I’m alive, bitch!
Even if the Domestic Dominatrix thinks she’s finished me off.
It’s been 20 years since Martha Stewart traded her Manolo stilettos for ballet flats, her 1,000-thread-count Egyptian cotton bedsheets for a lumpy, polyester blend-covered bunk bed — the bottom half, she moaned — and suffered through a diet of horrific coffee and fat- and carb-heavy grub as she became the most fabulous and furious inmate ever to grace Club Fed.
Two decades later, she’s still fantasizing about (plotting?) my grisly demise.
I made an uncredited cameo appearance in the new Netflix documentary, simply titled with her first name, “Martha.” Like Cher. Or Osama.
It’s about the life and crimes, hissy fits, grudges, vendettas and remorseless misbehavior of the New Jersey-born model-turned-stockbroker, then internationally celebrated purveyor of homemaker porn.
Martha’s a perfectionist so petty and abusive, she was caught on camera in the doc berating a kitchen worker for using a too-small and “stupid” knife to cut an orange, then unsuccessfully ordering members of the film crew following her to cut out the vicious tirade.
She’s an obsessive-compulsive so mean, she grew apoplectic at a lowly stockbroker’s assistant over the poor quality of the “hold” music she was forced to endure. And so miserly, she came within a millimeter of losing a company once valued at more than $1 billion over an illegal 2001 stock sale that saved her some $45,000. Then she demanded an underling reimburse her for 10 bucks worth of coffee and snacks.
After a strip search and a stretch in solitary confinement — punishment for touching a prison guard — during her five months’ incarceration in West Virginia’s notorious “Camp Cupcake,” one would think Mistress Martha would have mellowed.
Instead, Martha — who has compared her plight to that of the late South African freedom fighter-turned-statesman Nelson Mandela — today is playing the innocent victim. She has spent the years stewing over her persecution by a sexist justice system that she says was hellbent on taking down a woman who’s rich, or something that rhymes with it. And she remains dangerously preoccupied with little, insignificant me.
Long after she and her insider tip-giving stockbroker Peter Bacanovic were convicted of securities fraud and other crimes, then lying about it to federal investigators, her thoughts were not with her family, her pink-slipped employees, her mini-menagerie of animals, or even her own miserable self.
She focused her fury at me.
In the documentary, the now-ex-con harked back to our long-ago connection in Manhattan federal court, where I covered Circus Marthamus. The uproarious 2004 trial began with court officers acting as Martha’s personal valets, clearing the ice in front of the courthouse so that the defendant and her entourage would have an unslippery path from limo to building.
Sitting front and center throughout the six-week event was a veritable celebrity petting zoo, featuring an ever-changing cast of Martha’s famous and infamous pals, from Rosie O’Donnell to Bill Cosby. They shielded their tired tushies from the hard wooden benches with high-end gel pads provided by the entertainment guru while the rest of us mortals suffered in the cheap seats.
And here’s Martha now:
“New York Post lady was there,” she sneered, “just looking so smug.
“She had written horrible things during the entire trial. But she is dead now, thank goodness.
“And nobody has to put up with the crap she was writing all the time.”
News of my passing came as a shock. Should I be scared about continuing to write that “crap”?
But rather than feeling angry or worried, or to seek an emergency order of protection, I am overwhelmingly sad in the face of Martha’s bitterness.
In the years since my close encounters with the Marvelous Ms. M, now a spritely 83 years old, she’s gone from being a billionaire to a mere multimillionaire.
She has maintained pop-culture relevance by participating in a raunchy Comedy Central roast of pop star Justin Bieber and has teamed up, improbably and hilariously, in TV cooking shows with rapper and pothead Snoop Dogg. Last year, she became the oldest model ever to have her photo grace the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
She has never accepted responsibility for committing felonies that stood to damage the American financial system.
But I get the sense that Martha is lonely. Her marriage of 27 years failed after she was impulsively unfaithful. Her wealthy boyfriend dumped her after she exited prison. Martha, always a cold and indifferent mother, seems to have a strained relationship with her only child, a daughter who loyally attended her mom’s entire trial.
“I love the company,” Martha crowed during a pre-prison press conference at the New York City headquarters of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc.
This was the only entity, living or inanimate, to which Martha breathed a word of affection, with the possible exception of her “two, beloved, fun-loving dogs,” her “seven lively cats,” plus horses, canaries, chickens and assorted other critters, all of which presumably never put her phone calls on hold.
She’s rich. She’s beautiful, creative and temperamental.
I pity her.
