Martha

People always talk about the really big figures

who change things culturally.

Did they create this moment, or did the moment create them?

Martha's like that.

She made such an enormous mark on the culture.

She is one of the most powerful women on the planet.

Martha Stewart!

- Martha Stewart! - Martha Stewart!

She has remained relevant for more than 50 years.

I'm Martha ******* Stewart.

I can do whatever I want.

- Martha Stewart! - Now, let's make that bed.

Ooh!

Smoking on kush and hot pot.

Martha is one of the greatest teachers ever.

She's the queen.

To this day,

you cannot take your eyes off Martha Stewart.

If there was ever the original influencer, it's Martha.

She made the world we're now living in.

American women needed to be redirected

from opening cans of cream of mushroom soup

and pouring it on top of broccoli and boiled chicken.

Before Martha, there were a lot of women

who gave advice about homemaking.

And the number one thing about these women,

they had to be very nice.

I'm Betty Crocker, and I promise you a perfect cake every time you bake.

And what they were gonna show you how to do was easy.

A solid cylinder of mixed goodness.

When Martha came along,

she is saying something completely different.

If you're having a big crowd for Thanksgiving this year like we are,

you might wanna make more than one kind of turkey.

This is one of the most beautiful turkeys.

It's encased in a puff pastry.

She became an aspirational force to millions of people.

This idea that you could have it all.

Martha Stewart. She's a self-made billionaire.

She was saying to women, "Homemaking can be a powerful thing."

I'm always trying to fill a void. Something that doesn't exist.

Something that people need and want and don't have.

She wanted to make it possible

for people to have the homes and surroundings that they wanted,

no matter whether you have money or not.

The high standards that Martha has set for herself

have become many other people's as well.

And that is the problem for a lot of women.

It's a fantasy world,

aspiring to a lifestyle that you can't have.

Homemaker porn, essentially.

People were threatened.

We have very strong but conflicted feelings

about how a woman should be at home.

"She's an intolerable perfectionist. She's a control freak." How do you plead?

Um, guilty.

People attack me for being a homemaker, but, in reality, what am I really doing?

I'm celebrating something that's been put down for so long.

I think I'm like the modern feminist.

Everyone thought she was perfect,

but it was still something she was striving for

and couldn't rest until she got it.

She was pursued by furies of her own creation.

Martha Stewart was indicted on criminal charges.

Her image is so associated with perfection,

and this is the antithesis.

She faces years in prison.

Absolutely perfect.

- Perfectly, perfectly perfect. - Perfect condition.

- Perfectly secure. - Perfect little pattern.

Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Picture-perfect.

Mmm. The perfect ending to a perfect meal.

Somewhere along the line, Martha bought into the idea of perfection.

But the question is not whether perfection is attainable.

The question is, "At what cost?"

What is it that you most dislike?

That's a hard question to answer.

I dislike waste.

I dislike inefficiency.

Avoidance.

Impatience.

I dislike people who think they can do more than they can do.

I dislike not paying attention to details,

being mean just to be mean.

I dislike aprons and housedresses.

I used to dislike the color purple.

A lot. But I don't dislike it so much... And red. I...

I don't plant very many things red in my garden, if anything.

Uh, if something pops up red, it's usually taken out.

So red is another thing I'm not very fond of.

Okay. Next?

It's October 18th.

We have lots to do in the garden.

I would like to lay the path to the summerhouse garden from the main road.

I think we should do rough stones like the other path,

more like cracked ice.

Send.

There's a little saying that I really like.

If you wanna be happy for a year,

get married.

If you wanna be happy for a decade, get a dog.

And if you wanna be happy for the rest of your life, make a garden.

This garden looks pretty good.

I think we should probably do a little bit of trimming on the boxwood.

New paragraph.

I was maligned for being a perfectionist,

criticized for trying to create a lifestyle that was unattainable,

which was not the case at all.

What I was really trying to do was to educate.

There seem to be some dead peonies, which makes me very unhappy.

Send.

I am a perfectionist.

And it runs in the family.

And it started with my father.

Dad made each of us learn how to garden.

He could grow anything.

I was the ideal daughter.

I wanted to learn. He had a lot to teach. And I listened.

I was the one trusted to iron his linen shirts.

And he had the Harris Tweed jacket

and the turquoise-blue tie that matched his beautiful blue eyes.

My father was the handsomest father.

He loved me.

And it was very obvious to everybody that I was his favorite.

He thought I was more like him than the other children.

- In what way? - Well, he was a perfectionist.

He got the job done that he could... that he was set out to do.

Not his work work. He was... he was a failure in work.

He could've done pretty much anything he wanted to do,

and he was stuck in a salesman's job.

He sometimes started the day off with a large glass of coffee and red wine.

So is that an alcoholic? Maybe.

But he never looked like a drunk.

He never stumbled around and threw things and broke things.

That wasn't my father.

But he was a dissatisfied, unhappy human being.

He couldn't support six kids. And we needed food.

So we had gardens.

And we would trade for goods that we couldn't grow.

He stood over you like a sergeant.

Mean.

Mean.

"You're not doing it right."

He would give us an order. "Weed the tomatoes."

And if we didn't follow through, we paid the penalty.

We had our whippings. It was the yardstick.

We dreaded the yardstick. And at times, it was the end of the belt.

To this day, I despise gardening.

He had lost his job.

No money saved.

Six kids.

And they needed money.

There was a girl across the street who spent her free time modeling.

She and her mother one day said to me,

"You're pretty enough to be a model. Would you like to be introduced?"

I started off at $15 an hour,

which was a lot better than the 50¢ I was getting babysitting.

Busy, active people, stop!

Now you can odor-proof your body. Odor-proof...

That was a major event in Nutley, New Jersey.

Everybody stopped everything to watch Martha.

But I was not a super-duper model.

I was never in that class.

But I was certainly successful.

I would give most of my paycheck to my mother

because they still had young children at home.

She made sure we always had good food.

She was such a good cook.

I stood by my mother's side in the kitchen,

learning everything I could.

She was a schoolteacher, and she had to cook 16 meals a day.

I thought that was pretty fantastic that she could do all that.

But the cookie-cutter house and the cookie-cutter life,

that was not for me.

Martha had a scholarship to Barnard School in New York City, very prestigious.

I really loved college.

I really liked history, art history, economics.

I was a popular girl on campus.

People knew who I was, a tall, blonde, pretty girl from New Jersey,

walking around in Bermuda shorts, looking chic.

I was looking for adventure,

looking for the future.

At Barnard,

there was one woman who was driven to school in a great big Rolls-Royce.

And we all sort of scratched our heads. "Who the heck is that?"

She came up to me one day in an art class.

And she said, "I have a brother who goes to Yale Law School."

"Would you care to have a date with him?"

He picked me up in his little yellow Mercedes sedan.

I had never been in a Mercedes before.

We went out to dinner. He was very polite and handsome.

And he had traveled a lot.

It was exciting to meet a sophisticated young man.

And he had an American Express card, which was a very big deal in those days.

And he was just intriguing, playful, and nice.

By the end of dinner, I was madly in love.

Andy Stewart, oh my gosh.

A beam of light.

Andy was so nice,

not at all like my father.