A Conversation with Martha Stewart

Martha Stewart needs little introduction. She’s a force of nature. America’s first self-made female billionaire. The author of a hundred books. An entrepreneur who built a media empire from scratch. She’s the hardest working person I know. And I’m lucky enough to call her a friend.

RICHARD: Hi, Martha! I was feeding the goats when you called earlier. Sorry I missed you.

MARTHA: How many goats do you have now?

RICHARD: Four.

MARTHA: What kind?

RICHARD: Two Nigerian Dwarfs. One Nubian. One Kalahari Red, I think. They were a gift from a farmer we work with. When they arrived, I was like, “WHAT THE F AM I GOING TO DO?” And now they’re here. I love them so much. They make me so happy.

MARTHA: Don’t they eat all your plants, though?

RICHARD: No, they have their own area in the garden. They’ve got plenty of room, but they have eaten everything. I have been feeding them organic vegetables by hand! Actually, I was thinking about you yesterday when I was down there giving them dinner because they poop everywhere. And remember when Harvey and I saw your giant new vegetable garden last summer? You told us it grew so well because your donkeys had been pooping in the paddock for years before. So maybe that’s the spot for my next vegetable garden?

MARTHA: I think that’s the perfect place.

RICHARD: Anyway. How are you?

MARTHA: I’m good! I’m in my car as usual. I live in my car, as you know. Back and forth to the city to do my stuff. I just keep keep keep doing doing doing—as do you—we keep building and building as much as we can! Congratulations on all your stuff. It looks so good right now.

RICHARD: Thank you. And thank you for having a chat today. I was thinking before the call, you know, I don’t have many friends. I work ALL the time. I’m very selective with the time I have. But I really love you and I respect you and I’m really, really grateful we get to spend time together. It means a lot.

MARTHA: Thank you. I feel the same. So tell me, what’s the book about?

RICHARD: It’s called The Flamingo Estate Guide to Becoming Alive. It is actually more about lessons from the garden, what the garden can teach us about living. There’s a chapter, for example, called “Prune Your Roses,” which is about editing your life really hard, you know, like getting rid of the bad people, not putting up with the crap. And most importantly getting rid of the distractions, which I know you agree with.

MARTHA: Yes.

RICHARD: And then there’s a chapter on work called “Work like Wisteria,” because...

MARTHA: ...because you just can’t beat it down! It fills every nook and cranny, right?

RICHARD: Exactly.

MARTHA: You can try to kill it, and it just keeps going!

RICHARD: So I thought . . . who do I know who’s like Wisteria?

MARTHA: [Laughs loudly.]

RICHARD: And that’s you, of course. Little Miss Wisteria.

MARTHA: But here’s the thing with Wisteria. Have I told you what my father told me?

RICHARD: No.

MARTHA: He grew these two beautiful Wisteria trees and then one year, one of the two trees didn’t bloom. And he told me to hit it with a hammer.

RICHARD: What?

MARTHA: Yes! Hit it with a hammer all along the branches! And the next year it will bloom brilliantly. So, of course, I hit it with a hammer. And it never bloomed more beautifully than the next year!

RICHARD: Wow.

MARTHA: And then guess what happened? It died!!! [Both laugh.]

RICHARD: So what’s the moral there? To bloom wonderfully and die, or stay flowerless?

MARTHA: Not to bloom. It’s okay not to bloom for a while. Because that’s what happens in business. That’s what happens in life. Not every year is as productive as you want it to be. And that’s okay.

RICHARD: There’s a chapter in the book about the Stone Fruit trees, how the Plums need to drop their leaves and rest, to come back stronger in the spring, which is true.

MARTHA: Yes, even the trees need rest.

RICHARD: That reminds me, did you really just grow 600 Christmas trees?

MARTHA: No. I grew 609! We wanted to do a segment for television on planting a forest of Fir trees that would ultimately fill a big space as a windbreak. A friend of mine grows Christmas trees down in Virginia. So I invited him to come up, and he brought all the seedling trees.

RICHARD: And I saw they are huge now.

