10
Back Home
It just seemed like the natural thing to do.
—ALEXIS STEWART
Betty Alderson was among the small crowd of town residents who gathered on the tarmac shortly after two A.M. on March 4, 2005, at Greenbrier Valley Airport, seventeen miles from the prison, to say good-bye to Martha. As Martha and Lexi boarded the private company jet together, one resident waved a sign that said, WE’LL MISS YOU MARTHA! GOOD LUCK! COME BACK AND VISIT US! Betty and others waved. Martha, decked out in a poncho a fellow inmate had crocheted for her out of the gray yarn from the prison commissary, waved back.
A few hours later she was back at her new home in Bedford, New York, frustrating the paparazzi camped out at her front gate as she drove in behind tinted car windows. The cameras could not get a clear shot of her, which was just as well, because she was not picture-ready just yet. Martha already had a Friday night date planned that would prepare her for the cameras—Eva Scrivo was coming over to do her highlights.
As Eva mixed the highlighting solutions and got her scissors ready to give Martha the full beauty treatment in the kitchen, Lexi made her famous risotto for Martha’s first home-cooked meal after months of prison food. Eva says:
We had dinner with close friends while she had her highlighting liquid on and it was funny because we were working with hardly any light. The house was behind in renovation and construction. So we had actually taken a lamp and removed the shade—anything for light. It’s so funny that people get nervous around Martha like she’s this perfectionist and expects the best, because we’ve been in the funniest of circumstances.
One time we filmed a commercial in a cotton field in Texas. It was when cotton sheets were first introduced to Kmart. It was something like a hundred degrees. They had taken a bed and put it in the middle of a cotton field. I was dreading the job because of the heat—that is not an environment for great hair and makeup. We shot for about sixteen hours, and Martha remained flawless out there. She’s that resilient.
In the months while Martha was in prison, Alexis and Laura’s husband, Randy, were in charge of preparing Martha’s Bedford home for her arrival. Martha wasn’t there while the work went on, of course, so that was frustrating for her. But she had seen pictures of the floor in the main building. Alexis and Randy were furious when they found out that she was using a friend to go to the house and photograph the work in progress for her. But Martha is Martha and details are her obsession. In one of Martha’s many letters to her mother, she wrote, “Mother—are all the doorknobs polished and nice and shiny?”
During my visit to the prison, Martha had been unable to contain her excitement when she talked about her new home in Bedford. She urged me to take my family for a visit. She spoke of the concrete slabs in the horse stable that had been textured to look like wood. “It took me three years to find the woman who could do the process,” Martha told me. “She uses large handheld metal forms and presses the design into the wet cement.”
Now that she was home, she saw there was much more work to be done before it met with her approval. Her first morning home, in the clear light of day, Martha strolled through the house and inspected it, making a list of work that still needed to be completed—a scratch was on this wall, this paint finish wasn’t quite right, this molding needed to be replaced, and on and on. Now that she was under house arrest, she was going to be spending far more time than usual at home and would be even keener on the details.
Some family came over the next night for dinner. Martha cooked. On Sunday, Martha threw her first official postprison party.
“It was a very small gathering of close friends and family,” says Lisa Wagner, who took her three sons. “It was quite a day, just to see her in the new house.” Martha had laid out a buffet and rustic baskets full of thick bread on the two-inch-thick white marble countertop in her kitchen. Next to the white flat soup bowls and plates, she adorned the table with glass vases filled with white calla lilies, tight-budded irises, and white tulips. On the windowsills she had placed white pots of fragrant pink and lavender hyacinths.
“The kids thought it was great that Martha offered Coke in those small old-fashioned glass bottles,” says Lisa. Coca-Cola was a drink Martha had learned to appreciate at Alderson. “It was just like old times. Martha showed everyone around the property. She was so overjoyed to see everyone.”
After a good night’s sleep, Martha was gracious to the press gang outside and mixed them up batches of lemonade and hot cocoa.
“I think that going through the experience that she had gone through allowed her to get in touch with herself and how she really feels inside.” says Eva. “Martha is very outgoing, and when she came home I think she just acted true to herself. She was engaging with the press. She realized that the best thing to do is just be who you are, so she was generous and friendly with all the newsmen and women. She had a very healthy attitude about everything.”
Martha accepted the fact that the press—and the world—were going to be curious about how and what she was doing, how she looked, and what her next big step was going to be.
Martha was back and soon everything was like before—a frenzy. For those who thought she’d sit back and take a rest and be a different kind of Martha—a quieter, meeker, softer kind of Martha—forget it. “When she comes back, watch out,” Laura had told me just before her release. “Martha has two years of her life to make up for.”
She wanted that house finished, and fast. So she pushed the construction workers, who were behind schedule, to complet the job in the same way she always pushed her workers. After months working with the big boss out of town, this was their first time getting the full Martha treatment. Long hours and hard work were the order of the day both inside and outside the house.
