Martha Inc. : Behind the Turkey in Puff Pastry, Behind the Meticulously Manicured Herb Gardens, Behind the Hand-Stenciled Tablecloths Lurks One Shrewd Business Mind--Martha Stewart’s

I HAVE A FANTASY ABOUT MARTHA STEWART. WE ARE STANDING at the edge of the 30-acre property she recently purchased at auction in the wealthy New York suburb of Fairfield, Conn. The land is the site of an abandoned nine-hole golf course, now overgrown by rank grasses and weeds: no fairway, all rough. The season is April in a late spring, the weather still faintly raw. But Stewart raises her arm, gestures toward the horizon, and the land turns opulent, the season advancing swiftly into midsummer.

Rows of heavily laden fruit trees suddenly spring from sloping hillsides, and in the wet bottom lands shade gardens appear. Stewart waves with an open palm toward bare ground in the middle distance, and beds of fritillaries and Higo irises and Von Rebay poppies burst forth, blooming in clamorous sequence. Bourbon and damask and species roses leap onto arbors, and stately peonies march in rows down to the sea. I start to speak, but Stewart turns to me, points, and I am instantly covered in verdure, a green man carrying a notebook.

In fact, Stewart is pointing past me toward the border this property shares with its suburban neighbors. There, doing her work with no magic at all, a crew of men trims trees, thatches grass, bulldozes soil. “Looks great,” she hollers, something her many fans might have trouble imagining her doing.

I am spending the day with Stewart in Fairfield and at her home in nearby Westport. Already I have seen perhaps a dozen people working at her behest this early morning, some gardening, some cleaning, some converting the attic of her house into a colossal linen closet. And like most Americans who are aware of Stewart, I sense the presence of many more people working behind the scenes for her: to produce her popular books and videos, to coordinate her lectures and appearances, to produce her music-to-eat-by CDs for Sony Masterworks, her Wednesday segment on NBC’s “Today” show, the bimonthly magazine Martha Stewart Living at her Manhattan offices, and--always the punch line--at K mart, which markets home textiles under the Martha Stewart name. If Stewart, 50, does not have the power to turn journalists into topiary or make nature spring to life with a wave of her hand, she certainly has the power to make men and women spring to work.

More than that, Stewart has the ability to define an entire landscape of domestic dreams that stimulate her fans and irritate her detractors. Her world seems effortless, perfect and within easy reach of every American woman. Stewart doesn’t merely work at home: Home is her work. As a result, there is something unusually personal in the reactions she causes in women, many of whom make room for their working lives only by sacrificing the quality of their domestic lives. Women love Stewart: “She’s done more to aestheticize the presentation of food than anyone in the past 30 years,” said one friend of mine. Women hate Stewart: “She should be shot,” said another. They dismiss her life as a fantasy, but it is a potent fantasy, a vision of grace and creativity in a world full of haste and shoddy goods.

And yet every fantasist pays a price. Martha Stewart’s price has been divorce--after 26 years of marriage to publishing executive Andy Stewart (they have one daughter, Alexis, 25)--and the ire of a venomous press. The marriage is now five years behind her, but the press is not. She has been called, sometimes directly, sometimes by implication, humorless, egotistical, cold, manipulative, bitchy--and a bad cook. Sniped Laura Shapiro in a 1986 Newsweek profile: “Entertaining in the spirit of Martha Stewart is an act of relentless display and ornamentation.”

When I ask Stewart about the way she has been portrayed in print, her face drops, and she says, “I don’t understand it. I’m only trying to make people’s lives a little more pleasing to them.”

To describe a man in her position, we might use a different, less openly sexist, set of adjectives: serious, confident, businesslike, managerial, demanding. And if that double standard gets applied to women in the workplace, how much more readily is it used to judge Stewart, whose workplace is her kitchen, her garden, her dining room? From her we expect only sweetness and light, which is not how most people go about building a business that generates a personal income of about $2 million a year and undisclosed multimillions in overall revenues.

Stewart’s manner is perpetually businesslike, and when she needs to break away from work, the garden and the party circuit offer little solace. Last year she went trout fishing in Argentina. Another diversion emerged recently when Ross Perot, whom she had met while she was working on Wall Street, talked to her about his campaign a few weeks before he ended his non-candidacy. She was, she says, “an early advocate of his courageous program for change.”