MARTHA: We planted them in 2009. And now they’re the perfect size for Rockefeller Center, not for the average home. But I did give a very tall one to a friend who has high ceilings, and she was thrilled with it. I just wish I had planted ten times as many. They are great for decorating outside for the holidays and for holiday parties.

RICHARD: Speaking of which, I looked at Entertaining yesterday, your very first book of the hundred books you’ve now done. It’s really personal the way you wrote that book. I really hear you in that book. Was that when you found your voice?

MARTHA: Well, that was the first book. And I had a teacher with that book, Elizabeth Hawes, who was writing at the time for the New Yorker, and she was a close friend. She lived in the neighborhood in Westport, and she came and she worked with me and worked and worked and worked and worked until we got it right.

RICHARD: It was released in 1982, but the type and the photography look so fresh right now. I don’t know whether that type of food styling has just come back into vogue, but the images and design are beautiful.

MARTHA: That was Roger Black, he did the design. He’s an iconic graphic designer and type designer. The main photographer was Michael Skott, and his assistant married my sister after the shoot. [Laughs.]

RICHARD: Was that the image you wanted on the cover? I think you’re wearing a white frilly blouse and you got all these yellow and orange flowers down the table.

MARTHA: Yes, it was my idea to wear that silly old-fashioned dress! But the housewives loved it. That’s who I wanted to love it. America’s housewives wanted that book because I wanted that book! Nobody had written a book like that before! I made it for me.

RICHARD: That’s the first business lesson. You MUST make the thing that YOU need.

MARTHA: Find a void and fill it.

RICHARD: Before you made that book you had your own catering company. You must’ve cooked in so many other people’s kitchens and inside other people’s homes. Did that give you insight into what people needed?

MARTHA: Yes, definitely, definitely. And I worked so hard at it. Every single day I worked, worked, worked in that stupid business. Catering is probably one of the most difficult businesses to have. And what I said to myself over and over again was, “I better photograph these parties because when I have grandchildren and they ask me what I do, I don’t want to look like a failure.” I thought if I didn’t have pictures of all these parties, they’d think I was just a scullery maid or something!

RICHARD: [Laughs.] Martha the scullery maid!?!

MARTHA: They would never know that I was actually a really good party planner and a really good entertainer. I also knew I wouldn’t be able to make that business of mine important unless I wrote a book about it.

RICHARD: That book shifted people’s perceptions from “have to” to “want to.” Rather than say “I HAVE to cook dinner,” it made people say “I WANT to cook dinner.” And clean. And bake. And garden.

MARTHA: That’s right. And that’s what Steven Spielberg said about my business. He said, “You turned your business from housekeeping to homemaking.”

RICHARD: In a different way, I turned my home into a business. I can’t think of anyone else except you who’s done that.

MARTHA: Exactly. That’s exactly what I did. I think about you a lot that way, and you’re not a copycat. You are an original. You took your fantastic sensibility, applied it to a house and a garden, and then said, “Boy, this is a business,” and you know, I totally agree with you. We’re kind of unique in the fact that we really did turn the love for home into a job. It’s so powerful.

RICHARD: But yet, it confuses people. We’ve had these really tough investor presentations where these finance bros are like, “What’s this thing you do? Are you a beauty brand? Are you a food brand? Are you a CPG brand? You’ve got to pick a lane, Richard! You need to focus! You can’t just be about nice things.”

MARTHA: You’re building a lifestyle brand.

RICHARD: Did you get that pushback as well?

MARTHA: Of course! They told me nobody wants to invest in a lifestyle. And they didn’t think I could take the company public. But I did.

RICHARD: There’s not really a formula for it. It’s not easy to copy someone’s previous playbook.

MARTHA: You’re doing something very different. And you’re taking it even deeper, into Ayurvedic thinking, regenerative farming. Taking what nature’s giving you and making those products, which I didn’t do. You’re making it a more sensory business.

RICHARD: I watched you on David Letterman many years ago, before we were friends, and you were talking about Kmart, and I think you said something like, “I believe everyone in America deserves nice things, but they shouldn’t need to pay so much for them.” Something like that. Do you still think that’s true? In this age of fast fashion, fast food, fast home, where everything is cheap, cheap, cheap...

