NETFLIX – ON DEMAND – DOCUMENTARY
Like Oprah Winfrey, in the United States and many English-speaking countries, Martha Stewart is (re)known simply by her first name. She is the subject of a documentary by R.J. Cutler, director of such political films as The War Room (1993), about Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and the sharp The September Issue (2009), shot in the offices of Vogue magazine.
Little known outside the English-speaking world, Stewart is a star of the American press, television and publishing industry: She has just signed her 100th book devoted to the art of living and, in particular, cooking. Martha is a two-headed monster, half Mrs Perfect, half Mrs Know-it-all, with many hands – gardening, DIY, setting the table, entertaining friends, upholstering furniture, wallpapering, baking, cleaning from top to bottom, etc.
A domestic goddess, as it were. It’s a label Stewart eventually embraced with as much grace as her British counterpart Nigella Lawson, whose second cookbook, How to Be a Domestic Goddess (Chatto and Windus, 2000), was titled after her, making the feminists of the early 21st century shudder.
Prison
A prime example of financial and professional success made in the USA, Stewart continues, at 83, to proudly wear her title of America’s first billionaire businesswoman. Starting out as a model, then a high-flying Wall Street broker, she moved on to organizing buffets and dinner parties, before launching the Martha Stewart Living magazine. TV then greatly reinforced her well-positioned status.
Like every successful role model, Stewart suffered a personal setback: Embroiled in a case of insider trading, the lifestyle maven made tabloid and TV news headlines during an interminable trial in 2004, the outcome of which sent her to prison, charged not with insider trading per se but with perjury. The case even inspired a character in season 3 (2015) of the TV series Orange is the New Black.
But this episode (extensively covered by the documentary) fostered a personal and professional springboard that allowed Stewart to shake off her overly smooth public image and bounce back after the stock market crash of her companies: Plummeting to rock bottom on the announcement of her setbacks, her shares quadrupled in value on her release from prison.
Having become – after prison – the quintessential chic badass, Stewart made friends with pot-smoking rapper Snoop Dogg and appeared on satirical TV shows where she made stinging, stinging fun of everyone and herself. At 81, she even posed in a bathing suit for Sports Illustrated magazine, returning to her shows and publications with the same dry, bourgeois charm that made her a success.
Hard-hitting and caustic
A documentary series, The Many Lives of Martha Stewart, in four 42-minute episodes, was broadcast earlier this year by the CNN news channel (now available on Max). The portrait of this faux housewife was more in-depth and incisive than in R.J. Cutler’s film, which remains, for the most part, gentle toward her.
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Former employees have described Stewart as a sometimes abusive boss. And prison buddies assert that, contrary to the claims of their famous fellow inmate, they have never heard from their cellmate again after she left Alderson Prison, in West Virginia, on March 4, 2005, by private jet.
Stewart gave her consent to be interviewed for the documentary but was less than pleased with the result: She was supposedly filmed from her bad side, hobbling (after foot surgery) like a “lonely old lady” in her garden. She also said the authors didn’t make enough use of the archives made available, spent too much time on prison and so on. This litany of grievances was the subject of an article by Brooks Barnes in the New York Times on October 30.
Martha Stewart remains the Martha she always was, at once imperial, circumspect, loud-mouthed, lucid, witty, hard-hitting and caustic. And, as many observers point out, rather uncomfortable, as she is whenever she finds herself in a situation she cannot control.
