You're Wrong About - Martha Stewart with Sarah Archer

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

This week we’re dishing up a mouthwatering feast of history, gossip, and white collar crime. Guest Sarah Archer tells the tale of Martha Stewart, a girl from New Jersey who achieved world domination by letting us look at her basket collection. Digressions include prairie dresses, condensed soups, and how to tell if your tween is reading Sunset Magazine.Some Notes:K-Mart CommercialEarly Martha Stewart Living TV showMartha on Letterman post-prisonSnoop and Martha, 2008Martha's Princess Peony Announcement Part 1Martha's Princess Peony Announcement Part 2Martha and Snoop lighter adSNL Martha / K-Mart bankruptcy Everything Martha eats in a dayHere's where to find Sarah Archer:WebsiteTwitterSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.sarah-archer.com/https://twitter.com/Sarcherhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI7hGjIwRsY https://youtu.be/6ko8WoHhmTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtZ2SZyJhgAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ocre0kXgvg https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb5uPYlpZK7/https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb5uPYlpZK7/https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb5u2hqpHzW/ https://youtu.be/y8jAtLBF_Lkhttps://youtu.be/Yme4gdvYi3Uhttps://youtu.be/lKh2IkbCbQohttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

And I have an idea for an HGTV show where you think you're house-hunting, but then it surprise couples counseling. Once you've finished painting out your pattern, allow the paint to set and dry. Then check for any imperfections, do a little touch-up if you have to, peel off the tape and enjoy your stencil. I'm Martha Stewart and I'm Kmart's new consultant for entertaining and lifestyle. I'll be helping millions of Kmart customers who tips on just about everything for the home and entertaining.

So come to Kmart. What were you convicted of? I don't know. Hello you. I'm Sarah Marshall and you are listening to You're Wrong About. We are talking today about Martha Stewart, an episode I have been wanting to do since the beginning of this show. And maybe you've been wanting it too.

My guest today is Sarah Archer, author of The Mid-Sanctuary Kitchen, America's favorite room from workspace to dreamscape 1940s to 1970s, which as you can imagine is my favorite book. And you can find more of her writing at sarah-archer.com. This episode is a soup-to-nuts story about Martha Stewart's rise and fall and rise again. And along the way is a meditation on domestic war of housework, how we navigate gender and doing the dishes in America today. I really loved making it.

I hope that the joy I felt at getting to discuss why I was the kind of seventh grader who subscribed to Martha Stewart living is palpable here. We have some hot and ready bonus episodes for you as always at patreon.com slash you're wrong about. And also starting this week, if you want to get that content a different way, you can do that by subscribing to bonus content on Apple podcasts. You can find links for all of the above in our show description. Thank you for listening.

I hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome to You're Wrong About, where we are crafting a new podcast for you every night at the kitchen table. And with me today is Sarah Archer, domestic historian, Philadelphian, Martha Stewart enthusiast, woman after my own heart. Sarah, hello. Hello. How are you?

It's a Sarah to Sarah. This has never happened before. It's a Sarah to Sarah podcast. I love this. Contrary to everything about my house and the way I live, I love any aspect of history about homemaking and housekeeping. And I also love hot gossip about Martha Stewart, and we are combining those two things today. The two best good things in the universe.

Yes. I read Martha Stewart living in middle school, which is fascinating. My room was a sty then. My house is a sty now, and I feel like this speaks to sort of what this whole thing is about. There are some people who are doing the crafts and emulating the lifestyle, and then for every one of those people, maybe there's like 10 people, including tweens, who just want to read about it.

Oh, I think it's more than 10. It's like most people, but I still love to read her magazines and books. The magazine, the print edition, sadly, is no more. It's digital only now. Really? Yeah. The last issue was in, I think, May of this year. The fact that I'm having a genuine emotional response to this is maybe the key to why we're

unpacking this at all. Why do people have such strong reactions? And I have a theory about why this is, and it concerns the question of whether domestic activities are leisure, labor, or some third entity. It makes sense to begin with me telling you in brief kind of my history with this subject and what this looked like to me, also as a tween watching this go down. Or I guess maybe this happened in 2001, Martha Stewart getting. Actually, it was, I think it was, it was 2002, three.

These years all blend together because I was just wearing the same gap sweatshirt the whole time. And I think there's no more revealing arena of sort of human relationships and gender dynamics and economics than who is doing the dishes and how and how we feel about it. So when I was growing up, I had, what I still think of is like a very weird and also to me still totally sensical obsession with Martha Stewart living, Martha Stewart weddings, and also Sunset Magazine, which is a West Coast. Oh, I love Sunset.

Oh my God. An obsession with homemaking as a concept was something I think I was drawn to as a way of sort of fantasizing about adult life and what it would look like in this idea of all the lovely things that you can surround yourself and being charged of. You know, I think that when you're a kid, you can't really control very much. So there was a fantasy of control for one thing. And also just the aesthetics were great. I also loved peer one import ads.

Oh God, those were great. It's from a peer. Yeah. I guess maybe lots of kids do this, but I associated strongly with little girls is that you have a dollhouse or some, you know, Barbie's dream house, some version of that and being a woman about town, having her own space. And my mom has women of kind of the boomer cohort really had the rules changed on them, you know, in that they were born in a time when it was not expected and in fact would

have been considered odd for them to be quote unquote career women. Whereas like when I was a kid, certainly, and you were a kid, probably there was, you know, the idea of not working was like not a thing. And that shift is a fascinating thread that runs through Martha's story. And I, you know, clearly we're living in the world that Martha helped build. Like I think right, just the whole concept of watching people do domestic chores on TikTok or looking at people's kitchens on Instagram, you know, I think she anticipated all of that.

And it's an interesting question, like when does being a little girl, you know, playing with your dollhouse and, you know, my Zillow habit begin? And I would say that they're essentially the same thing, sort of the flip side of that is my like interesting sort of tween devotion to Martha is that she annoyed the shit out of my mother who was interesting, you know, a busy, a busy lady who worked a lot of hard of hours. And she saw and sees Martha as basically this figure who's like trying to pressure you into doing all these difficult things.

