TABLEAU VIVANT

The surprising endurance of Martha Stewart's "Entertaining."

- BY HANNAH GOLDFIELD

A few weeks ago, when I got an email from Martha Stewart’s publicist, informing me that Stewart had agreed to a phone interview—"tomorrow at 11:15 for ten minutes," he wrote, in response to my request for “as much time as she is willing to give”—my heart began to pound. I'd find it disorienting to talk to any very famous person, to bring the intimate, illusory relationship between celebrity and civilian rudely crashing down to earth. But this felt like something more. The issue wasn't only the magnitude of Stewart’s celebrity but also the nature of it. In the first two decades of her media career, which began in the early eighties, Stewart’s lavish, ruthlessly overachieving approach to the domestic arts—advanced in such austerely titled books as “Weddings” and “Great Parties,” and also in syndicated newspaper columns, a cable show, and her eponymous magazine—made her a totalizing cultural figure, one whose suggestions tended to come across as commands. I was terrified that the conversation would somehow lay bare my own incompetence, my failure to comply.

More than a century into the debate about whether a corporation is a person, Stewart affirmed that a person can be a corporation—a public one, as of 1999, when shares of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia surged to almost two billion dollars in value. And though the insider-trading scandal that landed her in prison, in 2004, dinged her reputation, it ultimately proved that she was untouchable, paving the way for a winking, irreverent iteration of her persona. In the past decade, Stewart has cannily embraced her status as a kitsch object—the chilly, aging doyenne of “homekeeping” who hangs out with Snoop Dogg and poses for Sports Illustrated yet can seemingly do napkin origami in her sleep.