Martha managed to create an oasis. As soon as the greenhouse out back was finished, Martha filled it with exotic fruit trees and plants.
Besides housework, there was other business to tend to. Martha held a press conference at her Omnimedia headquarters, praising her more than six hundred employees. She got to work on her two new television shows, various book deals, and wrapping up her new baking cookbook that Lisa and others had worked on in her absence. Martha busied herself with business meetings at home, dinner parties, and other gatherings.
One day she had her mother over to lunch when she was entertaining ninety-year-old David Rockefeller as one of her guests. “He was such a nice man,” said Mrs. Kostyra afterward. “It’s so good to have her back. Martha was saying that the ankle bracelet was cutting into her ankle and hurting her. Of course, she doesn’t like any restrictions. Down in Virginia, she had to stay put but she was able to move around. Here, even though she was in her own element, she couldn’t move around. She didn’t have the freedom. That was part of the punishment, you know. What could you do? You had to accept it.”
Martha had some mishaps with the ankle bracelet from the beginning. Her parole officer had forgotten to tell her that they needed a separate telephone line for transmitting signals from the ankle bracelet, so Randy had to do some fast maneuvering to prepare for the day they hooked it on her leg.
Knowing Martha, I knew the ankle bracelet would prove to be almost more of a prison to her than the previous five months. She simply couldn’t stand the bracelet.
Alexis told me that the bracelet was all about power, the trial was about power, putting her away was about power—and most of all, not letting her work was all about power. “She couldn’t work as much as she wanted,” said Alexis. “They could come and bust her and she would be in violation of her probation.”
Martha could leave the house for only forty-eight hours a week to go to work and also to work in her garden. She put the hours to the best use she could.
I had known of Martha’s meeting with the reality TV producer Mark Burnett long before the announcement of the big new TV shows. He had been up at Martha’s home in Maine for a weekend visit before she even left for prison. It was information I had to keep to myself.
I also had heard about the Sirius Satellite deal way in advance. When Howard Stern was signed way back when, I said to myself, satellite radio won’t get serious until they sign Martha, and sure enough my premonition came true.
Martha and Lexi ran themselves ragged in the eight-week shoot for The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, which debuted on September 21, 2005.
“How did your mother convince you to do it?” I asked Lexi. “You never liked to be in the spotlight.”
Lexi shrugged. “It just seemed like the natural thing to do. We had a lot of fun together. We shot one scene where there was an exchange between me and my mother and I made a sort of sarcastic remark to my mom. One of the contestants blurted out, ‘I’ll bet that wasn’t in the script!’”
I made a remark about someone else who had a famous person as a parent and how it was difficult for that person at times. “Tell me about it!” Alexis said, and we both laughed. During our e-mails throughout the shoot, Lexi wrote that one beauty routine that became indispensable after a long day on the set was her at-home massages—or as she put it, “my two-hour torture massages.”
“Overall, the Apprentice experience was all right,” Lexi added. “I just hated the waiting-around part.”
Though she worked herself to the bone, Martha reveled in being back to work. “The contestants were in awe of Martha,” Eva told me. “They wanted to do anything to please her. Everyone was bowled over by her charisma.
“I think by the third day on the set Martha was in the swing of things. She had it down. Everyone was playing off each other and it was magic. Alexis brought in the young point of view and also the dynamic between Martha and herself. It was fun.”
When she was not working, Martha was busy making up for lost time with her daughter and enjoying her gardens and her prized horses. Lexi says:
The other day she put me on a horse and wanted me to take a ride. The horse took off in a gallop and it threw me off. I asked her, “What’s the name of that horse?” My mother said, “Dirt,” and I said, “Dirt! You put me on a horse named Dirt?”
During the trial I saw a friend on the street who hadn’t seen me in a couple of years. He had seen me on TV and commented on how much closer my mother and I seemed to be. I said, “What are you talking about?”
My mother and I have always been close. We are not closer since the trial and prison--we’ve always been close. I talk to my mother at least once a day, every day. I was going to be there for her and I was happy to do it. She would be there for me if the situation were reversed, but it doesn’t mean we are any closer than before. When would we have time to sit with each other five days a week and do nothing except be tortured?
Sometimes we fight, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we hang out together and other times we don’t. Big deal. It was certainly a time for me to be with my mother. It would have been incomprehensible if I hadn’t been there for her.
Martha jumped right into planning and getting ready for her other show, Martha, a daily show shot before a live audience. One day I viewed the promos. One clip showed Martha being knocked over by a cow—I remember that incident from an Easter egg hunt shoot she did at Turkey Hill a decade ago—and I knew she was going to have another hit on her hands.
Lisa, who oversees content on the show, says:
Everyone is so excited. We are working to do something very different, and it just feels right. We have our core viewers, but a huge part of what we’re doing is to reach out to more new viewers. There are a lot of people who now know about Martha but they don’t really know much about her—or they didn’t watch the old show.