And I think because I was a child and I felt like I was not seeing my current responsibilities. I was seeing this sort of dream life as like a shadow lane that I aspired to someday. I was like, no, you don't do the things you watch her do the things. And then you don't have to necessarily do it. And she built this empire. She made an unbelievable amount of money off of her personal brand in a time when that phrase also didn't exist. Then she went to prison for, I believe, insider trading.

And I think even when this was going on, and again, I was a Martha partisan, I was like, I don't feel like this is something other people aren't doing. You're telling me that basically somebody gave her a stock tip and was like, hey, the market's going to do this act accordingly. And she did. And you're saying that like all these other Wall Street guys aren't doing that. There was just this unalloyed glee in the media when this happened. It was like finally Martha fucked something up.

Finally we have her. We've been waiting for this. She's been too powerful and too perfect for too long. It's like watching somebody spill red wine on a wedding dress. You're just like, ah. It now seems like she did her time. And then remarkably she came out and she got back to her old life without missing a beat, essentially.

And now we're allowed to like her. And now she's this kind of like, I'm sure there's a lot of people who she's still profoundly in noise and that there's that that is still there. But it seems as if she has been accepted into the pantheon of people that we just accept as part of our character. And it's like we're not scared of her anymore. And I wonder if that's because we needed her or we needed to feel that she had been given her great big humble pie and had to eat the whole thing like Bruce Bog Trotter not to

mix a cake and pie. I think that's absolutely true. Or is it because culture like caught up with her and we realized that she made the world we're now living in? She has a clear sense of humor about herself in a way that she didn't always. And I think there was a real seriousness to her approach and her affect that I think some people loved. There are people I've heard it described as kind of ASMR, you know, she has this very

soothing speaking voice, but there are other people who really because she didn't approach it as like the semi-homemade category of Sandra Lee, Rachel Ray, like here's a little secret, your husband won't know they're actually coffee crystals, you know, you're saving a little time and you're kind of you're getting one over on the husband and kids. Basically husband and kids can fuck off like Martha is teaching you how to do something highly skilled that's really, really good quality and delicious. And there's not really a lot of mention of others. Yeah, there's no Jeffrey is there.

Jeffrey's never coming home. Right. He's going to In-N-Out Burger. He's on his own. What can I have you read a fascinating thing? Yeah. There's an article by the great Margaret Talbot. It called Le Très Richard de Martha Stewart.

Okay. Every age gets the household goddess it deserves. The 1960s had Julia Child, the sophisticated Frank chef who proved as permissive as Dr. Spock. She may have proselytized for refined foreign cuisine from her perch at a Boston PBS station, but she was always an anti snob, vowing to take a lot of the Lottie Dodd of French cooking, faintly bohemian and a little tatty like a yellowing travel poster. She was messy and forgiving.

When Julia dropped an egg or collapsed a souffle, she shrugged and laughed, you are alone in the kitchen. Nobody can see you and cooking is meant to be fun. You can't not do the voice. You have to do the voice. So that's paragraph one. I shall read paragraph two. In the 1990s and probably well into the next century, we have Martha Stewart, corporate

overachiever turned domestic superachiever. Martha is the anti Julia. Consider the extent of their respective powers. At the height of her success, Child could boast a clutch of best-selling cookbooks and a gemutelish TV show shot on a single set. At what may or may not be the height of her success, here's what Stewart can claim. Again, this is in 1996, a five-year-old magazine, Martha Stewart Living, with a circulation that has leapt to 1.5 million, a popular cable TV show, also called Martha Stewart Living,

filmed at her luscious Connecticut and East Hampton Estates, a dozen wildly successful gardening, cooking and lifestyle books, a mail order business, Martha by Mail, a nationally syndicated newspaper column called Ask Martha, a regular Wednesday slot on The Today Show, a line of $110-a-gallon paints in colors inspired by the eggs for Arkana Hensley, and plans to invade cyberspace in short, an empire. How dare. I know, I know, it is like, so I would love to hear your thoughts about it. Okay, one of the things that this reminds me of is our beloved friend of the show, Jamie

Loftus' stand-up special, basically, in character as a girl boss pastiche named Shell Gasoline Sandwich, and one of the things that Shell does, I think, as part of her morning routine, is yell girl boss into the mirror until it breaks every morning. Like, the first thing that comes to my mind when this author is like, Martha has a way bigger empire, and she has more tentacles going into more forms of media. And that's her being a corporate overachiever, you know, regardless of what that meant at the time, it feels like today, that is not just the least you can do, but the least you are allowed to do, like, if you were going to make a living in media in any way, like, if you're

going to be relevant in a way that involves, God help me for using this phrase, but producing content for people, which is what I am doing right now, you have to diversify in as many media platforms as you possibly can, because if you don't, you are more likely to collapse like one of the dinosaurs in Fantasia. Yeah, pretty much. One of the things that you hear about Martha a lot is mentioned is her, there's a certain she's a snob, she's waspy. So here's the deal with Julia and Martha. Julia was relatable, in part, because she didn't learn how to cook until she was almost 40, because she grew up in a wealthy household with stuff. It's almost like, imagine if like Prince Charles had a gardening show, it would be just be like 85%. Oh, I would

watch the hell out of that. The bejesus, it would be like 85%, like him apologizing for things, and they're just kind of not, you know, just, just try this, you know. And pretending to have a fake arm. That Julia was able to have, and you don't know how to cook French food, because you're American. So let's not know what we're doing together. Yeah, Martha really used the exact opposite. I mean, she grew up basically working class, like at sort of the bottom drawer of them, of the middle class, and had to learn how to do everything, because there was nobody else to do it. It is old money behavior to allow your stuff to get a little tatty. Like if you're really rich, you can have a moth hole, because you're not worried about people judging you for having

falling apart clothes, because you're rich, no one's going to judge you who cares. Exactly, it's nonchalant. You can drop the omelet, you're fancy, it's fine. Yeah. And it's a different kind of confidence than the confidence that comes from being a self taught expert, which is what Martha is. Yeah. You know, Martha's taste is quite waspy. You know, these exquisitely restored 19th century homes and really good front antique furniture, she knows what she's looking at, like she's not a Philistine. She doesn't decorate like a nouveau rich person. It's like being a butterfly with spots that look like eyes or something. Exactly. It's like, nobody's going to eat me now. Exactly. You know, she's born in 1941, grows up in Nutley, New Jersey, which is not a fancy place

in her family had a three bedroom house, and there were six kids, she goes to Barnard in the late fifties. And that's very unusual. I mean, that was an era when it was really for the most part, it was still, you know, debutants. And she, you know, she's from a Roman Catholic family, and she was working as a model. She was a very successful model who appeared in commercials. It sounds crazy now, but back then that was a big deal. It's fascinating to go back in time to, I guess, yeah, when Martha would have been in college in 1960, when it was like a Catholic president. I mean, I am old enough to remember, and I'm only in my mid 40s, there were debutant balls when I was in prep school in the 90s, where Catholics and Jews were not allowed.

