Martha's Moment
If you haven't seen the Martha Stewart documentary on Netflix yet and you have even the faintest interest in her, it's a great use of two hours of your life. In two hours Martha herself could plant dove white peonies where someone carelessly let red (a no-no color in Martha world) flowers grow in her garden, chide an employee for using the wrong knife to slice an orange, and prep a party for 20 guests.
Watching the film was like reading her magazine, Martha Stewart Living, back in the day. It was always a delicious love/hate read. My mom, my sisters, and I would scour every page, complain loudly about how out of touch she was, then quietly mimic her centerpieces and her cookie decorating and go buy her towels at Kmart.
"I'm celebrating something that's been put down for so long," she said in the documentary. "I think I'm like the modern feminist."
Unlike other home magazines and books that talked down to their audiences by promoting content that was "easy," Martha raised the bar and gave people something to aspire to. "They may never make that cake, but they can dream about it," she said.
This compulsive need for constant improvement extended to her time in prison, where she befriended an inmate who grew cucumbers in the prison garden. Naturally, she used them to make cucumber sandwiches for the women on her cellblock.
Martha's hallmark isn't perfection so much as her dogged pursuit of it. After the filmmaker, R.J. Cutler, released the documentary, she called up the New York Times, and explained the talking points that he'd obtusely, she thought, left out. "My magazine, my Martha Stewart magazine, which you might say is traditional, was the most modern home magazine ever created," she told the Times. "We had avant-garde photography. Nobody ever showed puff pastry the way I showed it. Or the glossaries of the apples and the chrysanthemums. And we prided ourselves so much on all of that modernism. And he didn't get any of that."
Cutler captured her impressive resilience, her sharp tongue—of her trial, "Those prosecutors should've been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high,"—but I agree that he largely missed what her magazine added to the culture. Imagine The Last Dance without Michael Jordan's on-court moves.
As her friend Lloyd Allen, said, "She was the first woman that saw the marketability of her personal life. Martha was the first influencer." If Merrill and I hadn't grown up on Martha, would Food52 exist? Maybe not.
Don't worry, though, I won't ever call you stupid for using the wrong tool in the kitchen. I do it all the time!
Have a great week!
