The startling confessions of the original influencer Martha Stewart

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Martha on Netflix is that Martha allowed it to happen in the first place. It’s not her style.

She doesn’t do anything unless she is in complete control, unless she can switch off the oven or add the salt any time she wants. 

Yet this new 113-minute documentary examines the chequered history of America’s favourite lifestyle guru – warts and all, including detail on her marital infidelities and her five months in jail after being found guilty of lying to the FBI during an insider trading investigation in 2004.

Martha Stewart, now aged 83, is interviewed on screen by documentarian RJ Cutler, and she makes some startling admissions.

‘My husband was very aggressive in bed. I liked it,’ she says candidly. Despite this, she admits snogging a stranger in the Duomo Cathedral in Florence when on her honeymoon. ‘It was an emotional place… why not kiss a stranger?’ she shrugs.

And she is scathing about the men in her life who have let her down. In 1987, that same husband Andrew Stewart had an affair with Martha’s assistant, which ended their marriage. 

‘It was like I put out a snack for Andrew,’ she recalls, then goes on to advise wives everywhere that ‘if you’re married and your husband starts to cheat on you, he’s a piece of s**t, get out of that marriage’. But weren’t you unfaithful first, reasons Cutler, mentioning one of her lovers. ‘That was different,’ is her tart response.

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Then in 2008 her Microsoft billionaire boyfriend Charles Simonyi told (post-jail) Martha that he was marrying someone else. ‘And by the way,’ he added, when they were in bed together, ‘her parents don’t want me to talk to you again.’ Martha was appalled. ‘How could a man who had spent 15 years with me just do that?’ she says, going on to call him ‘horrible’ and ‘stupid’.

Settling scores is always a pleasurable business and Martha certainly makes the most of the opportunities presented on Netflix. Indeed, one gets the sense that may even have been the main reason why she decided to participate in the first place.

If revenge is a dish best served cold, then Martha garnishes hers with bitter leaves and a chiffonade of scorn that is almost exhilarating. 

‘Andy betrayed me – right on our property. Not nice,’ she says, adding the salt. Nearly 40 years later, her anger still simmers on the back burner. On screen she is admirable, glacial, exacting, utterly terrifying. One clip shows a hapless assistant being told off for using the wrong knife to slice an orange. ‘You need a big knife, pay attention,’ she snaps.

Cutler himself is told, more than once, to move on from his line of questioning if she finds it irksome. What is more important, marriage or a career, he innocently wonders at one point.

‘You tell me!’ she cries.

And her flame-grilled exes are seemingly given no right of reply because this is Martha’s show, as it has been since day one. What did you expect from America’s first female billionaire, a woman whose brand was so strong it survived the shame of her incarceration, just like she did herself? Her toughness and resilience, now and then, do her credit. ‘I had to keep my self-esteem and my conviction that I was a good person,’ she explains.

The minimum-security jail she was sent to in West Virginia was known as Camp Cupcake – but it was no picnic. Martha was strip searched on the first day and later spent time in solitary confinement with no food or water for accidentally touching a guard.

During her stretch behind bars she occupied herself by trying to help the other female inmates with their life and business plans. By way of thanks, one of them crocheted a poncho for her, which she proudly wore on her release. 

Boyfriend Charles Simonyi sent a private jet to pick her up; a nice touch, but he only visited her once in prison. Why? ‘I don’t think he liked hanging out with somebody in jail,’ she says. Weaker women would have buckled at the rejection. Not her.

From the beginning there was Martha, and only Martha. She was the original influencer, the first woman to capitalise on the marketability of her own life, the one who realised before anyone else that homemaking could be powerful – and lucrative. ‘She had one gear – forward,’ says a friend.

As depicted here, her trajectory is amazing. Born Martha Kostyra, she was one of six children who grew up with her Polish family in small town Nutley, New Jersey. She went to prestigious Barnard College in New York, got a double degree, became a model (Chanel, Lifebuoy soap) to earn extra money and worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street.

In 1976 she launched an upscale catering company from her own kitchen before turning herself and her business into a global brand. ‘We tried to be a little outrageous, we wanted to attract people’s attention,’ she recalls. Early ideas included freezing bottles of vodka in blocks of ice garnished with lemon slices or flowers and serving a patriotic American cheddar cheese fondue.

Her first book, Entertaining, was published in 1982. It contained more than 300 accessible recipes and covered everything from wedding banquets to crudité platters – Martha never shortchanged anyone. Ambition drove her on, into the richly rewarded realms of Martha, Inc., which included the Martha Stewart Living franchise, encompassing an eponymous television show and a glossy magazine, watched and read by millions.