Let's back up a little bit to talk about Martha getting married and becoming a stockbroker. Martha meets Andy Stewart, her husband, who is a Yale law student, and they get married in 1962, or 1961, and then she graduates from college in 1962, and they have their daughter, Alexis, in 1965. They are living in New York City, and he's doing his law thing. Martha is still kind of trying to make a go of it a little bit as a model. She had had some very fancy clients, like she had modeled for Chanel. She is staggeringly photogenic. She's putting in her hours learning how to work with the cameras. Oh, yes. The stockbroker job was not really as dazzling as you might think. There's part of

the Martha lore is that she was this killer Gordon Gekko figure on Wall Street somehow, in the 60s and 70s. Andy helps her get a gig with a small, kind of down at the heels firm called Mones Williams and Seidel. She takes a brokerage course at the New York Institute of Finance, gets licensed as a securities broker in 1968, but she mostly works as front office glamour. She was a salesperson. She was a saleswoman, but this was in an era when there were basically hardly any women on Wall Street. Right. The timeline doesn't line up with her being a shark. I don't doubt she worked her tail off.

Is she Joan in this scenario? Joan Mad Men? She might be Joan. She was a superb saleswoman when it came to the actual kind of handshake deal making that that was left to the men. Naturally. She kind of is over it. By 1973, 1974, she's like... As many women were over a lot of things. As many women were over a lot of things, and the two of them are exhausted. New York is gnarly and it's so expensive. They say, okay, we're going to move to Connecticut. Andy gets a new job as in-house counsel at a company that happens to have headquarters in

Greenwich. It makes sense for them to live in Westport, which is where Tricky Hill is. Tricky Hill is an early 19th century farmhouse, which is basically derelict when they buy it. It's like they get a great deal on it, but it's like the money pit. No heat. She teams up with Norma Collier, who is an old pal from her modeling day. The two of them are beautiful. It's like these two women. They start a firm called the Catered Affair in 1976. They are a smash hit. They have clients including Paul Newman and Joan Woodward, Ralph Lauren, Robert Redford. The Catered Affair has kind of a gambit, which is that they take all of your serving pieces away in the station wagon, make all the food, put it in all the things, and then

kind of deploy it in your house so that it looks as though you have done all the work. God, it's brilliant. There's a point at which Martha starts taking side jobs and not telling Norma, and so Norma understandably is like, doesn't respond super well to this news. So they part ways. Martha begins selling pies and cakes at this kind of slightly crunchy gourmet food store in Westport called the Common Market. That becomes the origin of her working as a caterer on her own. This is another classic wasp thing where like the fancy or the store, the humbler, the name, like if you have something where like a loaf of bread costs $14, it's going to be called like

the bread shack. The bread shack or something. Nothing fancy. And this is where we get to kind of the shifting domestic landscape of the 1970s, and this is my the GIF or GIF where there's a person, I don't even know where it comes from, but there's like a guy kind of gesticulating in front of a red string wall. Oh, that's it's always sunny in Philadelphia. You should know this. There you go. I should know that.

Pepe Silvia, Pepe Silvia. So my version of that is I had this timeline. By 1970, 50% of single women and 40% of married women are participating in the labor force. Also in 1970, Jessica McClintock buys Gunny Sacks and begins producing peri dresses. Also in 1970, Gloria Vanderbilt appears in a quilt extravaganza called Gloria's Great Patchwork Bedroom in the Pages of Folk. 1971, Erica Wilson's needlepoint show premieres on PBS. 1972, Hobby Lobby opens. 1973, Roe vs. Wade is decided. Betty Friedan debates Phyllis Schlafly on TV and Michael's craft store is open. 1974, Little House on the Prairie premieres on NBC. Women can apply for credit in their own names. 1976, Yves Saint Laurent presents

his peasant collection, a 1978 passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. So what strikes you about this span of time? From the data points you're giving, it feels like there's a direct correlation between women gaining legal rights and the aesthetic of an imagined past domesticity becoming ascendant. And like what is the prairie dress for people who don't sit around thinking about these things or wearing them for that matter? So there was this very popular starting in the late 60s and it kind of emerges a little bit from big poofy sleeves, up to the neck lace, high waist, long skirt. It's also what everybody's wearing in the Stepford Yves movie. Exactly. That's precisely it. That brings me to a very incisive piece from Margaret Talbot's article.

If Stuart is a throwback, it's not so much to the 1950s as it is to the 1850s when the doctrine of separate spheres did allow married or widowed women of the upper class as a kind of power, unchallenged dominion over day-to-day functioning of the home and its servants in exchange for seeding the public realm to men. At Turkey Hill, Stuart is the undisputed chattelain, micromanaging her estate in splendid isolation. This hermetic pastoral is slightly marred, of course, by the presence of cameras. Here, the domestic arts have become ends in themselves, unmoored from family values and indeed from family. I think this is so interesting because it completely overturns the logic of industrial kitchen that we have had really since the 1920s.

