Last week, I was interviewed by Ferne Malice at the ninety second Street Why for her long running speaker series, Fashion Icons with Berne Malice. Berne has interviewed Oscar de la Rena, by anevan Christenberg, really everyone in and around the fashion world. We had a candid conversation about my childhood, my marriage, my career, my friend Snoop, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, and lots more. I'm posting it here on the Martha Stewart Podcast. I know you'll enjoy hearing it.
Thank you all for being here. Good evening. It's great to see so many of you here as this has been a remarkable and very special season for fashion Icons here at the ninety two and Why. Those of you who have been coming through the years know I always have a special introduction with anecdotes and info my guests will surprise him or her.
Well.
Tonight, I'm going to be joined by the busiest working woman on this planet. She has done it all and still has more to create and brand and sell. And hell, it's Martha's Dowart. We all know who she is, and I don't want to waste one more minute at the podium talking about her when I can have her on the stage talking with her. So now is the time to cancel your dinner reservations, as we've got a lot of years and stories to cover. Ladies and gentlemen and
everyone else. Let's give a warm and appreciative welcome to my friend, the one and only Martha's do it?
Thank you, isn't it?
Hi?
Oh? Thank you, Fern, We thank you. Very exciting. I read your bio over today and I found out we have something very much in common. We were brought up in Buffalo.
To school in Buffalo. Oh, the University of Buffalo.
Yeah, so my maternal my maternal family, my mother's family all worked and lived in Buffalo.
And I know that that's where you learned canning and doing preservation.
Oh so you know you did your homework. But my brother went to the University of Buffalo. He taught their dentistry and he's retired now, but he still lives in Buffalo, and I love that city.
Okay, So let's start at the very beginning. You were born on August third, nineteen forty one, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Makes you how old?
Oh?
How old?
Am I don't know? You have to do this subtraction. I'm old. I'm eighty two, and Fern is not as old as I am. She was born in nineteen forty eight.
So you and Tom Ford the only ones who called me out on my birthday on this stage. You're LEO. I think you believe in the stars. I do LEO positive traits loyal, wise, confident, a natural leader and generous. Some negative traits opinionated, attention seeking, arrogant and stubborn.
Wow, do you agree with any of us? They go well together, okay?
And some LEO celebrities for whatever it's worth, and they hold up well, Yes, you hold up well. Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, President Obama and Whitney Houston Company.
Yep, and mister Brady and oh, there's a lot of people who are on my birthday too, Carly close.
So tell us about your parents.
Edward Costra Castayra and Martha Martha Roskowsky.
Is it a Polish thing to name daughters after their mothers.
I don't know why. My father wanted his first daughter to be named Martha, after his beloved wife. And they met at guess where in Buffalo. My father was taking up Polish language course he's both parents' children of Polish immigrants who came by My maternal family and my paternal family all came from Poland, some from Levuff and some from Krakau, and they came in the early part of the twentieth century on by boat went through Roosevelt not
Roosevelt Island. They went through Ellis Island, and they went through Ellis Island, and they changed their They actually didn't change their name at the time. Some of their children have changed their names. My father refused to change Casteira. It's really Costeira. And he did all the research at the New York Public Library. He took me there weekend after weekend to do genealogical research. He should have started
an ancestry dot com. But he found out that we were actually from the Isle of Coos, which is in Greece. So I also think I'm Greek, and then I guess they must have been mercenaries going up to Poland. And my mother's family settled in Buffalo, New York. My grandfather was celebrated on his ninety ninth birthday as the longest living member of the Iron Workers Union in Buffalo. He was a decorative iron worker He did all the balustrades
and altars in Buffalo and those big churches. And he had hands who never wanted to shake Grandpa's hand because he would break your little hand. No, he's so strong. He had the anvil all the time in his hand. But he very artistic and a lovely, lovely man. And he lived on ninety nine. He was an amazing.
They had a very positive influence on your upbringing.
Oh very much. So. I would spend a month a summer every year in Buffalo. I took the railroad by myself with a sandwich up to Buffalo, just one sandwich, the one sandwich, and I must have had a little cup of milk or something. But my mom took care of that and got on the train in Newark, New Jersey, and ended up in Buffalo.
Okay, you have five siblings, yes, how do you fit in?
I was second oldest, my brother Eric with the one who went to University of Buffalo. I then my brother Frank, who lives down in Alabama, and then my sister Kathy, who lives sometimes in Austin and sometimes in Greenwich. And then my two youngest siblings unfortunately died not long ago.
You're still close with all the ones that. Oh yeah, okay, you've said in some interview that I read that you were the favorite child of my father. How was that shown?
Well, I guess I paid the most attention to him. Dad was Dad was if you know the play Death of a Salesman. My father was Willie Lowman and a sort of a disappointed uh not. I mean, I can't say my father was unsuccessful. He raised amazing children, so
that is a great success for anybody. But he was always a kind of like deprecating, and but also he was he was the Eagle Scout counselor and he would sit on the stage, bear chested, with a great big Native American interest on and he would show off like that, and then he would go back to selling pharmaceuticals. He started out selling Shaefer beer. You know, he was a salesman. He was, but he felt like he had never made it.
And I always felt very bad about that. And I was very close to him, and he was the one who really educated me in literature. When I read the when I read Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, he had to and I was like eleven years old. He had to explain to me with a scarlet lettermant. Very educated man, very well read. He played the violin by ear. He would walk around the house shirtless, playing the violin all the time. He was always shirtless. I don't know why.
He was like six two and a half, blonde, curly hair, blue eyes, and very handsome and wore beautiful clothes. And that was Dad.
He sounds fabulous. Okay, your mother taught you how to cook and sew. What was her.
