It took a flurry of e-mails and phone calls between pub­li­cists and p.a’s but I finally obtained an audi­ence with Martha Stew­art: one of the most pow­er­ful women (up there with Oprah, methinks) in North Amer­ica and now the come-back queen of cui­sine.
She was one of the stars at this year’s annual South Beach Wine & Food Fes­ti­val: a four-day feast on the beach that took place from Feb 19 to 22.
Like every­thing in Miami — home to the SUV, boob-jobs, tanned abs and obscenely large restau­rant por­tions — the event was a non-stop, over-the-top wing-ding. Celebrity chefs cooked up a storm, the King and Queen of Spain attended cel­e­bra­tions of Span­ish food and there were all man­ner of before– and after-parties at swanky hotels like the Raleigh and Delano. Need­less to say, the booze flowed freely.
But meet­ing Martha was a pleas­ant, easy-going sur­prise.
I inter­viewed her in Toronto in 1987 when she was begin­ning her rise to star­dom with pub­li­ca­tion of her sec­ond glossy book called Wed­dings. It fol­lowed her first book Enter­tain­ing which came out in 1982 and to which she is cur­rently writ­ing a sequel.
Known as a per­fec­tion­ist, con­trol freak and over-achiever, Martha attracted a loyal fol­low­ing and her fair share of ene­mies dur­ing the ‘80s and 90s.
I had a love/hate rela­tion­ship with this home­mak­ing doyenne, find­ing her impe­ri­ous and cold in per­son. Also, I dis­liked her mes­sage that women can do any­thing — even sand-blast a house as she did in full gear on one of her TV shows — in the name of cre­at­ing the per­fect home.
But the Martha I met in South Beach this year dur­ing our 20-minute, one-on-one con­ver­sa­tion was a gen­tler, kinder woman.
Maybe spend­ing 5 months in prison from 2004/5, then being con­fined to her home with an ankle bracelet for another 5 months — this result­ing from con­vic­tions of illicit behav­iour on the stock mar­ket — has, it seems, hum­bled and mel­lowed her.
What­ever the rea­son, she was affa­ble, polite and even warm as we chat­ted in the fest’s green room before her cook­ing demo dur­ing which she made sweet-but-simple green and potato sal­ads to go with the lob­ster she’d boiled. Dur­ing the demo, she showed a social con­science by ask­ing the audi­ence to buy these crus­taceans as the reces­sion has hurt lob­ster fish­er­men and proces­sors badly on the East Coast near where she lives.
Her cur­rent projects include a radio chan­nel, a line of house­wares for Macy’s, a TV show (shown in Canada on CBC), a line of eco-flooring made from recy­cled car­pet and her stal­wart mag­a­zine Martha Stew­art Liv­ing.
Her new book, Martha Stewart’s Cook­ing School, is a kitchen bible that offers step-by-step tech­niques for every­thing from mak­ing veg­etable stock to carv­ing a turkey. I highly rec­om­mend it.
She told me she wants to teach bud­ding cooks the basics. She likes to learn and loves to teach. Hence her low opin­ion of TV real­ity shows (Gor­don Ram­say, step right up) that are “schlock, demean­ing and sloppy.“
Martha even spoke out in favour of reha­bil­i­ta­tion in a Christ­mas mes­sage dur­ing her prison stay — a stay that seems to have elicited com­pas­sion and humil­ity in a woman who showed lit­tle of either some years ago. Then again, she is 67 years old and they say wis­dom comes with age.