The kitchen as we know it today is rooted in the principles of scientific management. It was the time and motion studies of the factory. Doesn't the Cheaper by the Dozen guy do this like he was an efficiency expert? That's exactly it. So this is pretty much the same generation. Oh yeah. So the idea is housework is a profession. Not a paid profession, of course. Oh heavens, no. In every way but compensation. Because you're being rewarded with the superior currency of love and devotion. Basically, this is feminism in 1926. Women deserve things to make their work easier. And what's super fascinating about this is that then what happens with the makers of appliances as water, gas, and electricity are coming into more and more homes and apartments,

appliance makers realize advertisers start casting appliances as invisible servants. And it's kind of sending the message that you can become a different kind of person or more specifically a different class of person. Then by the time we get to mid-century, you have this advanced kitchen and you're not a housekeeper. You're not getting splattered with things. You're not on your hands and knees cleaning the floor. You are elegantly managing your desk and the information center. You get to be the boss. Exactly. You're the boss. You are the boss lady. It was such a thing and then just dropped off a cliff around 1970, around like prairie dress time. And sort of the package-ness and efficiency and ease is helpful. I mean, people like it.

But there is also something a little dehumanizing about it. If machines are doing everything for you, where is the creative energy? And Martha turned a version of performative domesticity into her business. But to do this, she had to sort of unravel all of the efficiencies that made housework more streamlined. So it manifests a world where the kind of housework you do is only the kind that you like. And the presumption is that you have someone to help you do the other stuff. And in that respect, it sounds a lot like being a man. That's why it seems so fun. Oh my God, we cracked it. Exactly. And it's why people are so angry. There it is. You know how like men have like one thing that they make, like some men are

wonderful and diverse cooks. And that's wonderful. And I thank you. And this is not even a dig. But I feel like it's such a classic thing for like the, you know, your dad to have like, he never cooks anything, but he has this pork chop recipe that he busts out a couple times a year. And it's dad's pork chops. And he just kind of wanders in when he wants to cook something for fun. And then he goes away. Exactly. It is almost inevitably imbalanced. Because men are kind of like, you're so worried about being clean and just like chillax. I was like, well, no, you can't because then it's like treated like a crime against humanity. I flip flop between thinking that I have the domestic life of a man, which is that I do dishes when I feel like it, which is not

particularly often. And it doesn't get done if I don't feel like it. And like a lot of the essential tension people experience in the household is based on this idea that men and women are essentially trained for different standards. And that if the home was left to the care of men, and I place myself in that category, then things would just never get done. And it's like, yeah, they don't, it's not great. My house does not look good. And so I think this idea that you're sort of doing what you like and that you're also monetizing it big time is very threatening to people. That's like, well, I've been doing all the all the chores and like, I'm not a billionaire, you know, because it's existing in a different category.

Whereas, you know, Martha is professionalizing domestic work because she's a caterer, right? This is her profession. What if everyone's standards could just get lower? You know, like, I think that women's work will always be terrible as long as it remains women's work and not like domestic work for people who have a house. And husband means house bond. It means that you are married to the house. And it used to be a mutual responsibility to take care of this place that was taking care of you. And then as men moved out of the home and into the workforce, it became the woman's job and that things have been fraught and fairly miserable ever since. Like everyone has their own comfort zone. But like I want to push on that and say like, what

makes you happy? Like what are the things in your house that need to be clean or organized for you to have good quality of life? And like how much of it is just like a fear of being judged? And for some people, like you really do need a very organized house to be functional. And if that's what you need, then you should get what you need. But do all of us need that? Or are we performing for God or somebody? Oh, totally. I mean, my other idea is like, what if domestic work was paid? Like what if we were paid by the government for housekeeping and raising babies, which I think is also a great idea, but is farther off. And probably will never happen because having it unpaid means that women are dependent on men.

And of course, that's how things must be, because otherwise we would eat everyone. The Martha answer to that basically is to kind of say, okay, this is the world I belong in. So I'm going to be creative and enjoy it. Andy gets a job with Abrams Publishing and he becomes its new president and CEO. What's Andy like, by the way? Not to get submerged in Andy Gossett, but what's his deal? So that's a great question. So my understanding is that Andy's family is like blue blood adjacent. He's charming. He's handsome. He's like six foot, something or other. They eventually divorce. You probably know that, that they at some point, Andy,

like the late 80s, early 90s, they separate. That was the thing to do at the time. That was, that literally was the thing to do, but that people basically find, you know, Andy is a doll. And so it's this relationship with publishing that indirectly kind of triggers the beginning of entertaining. So they have a big launch party, Martha caters it. And Crown Publishing says, gosh, these hors d'oeuvres are sensational and, you know, meets Martha and is dazzled by her charm and beauty and smarts and basically says, you know, we should do a book. And entertaining is a huge, huge hit. It was in its 30th printing at some point. It's basically the biggest selling cookbook since Julia Child. Really? Yeah, it's huge. It's atmospheric and

stylish. It's very much designed to position Martha as a taste maker. It's a cookbook in the same way that like the Wizard of Oz is a travel log or something. Like it's this kind of like, look at the chapter about kitchens. It's mostly Martha Gardening. I remember she's like, here I am with my chickens and she's got like 40 fucking chickens. And you're like, Martha, how this is a lot of chickens, lady. Like, how do you have time? This is also shot through in the magazine later as well, that a lot of the photographs you see of like Turkey Hill or sort of nearby buildings, you know, they look like they could be photographs or drawings from the 19th century. Like there's it's almost just though you're

looking at a version of American material history in which plastic had never been invented. Wow. Which is keeping with the kind of modern, not to say hipster, but I guess the overall millennial aesthetic of like keeping everything in repurposed glass jars. Oh, she invented it. Martha, you're eschewing convenience, which again is a calling card of affluence. Visually, by say, well, we prefer our family prefers, you know, not to buy plastic things like, well, good for you. Right. Which means like my family can afford to put the time and energy into doing that. Exactly. Something that we just hear kind of in talking about stages of American cuisine, but this sort of this like Julia versus Jell-O binary, this idea of like before Julia

child, American women didn't know what the fuck they were doing. And they just poured soup over everything and it's like that always bothers me because I'm like, you know, like soup cooking exists for a reason and it's because you're you have to feed your family like multiple times a day. Like I will not stand for cream of condensed soup being maligned as a shortcut in recipes. Like there are so many recipes like that for a very good reason. Exactly. So imagine you're not rich. You have an ice box. You have a budget to buy food. You're living through the Great Depression or it's rationing during World War II. Your food will go bad if you don't cook it the right way at the right time. And if it goes bad, there's not infinite money or credit or whatever to replace