Favorite dish that she taught you, Oh, PIROGI And I still make her pirogy it's going to be. That's one of the recipes in my hundredth book. Yep, my hundred favorite recipes. But I stood by your side. I was like the student of the family, the serious student. And you know, my brother, older brother was the hunter, the trapper. He would bring home the muskrats that he sold the skins to Sears Roebuck and you got like fifteen dollars
of skin. So those muskrats were coming in during the February and March months when the muskrats were out breeding, I guess, and I had to do the skinning because I was the neatest, and you'd hang them up in the sink in the basement, over these old soapstone sinks. And I had a scalpel, and I was like a surgeon, so I could get them with no holes in them. That you get more money if you didn't have a hole in the muskrat skin. But he was also a hunter and a fisherman, so I tied all the flies.
So if the people in the audience any men are who are trout fishermen, I tie the best flies, not those flies, the little flies.
All of this makes perfect sense given how you're life and career evolved. Even at that age you were doing oh yeah.
Entrepreneurial yep, baking. Mom was a great baker, but she always asked me for my vinagrette recipe because I made the best vinaigrette in the family, and they still ask me for it.
Are you going to share that with that?
I've shared it up a million times and they still don't know how to make it.
Do you all know a vinegrete recipe?
All right, we don't have to get it'll be in the hundredth book.
Describe one of your first jobs at ten years old. You were babysitting for some very famous people's children. Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra.
Oh yeah, all the Yankees hired the girls from Nottley High School to come to like Englewood and around there the George Washington Bridge to babysit for their because we were known as the reliable ones. And of course, what the heck? I never got a baseball I never got
a baseball card, nothing from these guys. And the only one who remembered me sort of, his wife remembered me very well was Yogi Berra, and so I was babysit for his children too, And up until a couple of years ago, I was still seeing Yogi Berra at Yankee Stadium, as I still love those stupid Yankees.
Okay, we'll pass on.
And I did the first pitch to I think two or three years ago. Yes, yeah, I didn't quite make it to home plate, but it was right right in front of home plate, which when you watch all the other silly first pitches, I mean most of them, I don't even get even ten feet within the homeplate, and most of them go off like the third base or their first base. I got it straight, and I practiced. I practiced.
And you also organize their birthday parties.
Oh yes, we did a lot of birthday parties. Yes, that was That was the beginning I was. I was organizing birthday parties from the time I was maybe eight years old, seven or eight years old. I was very good at organizing and entertaining.
Okay, it's fifteen though, you started modeling. How did that come about?
Well, a neighbor across the street, this beautiful ballerina girl across the street, and she said, you know, I make a lot of money on weekends modeling. And she was in ballet school at American Belly School in New York, and she said, why don't you come with me to my agent. They'd like you. So I went on the bus with her, the number thirteen bus, and we went to Eileen Ford and I signed up with Eileen Ford for a short, short stint. It was, you know, for me,
kind of frightening but fun. And then Barbara Stone saw me. She was at Stuart Models, and she said, oh, you must come here, and she and her partners liked me a lot and got me really great jobs. And I really paid for my way through college with the residuals from all the commercials I did. So like at sixteen, I was, oh, I did Tarrygent. I had to learn how to puff. I've never smoked, but I learned how to puff very sexy cigarette Tarrytan with the Black Eye.
And I did Life Voice soap. I was a married woman. I was sixteen years old and I was a married woman in the commercial. It was very and we photographed it out at Perry Como's house in Shelter Island. Even had a house out on Schulter Island or something that's
so they said it was his house. And I remember these days so clearly because it really was kind of an important step in my life because I learned how to behave in front of a camera and I've been doing that ever since that I don't feel self conscious, I don't feel angst, nothing, nothing that people talk about. It was kind of fun and I also learned, you know, what angles and what looks good, what kind of smile, all of that stuff.
So you were you were doing a lot of this modeling while you were at Nutley High School. Were the other students jealous? Did that create any issue?
I don't. I don't think they were jealous. But they all watched gun Smoke ause my commercials were running on gun Smoke. And that was the number one program at the time, and everybody would be glued on Tuesday nights to gun smoke and they would laugh laugh at me the next day at school. But like I was the only girl in the in the trigonometry class, and I would you know, it was It was an odd, odd time and I was just finding my way. I was a good student, very good student. But I and I
loved my school. I love Notutley High School, and yeah, I just loved it. And I used to have the whole football team come over for breakfast. You know. My mother was very My mother was very kind to whoever I brought home. We would bring the teachers home. My parents were both teachers, so they appreciated us liking the teachers. And my mother always said, the teacher is always right. And I still feel that way, and I get so depressed when I see how maligned so many teachers are these days.
And my last guest on this stage also said that your parents are always right.
I ask my daughter, Then.
You attended Barnard College of Columbia University and apparently turned down a scholarship ten.
Yu, I did. I applied. I wanted to go to Stamford in California. I had never been to California. I had read about it, and I really wanted to go there. And I applied and I got a scholarship. I don't even remember now if I got accepted. I don't think I did really good. I don't think I really finished the application. But I got a full scholarship at NYU and a partial scholarship to Barnard. But I went up and looked around Barnard and saw it's proximity to Colombia.
It was such a nice place, and Barnard was very amenable, and the president was so great, and so I went there and I I major majored in history, economics, and architectural history with a lot of miners. I mean, I took as many courses as it could possibly take.
And at that stage studying those things, what was your plan or dream that you thought you would do when you graduate.
Well, early on, I didn't know. I was just so interested in learning as much as I could about as many subjects as I could, taking art classes with a great professor, whichcover over. At Columbia, classes were totally open. You could go to any class at Columbia and you could go to graduate school classes. You could do anything. And my favorite place to study was in the architecture Library Avery. It was such a beautiful little library and
I studied there all the time. I don't I didn't really think so much about what the career would be. I started a toy with the idea of being an architect, and because I'm always studying in this architecture library.
But to make money during college, you also models for Chanel.
