Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes was once asked if it’s true that Martha Stewart is difficult to work with. He said, “No, Martha Stewart is impossible to work with.”
I was never a fan of Martha when I was younger because I didn’t see the appeal. Now, as I’m older, I view her no different than an athletic coach. She has her way of doing things and it’s been very beneficial to her, so why change? Bobby Knight was no angel. Yet some people would say his behavior helped the players get the wins. I’ve seen athletic coaches scream, holler and berate young people for no reason. A lot of parents would call this “coaching.” It’s abuse.
But if a woman gets upset at someone, she’s difficult or impossible to work with. I’ll admit, filmmaker R.J. Cutler gives Martha a fluffy feel of appreciation as if Stewart is a misunderstood person. However, you have to ask yourself if it was “Martin Stewart,” would we get all the hate she does? It’s been 10 days since the Presidential election and people are already saying how much women hate other women as many white and Latino women voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.
By the time Martha started becoming a major household name in the 1980s and 1990s, Women’s Lib and the ERA was still fresh on people’s mind. More and more women were entering the workforce in positions their mothers and definitely their grandmothers didn’t take. I just saw a comment on a social media friend from a family friend who has to be 80 or near there. She said that when she took typing on a typewriter in high school, the teacher said if she doesn’t improve there’s no way she’ll be a good secretary.
I’m pretty sure a lot of other women have heard the same thing or something similar. Martha’s upbringing was in a home where she said she wasn’t taught much love and had a very brutal authoritative abusive father who commanded perfection. Like Joe Jackson, if you threaten your kids with beatings, you’re going to give them an inferiority complex. I’m not psychologist, but I can see why Martha may be “difficult.” When she was proposed to by her future husband, Andrew Stewart, she said she told her father who slapped her hard and said she wasn’t going to marry a Jew.
“I remember that slap,” she says before looking off into space.
Love her or hate her, Martha seems to have been chasing perfection her whole life. But she’s smart enough to admit she has faults. To be fair, bringing up her marriage to Andrew since they’ve been divorce since 1990 seems to be a little flippant. Why does Cutler want to dig at old wounds? Thankfully, Martha tells him that she gave him the letters she sent to Andrew as their marriage was falling apart that he can pull from. And she tells him to do that.
Now, some people might say it’s wrong for her to behave that way. But this is a very painful thing to reveal while trying to have forgotten about for decades. Martha says that Andrew wasn’t faithful and neither was she but Martha says there was only two incidents of an affair. And Martha cutting Cutler’s abilities to keep pushing it shows why she has been a good businessperson.
The irony is the women who she tried to speak to also tried to cut her down for no other reason that she tried to portray a sense of perfection. However, I would argue what Martha has been trying to do is to show people they don’t have to be high society. Remember, she went into a partnership with K- Mart that costs her some associations from high society organization. Now, you have Ree Drummond, Paula Dean and Rachel Ray who were able to tap into that retail department market.
They refer to Martha as the first influencer and one of the first to capitalize on the DIY themes that people today flood social media with. On one hand, you had Bob Vila showing men who maybe didn’t have father figures to show them how to do home improvements and on the other hand, you had Martha who was also showing a different style of home improvement.
Yet the horror of our society is watching people achieve a lot, we’re so happy to see them fall and hit as close to rock bottom as possible. And that’s where the the ImClone case comes in. You can’t have a documentary on Martha without this case, which 20 years later was nothing more than a witch hunt. James Comey, yes that guy, was a U.S. Attorney at the time and he seemed to be wanting to do everything to go after Martha but was upset when the government knew there was no insider trading as originally thought.
But what was worse is how Martha is appearing regularly on CBS Early Morning and Jane Clayson, the host at the time, railroads her into letting something slip about ImClone. But Martha says all she did was make a phone call to her broker, Peter Bacanovic, who told her the stock was about to drop so she sold it. Martha says she made the call while stopping at an airport to refuel her jet on the way to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
However, she was vilified in the media and on late-night talk shows and a poorly received TV movie in 2003 where she was portrayed by Cybil Shepherd. But it leaves you to wonder as America was recovering from 9/11, why was getting Martha behind bars so important? Martha says she managed to make it through the five months (150 days) in prison.
But she was not going to go quietly. I think what has made Martha more admired or respected is that she stood up to the patriarchy who wanted her to plead in the ImClone case. She made a comeback in the most unexpected arenas as a roaster on the dais in the 2015 Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber. Seated next to Snoop Dogg for most of the special, she managed to get some laughs by telling some very raunchy jokes.
Since then, Martha and Snoop have collaborated on a TV show and Martha found a whole new audience. In May of 2023, she appeared on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue at 81. The documentary is a testament to the Vince Lombardi’s statement of “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.”
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 