MARTHA: No, not cheap! Not cheap! Not cheap! I don’t believe in cheap! I believe in affordable, practical, beautiful, useful. And not luxury. I don’t use the word luxury ever.

RICHARD: But do you think we have lost the appreciation for quality?

MARTHA: You need to be discerning. The junk you see now in so many places, I never made that kind of junk. I still use my Kmart towels at my home in Maine. The bathrooms in Maine are all Kmart towels and that was in the 1980s, when I made those towels. Extra, extra good quality.

RICHARD: What happened to Kmart?

MARTHA: Kmart was the biggest retailer in America, but they had absolutely stupid people running it. It grew in spite of itself because people needed and wanted all that stuff. And then they started to expand; they bought a bookseller, then they bought a hardware store, and then, you know, they got way too big for the brains that were running it. And they lost inventory control.

RICHARD: You remember my old job at my creative agency, Chandelier? We’d go in to fix big brands, rethink their strategy and marketing. They’d all have a different brief, but they were all essentially asking the same question: TEACH US TO ACT SMALL AGAIN. They all suffered from the same problem. Brands lose their intimacy with people. They stop being vulnerable. They get too big to be interesting. They become too large to be personal. They don’t invest in the small things. Efficiency becomes the death of curiosity.

MARTHA: The sad thing about Kmart was that they were very good manufacturers. They were so, so good at making things. My secateurs, for example, my gardening scissors, they’re from Kmart at that time. They still work perfectly. The new ones from Home Depot fell apart because Home Depot doesn’t believe in that kind of quality. Everything we made with Kmart was so well made.

RICHARD: At the height of your Kmart deal, wasn’t your Martha Stewart range doing a billion dollars a year?

MARTHA: Oh no, $1.6 billion a year!

RICHARD: And it started the trend of celebrity brands?

MARTHA: Yes. There were three people at Kmart. Jacqueline Smith, from Charlie’s Angels, she was the fashion girl. I was the home girl, and then Kathy Ireland’s range. It was so smart because we were the first big celebrity brands in the mass market. In the luxury market there was already Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. They did licenses, but they also had their own stores. They went to the top first and then moved down the pyramid. I went from the bottom and moved up the pyramid. Ralph managed to do it because he really invested in the lifestyle. Ralph, you know, his company is an amazing idea.

RICHARD: Ralph’s brand is built on real storytelling and awe. They’ve invested in the brand’s promise. They invested in the things that make people want to dream. That’s the stuff we both love—through food and the garden. To allow people to dream, including ourselves. It’s such a generous act.

MARTHA: Yes.

RICHARD: Also, when you talk about a billion dollars, I don’t think any of this was ever about money for you.

MARTHA: No. But Kmart paid for a lot of the other things we were doing. It paid for the expansion of all the other businesses, like publishing. Our publishing business was very successful. We became a successful magazine within three years, which was kind of unheard of.

RICHARD: Was the magazine basically just your voice from that first book?

MARTHA: No. no, no, not from the first book at all. It was from that first decade of me doing stuff. The home stuff. That’s what the magazine prototype was. Did you ever see the prototype? You must have seen it in my office?

RICHARD: No.

MARTHA: It was the most beautiful prototype anyone had done. I had Gael Towey working with me and Isolde Motley, who were geniuses at that time.

RICHARD: Isolde Motley changed my life. She gave me my first job in magazines in New York when she was the corporate editor of Time Inc. Actually, we were all together at your house in the Hamptons years ago, do you remember? Isolde came over for lunch. I was with you and her and I think you had gone into the kitchen. When you disappeared I asked Isolde, “Why is Martha so good at everything?” And she said, “Because she’s pursued by demons,” and I laughed so loud.

MARTHA: You have a good memory!

RICHARD: Since then, I have come to think there’s a misunderstanding about you. Katie Couric once did an interview with you where she said she could never be friends with you because your office is too clean and everything’s too perfect. Later in the interview you said that you live quite frugally, and she said no, no, you live like the Queen of England, where everything is perfect. And I thought to myself that this was inaccurate. Very inaccurate. I don’t think your love language is about perfection. I think your love language is about effort.

MARTHA: Yes, I put in the effort.

RICHARD: I don’t think I’ve ever thought of you as being indulgent or extravagant.

