It changed US home entertaining forever – and this week a new generation of Americans can thrill to its challenges of throwing a ‘midnight omelet supper party for 30’ or a ‘Neoclassic dinner for eight.’
Martha Stewart’s seminal and, some say, almost revolutionary book Entertaining, first published in 1982, is being reissued Tuesday.
But what once impressed and intimidated readers not au fait with Boursin-stuffed snow peas or ‘heirloom’ table linen may now simply amuse them with its absurdity and pretentiousness.
In the early 1980s, many people were still serving food from cans, so Stewart’s ideas – along with her exhortation for people to pull out all the stops when entertaining at home – felt radical.
Nowadays, competition in her field is fierce and she is hardly cutting-edge, yet her name still carries enough weight in the home entertaining and decorating worlds for corporations to court the octogenarian for commercial tie-ups. The tireless businesswoman is estimated to be worth $400 million.
According to the 84-year-old, reissuing the long-out-of-print tome was inspired, in part, by the fact that her publisher had begun receiving requests from booksellers after a generation of TikTokers and 20-somethings became interested in Stewart’s origins following a recent Netflix documentary about her.
Entertaining launched Stewart on her path to stardom, becoming a huge bestseller despite the wild unfeasibility for ordinary mortals of many of her suggestions.
She urged readers, for instance, to launder and iron table linen on the day of the party and handwash it immediately afterward in cold water. A ‘babbling brook’ or orchard in blossom, she advised, made perfect party backdrops – ideally with serving staff dressed in ‘peasant, farmhand, Italian, Victorian, or maritime apparel.’
In the early 1980s, many people were still serving food from cans, so Stewart’s ideas – along with her exhortation for people to pull out all the stops when entertaining at home – felt radical
Martha Stewart ‘s seminal and, some say, almost revolutionary book Entertaining, first published in 1982, is being reissued Tuesday in a facsimile edition, meaning it is exactly as it appeared 43 years ago
Entertaining launched Stewart’s rise to stardom, becoming a huge bestseller despite the wild unfeasibility for ordinary mortals of many of her suggestions
In the intervening years, insiders have punctured Stewart’s domestic goddess image, whispering that she relied on an army of assistants to do everything from stuff the artichokes to polish the silverware.
Critics say she simply spread herself too thin over the decades, agreeing deals with retailers such as Kmart and Macy’s that might have made her rich but diluted her air of exclusivity.
Still, few deny her lingering influence. More than 40 years after she produced such gems of home entertaining wisdom as ‘a table is an empty space, and filling it is a gesture of thoughtfulness,’ modern emulators like Meghan Markle are still accused of pilfering ‘la methode Martha.’
However, readers leafing through the book’s 320 glossy, lavishly illustrated pages today might be struck most of all by the sheer chutzpah of its author.
For if any American celebrity might hesitate to remind the public of her past, it would surely be convicted fraudster Martha Stewart.
The original lifestyle guru – to whom every social media influencer owes a debt – built a vast business empire around herself, and has done her best – and her best, after all, is invariably perfect – to make the scandal that could have ended her career look like a mere hiccup.
Her comeback was all the more astonishing because her greed and duplicity appeared to epitomize the hubris of the rich and famous.
The new edition of Entertaining is surely the icing on the homemade cake of her rise and fall – and rise again.
More than 40 years after she produced such gems of home entertaining wisdom as ‘a table is an empty space, and filling it is a gesture of thoughtfulness,’ modern emulators like Meghan Markle are still accused of pilfering ‘la methode Martha’
However, readers leafing through the book’s 320 glossy, lavishly illustrated pages today might be struck most of all by the sheer chutzpah of its author
The original lifestyle guru – to whom every social media influencer owes a debt – built a vast business empire around herself
The new edition of Entertaining is surely the icing on the homemade cake of her rise and fall – and rise again
When the book first appeared in 1982, Stewart was still two decades away from that fall, which came in 2003 when she was charged with fraud offenses arising from insider trading in shares of the bio-pharmaceutical company ImClone Systems.
According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, she avoided losing more than $45,000 by selling stock after receiving insider information from her broker. The next day, the price plunged.
The scandal produced a memorable TV moment when CBS anchor Jane Clayson questioned Stewart about the controversy on The Early Show. ‘I want to focus on my salad,’ said Stewart pointedly as she kept chopping her greens.
She denied wrongdoing but was convicted of securities fraud, obstruction of justice and making false statements, and was sentenced in 2004 to five months in federal prison. She served her time in West Virginia (reportedly her last choice) and, as an old friend of Sean Combs, was reportedly nicknamed ‘M Diddy’ by fellow inmates.
Stewart then spent two years on supervised release at her home in Bedford, New York, including five months of house confinement with an electronic monitor.
Although she later tried to make light of her incarceration, she admitted on the Today show in 2017 that it had been ‘an awful, awful thing’ that nobody but murderers should have to endure.
Indeed, the indignities and ugliness of prison must have been particularly hard to bear for someone who had made beauty and perfect living her watchwords.
Pictured: Stewart entering Manhattan federal court in 2004
She denied wrongdoing but was convicted of securities fraud, obstruction of justice and making false statements, and was sentenced in 2004 to five months in federal prison
Pictured: Stewart and her daughter Alexis (left)
Born Martha Kostyra in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1941 to Polish-American parents, she cut her domestic goddess teeth by sewing, cooking and baking for her mother. Meanwhile, her father, a pharmaceutical salesman and keen gardener, taught her to cultivate plants, arrange flowers and design gardens.
