Perhaps the only professional homemaker to look right in an Armani suit, she marries home and hearth to the great wide world in one stupendously successful package: herself. The corporate captain of Martha Stewart Living Enterprises, Stewart is a synergistic communications empire that embraces books, videos and such products as $110 gallons of paint mixed to match the shade of the eggs laid by her chickens, or "Martha's Signature Giant Cookie Cutter Set". Now she's a self-complete man/woman on her estate, run by invisible serfs. She exudes something sexually ambiguous."There have always been media homemakers in America - public figures from Julia Child to Heloise, author of those Helpful Household Hints. But none ever saw the big picture - the great big interactive picture - that appeared to Martha Stewart Think Delia Smith with the brain of Bill Gates Think Maggie Thatcher if her medicine tasted good Think Madame Mao in China. "She is someone who has done an enormous service for ordinary women who identify with the roles of mother, wife and homemaker She has star quality She got rid of the husband [Stewart is div-orced.] She cut her hair. As New York magazine put it, "Her blue-chip perfectionism has made her the definitive American woman of our time."Camille Paglia agrees: "Martha Stewart is one of the most important forces at a time of crisis in America of the female sex role," Paglia has said.
Today, she is a phenomenon apart: a domestic diva with the following of a rock star. By her own example, she has rehabilitated homemaking after decades of social stigma. A stockbroker turned country caterer, she spent the Eighties producing best-selling coffee-table books on cooking and entertaining; by 1991, she was starring in her own sumptuously photographed magazine, Martha Stewart Living, which now earns advertising revenues of $12m a year; by 1993, she had launched a nationally syndicated television show, which recently won two Emmies. And I love it."It's impossible not to find Martha at once sublime and ridiculous. Blonde, perfect and 54, she is, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, compelling in her tireless pursuit of "home".
Doing things the Martha way has become what the cakewalk was to the Twenties: a joyful craze replete with its own ribald ironies. "I fast- forward through the chocolate curls," says a New York fashion consultant who tapes each and every Martha Stewart show "Never in my life will I make chocolate curls But I watch her. "There's no chance of dilution there!" she chirps."It's a good thing," she adds, as she always does, smiling into the camera before the cut-away, and you feel as though she's just tucked you in to bed. Issues like: don't you hate it when your iced coffee turns watery from melting ice? "There is a very easy solution to this problem," says the media star who has focused the American mind on how to organise a junk drawer, how to "antique" an urn, how to build a raspberry trellis, how to master anything and everything to do with house and garden: make the ice-cubes out of coffee. But these have nothing on Martha: none of the sensual mini-epiphanies that go down like spoonfed elixir, that enter the bloodstream like narcotics, that rock the soul... On other stations, Baptists and Christian fundamentalists are delivering their sermons; The Wizard of Oz is playing on cable, as is The Silence of Adultery. ON TELEVISION screens across America, Martha Stewart stands blonde and perfect in her sun-soaked kitchen on Sunday mornings to deliver her message: home is where Martha is.
