I had no problem whatsoever with stay-at-home moms. After all, that’s what my mother had done, and many of our viewers had made that choice too. I didn’t really understand why people were so quick to take it personally when someone decided to walk a different path than they had. I loved connecting with the full-time moms in our audience and doing what we could on the show to help them feel supported.
At the same time, I’d become a very public face of the opposite—a working woman trying to keep it all together, joking on-air about sometimes falling short. In other words, not Martha Stewart.
By now a fixture on TODAY, the former stockbroker and model had become the doyenne of domestic perfection: rib roasts that took days to prep, elaborate craft projects involving beeswax and wildflowers, paint colors serene enough to put you in a trance. Never mind that she’d run a media conglomerate and amass a net worth exceeding half a billion dollars. Her message of making your homelife your masterpiece spoke to many women on a deep level.
Martha was very serious about her work. She had a group of diligent helpers who came early to set up her segments. For a spot on decorating Easter eggs, one poor assistant was tasked with blowing out the contents of a dozen eggs through a pinhole without passing out. Lacking the bandwidth for such projects, I was always happy to grab whatever leftovers she didn’t pack up and take with her—once I took home an entire ham she’d prepared and served it to Jay’s relatives on Easter Sunday. （It was delicious.） We were a funny combo: goddess of the hearth and frazzled career gal, who was unlikely to spend Saturday dipping candles while listening to Gregorian chants.
In 1996, Martha won a Matrix Award, a big deal for women in media that used to pack the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria with names like Liz Smith, Whoopi Goldberg, Amy Tan, Ann Richards. That’s whose eyes were following me as I made my way from the dais to the podium to present Martha with her award. I didn’t know her that well, so I wouldn’t be able to tell moving personal anecdotes. Frankly, I’d been a little apprehensive about the whole thing, so I’d come up with an idea: Martha was everything I wasn’t—why not play off that?
Poems were my specialty. Whether for birthdays or wedding toasts, I had a way with clever couplets that affectionately tweaked the honorees and caught the mood. My dad dismissed my efforts as “doggerel,” a lowly form of verse, though I like to think I raised it to an art form. I worked on Martha’s poem for weeks, employing the kind of care she’d bring to needlepointing a dog collar. The result:
Martha, dear Martha, what shall I do?
These people have asked that I introduce you.
I haven’t eaten, I haven’t slept,
Talk about making a girl feel inept.
Anything I can do, you can do better,
Potting a plant or knitting a sweater.
Dipping a candle, tiling a table,
You’re always ready, willing and able.
A room needs repainting? You’ll make it sing
With robin’s egg blue…cause it’s a good thing.
Marzipan, tarte tatin, coq au vin too,
Bruschetta, pancetta’s not all you can do,
Your holiday meals are a feast for the eyes,
Can’t you use Stove Top and Mrs. Smith’s pies?
And on and on, for two pages. The women in the room—working women almost exclusively—roared.
I hadn’t set out to write a treatise on the escalating mommy wars, but the poem subversively nailed where a lot of us were back then and what we were anxious about. I felt like the applause in the room was driven by a sense of recognition.
Martha, however, seemed a little miffed.
“Well, Katie,” she said, turning to me as I settled back into my seat on the dais, “would you know what pancetta was if it weren’t for me?” I theatrically shook my head no. “Would you know what bruschetta was if it weren’t for me?” Again, no, Martha, I wouldn’t. By way of thanks, she had a very small bouquet delivered, and her office sent over a cookie-decorating kit.
It took a few years and some prison time for Martha to develop a sense of humor. She slayed at the Justin Bieber roast, and by the time Martha was co-hosting a cooking show with her unlikely BFF Snoop Dogg, her ironic appreciation of her place in the culture was complete. Nothing delights me quite like Martha Stewart poking fun at herself in her own tasteful way.
DURING THOSE DAYS on TODAY, it felt like there was nothing we couldn’t do. We took the show to the South of France on the occasion of the Cannes Film Festival; I remember the tricky time the cameramen had trying to shoot around the topless sunbathers.