She’s back in a role that feels a lot less perfect and a lot funnier. It’s a how-to show, but with more entertainment. People who know Martha well know that she has a good sense of humor—we’ve all seen it over the years. The new show is relatable to many more people.
Just like old times, Martha Senior made an early appearance on Martha. Mrs. Kostyra told me in July 2005 during one of our get-togethers, “I have no idea what I’m going to do. All I know is I’m to have my hair done and my nails done and my clothes done. They’re picking me up, so I don’t have to worry about driving and parking. I’m willing to do it. Martha is working so hard on it. She said to me, ‘Oh mother, it’s so much work.’ But we haven’t had time to talk about it. She’s always busy doing something.”
The mood on the set is upbeat, says Lisa. Martha has fun as they shoot. “I have to say I’m really glad to be back here working for her. It’s in a different office. We’re in the city now. We’ve built a new studio, the largest live TV studio ever built! A new chapter is being written. You can feel that the company is working to regain its strength and momentum. Everything feels like it makes perfect sense. The time that I wasn’t there I always knew I’d be back—it was just a hiatus. Martha has a lot of confidence in her key people and having them around her. That is really important to her. It’s really important that the show still delivers valuable content and that’s never going to change. That is always going to be the most important thing to Martha, and her readers and viewers expect quality.”
A few weeks after she got out of prison, Martha gave her former assistant, Judy Morris, a call to check in and rally the troops back together. She didn’t sound quite like the boss of old. Judy explains:
The phone rang, and it was Martha. She said, “How are you doing? I just wanted to check in. We’ll stay in touch. Everything is going to be okay. And we’re all going to be back together again.”
She wanted to see what I was up to, what I wanted to do to be a part of the company, and where I was with the new baby and the family. I told her my concerns about my being in Weston—it’s a longer commute. I have these two kids and I was a bit worried. As much as I would love to work for her every single day and be a part of the whole excitement of the new show, I felt like it was way too much for me to do with the family. I told her that I was interested in something part time, though.
Martha was very understanding and very open to it and said, “We’ll work something out. Don’t worry about it.”
She called back and invited us over to her house for Easter Sunday in Bedford—my husband, the two kids, and me. I hadn’t seen her in a year and it was like I just saw her yesterday. Immediately she gave me a big hug and a kiss and she grabbed Eddie, my baby, and walked around with him. She took a bunch of us on a tour through the greenhouse. She was so proud of it and showed us all the different plants and fruit trees.
Our three-year-old son, Jimmy, was skipping along with her in the greenhouse. She picked a kumquat and gave it to him as well as a little Meyer lemon to suck on. He kept sticking all these exotic fruits in his pocket.
As we were driving away, we looked back. Martha and Lexi went off on a walk out into this beautiful field, on a gorgeous afternoon. It was just so amazing to see her and her daughter together. Lexi has stood by her mother with all that she had to go through. Lexi had to be so strong, and she was there for her.
Lexi is amazed at how much her mother is lapping up her postprison attention and doesn’t mind one bit that the media and the neighbors are just a few feet away from her living space.
“When I went to Bedford for the first time, I told her to knock it all down and start over, but no, she couldn’t do that,” Lexi said one day. “And now she lives in a house twenty feet from the road!”
“What’s she going to do now, raise the stone wall?” I asked.
“No, it’s against town regulations.”
“Oh, God—you don’t want her to get in trouble with the town like the old days!”
“No, and besides, she enjoys being famous. She likes the attention she’s been getting.”
I don’t believe the women Martha met in prison will ever leave her mind and heart. When she left prison, she wrote this on her Web site:
Someday, I hope to have the chance to talk more about all that has happened, the extraordinary people I have met here and all that I have learned. I can tell you now that I feel very fortunate to have had a family that nurtured me, the advantage of an excellent education, and the opportunity to pursue the American dream. You can be sure that I will never forget the friends that I met here, all that they have done to help me over these five months, their children, and the stories they have told me.
There is disagreement among family and friends as to whether Martha has “changed” since prison.
In July 2005, Sophie Herbert visited her aunt in Bedford to have some quality time with her for the first time since she had gotten out of prison. Sophie herself had been on a sort of year-long spiritual quest, spending months traveling in India and going on retreat, trying to make sense of the past year and what her aunt went through.
Maybe Martha had changed a bit in jail—if so, Sophie would be someone who could really see it—but jail was the furthest thing from both their minds when Sophie arrived for her visit. She had hitched a ride with some friends, and when they dropped her off, Martha invited everyone in for a gourmet dinner cooked by her Le Cirque chef. After dinner, she gave them all a tour of the grounds.
When the guests left, Martha and Sophie settled into the couch and put on a DVD of The Merchant of Venice. Next to Martha were her dogs and the crocheted rats and possums made in prison.
“It was so funny,” Sophie told me. “Martha fell asleep in her chair with her black French bulldog, Francesca, the one that sleeps in her bed with her. And during the movie, they both fell asleep and the bulldog was snoring away.”
Martha was finally home, and it was a Good Thing.