Politics aside, most of Stewart’s leisure is really her business. Virtually everything she undertakes has as its purpose the making of a book or an article or a video. She is already under contract for five more gardening and cooking books, including a sequel to “Entertaining,” her first, which has been a golden goose for Clarkson Potter and its author. She is laying plans to branch into cable television. Think of it: 24 hours of Martha Stewart.

AROUND WESTPORT, YOU FIND ALL SORTS OF MARTHA STEWART LANDMARKS: the 1838 house she restored for her next book, “Martha Stewart’s New Old House,” which will be published this autumn; the Fairfield property, which will allow her to design gardens on a much larger scale than she has been able to do in the past, and, of course, Turkey Hill Farm, the 1805 Connecticut Federal house, set on six acres, which has been the focus of her universe for more than two decades.

To anyone who has seen Stewart’s videos or read her books, walking through the main house at Turkey Hill Farm is an eerie experience. It’s like touring the set of a long-running sitcom: Everything is so familiar, so exactly where you expect it to be. The style is Connecticut Proper, just this side of Connecticut Prim, with a strong dose of Rustic Americana. Ah yes, you think, here’s the green-enamel Household cook stove in the kitchen with the baskets hanging among the beams, and here’s the gilded Federal bull’s-eye mirror in the dining room, and here’s the library with its chrome-green bookshelves, and there, just down the hall, is the stenciled parlor. Indeed, what makes Turkey Hill Farm feel eerie is its double identity: It functions as the set for Stewart’s videos and for many of the photographs in her books and her magazine, but it is, at the same time, the setting for a real life. And therein lies the confusion and the apprehension that many people feel about Stewart.

Later that same spring day, for instance, Stewart addresses a crowd in the auditorium of the New York Botanical Society, just off Southern Boulevard in the Bronx. As we drive up to the Botanical Garden entrance, I can see through bare trees the dark brick buildings of the surrounding neighborhood, solidly working-class blocks with overtones of much rougher districts that lie just to the south. This is not Martha Stewart country. In the auditorium has gathered a crowd of several hundred Westchester women (I am one of perhaps four men in the audience) dressed in their weekday tea or luncheon best, many of them carrying copies of “Martha Stewart’s Gardening: Month by Month,” her most recent book.

Oddly enough, this is not really Martha Stewart country either. Though Stewart is wholly Northeastern in temperament and taste, her books have stronger appeal in the Midwest and especially the South, where her kind of leisurely, elegant entertaining finds a natural market. And sure enough, as the audience waits for her to begin her talk about designing a personal garden, one woman leans over to me and asks, “So what do you really think of Martha Stewart?” There is a world of ambivalence in that question. I understand it perfectly. After all, I have been asking friends and strangers the same thing for months.

The simple answer is that Stewart inspires contradictory emotions. Consider the Thanksgiving turkey she wraps in puff pastry. This scene appears in her “Holiday Feast” video, which regularly airs around Thanksgiving on public television. I know a woman who began weeping at the sight of that turkey. “It’s so beautiful,” she murmured, tears rolling down her face, as Stewart lifted the bird out of the oven, its pastry shell glazed by the camera’s lights. “It’s so beautiful,” that woman said, and part of what she meant was, “It makes me feel so shabby in comparison.” Resentment of Stewart is always shaded with envy.

The puff-pastry turkey is beautiful, after all; the pastry itself is just that added bit of effort, disguised as whimsy, that lets you know that Stewart takes the holiday seriously. We laugh (or cry) in confusion at Stewart’s turkey: Her bird makes ours look like a Studebaker surrounded by canned cranberry sauce and little cut-glass dinghies of Spanish olives. Meanwhile, Stewart’s family and neighbors are eating soup out of pumpkin tureens--pumpkins she grew and soup she made from stock she simmered with herbs she grew in beds she designed herself. Stewart embarrasses many of us because, on the surface at least, she has taken the meaning of the holiday more seriously than we have, given it the extra effort that is her trademark.

Indeed, seriousness is the very clue to Stewart. To be around her for long--walking through her April-bare gardens with her and her chow dogs, Max and ZuZu, lunching with her at Sole e Luna in Westport, waiting with her and her assistants in the green room of the “Today” show--is to learn that she is utterly serious about her work in all its phases. To be around her is to discover in person something she teaches in her books: that there is no such thing as graciousness, that essential quality in a good host, without seriousness. It is the ballast of good manners, the weight that balances movement, so to speak.