I went to Paris that my agency sent me to Paris for a stint, just a Stewart agency. Yeah, in the summertime, and it was it was so odd because I didn't know what to expect. I was studying French, so I could speak a little bit of French. They put me in the Rue de Journal in the Hotel Scundena V. I still remember my room up on the fifth floor and walk up and I had so much fun.
But I got in a line because like one of my dresses that I wore to a go see was wrinkled, and they called New York and said she came in a wrinkled dress. And I never did that again. But I did model in some of the shows and I had I had really fun, and they had parties every single night, and then you would work after the parties because all the collections were available only at nighttime because they were on the runways during the day. So I was doing the photography part. So you start to work
at two o'clock in the morning. It was it was weird.
So that was your first trip to Paris. Yes, memorable. Yes, you were also on the cover of Glimbor magazine and the ten Best Dressed in College issue in August nineteen sixty one.
Yeah, and that was a college I was dressing myself in homemade fashion. Do you remember Shaney. No, it was a it was a high fashion house right on like fifty ninth Street off of Park Avenue. A friend's mother who was pardon.
Bill Cunningham, worked with.
Oh she did, didn't know that. Oh, anyway, they would buy patterns in Paris, so though they were buying Chanel and Bent Valenciaga and different patterns lon Van and they would bring the patterns home and then make and the fabrics and they would make them for their clients here in New York. And so I got the patterns and so I would be cutting, you know, beautiful dresses. I still have a beautiful chanel jacket that I made in
my in my attic and my archive. And I still have one of the beautiful dresses that I made from a Lonvan dress which hide with wist. It was very nice, complicated and beautiful.
What did you remember what you wore on the cover in the Glamour shoot? No, a hat?
I think I had a hat, something pinkish, h okay. So also it's in the archive.
Her archive is where we all want to be, okay. So while in college you also met Andrew Stewart.
Oh I did. First. Let me see, the middle of the first year. His sister, who was a fashion icon the time, married to Stanley Love, the children's dress manufacturers. You remember Love dresses. They were always had the backpage ad of the New York Times magazine and little cute
little girl's dresses. And she would be driven every day to school in a Rolls Royce that had a cab in the front for the driver, and she would sit in the back and she was very like, very pitchy toitchy, and I thought, God, this is she must be interesting. I'm going to have to talk to her. And she was in a couple of my art classes, art history classes, and she came up to me one day and said, would I'd like to have a date with her brother, who was at Yale Law School, And I said, yeah, sure.
She showed me a picture and he looked okay, and I said sure, have him call me. And about three months later he called and we had a first date in New York, went to a restaurant like a Japanese early Japanese restaurant, like on fifty sixth Street on the East Side, and fell in love. And I I had never really dated anybody, seriously, I had never slept with anybody either, and we did all that, and it was a lot of first and we got out of love
at first sight. And my father got very upset with me for beinging, you know, saying I was going to get married. We got married when I was nineteen nineteen, Yeah, nineteen.
So how many how long did you know him before you got married?
Not not even a year?
Not even a year?
Yeah, but it's the true.
You kept him waiting at the altar at Saint Paul's Well.
We had a lot of tribes coming from Nottley, New Jersey to Saint Paul's travel and it took a little longer than my father anticipated, and we had to find a parking spot, you know, and whole thing. And we had a very small wedding which I paid for with my modeling earnings, even.
Though he's from this family.
With bo yes, but you don't those days. The bride paid for the wedding and the bride paid for the reception, which was at the Barbary Room in the Berkshire Hotel. And I had never I had never had a luncheon and it was a lunch, and never had a fancy lunch and any New York establishment. So I did all the planning and they were very nice to us.
And what was your wedding dress?
A homemade My mom and I made it. It was white Swiss embroidered organdy, a short, very bouffont skirt with a tiny and my waist at that time I was nineteen and my waist was nineteen. I still have the dress. I can prove it. It fit me and a tiny little buttons like thirty five little organdy, you know, covered buttons down the back, very pretty big sleeves with little tiny wrists, and a little pill box hat because at that time pillboxes were big and I had my hair
and upd with a thousand hairpins. I hated that hairdresser because then you had to take all the pins out while you're on your owage to the honeymoon, you know, and that was kind of painful. And where did your honeymoon in Vermont? We drove a little yellow Mercedes Sedan. I brought my husband's car up to Vermont and stayed in little inns or some places on the way. It was nice.
He was scoping at property for later in life. Yeah, okay, So nineteen sixty five it was an important year. You gave birth to Alexis Stewart, Yes, who is now fifty eight years old.
Yeah, she just turned fifty eight, can you believe it? And she has two of the most fabulous children, eleven and twelve.
Jude and Truman. Yeah, are you close to them?
Well, Jude just sent me an agenda for the weekend. This girl is twelve. She just started at a new school. They were at Avenue School downtown, where they became fluent in Mandarin. They're also fluent in Spanish and they are she's a dancer at Alvin Ailey and he's a soccer player. But she sent me an agenda. Could I please bring six friends? A five friends. They're going to be six of them on Sunday morning, pick up at eight o'clock
in the city. And then a list It's a page long, this long list of pick apples, make apple cier, make apple sauce, make apple pies and tarts to take home. And then there is horseback riding, two days, sandwiches, picnic outdoors, sleeping in Woodland Cottage which has nobody's ever slept in the Woodland Cottage. It's the most remote building on my property. And they want to sleep out theres and it's very cute and we're going to take pictures.
But I wonder where she got that from. That was.
But you know, I had to set up the whole cooking school that I mean, this was my Columbus Day weekend. I used to go to Maine on Columbus Day and take my friends. Now I'm entertaining apple six twelve year olds and I haven't even met three of them. Three of them I haven't met yet. And their mother's called to find out where they're going to be safe and where they everything was going to be okay.
I think they know they'd be saying, but.
I don't know if they know who I am. I know, you know, Judea is very they're very private, these kids.
Well, and your daughter has said in some print while back that she grew up with a glue gun pointed at her head.
