Martha Stewart, who indoctrinated millions in the importance of pastel hues and perfectly turned pie crusts, left her prison cell to return to the kitchen of her palatial home yesterday to begin a new, and potentially even more dizzying, chapter in her life as America’s household goddess.
As a tale of prison redemption, few in recent memory can match Stewart’s midnight stroll to the private jet that whisked her from a minimum security women’s prison in West Virginia to her maximum luxury 153-acre estate north of Manhattan.
When she first went to prison, or Camp Cupcake as it is called by the tabloid press, to serve her sentence for lying to investigators after she was accused of insider trading, Stewart’s public standing could not have been lower. The woman who built a billion-dollar empire on dreams of domestic perfection – marketing recipes, soft furnishings, kitchen wares, and gardening tips – had been transformed into America’s ogress de jour.
The perfect homemaker was unmasked in court as an imperious employer who drove her underlings to tears, and a haughty celebrity who, after abusing the public trust, described her financial misdeeds as ”a small personal matter”. The lifestyle expert’s life was a mess, and so was the company she built. Share prices in her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc, tumbled, her name was expunged from the cover of her magazines, and she was stripped of the title of CEO.
But a curious thing happened while Ms Stewart was behind bars: she lost 20lbs and gained a new fan club. While canny investors snapped up shares in her company, boosting its share price to above $34 yesterday from a pre-trial low of less than $10, Ms Stewart deftly tended her image.
Her website — and a team of high-profile publicists — described her efforts to bring her very own brand of tastefulness to convict life: foraging for dandelions on the prison grounds to spice up salads, whisking up tasty treats in the cell block microwave, crocheting, and teaching a nightly yoga class to her fellow prisoners. Stewart became the mistress of her own transformation.
”The experience of the last five months in Alderson, West Virginia has been life-altering and life-affirming,” New Martha wrote in a message to supporters posted on her website yesterday. ”You can be sure that I will never forget the friends that I met here, all that they have done to help me over these five months, their children, and the stories they have told me.”
The question is: will the turnaround in fortunes for the woman once known as inmate number 55170-054 prove a lasting redemption – and will it be enough to turn around a corporation that has been bleeding money for two years?
The media certainly seems to think so. As Ms Stewart took her first steps towards freedom in fluffy grey poncho and ankle boots yesterday, the cover line of Newsweek proclaimed: Martha’s Last Laugh. The picture showed Ms Stewart’s head pasted on the body of a lithe young model. From scrubbing toilets at 12 cents an hour, she appeared poised to reclimb the pinnacle of domestic deity.
True, there will be obstacles. Stewart is not yet at liberty. She will spend the next five months under house arrest, shackled by an electronic ankle bracelet, although she is allowed to leave the estate for up to 48 hours a week to work or attend church. But she will continue to draw her $900 000 salary and to pursue the projects dreamed up during her absence.
She has starring roles in two TV shows, and there is talk of a new range in furnishings, frozen meals, or even a clothing line. Her company could also profit from a department store merger which would broaden distribution of her line of cookware and flowerpots, and literary agents say there is a $5m advance waiting if she decides to publish her prison memoirs.
So far, the woman who inspired and alternately terrified others with such projects as ”hosting a country wedding for 100” appears to be profiting from a series of well-crafted plans. By volunteering to go to jail last October, and not wait for an appeal, she cut off a flood of damaging media coverage, and gave Americans a chance to exercise forgiveness.
”People do like comebacks. It shows that people can change. There is the aspect of conquering adversity, converting oneself from the villain to the victim,” said Robert Passikoff, founder of the Brand Keys market research firm. ”Largely what you are seeing is an attempt for a rejigging, a recalibration, a softening of the image that she had prior going into prison. What consumers were looking for was contrition and closure, and she offered it up.”
Stewart (63) is merely the latest celebrity to undergo incarceration, and her transgressions, by the standards of corporate America, were relatively modest. Unlike the late Robert Maxwell or Enron’s Kenneth Lay, she did not steal from pension funds or investors, and her ill-gotten gains from her sale of ImClone stock amounted to $52 000. However, few analysts are entirely confident that the warmth of her homecoming will last for the long term, apparently not even Ms Stewart herself who unloaded about $8m worth of company stock last December.
Ms Stewart’s earlier disgrace allowed consumers to stray to other purveyors of household perfection. Now they may find that they are equally as happy without Ms Stewart to guide them on how to make a better home and garden.
”The reality of the marketplace in the 21st century is that while she still retained the magic people were going to look at her products and services as being differentiated, if not superior,” said Mr Passikoff. ”Now she has lost some of that brand strength that bonds consumers to a brand, and they could turn around and say: ‘look, these sheets and pillow cases are all exactly the same’.”
Trials and tribulations of the rich and famous
Hotelier Leona Helmsley, aka the Queen of Mean, spent 18 months in jail for mail fraud and tax evasion. Notorious for her pronouncement that ”only the little people pay taxes”, Ms Helmsley has run the hotel empire since her husband’s death in 1997. She was number 247 on Forbes’s list of wealthy people last year.
Junk bond king Michael Milken spent two years in prison and three years on probation for violating security and racketeering laws. He is barred from trading securities for life.
After surviving prostate cancer, he now runs a non-profit foundation that tries to find a cure for the disease, as well as other charities.
Heidi Fleiss, known as the Hollywood Madam, was convicted of conspiracy, tax evasion and money laundering following an undercover operation in 1995.
She served 20 months in prison, and 300 hours doling out soup at a homeless shelter in Los Angeles. She now runs an adult clothing shop.
OJ Simpson , the former hall of fame American football player and movie actor, is most famous for the high speed police chase after the murder of his ex-wife, and her friend. Simpson was acquitted of the murder after an eight month trial in 1995, but was later found liable for her death in a civil suit, and ordered to pay $33m in damages. Since the trial, Simpson has been considered a pariah in the entertainment and sports industries and has been unable to resume his career. He is known to while away his days playing golf.
Mike Tyson The youngest undisputed heavyweight boxing champion met his match in court with a six-year sentence in 1992 for raping a Miss Black America contestant, Desiree Washington. Released after three years, his boxing career degenerated into farce when he used teeth rather than gloves on Evander Holyfield in 1997, earning a year-long ban. He never recaptured his glory years, filed for bankruptcy in 2003 and was last spotted crooning excruciatingly on Italian TV – Guardian Unlimited Â