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June
24, 2002 8:45 a.m. |
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his
is National Dump on Martha Stewart Week. Even though we are, at last word,
still at war with Islamofascism, the Palestinians are still massacring
Jews, and nuclear war is still a possibility between India and Pakistan,
the American media find Martha Stewart's $228,000 sale of ImClone stock
to be "What's Happening Now." The New York tabs are getting
their second wind, ABC's This Week decided to lead with Marthagate,
and the Leona Helmsley of the 21st Century has made the cover of the Newsweek
out today.
Can I ask one question? Who, aside from the media, cares? I have no idea if Martha Stewart is guilty of insider trading or not, but even if she is, I can't work up much outrage about it. After all, it's not like she blew herself up on a Jerusalem bus, dropped plutonium sachets into upstate reservoirs, or abused a child. And though it may be legal, the $1 million a year ex-Time-Warner honcho Gerald Levin is receiving to be a "consultant" to the company whose stock he piledrived into the ground is a more outrageous testimony to the financial rewards of insiderdom than Martha's dodgy $228K.
Don't misunderstand: If Martha is guilty, then she should be held accountable for it. But judging by the inordinate amount of media coverage this story is receiving, based on such flimsy evidence against her, it seems that Martha's greatest offense was ignoring Walter Winchell's advice to be nice to the people you meet on the way up, because they're the same people you'll meet on the way down. Everybody in the New York media knows that Martha Stewart has a reputation as a royal bitch, and more than a few people who feel personally insulted or mistreated by her have been praying for the day when she receives her comeuppance.
Bu there's something else driving this Martha-bashing, I think. A lot of people who have never given a second's thought to how Martha Stewart treats her gardener reflexively despise the woman who rode the 1990s nesting wave to fame and fortune, becoming America's undisputed goddess of domesticity.
As with Rush Limbaugh and the late, lamented Oprah's Book Club, people hate Martha Stewart without ever having experienced what she does firsthand. I know I did. Years ago, I loved to make fun of my mom for subscribing to Martha Stewart Living, because, well, everybody knew what a joke Martha Stewart was. Didn't they? One weekend, I was visiting my folks with my fiancée, and I caught her up late one night reading Mama's copy of Martha Stewart Living. We traded snarky comments about the thing, but Julie still tore out a recipe. Sheepishly.
One day, after we married, a copy of MSL showed up at our Manhattan apartment. We would have been less embarrassed, I think, had it been Hustler. We called my mother, who said, "Well, y'all kept tearing out articles when you'd come to visit, so I thought I'd buy you your own subscription." Oh God she noticed! Well, as long as we're not paying for it, I thought, I might as well read it for kicks.
As it turned out, MSL's lush photography and crisp design was really impressive, and had a way of drawing reluctant readers like me into stories about the most quotidian topics. You came out the other side educated about things that suddenly seemed useful to know. A couple of months later, reading MSL in bed next to my wife, I turned to her and said, "Hey, I didn't know all this about butter." There was no denying it from that point on: I was a Martha Stewart fan.
It had everything to do with the fact that I was also a newlywed husband who was struggling to learn how to cook and set up a household. I never learned to cook growing up (woman's work!), and interior design was chiefly a matter of thumbtacks and movie posters. Julie was infinitely more sophisticated on the design front, but inasmuch as she went straight from being a college senior to being a wife, there was a lot of practical information she needed to know. She grew up with a working mom who didn't have the time to do much cooking around the house, so she was as clueless as I was. In short, we needed to learn how to cook and keep house like grown-ups, and Martha Stewart Living made it seem stylish and modern, like the the kind of thing swell young Manhattanites might care about.
Happily, my wife and I soon discovered a mutual passion for cooking. In a city in which you can get just about any ingredient you want, it pays to know the difference between various kinds of butter, and to learn what you can do with kaffir lime leaves. MSL helped us get over the ridiculous idea that cooking was drudge work, or that doing it well was beyond our talents. That has proven to be a very good thing indeed. Nothing gives my wife and me more satisfaction than to cook for friends. Martha got us started on what's become an unexpected passion.
What's more, MSL teaches you things you may not have got at home, either because your mom didn't know how, or you couldn't be bothered to learn. How to care for silver. How to plant a garden in a tiny urban space. How to deal with water damage in your house or apartment. How to shop for the kitchen knives. How to pick out the healthiest tulips. This sort of thing might sound silly, until you find yourself standing outside the Korean deli with orders from the missus to bring home fresh flowers for the big dinner party, and it means everything to the one you love that you do this right.
Some people hate Martha for the same reason they hated Oprah's Book Club: snobbery. One of the great consumer revolutions of the past 20 years has been the mass-marketing of tasteful design. When I was a kid in the 1970s, decent-looking clothing and furniture was something for the well-off. The rest of us had to take what we could get at Sears, or worse. And it was all ugly. That has changed. Now, Michael Graves and Philippe Starck are doing appliances for Target, and the less exalted Martha Stewart has her own line of products at Kmart. The other day, some publication mentioned that Martha's lines at Kmart weaned the proles off polyester sheets and taught them the value of cotton — as if this were a bad thing. Why is it objectionable to make aesthetic quality affordable and available to the masses? Of course the Martha Stewart cult of personality is obnoxious. But you don't have to make Martha your personal savior or personal shopper to give her credit for being a good influence.
It's a lot easier to like Martha if you don't watch her TV show, where she really does come across as the neurotic, icy perfectionist of the stereotype. And you can't read MSL without laughing at the more ridiculous manifestations of the personality cult. Every month, MSL publishes "Martha's Calendar," a to-do list that surely bears no remote resemblance to this media mogul's actual schedule. The May 16 entry says: "Groom cats and dogs; spring-clean canary cage." If you believe Martha Stewart's hands come within a mile of her cat's fleas or her canary's droppings, I'll meet you on Ebay to sell you my Duncan Phyfe Adirondack chair.
It gets even more unbearably precious. I'm sitting here with the April 2002 issue on my lap, open to page 38, which has a full-page ad hawking a CD called "Martha Stewart Living Quiet Time." It's the soft-rock nesting soundtrack, and the CD cover art features Martha in a terry cloth robe, her hair up in a towel, sipping tea. "We've also included some of our favorite projects for the home, along with a recipe for cranberry oatmeal cookies," the ad copy reads.
That's called Asking For It. And there are plenty of people ready to give it to Martha Stewart, right between the eyes. They're taking their best shots now. It has been said that the vehement anti-Martha backlash is evidence of a sexist double standard, and, like I said, it's been attributed to Martha's legendary nastiness. There's probably some truth in both views.
I have a third theory: that some of this vitriol comes from media people who resent the fact that Martha Stewart became rich and famous by propagating the anti-feminist notion that homemaking is a good thing, and showing women how to find satisfaction by doing domestic tasks tastefully and well? Whatever her sins, I think Martha Stewart makes a lot of these career-obsessives feel guilty about neglecting their home life. And she's not going to get away with it, not if they can help it.