Lucrative Marriage of Class, Mass

In concept, it’s a hyperactive calendar.

It not only reminds you when the car-insurance bill is due, but if you dent a fender, it tells you the deductible. It alerts you to birthdays and doctor’s appointments. It does meal planning and airs the news, the soaps, whatever else you’re half-watching between tasks.

What’s more, it isn’t bulky and hard to use like a typical home computer. Its flat screen shares space with the magnets and crayon drawings on your refrigerator.

And from whose brow does this fount of Jetsonian convenience spring? Microsoft’s newly domesticated Bill Gates, perhaps?

No, silly, Martha Stewart--the Contessa of Cuisine, the Doyenne of Decor, the Nabob of Nesting.

Let’s call the next phase MarthaVision 2000: The Wiring of the American Woman. Of course, Stewart, who is all about inclusiveness, would never restrict her idea to one gender. She always says “homemaker,” never “housewife.”

Her electronic kitchen command center--code-named “AskMartha”--doesn’t exist yet, but then, just a few years ago, neither did a $200-million-a-year publishing, television and retailing empire now known as Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. What started 15 years ago with her breakthrough book, “Entertaining,” is now a cultural phenomenon. It’s a cottage industry in roughly the same sense that Stewart’s $3-million, Gordon Bunshaft-designed East Hampton estate--her second home in that exclusive Long Island enclave--is a cottage.

When Stewart isn’t busy being all about inclusiveness, she’s all about synergy. Wall Street is growing old waiting for her former employer, Time Warner, to exploit the supposed synergies among magazines, cartoons, cable TV, books and movies that were the point of the 1989 megamerger that created it.

Meantime, Stewart has used frequent TV and personal appearances to help build her magazine, Martha Stewart Living, into what real estate and publishing tycoon Mortimer Zuckerman calls “one of the most remarkable growth stories in magazine history.”

The 2.3-million-circulation magazine feeds a mail-order business--Martha by Mail--that allows Stewart to carefully test-market products and hone her retailing skills. There is a nationally syndicated newspaper advice column and a popular line of decorating, cooking and gardening books, many recycling material from the magazine. Stewart has even created two lines of wall paint--upscale and not-so--whose colors pop up regularly in the magazine’s decorating features.

All the ventures--even the planned high-tech ones--serve a Stewart aesthetic that emphasizes natural ingredients, earth tones, laboriously hand-made gifts and decorations, and a perfectionism that extends to the tiniest details.

Confident Moves to Expand Business

Extremism in pursuit of homely virtue has made Stewart a fat target for parody, examples of which flood the Internet, newsstands and television. No fewer than three network sitcom pilots are in the works, based on Stewart-like characters. Her less humorous critics never fail to point out that her own domestic bliss was marred by a nasty divorce.

Yet Stewart plows ahead, aware that she has spawned myriad imitators, indeed rekindled the whole home-help industry. Samuel I. Newhouse Jr., chairman of Conde Nast Publications, admitted to Stewart that her magazine’s success prompted him to revive House & Garden last year.

The growing power of Stewart’s personal brand name has given her bargaining muscle that she is not too demure to flex. Among her recent moves:

* She renegotiated an agreement with Kmart under which America’s second-largest discount chain gives prime front-of-store position to free-standing “Martha World” boutiques that display her line of sheets, towels and bed-and-bath accessories. Kmart is promoting the wares with $10 million worth of TV ads starring Stewart.

* She jumped from her twice-monthly guest spot on NBC’s “Today Show” to a weekly slot on rival “CBS This Morning” where, instead of earning appearance fees, she controls all advertising for her segment--an arrangement that Stewart described in an interview as far more lucrative. It also sets up her own TV show, syndicated by CBS’ Eyemark unit, which will follow “CBS This Morning” in most of the country when it jumps to five days a week in September. The current weekly version reaches more than 5.5 million viewers.

* After years under the wing of Time Inc., which launched her magazine in 1990, Stewart broke free in February, buying back her business for a price that Advertising Age put at “up to $75 million.” Time retains a stake of “substantially less than 20%,” Stewart said, declining to be more specific about any elements of the deal.

Both sides were cordial in announcing the breakup, but it was Stewart who had pushed for it. Time reportedly had rebuffed her demand for an ownership stake and balked at investing more capital to expand the TV operations. According to a former publishing mentor of Stewart’s: “Martha was not entirely convinced that Time Inc. was prepared to support her in the totality of what she wanted to do.”

Don Logan, Time Inc. president, did not comment on the reasons for the breakup other than to say in an interview that Stewart “wanted more control over her own destiny” and that the company’s pace toward her goals was “maybe not as quick as she would have liked.”