She modeled for Chanel (‘I could have been Elle Macpherson,’ she boasted earlier this year) to pay her way through Barnard College, the women’s branch of Columbia University.
During this time, she married Andy Stewart, then studying law at Yale, and their five-month honeymoon that took her to Europe inspired many of her cookery and decorating ideas.
After the birth of her daughter, Alexis, in 1965, she left modeling and became a stockbroker, soon earning $100,000 a year. A Wall Street downturn prompted another reinvention – this time into the sphere that would make her famous.
In the early 1970s, the Stewarts bought and restored an 1805 farmhouse in Westport, Connecticut, the model for the TV studio of her long-running show Martha Stewart Living. (In 2006, she put the property on the market for $9 million having paid just $81,000 for it – a measure of the Martha Stewart brand’s value.)
In 1976, Stewart launched a catering business in the basement of the house with a former fellow model, Norma Collier. Collier was the first but hardly the last to complain that Stewart was difficult to work with. They parted company after just a year, with Collier saying she didn’t want to work a ‘128-hour week.’
Stewart, however, was already cultivating the image that would define her. She catered for celebrity neighbors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, wrote for magazines and The New York Times, and opened her own gourmet food store.
Her husband, a senior publishing executive, proved invaluable for a woman who has now published 101 books. Entertaining was the first of these tomes and four years later she was running a business valued at $1 million.
After the birth of her daughter, Alexis, in 1965, she left modeling and became a stockbroker, soon earning $100,000 a year
In the early 1970s, the Stewarts bought and restored an 1805 farmhouse in Westport, Connecticut, the model for the TV studio of her long-running show Martha Stewart Living
She catered for celebrity neighbors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, wrote for magazines and The New York Times, and opened her own gourmet food store
She married Andy Stewart, then studying law at Yale, and their five-month honeymoon that took her to Europe inspired many of her cookery and decorating ideas
Success didn’t come without controversy. Even back then, she was caricatured as cold, charmless and ruthlessly ambitious. The ‘guru of good taste’ was also accused of stealing other people’s recipes, although the allegations were never substantiated.
By 1987, as KMart’s new lifestyle consultant, she was expanding far beyond cookery into branding and merchandising. In 1990, she started Martha Stewart Living magazine (billed as ‘the magazine for the modern woman’), followed three years later by a TV version. No catering challenge seemed too outlandish: one feature even offered advice on hosting a ‘home circumcision party.’
That same year she and Andy divorced, and Stewart remained discreet about her private life. Later, she was linked to actor Anthony Hopkins and tech billionaire Charles Simonyi.
In 1995, New York Magazine put her on its cover, hailing her as ‘the definitive American woman of our time.’
Plaudits such as this emboldened Stewart to tighten her grip on her empire. So, in 1997, she and business partner Sharon Patrick consolidated all her ventures into Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia – with Stewart as chairman, president and CEO. When the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999, she became – on paper at least – the first self-made female billionaire in America. She still controls some 96 percent of the voting stock.
That vast wealth must have made many people feel all the more resentful of the insider trading scandal. Not that Stewart has had much time for self-examination.
As a People magazine special later noted: ‘Some expected America’s goddess of domestic perfection to fall into terminal despair.’ In which case, said Stewart insiders, ‘some’ people didn’t know the domestic goddess very well.
Her comeback was, needless to say, highly publicized and unstoppable. The KMart range expanded to include home furnishings, she returned to daytime TV with The Martha Stewart Show and fronted her own version of The Apprentice. A lucrative new partnership with JC Penney led to a legal battle with Macy’s over Stewart but she emerged intact.
In 2016, she surprised everyone by teaming up with rapper, turned unlikely bestie, Snoop Dogg for a cooking show that became a ratings hit.
Snoop posted a tribute on Instagram three years later, praising his ‘best friend’ for never ‘snitching’ during her trial. ‘Baby girl kept it 10 toes down and ate that prison sentence by herself, like the true baddie she is,’ he wrote.
In 2016, she surprised everyone by teaming up with rapper, turned unlikely bestie, Snoop Dogg for a cooking show that became a ratings hit
Pictured: Stewart on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue
Her comeback was, needless to say, highly publicized and unstoppable
Her daughter Alexis has been rather less complimentary. In a 2011 memoir, she laid into her mother’s parenting, accusing her of always putting work first. Alexis even claimed that she had been forced to wrap her own presents – advice that is conspicuously absent from Stewart’s books.
Her mother, she said, also embarrassed her by endlessly leaving the bathroom door open when she relieved herself and turned off the lights in the house every Halloween to avoid trick-or-treating children.
Stewart called the book ‘hilarious and enlightening,’ although one suspects that her smile was through gritted teeth.
Commentators like to describe Stewart as ‘indefatigable’ or ‘unstoppable.’ Two years ago, aged 81, she became the oldest model ever to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit edition.
‘I don’t think about age very much, but I thought that this is kind of historic and that I better look really good,’ she said. ‘My motto has always been: “When you’re through changing, you’re through,” so I thought, “Why not be up for this opportunity of a lifetime?”‘
Last month, Stewart launched her own skincare range, Elm Biosciences. Industry experts said they can’t recall any woman becoming a beauty entrepreneur in her 80s.
Coming from Stewart, it feels entirely fitting – just another course in a dinner party that never seems to end.
