Martha Stewart, America’s ”diva of domesticity”, is launching a magazine showing thirty-something women how to live ”better and more gracefully”, although handy hints on staying out of jail are mysteriously absent from the first issue.
Blueprint: Design Your Life is part of a multi-pronged attempt at a comeback by Stewart (64) who spent five months in a Connecticut correctional facility in 2004 to 2005 for lying about share dealing. She already hosts a daily television chatshow and has just announced plans for a residential community in North Carolina that will extend her perfectionist philosophy of ”homemaking” to the design of the houses themselves.
The launch issue of Blueprint includes a feature profiling a shade of white, described as ”relaxed, lived-in, with not even a hint of preciousness”, and raves about a $1 700 trenchcoat.
”Fifteen years ago we started Martha Stewart Living magazine, creating a new lifestyle category for women,” Stewart says. ”With Blueprint, we are extending our how-to expertise and unique style to a younger audience. Our goal has always been to provide useful, inspired ‘how-to’ information that will help women live better and more gracefully.”
Stewart is not the first disgraced celebrity to prove how wrong F Scott Fitzgerald was about US lives having no second acts. But she is going about it with her characteristic exhausting zeal, causing her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, to more than halve its losses in the first quarter of 2006 compared with the same time last year. Her 2005 salary, including bonus, reached $1,3-million.
The comeback has not been without its problems. An adapted version of The Apprentice featuring Stewart was cancelled after receiving low ratings, prompting Donald Trump, its executive producer and star of the original US series, to write her a scathing open letter. ”Your performance was terrible in that the show lacked mood, temperament and just about everything else a show needs for success,” he wrote. ”I knew it would fail as soon as I first saw it — and your low ratings bore me out.” – Guardian Unlimited Â