From Tobacco Model to Publishing Empress

Stewart, 55, nee Kostyra, the second of six children of a middle-class Polish-American family in suburban Nutley, N.J., worked her way through exclusive Barnard College by modeling. She posed, complete with a greasepaint black eye, in the “Us Tareyton Smokers Would Rather Fight Than Switch” ad campaign.

She married Yale law student and future publishing executive Andy Stewart in 1961, her sophomore year in college. Their daughter, Alexis, was born shortly after she graduated. Stewart became a successful stockbroker, but she left Wall Street for the home front in the early 1970s.

Ever industrious, she devoured cookbooks and launched her first business, as a caterer. She turned what she learned into gold in 1982 with her first book, “Entertaining.”

Stewart has compared herself to Bronx native Ralph Lauren, another iron-willed maven of style.

But to understand her ambition, it may be more useful to compare her with Walt Disney, whose grip on his kingdom only began to relax 20 years after he died in 1966.

Like the creator of Mickey Mouse, Stewart has spent her career transforming herself into a brand name that serves as the fulcrum for an array of media and merchandising ventures. And like Disney, she must devise a strategy to wean Martha Stewart the brand from its dependence on Martha Stewart the person.

Unlike Uncle Walt, Stewart does not radiate cuddliness. Respondents to a recent Hallmark Cards survey on “niceness” rated Stewart lowest among five celebrities, trailing winner Oprah Winfrey by a wide margin. (As the results began to be publicized, Hallmark rushed to add that the celebrities were chosen specifically because they all were considered nice. “We are not saying Martha Stewart isn’t nice,” a Hallmark spokesman emphasized.)

Nice or not, Stewart is no pushover. She dug in her heels when faced with a lawsuit by a former gardener at her Turkey Hill Farm in Westport, Conn., the six-acre country home that serves as a backdrop for many of her TV shows and magazine features.

Renaldo Abreu claimed Stewart owed him more than $28,000 in overtime for tasks that included washing cars and grooming her pedigreed chow dogs. Stewart testified that Abreu was far from a minimum-wage worker, earning $56,000 in 1994. In a preliminary decision last month, a trial referee sided with Stewart, ruling that as an agricultural employee, the gardener was not entitled to overtime under federal labor law.

Stewart also has sparred with her well-heeled Westport neighbors, some of whom have complained of noise and traffic generated by her tapings.

On the job, Stewart is by all accounts a demanding boss. Former employees have told tales of her micro-management and tirades when orders aren’t carried out perfectly. But she also has attracted a well-regarded corps of designers, photographers and other creative people.

“What hard-driving, ambitious person is not said to be a control freak?” asked action-movie producer Joel Silver (“Die Hard,” “Lethal Weapon”), a Stewart friend whose Frank Lloyd Wright house in South Carolina was the setting for a Thanksgiving feature in Martha Stewart Living.

David Metcalf, a New York-based advertising producer, wrote the classic TV spot for American Express Optima Card in which Stewart, spoofing her image, is shown “recycling” her old credit cards by using them to create a mosaic of Botticelli’s “Venus” at the bottom of her swimming pool. He also wrote the current ad featuring Stewart, in work boots and uniform, taking the wheel of a Kmart tractor-trailer.

Asked about Stewart’s reputation for being difficult to work with, Metcalf shrugged and said: “It’s not a problem if you share her work ethic.”

But who could share that work ethic? During waking hours, she is never idle, and she is famously stingy with sleep, allowing herself only four or five hours a night.

“She really does get up at 4 a.m. and wash the deck,” said a New York ad man who knows Stewart casually. “Most people I know like that would be on Thorazine.”

She is a model of efficiency as a hostess. During a luncheon at one of her East Hampton homes to announce the Kmart deal, she maintained an animated dining-table conversation while scanning the room with her dark brown eyes and giving small hand signals directing the staff to dirty plates or empty water glasses.

Intends to Broaden Appeal

Stewart’s other assets include the telegenic looks and aplomb of a former model, plus a dead certainty in matters of taste and household how-to. She more often calls herself a teacher than an entrepreneur, and it is clear that millions of Americans--especially career women who are more confident in the office than the kitchen--want to learn from her.

They also want to buy from her.

A $65 cake-decorating kit that Martha Stewart Living offered by coupon produced a flood of orders--more than 10,000--that astounded even Stewart.

BMW of North America recently used the magazine to motivate swarms of women to test drive the sleek imports, a notoriously tough trick for an ad campaign.

“There’s a phenomenon here of people who do what she says,” said Gene DeWitt of DeWitt Media, a New York-based media-buying agency. “I can’t think of a precedent for the response she gets.”