I must tell you that she is an amazing designer. She makes all of her jewelry, and she makes Jude's jewelry now and so yeah, so what she learned how to do.
And she's also said, which I find hard to believe, that you hate Halloween and would turn off all the lights so no one will come trick or treating.
Well, that was only when I was not happy, you know. And you know, some Halloweens, I'm happy, and some Halloweens I'm not happy. Just look online at Martha Stewart Halloween costumes and you will see the most extraordinary lineup of Halloween costumes. I have the best Halloween costumes of anybody on earth. And so Alexis was not paying attention those years.
Okay, so this one, you're gonna have the lights on this time?
Oh yeah, yeah. The horses just went out. I had these michonized horses that we sold in Grandon Road. They're large skeletons of beautiful horses, and they light up and they neigh. They make evil and the driveway and so they're already out in the driveway. They got put up today. The pumpkins have arrived from the garden and from the pumpkin farm, and they're all out there now, and then other things will be happening.
It's Octoberfest at Martha's World. Okay, So then we go to sixty seven seventy two. You began your career on Wall Street. How did you get your start there?
I decided after school that I did want a career in Wall Street, and I sort of got interested in investing, bought some stocks through my father in law, and started to learn about American companies, and I thought this would be an interesting an interesting place to go. I interviewed Merrill Lynch, I interviewed Parker red Path, something that's a
class Parker and red Path. They were too snotty. And then I interviewed a little firm called Pearlberg Moness and these go go guys, I mean they were the wild guys. That was if you saw Wall Street the movie, this was Wall Street times ten, and that appealed to me. I just really I really liked that atmosphere because they were making a lot of money and they were investing in very avant garde companies like McDonald's. Can you imagine McDonald's.
They were early early investors in McDonald's, which has been one of the best investments ever. And they were investing in something called Electronic Data Systems EDS. They gave me some really difficult clients. They gave me the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. They were really hard. I had to go to Rockefeller Center and pitch them stocks. They gave me Fidelity in Boston. I had to take the plane up to Boston and I one day I my husband said to me and I said where were you all day? And I said, well,
I had to fly up to Boston. I took this funny little man, he's like right out of the Army, Ross Parrot to sell electronic data systems to Fidelity and Ross Parrot, I mean he ran for president. Remember he invited him and not on the right party, but he invited me to his to his acceptance speech when he was running. And I had so much fun with him. He was really interesting and that company was really interesting.
Are there many other women there at the time I was.
There was one other woman called Donna. She was tough. She got bitten by a shark and then she stopped working a real shark, a shark literally, yeah, yeah, real shark. And and these guys were collecting all right, Barbara Nessen's were hanging on the wall, and Robert mother Wells. I mean, this was a wild place, just like the movie. And the education that I got was so good.
Yeah, ask you what stayed with you from that? What did you learn? What was the most important thing you learned from that?
Was good research? Yes, I learned a lot about research from Frank Williams, who is still working and still doing stuff, and he's just amazing. How important really researching companies like researching Tesla. Okay, you have to research these companies before you really take a stand on them. And Apple and Microsoft, and you can also have a boyfriend who worked at Microsoft. That was a good one. That was the good boyfriend.
And I learned a lot about software, and I learned about a lot about Microsoft and about what they do and how they do it.
Were you able to buy those stocks?
Oh yeah, yeah, bought everything you know.
That was a good job. Then Okay, tell us about moving to Turkey Hill Road in Westport, Connecticut and restoring eighteen oh five house. Was that your first major renovation project.
Well, we had a little cottage in the Berkshires first, and we learned how to do plumbing and carpentry. I was a bad carpenter. I was an even worst plumber. But I was very good painter, and very good decorator, and very good at at finishing things. And you would not have liked my kitchen cabinet so much, but I did build the entire cabinet cabinet, all the cabinets in the kitchen. And this was like a playhouse in the middle of nowhere in Middlefield, Massachusetts, right down the road
from Glendale Falls. Some friends down the street had a TV and we watched our moon landing. That was so exciting, and it was. It was a fantastic time, and it was a very nice upbringing for my daughter. She loved it there and she became a horse of Ventor and she it was. It was all very nice. But then then Westport, then we bought Westport, Andy, and I we
shouldn't have gone that far out. I mean, it was it was a long commute but actually he was working in Greenwich and I was working in New York, so the onus was on me to go all the way to New York every day. So it was kind of hard. But I loved my house. It was an eighteen oh five farmhouse, Federal farmhouse. It was complete wreck when we bought it on Cheo acres. We bought the next chee acres, and then we bought another shoe acres, and so I was on six acres, which I transformed into a very
beautiful garden, which is still extremely beautiful. The new owners, the people I sold it to you about twenty years ago, have taken amazing good care of the place.
Was it at this house that I read that you reportedly had very risk and nude pool parties.
I don't know where that comes from. I never had a nude pool party ever. I think people swam in the nude, but it was not a party.
Much better. I'll be sure to fix that.
I want to know where that comes from.
Oh okay, So then was it in that basement In nineteen seventy six, you and a model friend, Norma Collier, started a catering business.
Oh yeah, norm mccaire, who was also one of the ten best dress college girls the year before I was and Norm M. Collier was a very sort of stiff woman with two kids and a German husband, and she was very, very strict, And she and I became partners in the Uncatered Affair. That was the name of our catering business. She lasted less than a year, and she was a good cook, but she did not want to work hard like that. That was hard work.
Do you said Julia Child was a huge influence. Did you really cook every recipe in her two volumes?
I absolutely did, mastering the artifle. And I should have been in that movie.
You should.
That movie should have happened. Then I would have been a much better Julia. Julie Julie. I'm not Julia. I would have been Julie Meryl Streep. I could have been the student, but I was too old by then.
Also, with your catering business in nineteen seventy seven, you were hired to see the opening party have a gorgeous news store in New York called Abitare on fifty seventh Street between third and second. Do you remember that.
Oh?
