Home economics maven Martha Stewart is still on television, offering tips in her sonorous voice on making homemade ice cream and capturing fireflies for outdoor lighting accents, seemingly oblivious to the scandal surrounding her.
In spite of probes by the FBI, the US Justice Department, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Congress over allegations she engaged in illegal insider trading, the domestic queen and her Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia corporation continue to plow through the media waters, the bowspirit of uber-homemaker cutting through waves of bad news.
Over the past week, Stewart's lawyers have handed over phone records and other documents to a US congressional panel investigating allegations that the domestic doyenne engaged in a bit of insider trading.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
The case against Stewart by US securities regulators hinges on an 11-minute phone call she had with Douglas Faneuil, a new 26-year-old assistant to her stockbroker, Peter Bacanovic.
After changing his story several times, Faneuil now says he gave information not available to public investors that biotechnology firm ImClone's promising new anti-cancer drug Erbitux had been turned down for public sales by the US Food and Drug Administration. That bit of information, regulators suspect, promoted Stewart to sell her 4,000 shares of ImClone.
Stewart and Bacanovic contend she had a standing verbal order to sell her ImClone shares if the stock dipped below US$60 a share. Stewart sold her ImClone shares at 59.98.
Stewart has denied wrongdoing, but didn't help her case any when she went on a morning US national television talk show in June -- just as the scandal was making headlines -- menacingly slicing cabbage while refusing to comment on the case.
"I want to focus on my salad!" she snapped as she continued to chop.
Born in August 1941, Martha Kostyra was the second of six children of New Jersey salesman Edward Kostyra and his strict Polish housewife, Martha
She spent her early teen years making her own dresses, digging in the family garden and concocting pastries for a household that never enjoyed postwar prosperity.
Her soft, WASP-ish features soon caught the attention of fashion model scouts, who catapulted her into New York fashion circles. She soon grew disillusioned and abandoned the runways to study art history at Barnard College.
At Barnard, she met Andy Stewart, an ambitious law student and son of a Wall Street stockbroker. The two married in 1961, and Stewart used wedding present money to begin investing in the stock market.
The markets soon made the couple wealthy. When a downturn in the econonmy hit in 1971, the Stewarts moved into what she would later remember as a "old wreck" of a house in Westport, Connecticut.
The experience of reviving that wreck steered Stewart towards the unexploited world of the homemaker. She soon opened a gourmet food shop in Westport, followed by a catering business that became the million-dollar Martha Stewart, Inc concern serving high-end, yet fiercely traditional fare to corporate clients and a host of celebrities.
During this time, Stewart published her first book, Entertaining, which sold 500,000 copies, a record for such a title. The book was soon followed by other tomes on staging weddings, pies, tarts and hors d'oeuvres.
It was during this time Stewart earned a reputation as addicted to work, fueled by chronic insomnia and dogged by stories of exploiting, then failing to credit the talented people she hired.
In 1987, Stewart divorced her husband of 28 years, and then signed a deal to market a home goods line with retailing giant Kmart.
The two events, Martha watchers say, put the executive housewife into a frenzy of activity. She signed a deal with Time Warner to publish her own magazine and other book titles.
Once nurtured by the media conglomerate's vast resources, she succeeded in wrangling her brand ownership back, and soon launched her own public company, Martha Stewart Omnimedia, a sprawling media empire that made Stewart a homemaking tycoon.
Now Stewart's destiny is imperiled. Shares of her company traded at less than US$8.50 Friday, down from a 52-week high of US$20.93, after falling as low as six dollars a share.
Analysts have questioned whether Martha Stewart Omnimedia can survive the scandal surrounding Stewart -- especially in the current atmosphere of a crackdown on the corporate accounting problems shaking the US economy.
"Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc is not really an institution, so much as a kind of colossal one-woman band that is destined to fall silent when the musician stops playing," observed Christopher Byron in his stinging biography of Stewart, Martha, Inc.
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