it. So if you then turn around and say, here's a brand new refrigerator that will keep things fresh and a whole repertoire of canned goods, where if something goes sideways, you can always rely on mushroom soup. I mean, that's heaven for right. I mean, it's not like a trivial thing. Soup for you. Not for me. And so this is a super interesting moment to kind of get into the weeds on Kmart. Would you like to read a passage from the New York Times, a 1997 article about Martha's ongoing complicated relationship with Kmart? Oh my God, I would like nothing more. She prodded average Americans to consider quince preserves. She ratcheted up their sense of inadequacy because they did not press their vintage linens and whip up exotic omelettes

with eggs from their own chicken farms. Now she wants to take away their burgundy sheets. She, of course, is Martha Stewart, and her remaking of the American Bed and Bath is part of a joint venture with the Kmart Corporation. Next month, Ms. Stewart will roll out her new line of sheets, towels, pillows, and bed throws at Kmart stores. The idea behind every day is to lure middle Americans away from what Ms. Stewart sees as the often dismal offerings of lower priced stores, dark colors, polyester fabrics, fruit prints, by giving them a taste of what shoppers with a lot more money and time for glue guns get from fancier outlets. So this is framed as if she's doing something very sinister, which is interesting. It's so fascinating and it's also she's schooling

taste and you know how people love that. Martha's books, it was entertaining and then followed by you know weddings and tarts and you know all these other books that did amazingly well. She's starting to appear on TV shows here and there and she's developed a cult following. So there's a woman named Barbara Lauren Snyder who was brought into Brain Trust for Kmart by the soon to be CEO, Joe Antonini. And Joe says you know aesthetically we suck, we really need to kind of start like branch you know kind of upping the aesthetics, the quality. This is a very ignorant question but it's just hard to know which giants have fallen recently. Like is Kmart still around? I don't feel like I see Kmart anymore. It sure isn't and that actually figures into our story a

little bit. Oh okay. So they there was this desire to cut sort of quote unquote revitalize Kmart which spoiler alert ultimately did not succeed but when Martha was involved they had a good run. So Barbara Lauren Snyder explores bookshelves and is seeing Martha Stewart everywhere. She's like gosh this woman is like photogenic and you know when people are showing up to her events and droves. What if I could bring her on? And is this like mid late 80s? When are we now? This is like mid 80s. Martha is not yet on TV but she's like a known quantity in books. She's like Alice in Roman. Exactly but better. So they ultimately carved out a deal where she gets $200,000 a year. This is in like mid 1980s and $3,000 a pop for each one of 30 appearances

where she goes to a Kmart event. The relationship begins to get complicated because Martha understandably wants more and more and more influence on the aesthetics. So she's kind of going through the shelves and you know this is all like the polyester count is like the thread count is too low. This is like the colors and there's a point in like the early 90s where she says you know what if we could do like fancy mustards and cookies and sort of tea and cat stuff like we could do Martha Stewart branded grooming tools treats and toys and Jo Antonini is like what the fuck. In 2002 Kmart goes bankrupt and I put it to you that if they had permitted Martha to sell branded cat stuff that may have unfolded differently. I'm just saying

and the tension that ran through it the entire time was this question of taste that the color palette she was advocating for like the arcana hens was too unusual to eccentric. And what colors is she talking about that America wasn't ready for? They're basically like it's all the colors that you see now on HGTV. It's like turquoise, blue, seledon, green, lots of grays. It's actually very pharaoh and ball. So they have this wonderful almost like instantly historical feeling. They look as though they've been on the wall for 100 years. You know that is not a look that everybody wanted in 1990. This was the era of it was like Frasier's apartment. We're coming off the high of the 1980s. Everybody wanted neon colors.

A lot of glass brick. Either people just organically have these opinions or they're being coached to like go and be like blah, blah, blah. Oh, these cabinets are oak and oak is from the 90s and we need everything to be stainless steel and pale granite. And it's like you know that like this anything of a time is going to look stupid and dated and within your lifetime, right? It's interesting to look at then what Martha does that a lot of her interiors have a kind of like colonial 19th century eternal quality. Like they're not trendy. So she strikes a deal in 1990 with Time Venture to develop the magazine that becomes Martha Stewart Living. And the response to the initial test issues blew the executives away. They were kind of expecting it to bomb.

They were just like, ah, we're going to try this, whatever. I think we'll try things. Once again, it's like we don't just want more women in corporate hierarchy like because it's nice, but also because you'll make more money, you idiots. Yes. So it peaks in 2002 with two million copies per issue and the magazine industry is, you know, the world has changed. That probably will never be the case again. But at the time like that moment was probably as big as magazines like we're ever going to be, right? Yeah. Yeah. And she meanwhile in 1993 begins working with a company called Group W Productions where she starts a weekly half hour TV show also called Martha Stewart Living. And that's basically the magazine Come to Life. That's like the magazine

on TV expands in 1997 to an hour all weekdays and then a half hour episode on the weekends. This runs until 2004 because something occurred in 2004. I went to prison. And she was appearing on the early show and the today's show and having, you know, holiday specials, this, that and the other. There's a producer involved, Richard Sheingold, who was like, I guess we'll do this. But like, why do people who live in big cities, and that's most of the viewers, want to watch a TV show about gardens when they don't have gardens? Because they live in big cities, you guys come on. Why do we watch James Bond movies even though we don't work for MI6? God. So at this point, she meets a woman named Sharon Patrick. And I

would like you to guess where and how they met. Knowing that Sharon Patrick is a business lady. Sharon Patrick is a very impressive business lady. Okay. Flea Market. That's actually a great guess. They were hiking Mount Kilimanjaro. So as one, Martha is like an incredibly intrepid traveler. She's like hiked Machu Picchu, like she travels all over the world. She expresses this desire to Sharon that like, I'm being paid $750,000 a year from Time Warner, which is nice. But given how much money I am making for all of these entities, I want more and I want more control. Just like the Backstreet Boys said in the late 90s.