Yes, I was doing the pr at the time.
Oh you were a time I met you my party. Nice.
I'll tell you a party was beautiful. That It's the first time we ever saw tables of cruditay that were not just strips of carrots and celery. Everything was in you know, there was our chips, cabbages and everything was inside the ridicio heads and the cabbage heads. It was gorgeous. But you made everybody in the stort crazy. Why because you tried to move everything around and you you were like making them all nuts. And I remember saying my friends,
she's never gonna make it in New York. So much for my prediction.
But I did the big party in the armory for the Folk Kurt Museum antique show. That was one of the funnest parties because I brought in cages of chickens, live chickens that were growing, and bales of hay. This is before the fire department got smart, and and that was that was such a beautiful party and people are people still talk about that because it was unusual. Absolutely, and now it's not so unusual to see live chickens walking around in cages and stuff, you know, like cows.
Cows are at parties now.
Yeah, Okay. Then Andrew became the president of Harry Abrams Publishing and he hired you catering company do a big book release for a title that was a very very successful book, The Secret Book of Nums.
Yes, but the first one was Fairies. The party. That party was Fairies, and it was by Rune Portfleet of Dutch, author and illustrator, and we did the Fairies party, and that's where I met That's where I met everybody in publishing. I met Alan Murkin, who was running Crown Publishers at the time, and what a lovely, lovely man he was, and he was walking around looking I had girls dresses Fairies.
We had it at the US Customs House, which is one of the great landmark buildings here in New York, way down in the Financial District, and I had every All the girls had wings and they had little gossamer dresses and serving. We cooked omelets on those little stoves all night long. The late party guests we're invited to come like at ten o'clock at night and stay until
two or three. My mother in law decided to do the code check and she forgot to give numbers and just a little, just a little glitch in the evening because nobody could get their coats. It was so horror horrorfic. But I remember that was the only bad thing about that party. But it was such a beautiful, beautiful party. And mister Murk and Allan invited me to come and talk to them about doing a book. And that was your first big book, And that was my book, Entertaining.
How many of you have that book?
I can't see anybody. It was really a story book. It was a picture book, and it was a recipe book. And I worked on it with a woman called Elizabeth Hawes who was married to a crazy guy called Davis Weinstock.
And your next books were done under the Clarkson Potter.
Yeah, that's cool, that's Crown. Yeah. Clarkson Potter is an imprint of Crown Publishers. And I've been with them ever since nineteen eighty two, so that's over forty years.
And that was the same time that a good friend of mine who you knew well, Lee Bailey, was doing cookbook Oh love. Those were the first real cookbooks with photographs. Oh yes, the food before that, you never saw pictures of the food exactly.
And Claires and Potter at first when they saw that Entertaining and the volume of pictures and texts. They said, well, how about black and white? I said, absolutely not. It has to be a full color book. It has to be a beautiful book in addition to being a useful book. And so that's been the whole that's my modus operandi in for books. It has to be beautiful, it has to be useful, it has to be practical, and you have to be able to read it, and you have
to be able to read it. So we're on the hundredth now.
Well, the books followed Martha Stewart, Quick Cook, Martha Stewart or durvs Martha Stewart, Pies and Tarts, Weddings, The Wedding Planner, Martha's Do Secrets for Entertaining, Quick Quick cook Menus, Martha's Steward Christmas. And now it's up to one hundred books. That's pretty Yeah, it's very exciting. One hundred book, come on. And that was followed by endless articles in magazine's newspapers, TV appearances on Oprah and Larry King. Any of those experiences stand out to you as well.
I still have my first interview on Oprah when she was in Baltimore. It was it was so interesting. It's so interesting to look at that interview with Oprah then and then and see Oprah now. It's it's incredible. And the same thing with Rosie O'Donnell was early interviews with Rosie and being on her show the whole My life has really spanned so many decades that and so many interesting things happened in each of those decades, in terms of media, in terms of fashion, in terms of just lifestyle,
evolution of lifestyle. It's been a very interesting, interesting life.
That's why you're here tonight, thank you. Oh but then it kind of that time your marriage was over. You separated during the wedding book tour.
Now take that and that was so cruel. Ugh, it was so cruel having to talk about weddings when you're in the middle of a like a not a very nice divorce.
Well that was after twenty six years together. And you were quoted in CNN saying and in twenty seventeen quote, I had to sacrifice a marriage because of the lore of the great job, the fabulous workplace. But I don't regret it at all, because what I've done is something bigger and better than just one marriage who was nice.
I must have that's okay, and have to remember to look for that one up.
I'd be a little embroidered on a pillow. I also read that you dated Sir Anthony Hopkins for a while but broke up because you couldn't stop thinking of him as a Hannibal lecter.
Well, that's true too, because I was introduced to him by Tom Cruise when he was still married to Nicole. And they took me out to Tom Cruise. That's no, that was nice. They took me out to dinner with Anthony and Sir Hopkins and out in California, and then he took me back to his house. It was a nice house, it wasn't great, and and I was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel and and I said I had to go back to the hotel because I had to work the next morning. And then he said, please,
you know, come back to come back tomorrow night. And he was very nice, very very nice. But then I was trying to think if I could possibly invite him up to Maine, because I have this large home in Maine, and I just couldn't think of having him stay on this, like the second floor, because it's too close to Hannibal. I mean, really, he's a very good actor. How stupid he was. He's a very interesting man. I'm stupid.
Other famous manudated famous.
The man who invented word in excel for Microsoft. He was number thirteen employee at Microsoft. He's a geek. He's his t shirts read eminence geek. And so I should have taken that as a but that was fifteen years. I duted him for fifteen years. And and he you know, he had the he had the boat, he at the plane, he had the helicopters, he had you know, all that stuff that was a transportation. And then he had the transport and and but I actually really was I was
really very kind, as you put in anything. You know. I was a nice, nice person, and I thought he should have kids, and I was I was too old to have kids at that point. And I, you know, I kept encouraging him, you know, have some babies someplace, you know. Because so then he he married somebody like twenty five years younger than he, of course, and she got all the planes and the boats and all of that stuff, and the babies and the babies.