Martha Stewart Living, pretty to behold but costly to produce, finally turned a profit in 1996, its sixth year. Magazines typically lose money for several years after start-up but can garner immense profits afterward, especially if they keep growing. MSL’s growth has been spectacular. Circulation climbed 39.7% in 1996--by far the biggest gain among magazines selling 1 million or more, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Gross ad revenue, meanwhile, hit $65.6 million last year, up 97% from 1995, again topping the charts for comparably-sized monthlies.

Although Stewart’s magazine readership is mainly upper-income professional women, she is not content with just that niche. Her goal is to marry class to mass. Thus, she sees the Kmart deal as perfectly logical and shrugs off the notion that associating with a price cutter will somehow rub the veneer off her gilded image.

“How else could I reach 77 million people?” she asked as she hosted a reporter in her unadorned office in midtown Manhattan. Besides, marketing surveys have shown her that more than half of her readers have shopped there in the last three months. “I buy all of my photography equipment at Kmart,” she said.

Eyes fixed on the next mountain, Stewart hopes one day to be selling her own line of gardening products at Kmart. Such a move would be in accord with her strategy of extending the brand as widely as possible.

Brand extension isn’t always easy to achieve. Much as they might trust her on pancakes, for example, it isn’t clear that Connecticut club women would turn to Aunt Jemima for decorating ideas.

Stewart, wary of damaging the franchise, tests each stepping stone before putting the weight of her name on it. Last fall, she introduced a magazine column called “Healing” to offer folk remedies, diet suggestions and other “alternative ways to cope with all types of human ailments, injuries and problems.” If the column is well accepted, it could suggest a whole new thrust into personal health. If not, it was a minor risk.

For marketing strategy, she consults herself. “I’m the reader” is her mantra, and experience has taught her that if something interests her, it will interest millions more.

What interests Stewart these days is technology. In a recent letter to readers, she noted: “Now, I, a single human being, have six personal fax numbers, fourteen personal phone numbers, seven car-phone numbers, and two cell-phone numbers.”

At home in Connecticut, she has a closet containing a fax machine, two printers (color and black-and-white), a computer, a TV and VCR, and two telephones with eight lines. Given her penchant to do two or more things at once, she can dress in the morning and catch up on e-mail as the TV news runs in the background.

Does every woman need to be as wired as Stewart?

“Absolutely!” she exclaimed. “In 10 years, every woman in America is going to want to be wired.”

The main barrier, in her view, is that computers are still fundamentally unfriendly. As an incentive to get women to join the computer age, when she expands her TV show to five days a week she will offer a companion online service. Watch her whip up a mango-and-lime-glazed chicken and presto!--the recipe will appear on the computer.

Far more ambitious is AskMartha, “the biggest and best idea that I have right now,” Stewart said. “I think of another application every day. If I can keep coming up with an idea or two a day, applications where AskMartha can be helpful, that’s 700 ideas a year. That is a very big business and nobody’s doing it.” She said she has enlisted hardware and software experts from her staff and outside to develop the concept into an easy-to-use device that will help people organize their whole domestic life. In some ways, the system resembles home-finance programs like Quicken or Microsoft Money, she acknowledged, “but this is much, much bigger and more complex.”

As ever, Stewart has a full platter.

Beyond the challenge of running a $200-million enterprise without a multinational corporate giant as a safety net and dreaming up such high-tech adventures as AskMartha, she is planning to let her followers participate even more directly in her vision through an initial public offering of stock. No offering has been scheduled, but she has discussed it with investment bankers.

Distilling the Stewart Worldview

Meanwhile, she also must prepare the company to survive without her. It’s an open question whether readers, viewers and advertisers will accept Martha Stewart Living without Martha Stewart.

“That was always an issue for us,” said Time Inc. President Don Logan, Stewart’s former corporate overseer. “Time magazine will always be Time magazine, but with Martha Stewart, it may be impossible to separate the person from the business.”

She said that she and her staff are continually compiling “standards”--precepts of Marthiana, if you will, that help answer the question: “What would Martha do in a situation like this?” The hope is that if her style and viewpoint are properly codified, things can carry on smoothly without her.

Margaret Roche, gardening editor of Martha Stewart Living, said that while she has a good sense of her boss’ taste in matters horticultural, other employees act as arbiters of color, fabric and food presentation in Stewart’s absence. The staff is well inculcated in the Martha Stewart worldview, Roche said.

Still, Stewart, fit enough to have conquered 19,340-foot Mt. Kilimanjaro a few years ago, shows no signs of letting up.

“I plan to be around for a good time to come,” she said, laughing.