Gifted people are often poly. They can rock up in many fields, and always plough a splendid furrow. Flatley, the Riverdance chap, was also a champion boxer and flute-player. Trump, no matter his polarising hues, has conquered heights in real estate, television and in politics. Oprah built careers in acting, in television presenting, in syndicated production, and, by way of encore, in gossipy Royal revelations. 

And then there’s Martha. 

Martha Stewart has lived her American life on the world stage, caught in a protracted game of musical chairs, in which she unerringly finds a seat when the rapping ceases to rap. 

Her trajectory, much closer to that of ‘Innovating Deity’ than ‘Queen of Domesticity’, is the subject of a Netflix documentary by R.J. Cutler. At 115 minutes, it takes half the time of her classic beef Bourguignon, and is surely twice as satisfying. 

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There is so much to admire in this person of gravitas, guts and garlands. What fascinates is how far she has travelled from blueberry scones; and yet how near they are again, by way of circumnavigation. 

‘When you’re through changing, you’re through’, says the imperious 83-year-old maven, straight to camera. She is clad in black; beautiful in her mid-winter, with eyes to off-set the December winds. 

She hands over many personal affairs to Cutler, as independent evidence of the gross imperfections of her life. She simultaneously resents putting words on her fuck-ups. ‘Infidelity’ seems so harsh, when it can be cast as the sharing of emotion and beauty, wrapped in a stolen moment during her European honeymoon. 

She kissed a man. It was nothing. Get over it.

***

Martha Kostyra’s first triumph was to get on the right side of her father. 

At his elbow she learnt how to garden, and by attending to his instruction, she avoided his strap. If love was delivered obtusely in their six-children household, it was because it was shared by way of common action, not symbolic hugs. She learnt how to produce great ingredients from her Dad; and how to cook wonderfully, and host big numbers, from her Mum.

Their modest home was in Nutley, New Jersey – a spill-over neighbourhood of Newark, roughly the shape of a square. Indeed, the principal threat of those 1950s days of urban consumerism was that of being dragged into a square, cookie-cutter life. 

Martha resisted. She believed that normal people should lead extraordinary lives. 

She paid attention to those Nutley lessons: living well does not depend on income; the garden delivers happiness for a lifetime; let there always be place for another setting at the family table.

Aged 13, Miss Kostyra began a modelling career which allowed her contribute to the family home. Pretty and tall, she knew her worth – parlaying the camera work to a scholarship education at Barnard College. She became known around campus for her style. 

Step One to curating good living at home is to curate good style on your back. 

At age 19, she married a wealthy Yale student called Andrew Stewart, whom she fancied as a piece of alright, with whom she had a daughter, and whom she later described as ‘a piece of shit’, when things went awry.

In return, Andrew described his 27-year-long marriage to Martha Stewart as ‘painful and abusive’. 

The director’s camera catches his subject making a throwaway comment that resonates throughout his movie.

Speaking directly to camera, Martha characterises herself as a romantic. She also recalls that, early in their marriage, Andrew treated her rough. And she liked it.  And – She – Liked – It. 

Cutler’s ‘Martha’ reveals Stewart as an unreliable narrator of her own tale. This rhymes with the nadir of her life, which most every viewer knows before pressing ‘PLAY’. 

In 2004, Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months’ incarceration for lying to the FBI, regarding a suspicious share-trade. Prison was a devastating and demeaning experience for her, most especially because it seemed the media was out to destroy ‘Ms Perfect’. But the judicial cataclysm was the making of her Third Act. Surviving that – moving beyond felony – allowed Stewart to be whoever she damned well wanted. By way of imagination and balls, she would participate in roasts, second-hand smoke spliffs, befriend Snoop, own her badass-ery, and become a knockout Sports Illustrated pinup at 82.

***

But enough of the Stewart failures. What of the successes?

Martha Stewart’s insight was a simple one: because day-to-day life is for everyone, it’s worth living well. 

Upon this big, audacious idea – emerging from her catering business – she would build a syndicated television show, a myriad of lifestyle magazines, and a commercial association with K-Mart which brought the promise of domestic beauty to 70 million American shoppers, weekly. Her face sat at the centre of the branded solar system.

Stewart’s success rocketed in the 90s, when brand synergy was under-appreciated and when the cult of personality, a mainstay of today’s landscape, seemed threatening. And because she pushed, she made it happen. When Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia went public, its leader became America’s first, self-made female billionaire. 

A Charlie Rose TV interview catches her in full-flow, in 1995. It is an intense exchange, like an aromatic jus, in which Rose – himself riding high on success and promulgating the joys of ‘self-improvement’ – throws quick-fire questions to test her mettle. 

Surely she is living quite differently from the lifestyle she is promoting, he observes. His interviewee slows the intensity, and takes stock. She agrees with him. Her life does have an essential dichotomy, because she both wants domestic beauty, and she embraces her firebrand status. ‘I believe women can have it all’.

***

The movie ‘Martha’ is an exquisite study of an exceptional person. It left me feeling I too can do extraordinary things. 

Although its dominant theme is an exploration of the pursuit of perfection, I rather its lesser-stated undercurrent – that of the power of resilience. 

Martha Stewart never stopped changing – and has never stopped willing her next chapter to begin. 

I thought of all those American TV hosts from the 90s. Many became croppers over the last ten years, because their behaviours which were found wanting, felonious, or both. There was Matt Lauer, Ellen DeGeneres, even Charlie Rose himself… 

So many of the 90s big-talkers were eventually struck dumb. Exhausted and found out, many have limply staggered from the stage. It’s as if they could not stomach the pain in learning, nor summon the energy for rebirth.

Martha could. Martha did. Martha will.