Okay. In nineteen ninety you signed with Time Publishing ventures to develop a new magazine called Martha Stewart Living that started with a base circulation of three hundred and fifty thousand, and it peaked years later at over two million copies per issue. Tell us about that magazine, which I loved very much.
Well, it passes fortieth anniversary, which I was very proud of. The magazine was presented first as a book series of books. To Clarkson Potter, I said, you know, I'd like to write about all other subjects, not just food. And I had done food and gardening and weddings, and I thought that there are many other categories of lifestyle that I could really write about, including collecting, including entertaining, including decorating, including just special special life events. And they said, ah,
you know, we'll just do books. We're planning to do books and all those subjects we don't want you just to do. I called them the beautiful how to books. So then I thought, ah, well, the format that would really work for all of this would be a magazine. And at the time, in nineteen eighty nine, magazines were not doing so well. They were several magazines I think for every new magazine, three were closing. And because of
the advertising at that comment at that time. But I went to sign neuhause he gave me he liked the idea and he liked the name living, and he gave me the money to build a prototype. And I worked with jug Turshian and several other really talented people to create this beautiful, beautiful prototype magazine. And then when SI saw it, and we became friends during the process, so I saw it, he said, oh, well, what do you want to call it? And I said, well, Martha's Stewart Living.
And he said, well, this is Condy Nast Martha, and it has to be Condy Nest Living. And I said, if that's a deal breaker, can I have the prototype? And he gave me the prototype, and I went to another very powerful, lovely man. I went to succession to Rupert,
and I first met with his lawyers. I was in a room way up high in some building and they're all very they're waiting for Rupert to show up, and they're all chatting away and being friendly, and they had sort of thumbed through the prototype and Rupert came in. They all changed totally. I mean, it was just it really was like the show. Rupert changed the whole room Oh my god, he really had it at that especially
at that time, this is nineteen eighty nine. He was fantastic and he said he looked at it and said, I would really like to do this, but I'm selling my magazines. I'm you know, seventeen, I just sold and I'm selling this and I'm selling that. And he said, I suggest you take this to Time. So he gave me at least a lead to Time, and so I went to Time and met with the CEO and the president of Time Magazines and we had lunch at Caravillan restaurant and the guys looked through the prototype at lunch
and they said, yeah, this is the July issue. What are you going to do next to wy It looks like you covered it. And I said, well, you don't get it. It's living is limitless. This is a subject matter that can go on for years and years and years. And they finally bought it, and they but they did. I said, if you don't like it after a while, you know, here's a piece of paper, what's the price for me to get it back? Because it's a fifty
to fifty kind of partnership. And they wrote down a kind of an astronomical sum at the time, but it turned out to be a bargain after the few years I was there, and I bought it back.
And how soon after that did Martha Stewart Living become a TV show?
Oh? Pretty soon, right after. I believed in a word called synergy. At first time thought that was a dirty word, and I thought, you know, time, you're get with it. You know, TV does not cannibalize the magazine. People who watch TV don't necessarily buy the magazine, but if they get hooked on the TV show, they'll buy the magazine. And we had a big arguments about synergy, and the synergy went on, and I mean these arguments went on. It was real kind of boring after a while. But
I got a TV show. At first it was a weekly once once a week show on CBS. Then it went to daily and and that was fantastic in retrospect. I wouldn't be doing a daily magazine if I were myself, if I were still being editor in chief and creator of the magazine itself, because you take on you know, you just can't balance it all. It's very hard. And even though I had a fabulous editor in chief as old A Motley who stayed and worked for time. After a while, I was always doing too much, but uh,
but it was great. And then the TV show became very successful the and I and I liked doing it because I got such great guests on the show. Everybody wanted to be a guest. I mean, Russell Crowe came on, you know, what the heck you know? And uh and and all in late night hosts came on because they loved the show. Everybody did.
Yeah. And when did you start? When did did you meet and start working with you? Long time publicist Susan mcgrino.
Oh, about forty years ago, a little bit more. Susan was maybe an associate editor, but she was doing pr and marketing at Clarkson Potter. So that's where we met. I remember encouraging her. She would go on all the book trips with me. I mean we went we went to all over the country and we had so much fun. When we went down in Mississippi, we stopped in to visit on John Grisham and we stopped in we had
Dome perignyome for breakfast with him. And then we would drive around and rented Cadillacs and we had so much fun and we still have fun. She went to Paris with me this past weekend.
Just came back trip to Pramez. Yeah, you did mention the late night talk shows. I mean you've been on Letterman, Fallon seth Meyer, all of those. Often is the one that's your favorite?
Oh no, it's like my children. You can never say that, they're all so different. I did like messing up David Letterman's suit. I was able. They let me pour stuff on his suit and they said, nobody's ever been able to do that before. And he didn't hit me.
And then a couple of years later, you were working with Sharon Patrick and managed to purchase all your television, print and merchandise and ventures related to this, Martha Stewart Brand consolidated into a new company which you became chairman, chairwoman, CEO and president of Martha Stewart on the Media.
Arthur Stewart Living on the Media.
How did that change everything?
Wow? It was great and the contracts were wonderful. We got kmart to approve a contract that allowed us to license all the products that we were developing. My theory was that if you read the magazine and you get all these fantastic ideas everything every I mean, if you see a yellow towel in our magazine, you want that towel, but you can't make the towel, but you could by the towel. So that's how the merchandising started. So omnimedia meant in the center. It was the it was like
a solar system. My business plan was beautiful, it was it was the solar system. Middle was content. The first little orbit orbit was omnim media. So that was the magazines and the books. Then it was omni merchandising the products that emanated from all that content. Then it was omni Internet because the Internet was just starting. I mean Google is just twenty five years old and my magazine's
forty years old. But in nineteen eighty two I bought my first computer, so I knew that computers were going to be something special. And it's it's all panned out and.