But the paradox is that Stewart’s fame disguises her seriousness. At her lecture in the Bronx, Stewart stands beside the lectern, tall, elegant, self-deprecating, funny. Silhouetted against the huge screen behind her, she speaks without notes, talking about her family, about the U2 tickets she got for her nephews at the last minute, about her bed of columbine that she raises because they were her father’s favorite plants. It is a friendly mix of casualness and inconsequentiality. She presents virtually nothing of news to the horticulturists in the audience.

But she has pitched her talk perfectly. The audience has not come to hear technical tips about gardening. They have come to see Stewart, to contemplate her celebrity, to explore for themselves the distinction between image and reality. Her message is essentially this: You, too, can create beautiful gardens, you will learn a lot by trying to do so, there is nothing I do that you can’t do, choose your own style. During the book signing that follows, one woman says to her: “I came here expecting to hate you, but your talk was wonderful.”

But while Stewart speaks to this attentive audience in encouraging generalities, a different kind of evidence flashes on the screen behind her. In slide after slide, the audience witnesses the results of her years of work and her extraordinary eye for detail and quality. Sweet peas and roses grow in drifts or are gathered in huge drooping clusters for the house. Iced tea is set outdoors amid irises beside a white wooden gate. Lettuces grow in raised squares of soil, each square sufficient to feed 100 people--this slide from the days when Stewart was greengrocer to her own successful catering business.

Everything from the laying out of onion transplants to the sheltering of roses in burlap for winter has been done with extraordinary care, by her or by gardeners working under her supervision. But in that audience in the Bronx, and elsewhere in America, the natural tendency is to concentrate on Martha Stewart herself, as if the truth of her somehow lies in the figure she cuts in the media rather than in the woman pruning her raspberry bushes.

“I HATE LACK OF ENERGY,” STEWART SAYS. “AND I DO MEAN I HATE IT.” WE ARE having dinner at Jour et Nuit in SoHo the night before her weekly “Today” spot.

Stewart’s short hair is slightly tousled; her look has come a long way from the Junior-League-immaculate style of the early cookbooks. She still has a model’s presence, a reminder of the days when she paid her tuition at Barnard College by working as a model in commercials for Lifebuoy soap and Tareyton cigarettes (“Us Tareyton Smokers Would Rather Fight Than Switch”), for which she wore the Tareyton black eye. “I was 16 years old,” she says, laughing. “I spent a week practicing smoking, and then they asked me just to turn and hold the cigarette near my lips.” Born Martha Kostyra in Jersey City in 1941, she alludes constantly to her childhood home in Nutley, N.J., where her father, a pharmaceutical salesman, taught her to garden, and to her mother and sisters and brothers and neighbors, who pop up often in her books and videos. Her family came originally from Warsaw and near Lvov: Her grandfather was an ornamental-iron worker on the Polish East Side of Buffalo, N.Y. Hers was the kind of upbringing in which she quickly learned the ceremonial value of food and the rituals of the seasons.

She also learned the importance of hard work. In high school, she wanted to be a chemist, and some of the chemist’s passion for exactness survives in her character. After college, she became, for a time, exactly the kind of superwoman her readers sometimes imagine her to be. She was a stockbroker on Wall Street, raised a daughter, started a catering business and spent weekends in Middlefield, Mass., in the Berkshires, where she gardened and cooked.

“We lived like hermits up there,” she says of the time she spent in the small country house. “But that was where I first began to put together the ideas for my catering business and for ‘Entertaining.’ ” In 1982, when that book was about to be published, her husband told her he thought 25,000 would be too large a print run. “But I had been working on Wall Street,” she says, “and I was used to much bigger numbers.” The book has since sold more than 625,000 copies.

Stewart’s energy has always been indisputable. “I come from good genetic stock,” she says, “not much sickness, or anyway no tendency to complain of it. I don’t need much sleep. Longevity runs rampant in my family.”