Right. You want some ownership. And frankly, the business world or the business side of the creative life is littered with people who tried to do this and failed like Halston. It is incredibly hard to do that because usually people who are aesthetically gifted for that to be in the same package as somebody who is incredibly business savvy and creative in that regard is extremely rare. Or to be savvy and choosing the right person to partner with if you're able to outsource that, I bet. Yeah. Sharon Patrick basically says, you need your own company. So she sort of signs on to help

Martha kind of write a vision statement, carved out a role, business plan, what would this actually look like? It's like a multimedia entity where everything kind of revolves around her. Like where she's the Rupert Murdoch to compare her to the most sinister person possible. If he were creative. The one thing that's interesting about Martha, Inc., the book and the movie upon which it is based is that it's a little bitchy here and there. And I dislike those parts of it where there's kind of armchair, psychologizing about why Martha is brisk with people in the elevator or whatever. Oh my God. Don't you love how there's biographies of great men? And it's like,

sure, he murdered his wife. But on the other hand, those sentences. And then a woman can like, not that necessarily that running a giant company is like a great thing to do. I think the way that the girl boss concept obscures the broader and inescapable sense of capitalism is one of the many issues with it. But on the other hand, the fact that women are punished as much, if not more in mainstream media for like occasional rudeness, then men are for murder. Like I'm not exaggerating here. It's quite something. You don't hear a lot about like, well, why was Steve Jobs so rude and mean to people? It's like, because that's what geniuses do, you dumb bitch. At least if they're men and they go

on crazy diets too. So they go to Time Warner. And like, you know, we want my interest back. We want to buy you out. And they're kind of like, ha, ha, okay, it's like $85 million. You know, Martha at this point is doing great, but not like hundreds of millions great. So Sharon walks her through, they get financing. And part of it is an advance on Martha's re-upped contract with Kmart. So they're able to cobble together that was like 16 million from Kmart. The initial stock offering is underwritten by Morgan Stanley. That's the IPO. I am not sure whether the loan she got, she had some sort of like a very large four year loan was she immediately paid back came from Morgan Stanley or some other source in some fashion.

She puts together this like mammoth package and Time Warner is stunned. And they're basically like, okay, and this new entity is born. Martha's the CEO. Sharon Patrick becomes chief operating officer. And the stock goes public on October 19, 1999, initially offered at $18 a share. It closes at 38. And by closing, Martha Stewart is the first self-made billionaire in the United States. And that's billion with a B. Billion with a B. You know, I mean, this is in 1999. So this and people on Wall Street, like at this point still as now mostly dudes are like, holy shit, like how did she do this? Because it's banking on people not believing in you for one thing. Absolutely. Oh yeah. She starts to get all this attention. This is also when the lore of Martha

as being kind of like up before the chickens and like running, you know, miles per day and just, you know, just being this kind of like incredible sort of Uber woman is born. So she sort of famously is like, oh, I only need, you know, three hours of sleep. The myth and legend of kind of Martha, not just Martha Stewart living magazine, but sort of Martha's lifestyle becomes, you know, very much fodder for, you know, magazine articles and it's, and fascination. I feel like the fastest way to get the public's attention is to tell them you sleep an obscenely tiny amount. And they're like, what? No, really? Maybe that's true. I mean, I guess there are some people for whom that's true. I don't know. I want to write a like aspirational lifestyle book for

people who sleep all the time. Like Kat. As much as possible. Yeah. Even now, she's 80 years old, as we're recording this. She does not have the kind of wealth that she did when MSLO first went public, but she has plenty of money. She's fine. She's people with much less money than she has now. Don't work. And she's on TikTok, like selling skincare. I mean, she, she works. Like she's, she has never stopped working. I mean, comparing this to like the Theranos model of becoming a self-made blonde lady billionaire, which obviously I still can't stop thinking about, like if you must, then it does seem like rather than selling a giant promise that science already knows is impossible and then committing ever more ornate varieties of fraud to keep the ball rolling

forward. What if you just like, figure out what you like doing and then force people to pay you ever increasing amounts of money to do it? Oh, absolutely. That's like what, I mean, isn't it Dolly Parton who said basically like figure out what you're good at and then do it on purpose? Yeah, that sounds right. You know, she, so she was really writing high until the crime. No, do you, do you have a memory of the crime? This happened, if not in the immediate aftermath of her becoming the first female self-made billionaire, then like in this era of her career where she was like standing above us all, the joke was like all about her super competence and her like uber prowess. Yeah, I just think the feeling that she had become

uncomfortably powerful. And again, like I think there's a lot to be said reasonably about that is comfort of living in a country that is controlled by moguls. And at a certain scale, like ethics are impossible, especially if you're partnering with companies and with manufacturers and that kind of thing. Like there's investment banks. Yeah, exactly. Like there's, there's all kinds of extremely valid criticism to bring to Martha Stewart and her kind of rise to the level of fame that she had and to talk about the problems with her as such a prominent public figure. But I don't think we were talking about that as much. I think primarily the concern was like, this is a woman who's like become extremely powerful, kind of without us noticing

until it was already happening. And like we're stressed about that basically. I don't remember the circumstances. I just know that she, I always picture it as like a lovely sort of informal summertime, like you're eating canapes at someone's lovely estate in the Hamptons or whatever. And someone's like, Oh, Martha, buy the buy. You might want a short Pfizer or whatever. And so again, this is the fall of 2001. So people are, it's like Tom Broca's assistant is like getting mailed anthrax letters, you know, 911 has happened. There's a lot going on. Everyone's very stressed. So Martha had at this time, this gigantic portfolio of her own stock. And that is what made her a billionaire. In addition to that, she had what we normal people would consider,

you know, a huge investment portfolio with her money manager at Merrill Lynch, several million, maybe 10 million, something like that. One of the holdings that she has is a company called Imclone. And on December 27th, 2001, she sells all of her shares. The SEC alleges that she avoided a stock loss of about $45,000, like 40 to 50 by selling on the 27th. That's like nothing to her. It's like literally, it's like a rounding error. So on the 27th, because on December 28th, it is announced that Herbatux, which was an experimental cancer drug that the company had been developing, was not going to get FDA approval. The doctor who founded the company, Sam Waxel, who's a friend of Martha's, I think they actually dated at some

