e-mails and sent them to the Journal.

As the holidays approached, Martha and the other inmates decorated the administration building using anything and everything they could find around the 75-acre camp. She and the others fashioned a wreath of spruce measuring almost 40 inches in diameter. They decorated it with freshly fallen pinecones and some red balls that were left over from other decorations—wreaths, swags, and Christmas trees.

Martha gathered the troops together to make a holly wreath for the officer who ran the fix-it shop as well. When the prisoners hung it up in his window, it sagged. Distressed by this malfunction, Martha pointed it out to the officer, who made her a large metal ring to keep the wreath upright. Martha would have made it herself, of course, but the inmates were not permitted near tools, much less allowed to use them.

The wreath garnered admiration among the prison staff, and Martha hoped the crew would get a bonus for their work. The average pay for most was $15 a month for the chores they performed in the prison, including raking leaves, bathroom duty, and laundry detail. Martha was a hit on bathroom duty, and at one point she instructed all the women how to properly clean the floor waxer so the floors would shine better.

To make extra money, some inmates worked as manicurists or hairstylists at the prison. Others had relatives on the outside who would send the $290 monthly allotment allowed each prisoner for use in the commissary to buy sundries such as toothpaste, soap, yarn, shoes, a deck of cards, or cigarettes.

Most did not have those people on the outside, and Martha felt sorry for them. During one phone call with her executive assistant, Julia, she tried to remedy the situation. “Julia, do you think we can arrange for deposits of $290 to go into some inmates’ bank accounts?”

Martha was allowed visitors four out of seven days, and except for the immediate family, the visits were divided into morning or afternoon sessions, four hours from eight to twelve or from twelve to four. In the beginning, her visitors were an inconsistent trickle and she complained about that.

“She’s driving me nuts,” Alexis told me one day after one of her weekend visits to her mother. Alexis made the ten-hour drive from Connecticut each weekend, listening to audiobooks on the way. “She wants to see more people. She’s lonely and bored. I go down and visit her for days at a time and sit and listen to her and eat that crappy food. There is positively nothing to eat in that town. Nothing!”

You’d have to understand Lexi’s wicked sense of humor to know how devoted she was and how she was only joking around when she’d say things like “I refuse to go down next weekend; I need a break,” or “I told my mother I wasn’t coming back down for Thanksgiving.”

It wasn’t long before Martha was fielding visits like any other set of appointments. Eventually, Julia, with her wonderfully precise English accent, instructed each and every person planning to make the trek: “Once you’ve made a date to visit Martha, please try to honor that date so the day will not be vacant and others scrambling to fill it. And it’s best to eat before you visit. There is no real food, no real coffee or tea. Unless you want an excuse to gorge on candy bars—in that case, you’re all set. Take a lot of quarters for the vending machines. Leave anything you can’t take in in the car; there are no lockers. And don’t forget to wear warm clothes. It’s cold in that prison.”

It was a quiet wintry evening when we arrived in that remote Appalachian valley. It snowed lightly as we drove down the mountains. We made our way to the Hospitality House for Alderson, a rustic old home that accommodated visitors with limited means of support—shelter and food were provided at no charge. Nondenominational religious services were available, too. We weren’t spending the night there; we went to pick up a key to the house where we would stay that Betty Alderson lent us.

Sophie Herbert had recently stayed at the Hospitality House during a visit to Martha and she reported to her that it was lacking in Martha-like necessities: quality sheets, blankets, towels, and other comforts. Martha immediately directed Julia to send what was needed to the House. Although the House is still not exactly the Ritz, it is now fully decked out in Martha Everyday from Kmart.

Early the next morning, we passed through various checkpoints and arrived at a 12-by-12-foot freestanding small brick building where we had to line up with other visitors. Once inside the cramped quarters, we each filled out a form and had to list whom we were visiting, that person’s prison number, and the license plate number, make, and model of the car we were driving. The next step was to go to the visitors’ hall and wait until the guard at the desk checked us in.

“Are you staying for count?” the guard asked, referring to four P.M., the time the prisoners were counted. This old tradition dates back to the earliest days at Alderson. Up until very recently, they rang bells to signal the beginning and end of count. There were five counts per day. “If your arrival is too close to one of the counts, you won’t be allowed in until after all inmates are accounted for,” the clerk told us in a tone that let you know he’d given this speech a thousand times. “Once you get inside the prison, you can’t leave,” he warned us. “No going out to your car. If you do, your visit is over.”

