Our Lady of Perpetual Hostessing and Other Secular Saints

Martha Stewart’s tribulations have had me thinking about sacred cows. The term comes from India, an import from the Raj, where it was noted that pious Hindus venerated bovine ruminant quadrupeds.

In our turbulent and godless times, sacred cows -- the human kind, the Martha Stewart kind -- provide pleasing stability. Or they did until recently.

The need for them is buried deep in our collective memory. Medieval hagiographies explained that even vicarious contact with saints, touching the hems of their garments, for instance, improved one’s lot. Imitation of the saints had even more dramatic effects. And it was on this basis that Stewart achieved her lofty status -- she offered a form of redemption through imitation.

Like the saints, Stewart published inspirational texts: Her first book, “Entertaining” (1982), was designed, like holy writ, both to inspire and to instruct. Make cupcakes my way; garden at night with a flashlight, as I do, and you will be saved from the chaos and disorder of the world. Without waiting for the Holy Father, in a 1991 announcement Stewart declared her own canonization. “Martha Stewart,” Martha Stewart mystically said, “is no longer a person. Martha Stewart is an attitude. Martha Stewart is ideas.”

Her energy level and her self-profession of domestic perfection and personal divinity were exhausting to consider. And magnificent. In every edition of her magazine, Martha Stewart Living, a calendar appears in which Martha publishes her punishing schedule of improvement to inspire, possibly to humiliate, her followers.

The first time we met, I took the precaution of checking this intimidating calendar, the better to achieve the appropriately reverential conversational tone. Surprised by an anomaly, I asked her, “How come it says that today you are ‘antiquing in Maine’ when I can see very clearly you are having dinner here in London in Shepherd’s Bush?” I got a stare -- perhaps one familiar to the ex-Mr. Stewart and Securities and Exchange Commission investigators -- that only a furnace could defrost.

Then there are film stars. A visit to the Audrey Hepburn website exposes a rich source of material for the sacred-cow researcher. It also produces a numbing effect, like drowning in a swirling vat of seductively warm, opiated marshmallow. Perfection never knew -- or perhaps needed -- so many adjectives. Hepburn is described as “innocent, ethereal in her rare beauty.” A tragically early death in 1993, at 63, enhanced a reputation already engorged with triply distilled goodness. In her life Hepburn was above criticism; in her death she moved to territory far beyond it. Beautiful, flawless, vice-free. Moral, kind, intelligent. To mutter anything even mildly contrary about Hepburn is to besmirch blameless virtue with the foulest profanity. We all elected her to this impossible status.

Lacking conventional saints of contemporary relevance, we have had to invent them. We want our saints to be immune from criticism, from modification or abolition. We seem to need these fixed points in our negotiation with the real world. We seem to need people worth veneration. We seem to need what Hepburn became and what Stewart invented.

There are other characters who effortlessly claim the status of sacred cow. Moral superiority has sanctified Nelson Mandela. Equally, Salman Rushdie’s famous problems, if not perhaps his literary merit, have immunized him from conventional criticism.

Some works of art are inviolate: Orson Welles’ 1941 feature film debut, “Citizen Kane,” is routinely described as “stunning” or a “landmark” or “astonishing” or “superb” or “awe-inspiring” or “the epitome of filmmaking” or a “masterpiece.” Sometimes all in the same account. It is most certainly a very good film, but why is it beyond criticism? Possibly because an idealized version of Orson Welles supports our belief in the notion of the idiosyncratic individual genius leaping unformed, but absolutely complete, into the public arena.

A sacred cow is someone or something we do not want to criticize. An irreligious culture, we create sacred cows because they offer us a form of perfection. If we are forced to understand their flaws, it is a betrayal of faith. Which is why Martha’s fall from grace has the awful fascination of a car wreck.

Can sacred cows go to the slaughter? Can paradise de-select saints? Surely the answer is yes. As Rushdie himself once observed, “The modern world lacks not only hiding places but certainties.”