A Recipe for Envy

One of the repeated gripes against Martha Stewart's recipes and domestic projects is that they are difficult and overly involved. Real women, we are told, don't have the time to tie chives around beggar's purses or stencil floral patterns on barn floors. With "Just Desserts" (Morrow, $24), the "unauthorized" biography of Ms. Stewart, Jerry Oppenheimer offers a simple and seductive alternative.

In less time than it takes to verdigris your hanging planters, you can skim the surface of 399 pages of dish and dirt on the domestic diva and feel better about yourself by feeling worse about her. With unrelenting animosity, Mr. Oppenheimer attacks every aspect of Ms. Stewart's life--her marriage to publisher Andrew Stewart, her fitness as a mother, her business dealings, her sexuality. But in his compulsion to pop every bubble in the bubble-wrap surrounding the carefully packaged Ms. Stewart, the author fails to present a consistent indictment.

For example, he mars his portrait of an image-obsessed Ms. Stewart with potshots from an observer who describes her showing up for a business lunch "with no nail polish on and with her hands totally messed up" from gardening, or a dinner guest who repays hospitality by remembering how her host "looked a wreck."

Elsewhere he submits that Ms. Stewart is cold and aloof with the opposite sex, quoting a colleague who calls her a "man hater" and another who suggests she underwent a hysterectomy because "she just didn't want to be a woman anymore." But then he titters at her alleged flirtation with a male film technician as he taped a microphone to her thigh and tut-tuts a magazine shot of Ms. Stewart with her "bosom barely covered." In making his points and picking his targets, Mr. Oppenheimer employs all the subtlety and discrimination of the Oklahoma City bomber.

If one thesis emerges from the rubble it is that Martha Stewart is a hypocrite. "Stewart writes in great detail about her perfect childhood, her perfect family, her perfect education, her perfect marriage," he cavils. "Taken as a whole, it seemed all too perfect." While he fails to produce one quotation in which his subject makes such claims, he inadvertently captures a truth about the woman: Martha Stewart is not a whiner.

In an age where our national sport consists of watching celebrities and nonentities alike parade their pathologies on TV talk shows, Martha Stewart marches on those same programs and suggests, literally, that we make lemons into lemonade. This clearly offends Mr. Oppenheimer's sense of journalistic authenticity.

If Ms. Stewart savors memories of mother serving "mushroom soup and pierogi" at Sunday dinner, Mr. Oppenheimer counters that after-school snacks consisted of plain mustard sandwiches. If Ms. Stewart remembers Andy Stewart throwing pebbles at her window during courtship, Mr. Oppenheimer objects that "stones would have never reached her window" on an upper dormitory floor.

My hunch is that if one truly wishes to understand what drives Martha Stewart--the woman and the phenomenon--one cannot separate her penchant for remembering things as better than they were from her passion for making things better than they are.

During a lecture, when confronted by a student who complained that the Martha Stewart lifestyle was beyond the means of a mere college student, Ms. Stewart replied: "When I was your age I lived in three miserable rooms overlooking the rooftops of 114th Street, and I still had time to plant some herbs on my windowsill, and still had time to go around to junkshops and collect some pretty things. And I made life nicer."

Making life nicer is, in essence, what Martha Stewartism is all about. It is what appeals to the legions of "Martha Stewart wannabes" (as Mr. Oppenheimer condescendingly calls them) who buy her products, read her advice column and dream by the opulent pages of her picture-books "Weddings" and "Entertaining." It is also this striving, quintessentially middle-class impulse that elitists love to loathe. Ms. Stewart has confessed to confusion at why her life should be "critiqued, maligned, and even despised." But the fact that she herself is a dissenting member of the generation that grew up with, and then rebelled against, June Cleaver and Donna Reed made it all the more inevitable that she would serve as a target in the game of pater la bourgeoisie .

Mr. Oppenheimer quotes Erica Jong describing Ms. Stewart as "the woman who earned her freedom by glorifying the slavery of Home." In retrospect, it is Martha Stewartism that appears the more liberating alternative to the "zipless" activities glorified by Ms. Jong. At best, a woman may enjoy the promiscuous "Fear of Flying" lifestyle for a brief time. But she can enjoy the simple pleasures of Martha Stewartism in youth or old age, in solitude or with family. As a recipe for life they may not satisfy your soul, but at the very least you will end up with herbs on your windowsill and flowers painted under your feet.

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