The guard was not amused. He took our forms and the clear plastic bags we were given to keep our ID and any other items that were allowed into the prison—prescriptions, cigarettes (new, unopened packs only), lighters, quarters for the vending machines, eyeglasses or sunglasses, and makeup.

On the morning of our visit, one of the guards told us that Martha had awakened early and had volunteered to shovel the snow from the prison sidewalks. “I’d be doing just the same if I were back in Westport!” she told them cheerily and got to work. “It’s good exercise.”

Martha entering the visitors’ room was a sight to behold. In she purposefully strode, with her khaki pants and shirt perfectly pressed. Her khaki overshirt was unbuttoned and worn like a jacket, revealing a white cotton T-shirt underneath. Her hair was impeccably groomed, and she was wearing sunglasses that looked decidedly European.

As she walked in, she motioned to Laura and me to move over to a particular set of chairs. “Grab those. They’re the best seats in the house,” she said. After hugs and kisses, she explained why. First, from the vantage point of that particular table, she had a clear view of the whole room. This was important lest someone sneak a photo of her—the press had been relentless, and the tabloids were offering people in the town $1,000 a pop for any information or photos of Martha. Second, the seat gave her access to the light switches for the room as well as control of the ceiling fan and heating thermostat, to which she made adjustments occasionally as we spoke, scouting the room first to make sure no guard was watching. Then we moved right to the important topic—the drama of prison life.

Martha told us a story about how she’d almost been in a scuffle a few nights before. She had been swept up in an intense Scrabble game with a few others in the recreation hall when she was pelted from behind with a cascade of dominoes. Annoyed, the players turned to see who had interfered with their game. It was a woman sitting in the corner who looked as if she either had taken a shine to Martha or wanted to start a fight with her. Either way, she looked menacing.

“The women looked out for her,” says Eva Scrivo, who also visited Martha in prison. “All the things that make people different—age, social status, wealth, poverty—none of that matters to Martha. Being thrown into this prison environment, she discovered that there were educated women, uneducated women, women who couldn’t raise their children—all kinds.”

As Martha’s colorist for several years, Eva says, “The first thing I did when I got there was look at her hair color. Martha had been doing her own highlights in prison. It wasn’t bad. She looked well rested and vibrant and she was making the best of it. She wanted to know what was up with me. She did not feel sorry for herself at all.”

Martha told us she bonded with many of the inmates by teaching them her own personal Martha Stewart Living health and beauty tips, free of charge. “Your hair will fall out if you keep braiding it,” she had warned one African American friend. “You’ve got to stop.”

Martha skipped lunch while in prison and began teaching evening yoga classes to a dozen regular students. “I think many of the women have been rejuvenated,” Martha said, “ simply having me around.” (When I later told Martha’s mother this, she was amazed. “I had no idea my daughter could teach yoga,” she said.)

And even though the food wasn’t much to write home about, Martha did. In a typewritten note that Julia e-mailed to friends and family, Martha wrote:

For breakfast this weekend there was a rather simple but good meal. Two hard-boiled eggs—they must have read MSL because they were delicious—just a tad soft in the middle and tender whites—whole wheat toast—although I had to look for the very scant amount of wheat in the bread, real butter doled out with a minuscule ice cream scoop, watery coffee, with 2% milk, that actually tasted like coffee and a bright orange clementine. I felt as if I were at Turkey Hill eating one of my own hard-boiled eggs, sliced and laid on buttered toast.

Martha pointed to a new pair of boots on her feet and complained, “These cost me six hundred hours of labor! Sixty-five dollars! I found the Wal-Mart price tag inside one of the shoes. Guess what the price was? Thirty-five dollars! I took the tag back to them and let them know what a rip-off it was.” Even Martha’s bark couldn’t get the prison people to back down on the price. They were, however, rather stylish ankle-high boots, and she wore them untied in a casual manner, with the tongues pulled out and away—the way kids sometimes wear sneakers.

At a certain point during our visit, Martha leaned back in her chair, stretched out her legs, raised them, then let her heels hit the ground, proclaiming, “I think I’ll have an orange juice.” This was our cue to get out our quarters and fetch a refreshment for her from the vending machine. Unfortunately, this was one rule of Julia’s we had not heeded closely enough.