MARTHA: I’m not at all! And that’s my daughter’s biggest complaint about me, that I should have been more extravagant. I wasn’t and I should’ve been. I should’ve treated myself more fabulously than I ever did. Like when I became an instant billionaire in 1999 when I went public, I drove up Madison Avenue with my daughter and I said, “We can buy anything,” which is true. I could have bought any building, I could have bought any house. I could have bought any piece of art, anything. And I didn’t because I was a stupid asshole in retrospect.

RICHARD: Do you remember when I first met you? We flew together to your house in Maine. I was so nervous, and I remember you brought a huge box of croissants for the flight, freshly baked that morning from somewhere...

MARTHA: Balthazar, they had the best croissants in New York.

RICHARD: Oh, my friend Mark Tasker is the head baker there! And has been since it opened. He probably made them.

MARTHA: They were the best. But Ladurée’s are better now.

RICHARD: Let’s not tell Mark. But anyway, I had the warm croissant in my hand and I remember thinking, “Wow, Martha cares about quality.” And then we got to Maine, and I think you had a heated conversation with someone who gave you a quote to fix your chimney. And I think they wanted $300 or something. And you said you might just fix it yourself if it was $300 because you knew how it was done. That is my favorite quality about you, that you never ask someone to do something unless you know how to do it yourself.

MARTHA: Well, that’s what the whole magazine was about. To teach you how to do everything. It didn’t mean that you had to do it. But you knew how it should be done and then you would be a more demanding person of everyone around you because you knew how to do it right. That’s what I cared about, knowing how to do it.

RICHARD: So a related question about work. When that happens, and your business expands, and the business is very much a manifestation of you, and the effort you put into things . . . is it hard to find a CEO? Doesn’t it get frustrating when someone else is running your stuff?

MARTHA: Trying to find like-minded people is the most difficult part of the business.

RICHARD: Your instincts around finding good people...have they changed over time?

MARTHA: No. And I regret not sticking to my original strict methods of finding people. To be really like-minded, they couldn’t be sloppy in any way. And they had to be thinking about the company, not about themselves.

RICHARD: I met a very famous French entrepreneur who runs a big luxury group. We were talking about the difficulties of finding good people. He told me he’ll never give someone a job unless he can have a meal with them. Because he wants to see the way they use a knife and a fork. He wants to see how they speak to the server. And see if they wait to eat before he does. If they chew with their mouth open. If they have manners. If they can read a room. You can learn a lot from someone by looking at the way they sit at a table.

MARTHA: Oh, that’s true. That’s very true.

RICHARD: Speaking of staff, do you remember what you told me you feed your giant Staghorn Ferns?

MARTHA: Bananas? They love potassium.

RICHARD: No, not bananas. You told me you feed them your old CEOs. That’s how they grow so well! [Both laugh.]

MARTHA: Oh, how are all your Cycads?

RICHARD: Oh, they’re so happy! They’ve exploded. I’m going back down to buy some more from that Japanese grower in Anaheim. My only worry is if it gets too cold in LA this winter.

MARTHA: Yeah, they might turn brown on the edges. I would just throw a sheet over them just to protect them from frost. I lost a lot of Citrus trees because we had a panel of the greenhouse blow off and nobody noticed for a night. So many Citrus trees died. I was so sick to my stomach.

RICHARD: I love that greenhouse, it’s so beautiful. Yesterday I was sitting in a new restaurant next to our office named Highly Likely, owned by the brilliant chef Kat Turner. She told me a story about our mutual friend who, many years ago, worked at Martha by Mail, which is my favorite thing that you ever did. Anyway, her dream was to join your culinary team. She really wanted to switch from the catalog to the kitchen. Your Director of Food said nobody could work in the culinary team unless they could cook Martha an omelet. And she froze. She said she was terrified. Years later, it still haunts her.

MARTHA: [Laughs out loud.]

RICHARD: I said if Martha comes to Los Angeles, she’s definitely gonna come over. And she’s going to cook you that omelet!

MARTHA: Yes, let’s do that! I’m coming out soon to do a Scott’s commercial. So I’ll let you know. Let’s try that omelet.