She spent five months in jail after being found guilty of lying to the FBI in 2004 

She was the lifestyle guru whose lifelong pursuit of the ‘perfectly perfect’ set the pace for all the others who followed.

Without Martha there would be no Nigella and no Gwyneth Paltrow; there would be no Amanda Holden trying to flog her homeware range on QVC, no Kirstie Allsopp urging us to make our own Christmas decorations and no Meghan Markle using jars of homemade jam in a limp attempt to launch her own lifestyle company.

She was always different. From the beginning, Martha was an accomplished homemaker and gifted cook, a woman of prodigious energy and business smarts who saw it as her life’s work to steer American housewives away from pouring a tin of mushroom soup over broccoli and boiled chicken and drive them on to a superhighway of fresh ingredients, good cooking and new ideas. She draped her Thanksgiving turkey in pastry and even suggested cooking two turkeys instead of one enormo-bird – revolutionary!

She had tips on everything from decorating, organising, gardening and entertaining to crafting and even folding napkins into Christmas tree shapes to ‘enhance your holiday tablescape’. She was inexhaustible and exhausting. She kept hens – and launched a paint range inspired by the colours of the eggs they laid. She offered her readers and viewers a fantasy of affluence and immaculate organisation incorporating peg boards, plumped cushions and fully-stocked cupboards.

In the American guru-scape she was post-Julia Child but pre-Ina Garten, aka the Barefoot Contessa, whose television career Martha helped launch. (Interestingly, the two women are no longer friends. Martha says Ina stopped speaking to her when she went to jail. Ina says that is just not true.)

I have been a devotee of both these amazing women for years – I’m not taking sides now! 

Yet today, with such a proliferation of influencers and online experts advising everyone on everything from how to clean a sofa with a saucepan lid wrapped in a cloth to mad Mrs Hinch perfuming her skirting boards with Zoflora, it is easy to forget that once upon a time all we had was Martha and her egg paints and her dill dip and her one-pan pasta and her bulb-potting schedule to keep us on the right homemaking track. 

Yet even today, to look on her packed website, to peruse her suggestions on autumn tasks and Christmas preparation, is to realise that I will never attain Martha levels of perfection.

In each recipe or household tip on her website she is referred to as ‘our founder’ – as if everyone is a fully-paid member of Cult Martha, which of course we are.

And we are encouraged to see and copy how Martha transplants her hostas, instructed on ‘how to take a bath properly’ and even encouraged to establish an outdoor ‘catio’ where our pet felines can play in safety. 

There are instructions on how to fold a fitted sheet, juice a lemon correctly, polish copper the right way, alongside ten different and fun ways with watercress, how to make your own Halloween treat bags and details on baking your bacon instead of frying it to eliminate ‘grease splatters’ – aargh. On and on it goes, relentless in the pursuit of perfection, all of it fuelled by Martha’s uncompromising good taste and boundless creativity.

It cannot be denied that her social and cultural relevance declined after prison, but somehow, with gritted teeth, she built it back up to become the financial powerhouse she is today. 

This is rather blithely explained in the documentary by her one-off participation in an alternative comedy show on US television in 2019 and by striking up a friendship and business partnership with rapper Snoop Dogg.

The pro-Martha case is also made that her guilty verdict and conviction primarily happened because she was a high-profile scapegoat – as the richest self-made woman in America, she was certainly an irresistible target for those wishing to make a point about the evils and unfairness of insider trading. And the punishment that awaited those who dared to dabble.

Yet somehow, Martha Stewart did her time – in more ways than one – and transcended it all. 

She never married again and a relationship with Anthony Hopkins ended after he appeared as Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs in 1991. ‘I could never disassociate him from the character,’ she says. ‘It was too terrifying.’

She says her survival over all these years has been powered by her two life mottos, which are: 1) Learn something new every day and 2) When you are through changing, you are through.

One of the hardest things to do in modern public life is to maintain cultural relevance as an older woman – yet somehow she has done it. Along the way, Martha Stewart has changed the way American women live (and many more worldwide), what they buy and what they think about.

The documentary ends with our heroine alone but unbowed, inspecting one of the immaculate gardens she has established at one of her beautiful multi-million dollar, utterly perfect country homes. As she prunes and ruminates, she has one last piece of advice.

‘If you want to be happy for a year, get married,’ she says. ‘If you want to be happy for a decade, get a dog. And if you want to be happy for the rest of your life, make a garden.’

Martha my dear, I am transplanting my hostas as we speak.

• Martha is on Netflix now.