But her energy has sometimes worked against her where the public is concerned. Skeptics find it hard to believe that she does everything she seems to do: They insist that she must be a mere figurehead, a corporate Snow White with plenty of dwarfs, or that she is in some way guilty of inauthenticity, marketing an image of timeless domesticity that she herself--now more CEO than housewife--no longer lives by.

Stewart’s fans, though, sometimes seem to think that she must be a hyperactive housewife, that she somehow works alone, spinning sugar and ideas and millions of dollars out of her studio kitchen. Those readers tend to ignore the collaborative nature of books and magazines and television shows. They tend to ignore the complexity of Stewart’s enterprises, which are geared to produce not a single lifestyle to be emulated but a profusion of ideas to choose among. Stewart’s pattern has been to move through collaboration toward ever more expansive forms of communication: from her recipe books to a wider-ranging volume like “Gardening,” from the large audience for her books to the immense audience of K mart.

And yet she is no mere figurehead. I ask about her role as editor-in-chief of Martha Stewart Living, which she built up largely with staff who had worked on her books. “To be truthful,” Stewart says, “about 95% of the ideas for articles come from me. I think of the magazine as an ongoing encyclopedia. It gives me a chance to learn so much.”

Martha Stewart Living--a joint venture with Time Warner--is, so far, the truest and fullest representation of what might be called Stewart’s vision of American domestic material culture. The magazine’s backdrop is the history of the home. Many of its articles concern collecting or restoring objects from the past: kitchenware, linens, cutlery, outdoor furniture. At the same time, Martha Stewart Living is trying to reinstate a kind of de-formalized tradition, trying to show its readers that Americans have chosen instant products and instant habits not because they are easier or even really faster, but because we have let ourselves get lazier, less energetic, less knowledgeable of the past, less willing to open ourselves up to domestic pleasures, less able to live with grace.

“I CONSIDER MYSELF ONE OF the original feminists,” Stewart says over grilled dorado at Jour et Nuit. “I’m trying to help give women back a sense of pleasure and accomplishment in their homes.” Her audience is a whole generation whose sensibilities, she argues, have been blunted by the careerism of the last two decades, women who have forgotten, or were never taught, how to make a home into something more than a rendezvous.

What has been striking in Stewart’s life is her peculiar combination of domesticity and business acumen. “When I began in the catering business,” she says, “the caterer was a servant. I started my business with a friend whose husband told her he didn’t want her in the kitchen at parties. When I left the business, the caterer was treated like a guest.” She says this with a tough edge to her voice, which suggests how much she hated the caterer’s ghetto and how hard she worked to get out of it.

Jour et Nuit has filled to overflowing. There is a clamor for seats. We are waiting for Russ Titelman, a record producer and a friend of Stewart, to join us. The maitre d’ tells Stewart that the table is hers as long as she wants it. I ask her what plans lie ahead for her.

“Are you ready for this?” she asks. “We’re planning right now to start a Living Channel on cable. I don’t watch much TV, and when I do I want to see something useful. ‘This Old House,’ those kinds of shows, I love them. The Living Channel will run practical programs--a half-hour show demonstrating how to plant a rose, for instance--24 hours a day.”

For now, Stewart has only six to eight minutes on the “Today” show once a week. The next morning, waiting for her segment to begin, she is wearing white jeans, a sweat-shirt-like top and a sand-colored hooded silk jacket that, she says, will look, through the camera’s eye, more like canvas, more appropriate than silk for spraying in the garden. Then it is air time. Stewart joins Katie Couric behind a table cluttered with props for her subject: integrated pest control.

The lights on the set come up and the rest of the studio dims. Stewart holds up sprayers and organic insecticides and bits of diatomaceous earth. Couric quips and mugs. Stewart keeps the pace moving, pouring out as much information as she can. It’s like an old episode of “Beat the Clock.” Then the red light goes off and her segment ends.

Stewart and I take the elevator to the 50th Street lobby. She has changed from her “gardening” outfit into a pantsuit in a subtle plaid. She is headed for her magazine office and then to lunch with the president of Barnard College. She is carrying loads of stuff, piles of papers and reading. Susan Magrino, her publicist, carries Stewart’s garment bag. We walk out into the day, which will be warm and beautiful, and Stewart’s driver pulls up to the curb. Stewart turns to Magrino and says soberly, thinking of the “Today” segment she has just completed, “Now we can get to work.” It is 9 a.m.