Then you went. Then you went public on the New York Stock Exchange October nineteen ninety nine, twenty three years ago. What was that day like?
Well, I remember serving croissant and nice drinks to all the traders on the floor, and the company went public with great eight enthusiasm, and the stock went from eighty eighteen dollars a share opening price to about thirty seven dollars a year, so we became instant billionaires.
You were the first female self made billionaire in the US BEFO.
Yeah, and I remember. But the funnest thing was I remember driving up Madison Avenue and saying, Oh, Josh, I could stop anywhere and buy anything today. It was so excited. That was exciting. And then I went home and my mom. My mom had sold all her stock and she was a She was a millionaire at the end of the day. She was smart. She sold the stock on the first day, but unbeknownst to me, we didn't put it. We didn't put a stop gap on her. She was just she was very smart.
But then what happened a couple of years later, You got a tip from your broker.
No, I didn't get a tip, and it was all that is old old newsman, and I ran into a financial problem and I was accused of lying about and lying about a crime I didn't commit. So it's kind of convoluted. You're going to have to wait for my documentary, which is coming out next year, to learn the real story, and I'm not talking about it. And it was at the wrong time. I was in the wrong time at the wrong place. Look what's going on in the newspapers two day Supreme Court Justice Menendez terms, all.
Right, so you're not going to tell us about five months in a prison in West.
Oh the five months are It's fine. They were. It was like going to camp. It was called it was called Camp Alderson. We nicknamed it Camp Olderson. It was on the grounds of a all girls private school, like a like a junior college in West Virginia, on a river polluted by the coal mines. And and it was kind of interesting. I was in a dormitory. I had a roommate. She had the top funk. I had the bottom bunk, and she slept with giant curlers in her hair every night. And and you were not You were
allowed three books a week. That's all. You were allowed three books from the library. And I managed to get more books. There were like things to do at night after after dinner. You there was craft classes. There was a writing class. There was an entrepreneurial class.
All these classes.
No, no, I actually taught entrepreneurial behavior and that. And when I got I asked for business plans. Oh gosh, there were some crazy plants, very interesting, and I helped. I helped a lot of women there, and I made some nice friends, Sister Carol Gilbert. She was a Catholic nun who had been convicted of trespassing on government property on a nuclear warhead site out in Colorado. She was there for like fifteen years. Horrible, horrible misjustice and injustice
I learned. I learned a lot about the American penal system and how stupid it is.
But do you remember a visit you had when you were there from the designer Ralph Rucci, who's here tonight. He managed to smuggle in some frockaf.
The smuggling stuff worked sort of. I mean, thanks Ralph. We love Ralph, we love him. But I had nice visitors. Nathan Mervel from Microsoft came down in his private plane just to see me and talk. Gil Butler came down from New York to talk about my foundation and what I should do. I mean, amazing visits. Andy Monest, my old stockbroker boss. He came down on the wrong day and had to go back. They wouldn't let him see me.
And you know, stuff like that. Stupid stuff. I got put into solitary, which was like a whole way with a bench in it for a day because they found a hard boiled egg in my room. I made apple jelly from the crab apples growing outside our dormitory, and and that was okay. They didn't mind that.
They didn't invite you into the kitchen to cook anything.
Oh no, no, you wouldn't want to be in that kitchen. You know, twelve month old eggs and stuff's crazy. But I had a friend, Audium, who's was there for not telling stories on her boyfriend, and her mother is from Eritrea, and she would bring those that soft, beautiful bread, you know, the Ethiopian bread stuffed in her bra because it didn't show up on the X rays. And we would eat that delicious Ungia bread. Oh so good.
Okay, So that really didn't change a lot in your life, because when you came out, they would deals with kmarts, years more shows. We're on the Hallmark Channel. You acted in Law and Order SVU. You're an ugly betty and then you serious exam. You did flooring and furniture collections, wines, frozen food with Costco.
No, it was okay, and because I think people realized the enormous of injustice and crazy stuff going on.
How many different lines do you have or have you had? Licenses?
Quite a few. I especially love doing the doing the home goods, the kitchen wears. We have some beautiful kitchen wears. We just started our own Martha store on Amazon, which is growing nicely. I was doing a very nice fashion line talking about fashion icons on QVC, which did very well. I mean, they loved my embroidered jeans. I had peacocks on them because of my peacocks and poppy flowers because I grow a lot of poppies. We did very nice, very nice clothing for QVC, well fitted and well made.
My downpuffer vest is very popular still. We're now making it in leather, which everybody loves. Pleather, not real leather, vegan leather.
And all of this is online.
A lot of it's online. I'm doing a line of sketches which are extremely popular. Commercials are running, yeah, they're running all the time. And I'm actually really having some influence on the designs and on the actual fabrication. And they're very nice, very nice comfortable shoes. Even my male friends are wearing them.
And you got your friend, which we'll talk about. Snoop Dogg tell us about that.
Really, Snoop and I became friends on my program. He came to talk about brownies and different recipes a long long time ago. And then we were asked. We were both asked to be on the Justin Bieber Roast and Snoop and I sat next to each other and rebonded, and somebody saw our behavior on that roast and asked us if we would do a show. We did the Martha and Snoop Pop Luck Dinner Party show, which was
very fun. I got to meet every rapper, every performer that I had never dreamed of meeting and talking to on that show. We had a great time, and I brought I brought unusual foods. I mean I brought mister chow on and Snoop had to eat stuff that he had never tasted before. He now has two successful cookbooks because of me, Yeah, because of me. And he also has a line of sketchers.
And he has a new holiday show coming up.
Oh he's He's doing a lot of good stuff and has a movie coming out to which I cannot wait for.
And I also read which I'm very excited about you creating a healthy cat and dog food line cooperation with Chewy Does. Yes.