point, and his father and his daughter all sold their shares. And she sells her entire position, which is about $230,000. Baconovic claimed that there had been a preexisting agreement to sell the stock if shares dipped below $60. And there was a notation in his files that had sort of the at symbol, which was at the time we didn't associate with Twitter, that said at 60, which was later shown to be written in a different pen. It's odd because in a situation like this, normally you'd have a stop loss order in place so that you don't have to call, this is what I want to do. If it goes below this amount I want to sell and you have all of those in place so that you don't have to worry about it. So this happens very quietly in sort of the

end of 2001. Months go by. In October of 2002, Douglas Fanuel, who is Baconovic's assistant at Merrill Lynch, pleaded guilty to the feds to taking a payout in exchange for keeping quiet about the sale. Why is he being questioned by the feds initially? Is this with regards to this or something else and he happened to mention it? The SEC was on to the whole urban tucks in clone situation. And is this something that other clients did or is it just a Martha thing that they're looking at? Martha and the sort of Sam Waxle circle of influence is there the best known. I think it was only people in this inner circle who knew about it, but that's actually a great question. I'm not totally sure about that. But the feds are on to the timing of this. And so

they're sniffing around. So the day after that, October 3rd, she resigns her position on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange. And months later, in June 2003, she is indicted on nine counts, including charges of securities fraud and obstruction of justice. So on that day, she voluntarily steps down as CEO and chair of Martha Stewart Living Omni Media, what stays on is Chief Creative Officer and goes on trial famously in January 2004. And to this day, she insists that she didn't know there are incriminating details like the little at 60 indication, there were things like she asked her assistant Annie Armstrong to change the call log on December 27th, and then thought better of it and asked her to change it back. And Annie Armstrong has said

repeatedly that Martha never asked her to lie. She just so but she her testimony becomes very key. So you may be surprised to know that the charges of security fraud were ultimately dropped and she's convicted in March 2004 of felony charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Don't obstruct justice, you guys. That's how they get you. All of that stuff ultimately leads her to be sentenced in July 2004 to serve a five-month term in a federal correctional facility in Alderson, West Virginia, which is like a schlep from New York. And that was kind of like an annoying added detail. So she's there. I believe it was two-year period of supervised release. And so she's up in her house in Bedford, New York after that.

In the lead up to this, it would probably be an exaggeration to describe Jeffrey Tubin as a friend of the show. He's like a recurring, how would you describe him? He's something. He's something else. And I have to say, his article, Lunch at Martha's, which appeared in the New Yorker kind of once shit had started to really hit the fan, but before she was sentenced, or before she was convicted, is a masterpiece. He's a hell of a writer, and he's always said some weird-ass shit about women, and both these things are true. Yeah. Totally. So in describing her plate, she says, okay, that's puzzling and also confusing because my public image has been one of trustworthiness of being a fine, fine editor, a fine purveyor of historical and contemporary

information for the homemaker, and that I have been turned into or vilified openly as something other than what I really am has been really confusing. I mean, we've produced a lot of good stuff for a lot of good people, and to be maligned for it, that is kind of weird. And Jeffrey writes, when we took a lunch break, it was clear that the wounds of the past year ran deep. After I admired the silver chopsticks that had been set out, Stuart said, you know, in China, they say the thinner the chopsticks, the higher the social status. Of course, I got the thinnest I could find. After a pause, she added, that's why people hate me. Oh, Martha. And she's right, right? Well, yes and no. I mean, I think

we elected president a man with a gold toilet. Well, yeah, a man with a gold toilet, crucially. Yes, crucially. It's not wealth per se. I think it's something like perfection or its pursuit that really just makes people nuts about women. So she goes to jail for five months. She basically thrives. It sounds like her description. I mean, there's this amazing interview she does with David Letterman, where he, to his credit, kind of apologizes and basically said, you know, we really made hay out of all of this and I'm very sorry. Most people who go to prison in this country do so, you know, for no good reason and have it much worse, which is true. The justice system, you know, there's no, she talks about expired food and this is at a prison that's

pretty nice by comparison. I mean, these are like white collar crimes. It's not people, it's not a place where you go and you're scared. It's a place where you go and you're like, ew, this is expired. Which is not great, but it's compared to the absolutely nonsense offenses that send people away to terrifying places for years and years is evident. So she becomes, when she's in jail, a kind of advocate or sort of liaison between the brass and, you know, her other inmates. There's footage of her leaving and kind of getting on her private plane with her daughter and she's wearing a knitted poncho or like a crocheted poncho that I think was made by one of her fellow inmates. So it was like one of her friends.

Prison is a place where people do crafts if they have the time and the supplies. I mean, what else are you going to do? That's what I love about Escape from Alcatraz, all the crafts. And then she's out and she bounces back into Martha Stewart living on the media, like getting busters. Like she's this Martha Stewart every day, Kmart interior paint line goes on, you know, she's on the apprentice. I think I knew that in some like far off part of my brain where very old vintage wines are stored. I think the plan was that she was going to like replace you know who and that didn't happen. But

anyway, so she's on the apprentice briefly. She publishes a book called the Martha Rules, which is her sort of rules for for success. You know, she comes out with the baking handbook, the homekeeping handbook, all of these beautiful new books from Clarkson Potter. She's on the Today Show demonstrating crafts. She has a Colin show on Serious Radio. She was she's on an episode of Lawn Order SVU playing the headmistress. This is true. You'll find she plays the headmistress of a prep school. That's a good role for her. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia begins selling craft supplies at Walmart. Kmart is bankrupt,

remember. She makes a deal with the Hallmark Channel, Toast to Show. She's her cooking school show debuts on PBS in 2012. She partners with 1-800-FLOWERS, Home Depot. It's like on and on. You know, she's doing a version of what she did before. In the fall of 2016, VH1 premieres her new show, Martha and Snoop's Pop Luck Dinner Party. Do they become friends because they do the show together or is it built around a pre-existing friendship? So I think this started when somebody got the idea to like have Snoop be a guest on Martha's TV show, like helping her make mashed potatoes or something. They have a rapport. You just got to go with it when that happens.