I went to the machines and inserted a dollar in the change machine only to find it was out of change. I then put my dollar into another vending machine and found the orange juice was out of stock, but I managed to get my money returned in quarters, thank God. I was able to get Martha her orange juice from yet another machine in the long row of machines.

Martha and her fellow inmates were allotted 300 minutes of phone time per month, and besides calls with her mother and Lexi, Martha used up her minutes with Julia, her lifeline to the rest of the world. They spoke almost every day so Martha could get constant updates on what was going on at the office.

Every day Julia prepared an express package for overnight delivery to Alderson, which took two days to get there—the town was so remote it required an extra day in transit. Federal Express packages were forbidden; the prison only accepted mail from the United States Postal Service.

Besides money, books of stamps are common currency in jail. It didn’t take long for Martha to learn to use the bartering system to get what she wanted. In exchange for a book of stamps, $2 in yarn, and a bag of fiberfill, Martha commissioned a fellow inmate to crochet Christmas presents for the seven cats waiting for her back home. A few weeks later, the job was done and Martha was presented with seven woolly rats.

Next she worried about what she was going to do for presents for her dogs. Everyone at Alderson was all booked up with holiday needlework, so Martha decided she would make them herself. She had mastered the single and double stitch from her mother, but Martha has always preferred knitting. Nevertheless, she decided to crochet a large gray and pink possum for each dog.

It was while looking for the gray shade that she came across a type of yarn that was new to her. “It was actually more of a cotton string, and when doubled it creates a wonderful texture,” she described. “You wouldn’t believe the color—it was exact Hermès orange, just like the Hermès boxes, and spectacular. I am going to crochet the scarf of all scarves for Kevin, Mr. Hermès himself.”

If only Mr. Hermès could have seen Martha do her stuff in prison, I thought. As the holidays approached, the inmates held a decorating contest with a cash prize of $100 to go to the cottage judged best decorated. The theme was Peace on Earth. Everyone in Martha’s cottage, J11, looked to her for guidance. “They’re all relying on me, so I have to give it a try,” she confided. “And there’s not much to work with around here.”

There was nothing like a little competition to make Martha feel like Martha. She knew how to write the word peace in about a hundred languages. So with approximately $25 worth of glue and glitter, ribbons and construction paper, she decided they’d make white banners, furled at the ends, and would hang them from the ceiling, each one inscribed with peace in a different language.

Martha had even more up her sleeve. Using some of her valuable phone minutes, she rang up Julia and asked her if she’d seen any inspiring holiday decorations about town. Julia told her about the ad for Tiffany she’d seen in the Wall Street Journal with stars made from wreaths of flying birds. That was it, Martha decided; she was going to bring a little Tiffany to Alderson. She asked Julia to send her the advertisement along with instructions on how to fold doves and cranes origami-style.

Not only had the theme been leaked, but the eventual outcome of the contest would later be leaked as well. Newspaper headlines read along the lines of STEWART UNABLE TO LEAD TEAM TO VICTORY. The press found it irresistible to report that a competing cottage won the contest by constructing a nativity scene with snow-covered hills, sleds, and clouds.

For the final hour of our four-hour visit with Martha, we played Scrabble. A four-hour jail visit is a long time, and you run out of things to talk about. There was only so much Laura and I could report from the outside world and only so much Martha could tell us about the inside. So out came the Scrabble board from the shelf in the visitors’ room.

Martha had come armed with her dog-eared Official Scrabble Dictionary so she could challenge us on any words that we put down that looked suspect. Martha has been an avid Scrabble player since childhood. Her father taught her the basics of the game. She told me that she prefers to play with more than one other person because the game is over quicker that way. She kept score with a pencil and notepad. She took the lead from the beginning, getting one bingo (a seven-letter word) and two triple-word scores, and playing a doozy off my dismal x word.

Back in Westport after my prison pilgrimage, I went by the house on Turkey Hill Road to pass along the news of my visit with Martha. Her mother was holding down the fort along with the maid, Lily. They watched over the house, the seven cats, the two dogs, and the innumerable songbirds. Martha had been calling her mother regularly to check in and always asked, “Are you petting the cats and dogs?”

The two chows greeted me as usual in flat-out reclining positions on the floor of the back entryway. The cats were everywhere, many with their crocheted rats that Martha’s friend had made; some of the toys were missing ears and their yarn was unraveling. One of the dogs’ pink-bellied possums was sprawled on the kitchen table.

