Martha Stewart Comes Clean - 2

goodhousekeeping

continued...

To be sure, the crafts room appears this month in the pages of her magazine, but it isn't just for show. Says Susan Lyne, CEO and president of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, "I was there a couple of weeks ago, and she was sewing this extraordinary fabric into pillows for the couches in the dining room. She was doing it because she loves it." Plenty of things Stewart does in her spare time — garden tours, visits to plant nurseries, hiking — aren't meant to be turned into a feature in her magazine or a segment on her show or a line of bath towels. She just enjoys them, or thinks they're important. For example, Stewart's involvement in finding top-notch health care for her mother, "Big Martha" Kostyra, who turns 93 in September, has led to her donating $5 million to Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, seed money for the Martha Stewart Center for Living, a geriatrics center. Opening in November, it will offer comprehensive clinical care and develop new treatment approaches. "It's something I can do for the rest of my life," Stewart says. "I can keep learning about all the different technologies." She is endlessly curious. "It's my most telling characteristic," Stewart says. "I'm interested in trying anything new."

If there is something childlike in her busyness, there is also something appealingly eccentric. If you didn't know who she was, if someone told you about this local lady who drove a carriage and tended bees, who kept canaries, three dogs, five cats, three donkeys, and five horses, who planted 45,000 daffodils and did so much remodeling she built her workmen their own lunchroom, you might think, Well, there's a real character.

Stewart clearly doesn't care what anybody thinks. She does exactly as she pleases, and you can't help but notice how many of her activities are performed solo. There are lunches and outings and benefit dinners and glamorous trips to exotic places with her friends (who include Kevin Sharkey, decorating editorial director of Martha Stewart Living, and Connecticut landscape gardener Memrie Lewis). There are frequent calls to and weekly visits with her daughter, Alexis, 41 — the only child from her only marriage, which ended in 1990 — who lives in New York City and whom Stewart calls her best friend. ("I probably am," says Alexis, the droll cohost of the freewheeling Sirius radio show Whatever. "People think we don't get along because we're constantly arguing. She can trust me implicitly. I'm not afraid to tell her the truth," she says, adding affectionately, "much to her dismay.")

But Stewart's on her own a lot, happily so, making herself a salad for supper, catching up on computer correspondence late at night, watching movies from Netflix even later. "I don't have time to have friends come and stay," she says matter-of-factly, "except on weekends in Maine. I invite a lot of people to come to Maine."

She likes living alone. "I chose that," she says pleasantly. She seems to need a solo life. "You're not tripping over people." That goes for Charles Simonyi, her beau (and, she says, the only person she e-mails socially). Stewart has known the 58-year-old self-made software billionaire for about 13 years, and they've been dating for the past few. She's not one to go all girly talking about a man, but she does speak warmly of Simonyi. "He's a self-professed nerd," she says fondly. "Very nice, very thoughtful, very smart" — and with a bachelor's fixed habits. "He's very compartmentalized; he knows exactly where he's going to be when," says Stewart, who finds his life a little too "beautifully planned" and suggests that this limits their opportunities to get together. She shrugs. "I just let it be that way." When I ask whether she'd ever consider living with him, she responds straightaway, as if the answer is obvious: "Well, he lives in Seattle and I live here, so it's kind of impossible," she says. "He can stay on his boat for six months at a time, and I have a job."

In April, Simonyi became the fifth space tourist to fly by rocket to the International Space Station, a 14-day adventure. He likened the journey, Stewart says, to her time in prison. "When he first decided to do it," she recalls, "he told me, 'It's sort of like what you did, Martha.' None of that trip was in his control, and neither was mine. He was so admiring of me for having done what I did so well that he wanted to have that kind of experience" — being flung into very unfamiliar territory. "His was much more interesting," she says of their sojourns, then pauses for comic effect. "Obviously."

Her months in jail didn't change her, Stewart insists. "You don't need that kind of ordeal to change," she tells me briskly. "That should not be the stimulus for change, and it wasn't." But Stewart is an ardent fan of the idea of transformation. "When you're through changing, you're through," she often says these days. "That's my new motto, and I'm imposing it on everyone else." She's such a believer in change — by which she mostly seems to mean learning new things, tackling a new project or idea — that she won't give what she sees as her unfair trial and imprisonment the least bit of credit for helping bring about anything so positive.

She used her incarceration as a hiatus, she says. "It gave me an opportunity to read, to think about a lot of things — my farm project [at her Bedford estate], my whole company, and what I wanted it to be."

She's never contended that she wasn't sometimes disheartened — days after her sentencing, she told CNN's Larry King that she felt "shamed," and that the trial had "been really devastating." She seems philosophical about having been what she terms "beleaguered," suggesting that hardships go with great success. And she's proud of the way she coped. "I kept my chin up and my stomach in," she says.

I'm reminded of her extraordinary will, and of a remark she once made to Oprah: "I can almost bend steel with my mind," she said. I repeat it for her. "I got in trouble for that quote," she says. "But you have to think that way when you do the kinds of things that I have to do."

Of course, she brought more to her hard times than dead-on determination. If that were Stewart's chief survival technique, she would have been successful in life only as, say, a Marine drill sergeant. She approached difficulties with an enviable equilibrium — "The more you adapt, the more interesting you are," Stewart says — and a reliance on family. Daughter Alexis was "tremendously helpful," Stewart says. "Because I could discuss things with her, I could put up with everything. She's been through the fire with me." Stewart's love of physical activity stood her in good stead during her trial: "I'd go build my farm or plant a tree; I had lots of fabulous distractions."

She was also helped, then and after sentencing, by her gift for excising unhappy thoughts. "I'm a very good editor," she says. "I can edit out the bad, the hurtful." Indeed, she's said that she actually doesn't remember exactly what crime she was prosecuted for. More than any other quality, what seems to have sustained Stewart in tough times is an innate belief in herself. "Just knowing in your heart that you are a good person — an honest, good person — can get you through an awful lot of crap," she says.

At Alderson, Stewart reached out to the other prisoners, urging them into activities. "We'd have picnics" — Stewart and the other prisoners were free to roam the prison camp's 100-plus acres during the day — "and we'd have dinner parties," she says. She and about eight other inmates regularly exercised together. "We did 500 sit-ups every night, and I taught yoga." She still practices yoga, and works out with a trainer at 6:30 a.m. three days a week. "And I told stories about what it's like to work and about good business behavior. I was a role model for a lot of these women."

She also got to know many of the children who visited their mothers in prison. "They'd come up to her and show her something they had made," Susan Lyne recalls. Once, in the visiting room, Lyne saw Stewart watching a little boy sloppily stuff a board game into the closet. "He looked up and saw her. All she had to say was his name, and he started putting all the pieces where they belonged." I ask Stewart if she's done any work on sentencing and prison reform, which she discussed in a letter posted on the Internet while she was in Alderson. "I am outspoken about it, but I don't want to concentrate on it now," she says. Building her company has priority at the moment, and she's loving every minute of the long hours she puts in. "I went through three years of extreme torture, and now I'm feeling so much better," she says thoughtfully, with no distress. It's not her way to brood over unpleasantness or the past. Stewart is all about relishing the present and looking ahead to the future. "Aren't these delicious?" she says, offering a plateful of shortbread cookies that had appeared with the pie. "Take some home."