You got to go with it. And there's famously this photo that this sort of an early meme that circulates that has the photo of the two of them and says like one of these people is a convicted felon. They're both people who have really created a valuable asset out of their personalities and their creativity. I feel like it makes sense that they would be friends. And they're both fans of, you know, she's involved with a company called Canopy Growth as of 2019. That's a Canadian marijuana company. So she's, you know, as ever ahead of the curve legal weed. That's how you make money. You know, she doesn't show any signs of slowing down. So hopefully she'll be, you know, she'll be a fixture in the American landscape for as long as the Republic

exists. So for another three years. Until 2024. And then we'll see. It's interesting again to compare this to Elon Musk, who I feel like she's doing all the stuff that his fanboys kind of like to think that he's doing in a lot of ways. Right. Exactly. Beyond the question of like, should we have tycoons as role models? It's like, well, if we're gonna, because clearly that's something that's happening and we can't put that genie back in the bottle, like shouldn't it at least be someone who has actually been successful? I mean, she's really, truly self made. And that's pretty rare.

And unlike Donald Trump, she actually made money at any time, even one time in her life, not just that, but the whole time. One thing that I've always really admired about Martha is that she's not into pseudoscience. And increasingly rare trait, it must be noted. Yeah. Like basically every other sort of like woo influencer is telling you about like, you know, berries that will reduce inflammation, which is kind of an unspecified problem that people seem to have and that you have to. She's not doing wellness.

Yeah. And to the extent that the magazine covered health stuff, she'll talk about sunscreen. Right. She'll interview, you know, or have one of her writers interview dermatologists. We'll talk about like the under reported incidents of heart disease in women. Actual medical wellness and not sort of like, oh, you need to buy this like piece of jade because then your sex life will magically become jade like, I guess. I don't know what is supposed to happen. Or like if you hustle enough, you'll get my lifestyle.

Yeah. I think what I've always responded to about Martha Stewart kind of getting back into this very complicated world of kind of domesticity and media about it. She's not telling you that if you do XYZ thing, you'll be radiant and well and have the beautiful skin of a celebrity. And she's not telling you that if you hustle hard enough, you can become her. She doesn't want you to be her. She wants to be her. And I feel like the idea is like, if you want to do one of these crafts,

you should do this craft because it's fun. And if you don't, you can watch me do it, which is also fun. And it's like, that's a viable product. Absolutely. Yeah. No, I totally agree. You know, for people who haven't maybe given this as much thought as you, like what, why are you drawn to this? I was so fascinated by this idea of kind of, you know, the cultural meaning of what we do at home

and how powerful that is and how much it's it's denigrated, but it's so important. And it remains, you know, here we are recording at a time when our reproductive rights are probably about to pivot back to pre Little House on the Prairie, the TV show, not the actual Prairie. But, you know, hard to tell at a certain point. There's this notion because of the whole sort of separate spheres doctrine that it's, it's not political. It's like every white woman with a yoga mat you meet is gonna say,

well, I'm not, I'm not political. I don't want to think about that. And like deciding that it's okay for you to opt out is very political. Yeah. I mean, being capable of opting out is already saying that you're a fairly specific kind of person. The home is not your retreat from that. That is where you live out those values every day. And I think, you know, the idea that you sort of only want to talk about the domestic,

well, the personal has always been political. Right. That's not a new idea. I mean, it was newly articulated. For instance, like in this country, we've had a formula shortage and we have right now op-eds being published in sort of ultra right wing conservative outlets, like the National Review, about how like, gosh, all these school shootings kind of make homeschooling sound appealing, don't they? Well, gee, that plus the fact that like nobody can find formula.

So it's like you're terrified of your kid getting shot. It kind of almost sounds like it would be easier for women to not take part in civic life, doesn't it? And I don't see how you can look at that and think that all of this stuff is separate from, you know, that is not part of political life or civic life. All of it is, you know, who takes care of your kids? Who makes the food? Who cleans your house?

Is integral to how we live. You know, my approach to that, the way that I would sell this concept of why study the domestic sphere is A, because if something seems not worth studying, and it's also something largely done by women, at least historically, then it's like, that's probably why that bias even exists, whether or not you harbor it. But also just the fact that the domestic sphere is where a lot of women's lives and women's work have taken place historically as well. And so to study the history of that is to study women throughout history,

women elsewhere in time. I don't think that this is like a raw, raw girl boss, like, isn't she the greatest story? Like, you can definitely see it that way. And it's definitely there. But to me, what's exciting about this is like, somebody figured out basically how to acquire enough power to only do the domestic things that she liked doing, and then to share that as something that other people might have the freedom to do. And it's this thing that makes domestic life and homemaking neither this obligatory,

constant slog, nor something that like is stupid because women have to do it. It's just, that's meaningful to me. It's not frivolous just because the starting point of that inquiry is personal. You know, my wish for everybody is that they have the domestic life that they want. That is about resources. And it's about creating the institutional support that people need in order to have the daily lives and the home lives that they deserve to have as human beings. But I think that as you kind of study these things, you also get to notice what you like.

And just thinking about design is by definition like taking seriously what you respond to aesthetically and what kind of improves your mood and makes you happy. And I think all of us deserve to have the time and the freedom to enjoy the space where we spend our lives. That's not available to everybody, but it should be. Every now and then I would make jokes about- I heard. Yeah.

He had a TV. And who? And I felt, I felt horrible about it because I just felt like, well, I know this woman for a long time, we're very good friends and here we are making jokes about a terribly unfortunate situation. So it's nice that you came back. Well, I know it was all in good fun and it is your job and I always stick up for your job. Well, thank you.

I do. I appreciate that now. And that was our episode for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned something. I hope America learns something eventually and that someday the dishes are done in a way that is equitable and freeing for all humans. And as always, we have bonus episodes for you and that was second way to subscribe to them.

You can do that at patreon.com slash you're wrong about or starting this week at Apple podcasts. And if you don't want to spend money on that, you can spend it on anything else that makes your life better, like a hot dog. Thank you as always to our amazing editor and producer Carol and Kendrick, who I will be making a pie for as soon as I see her again. And thanks as always to you, our wonderful listeners. You're the best. We hope you're having a neat summer.

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