Martha’s mother had made a visit to her daughter on Thanksgiving Day with Laura; Laura’s husband, Randy; their son, Charlie; and their daughter, Sophie. “It was heartbreaking to me that my grandmother of over ninety had to spend Thanksgiving in prison,” says Sophie. “That was the hardest thing for me.”

Before they even got to see Martha, there had been delays. “I had forgotten my driver’s license for ID at the hotel,” says Laura. “It was a thirty-five-minute drive away. Stupidly, I had left it in my other jacket and they were giving me a hard time about letting me in. I had to prove somehow that I was Martha’s sister. Martha couldn’t understand why they were making her wait so long to come in and see us. We had to wait in the long line. Martha’s little place was the next building over. She could see us and was waving to us—then all of a sudden she stepped back and there were ten other ladies waving to us!”

Though Sophie was at first struck by the reality of being in a prison—“It was a harsh and emotional place,” she says—she was also moved by the experience. “It was nice in a way, having everything taken away, not having the distractions of a big family dinner. It was simple and we were thrown in with a bunch of people we didn’t know in a big room. But it was a real honest place to be. I thought to myself, no one has died, no one is ill, and everyone is learning from this experience.”

When Sophie left the prison that day, she and Charlie heard some heartfelt words from Aunt Martha. “There are people who will die in this prison and won’t ever get a visit from the outside, and that is so sad,” she told her niece and nephew. “I hope you will always have the will to learn, to imagine, and to see.”

When the family left the prison, they were starving. The problem with visiting Alderson on a holiday was that all the vending machines that were normally packed with candy, popcorn, pizza, and other nonholiday fare were empty before noon with all the family visiting going on. Sophie went back to Hospitality House, where she had stayed the night before. “I ended up cooking Thanksgiving dinner with everyone at the house,” she says. “I loved that place. I didn’t tell them who I was, but they figured it out.”

Laura, Randy, and Charlie went looking for a restaurant, but the only place open was the local Wal-Mart. Laura says, “We went to Wal-Mart hoping to find something to eat there. I stood there thinking what a bizarre Thanksgiving this was. Prison in the morning, Wal-Mart in the afternoon—and then somebody tapped my shoulder.” It was Laura’s nephew, Kirk, George’s son, who had also come down to visit Martha with George and the rest of the family. They, too, had come to Wal-Mart looking for something to eat. “It seems that next to the prison, Wal-Mart was the most happening place in Alderson,” Laura says.

Alderson might have said a silent prayer of thanks to Martha for Wal-Mart’s being open that day. Before Martha got there, “the town was a quiet, subdued little town, not a whole lot going on,” says Betty Alderson. She continues:

It’s hard to keep a business going because we don’t have enough traffic. But even before Martha got here, we almost became a bustling little town. So many people came from all over. Many of them thought they could just pop into town and go over and visit her. And if they couldn’t do that, at least they wanted to get as close to her as possible, so they would drive down to the prison gate or cross the river and look across where they could see into the prison. Of course, when all these people were in town they would come and shop at all the stores in Alderson, stay at the motel, and eat in the restaurants, so it was a great boon to Alderson. It put us on the map, and the media was so kind. They portrayed us in a very positive way. We have nice people, and it’s a pretty little town.

Martha’s friends came to town, some of them in a limousine, and that was a big thing for Alderson. We watched for that limo to come into town every day, and then Martha’s friends would come into the store once in a while and they would say, “Martha sent us.”

In honor of Martha, Betty set up a shrine of sorts in her store: a display of Martha’s books stacked on a pretty lace tablecloth surrounded by a tea set of china cups and saucers. “I was overwhelmed with Martha’s generosity and her doing what she did for us,” Betty says. “I became a big Martha fan. We saw a softer side to Martha. We saw why she became the person that she is because she not only worked very hard but she projected a lot of good things.”

After Martha left, the town just wasn’t the same, says Betty. “I felt a big void,” she told me. “I thought, how can we go back to being that slow little town again? But the media still comes in every now and then to ask us how Alderson is after Martha. It is much slower, but we are still feeling the effects of her being here.”

Whether Martha knows it nor not, she left something behind, something that will live on in the tiny town that grew to love the big CEO from New York. “A lady came in and gave me some of Martha’s crocuses,” says Betty with a smile, “so I planted some over at my house and I gave some out to other people to plant at theirs. So now we’ll all have a constant beautiful reminder that Martha was once here.”