The bull in Martha Stewart's china shop

Christopher Byron explains why his unauthorized biography has ruffled the "queen of whitebread living."

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Apr 19, 2002 | Christopher Byron's got a thing for Martha Stewart.

The financial journalist is best known for his scorching critiques of shoddy IPOs during the giddy dot-com years. But in a 1999 column he wrote for the New York Observer about the stock market debut of Martha Stewart Omnimedia (which made her a billionaire), he found a lot to praise in the prospectus, and a lot to admire about her ass.

"Right now, Ms. Stewart is a pretty good-looking woman, if you want my frank opinion -- and I've studied her close up from behind on a Stairmaster (she works out at my gym)," wrote Byron.

In his new book, "Martha Inc.: The Incredible Story of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia," Byron recounts Stewart's flirtatious response. She called Byron up, thanked him for the column and asked: "What do you mean pretty good-looking?"

But, alas, the publication of Byron's unauthorized biography has meant an end to the eyelash-batting.

"Martha Inc." depicts Stewart as a tireless businesswoman whose own life has little in common with the one she portrays in her magazine or on her TV show, outside of the accumulation of ultradesirable trowels and other luxury items. According to Byron, Stewart made her money selling a soft-lens vision of a domestic fantasyland that she's been able to acquire, but not enjoy.

Part financial analysis, part celebrity bio dish-and-tell, "Martha Inc." lauds Stewart as a mogul even as it shreds her personal life. Among the many unflattering charges: She chilled her husband right out of their marriage, she treats friends and family as hired hands and she terrorizes her employees.

Much of this will sound familiar to any Martha-watcher who reads the gossips. But Byron's extensive portrait so annoyed Stewart that Kmart pulled from stores a recent issue of the tabloid the Globe that featured a story on Byron's book headlined "Mean Martha Stewart Exposed," lest Kmart shoppers be discouraged from buying all those inexpensive Martha-branded housewares. The New York Post has also reported that the radio station WNYC, an NPR affiliate in New York, rejected underwriting dollars from Byron's book, for fear of offending Stewart, a supporter of the station.

From his home in Westport, Conn., where he and Stewart are no longer genial neighbors, Byron shared with Salon why he thinks Stewart makes so many people so mad, and why she's mad at him.

Why is Martha Stewart so polarizing? Why do people either love her or hate her?

She's sort of ground zero of an unsettled debate.

Women have been at the receiving end of economic abuse in this country for at least 100 years. Every time the country has its back to the wall they whistle up the women and make them go to work for slave wages, and then the country comes out OK. I mean that's what happened in World War II, wasn't it? That's what happened in the '70s, wasn't it?

When it comes time for all these women to get back in the shallow water, and the men want to come back in and take over all the important work, Martha Stewart becomes the message that says: "You can find empowerment back in the shallow water. You can find as much soul satisfaction setting a kitchen table perfectly as you can in the workplace."

All those messages somehow revolve around Martha Stewart, and they're unresolved messages, because at least half the women in the country don't buy any part of it, and the other half think it ratifies their life and worth as human beings.

There have been all these revelations in the press and in your book about the split between the image that Martha Stewart has created of herself and the "real" Martha, who uses obscenities and screams at employees and runs over her neighbor's gardener and so on. Why doesn't the discrepancy affect people's willingness to consume the image of Martha Stewart?

I think that is pretty easily answered: They like the Martha Stewart message. The Martha Stewart message appeals to millions of women, and they're not likely to be dissuaded from it when they find that it bears no relationship to the real Martha Stewart.

How did Martha Stewart get to where she is? What did she do to become a billionaire businesswoman? What's the story of her life? She sure didn't become a billionaire businesswoman by setting a perfect table and clipping deadheads off the begonias. That doesn't get you to the corner office and a seat on the Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange.

Martha got there by steamrolling everybody who got in her way, just like everybody else on the Board of Governors did, just like Jack Welch, who's a neighbor of mine, too, out here. His nickname is Neutron Jack; his nickname isn't Warm-and-Fuzzy Jack.

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