Oh, that's just hitting the stores and my dogs love it. My cat is a little fussy, but but she she's she's she'll like it when she when she gets nothing else eat everyst tang has everything. She's the greatest. How many animals do you have, Oh, several hundred, because I have. I have five horses, five donkeys. Five. I ride the horses and the girls are riding on Sunday and Monday. We have peacocks. We have all kinds of We have
the United Nations of geese. We have German geese, we have Chinese geese, we have Italian geese, we have French geese, the ones with the big livers. And we have American geese. And they're beautiful and they're they're all living happily on the property.
Okay, let's go to Sports Illustrated May twenty three cover how did that opportunity come to you and were you at all hesitant that being photographed in a bathing suit at your age?
Well? I have My body's pretty good, and you know, I work out. I got the call in November. Susan mcgreen. Now, I don't know if it's Susan's called me first and warned me that they were going to call. Somebody called me, and so I was waiting for Mjday, who's this fabulous editor. She's been the editor of the Sports Illustrated magazine for quite a while. Young, beautiful and blonde. And she said, you know, we'd like you to pose for the swimsuit issue,
and you want to do that. I mean, for heaven's sake, to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated at eighty two years old in a bathing suit. And I didn't know I had nine pages to do and nine different bathing suits. So we get we they she said this, in two months, we're going to go down to to Cosa de Compo in the Dominican Republic. And it was it was fun. I got there on a Thursday night, I think it was Wednesday night. Had to try on I don't know how many bathing suits, and you know,
you have to sort of like I had had. I had been waxed, I had been sprays hand, I had been quaffed and bleached in the whole the whole thing. I think I even had my face waxed. I mean all kinds of straight. You do all these things, and I don't spend a lot of time on that. I have to have makeup for TV every day, but I don't spend a lot of time doing the other stuff.
But I do go. I did go to plates. I discovered pilates, and I went at least three times a week, sometimes four times a week to pilates, and then continued to horseback ride and my regular trainer. So I got in good shape and it shows in the pictures.
It totally does truth.
And you and you, and it's and it's kind of fun, I mean, being poked and prodd. And they called them girls. I mean, you know, for Heaven's sake, you know, let's push your girls this way or that. I mean, they have a whole different language and a bathing suit. Shoot.
So is Playboy next?
Never?
Okay? We want we won't wait for that? Or what about the new TV show on the Bachelor is the Golden Bachelor? You can be the Golden Bachelorette?
No, no, no interest?
Okay, okay, we talked about They.
Asked me to be dancing in the stars. That kind of appealed to me, but I had had to spend too much time out west and so I have the business. I can't spend that time out in the West Coast.
A good friend of mine, which is whos usually always hear what is out to myight, Jeffrey Banks posted a picture of Kevin McCarthy as on Dancing with the Stars.
So that's way way. I was at a dinner and this handsome man was sitting two seats for me until I realized who it was. It was Kevin McCarthy.
Is it true that your shoe size is twelve?
Excuse me?
Your shoe size is a ten ten. Somebody told me you size twelve twelve? And do you really have someone paint the red bottoms of the Lubaton shoes by.
Painted with a black sharpie pen because I don't want red heels on the I'm red soles on my shoes like everybody else.
Good for you, okay.
He accosted me about that. He was not happy he was on this stage of me.
He was, okay, okay, And you're doing a new ford a line of comfortable gardening clothes with Tractor Supply Company. I think that sounds fantastic.
Very fun. See, because that what do I wear every day. I wear that stuff in the garden. I have a big, big garden, and I and a big property, and I have to wear comfortable clothes and I still have to look nice. I remember my daughter when she was at greens Farms Academy. She came home one day and she said, mother, can I ask you to do one thing? And I said, what she said, do not wear your apron to the grocery store. Because somebody said and told her that they
had seen me in an apron. So you have to look nice when you go to the grocery store. And I want all women to feel comfortable and work well and still have you know, have some style.
That's great. What's your favorite item that you have with your name on it?
Very my square ladle, square ladle. It wasn't that weird. It's a ladle. You know, Usually ladle's a round or oval or you know, but this is a square one with a handle on one side. So it's like when you're filling jilly jars you pour out a corner. Yes, and so that's one of my very favorite tools. The weirdest and the weirdest thing I my name on it. Kevin,
what a dibber. You need a dibber. My gibber is a pointed tool that you pushed down into the ground to plant bulbs or little plants, and that's called a jibber.
I'm going to go to some audience questions, but then I have two more things to ask you. A question from a Ukrainian woman to a Polish woman. Do you prefer your Perrogi's boiled, a fried?
Oh, boiled, always boiled first and then next day warmed and brown butter.
Nice? Okay. What was your most memorable wardrobe malfunction?
Hmm oh. I went to a dinner at the White House and for some stupid reason, I wore a beautiful suit by the way Ralph Lauren pink silk chantung suit, but it had culots and I got kind of a line for wearing coolots to the White House formal dinner.
What is the best gift you have ever received?
Best gift was the birth of my child, and the second best were the two grandchildren.
Great. What advice do you have for any aspiring entrepreneurs watching or listening to you tonight?
If you have a good idea and you have a passion for that idea, take it to the next level. Build a business plan, be serious, know that the work is all ahead of you, that business plans easy compared to what comes afterward. And go for it. I think going for it is like the best thing that you could possibly ever do.
I'd like to end tonight's talk with something that you said to Booth Moore from Women's With Daily and a talk during the Magic Show in Vegas, And this is a quote from you. You must really assume an authentic personality. You must be authentic to yourself and to the public. You must learn every day so that you can teach every day. I am a teacher. I don't think of reinvention as much as I think of evolution. I want to evolve and evolve and get better and not stay the same.
And that's the truth.
That's the truth.
That is the truth.
And tonight we had a masterclass from the best teacher in the world. Thank you, thank you.
That is so nice.