It's Always Martha, Martha, Martha

A not-so-tiny lesson about publishing, privilege, and pop culture

So many people I know from so many different age and other demographic groups have been watching the “Martha” documentary on Netflix that some other major influencers (naming no names, but one’s rhymes with Mynah) must be feeling like Jan Brady during cheerleading season.

I’ve been following Martha Kostyra Stewart for a good portion of her career. I even wore the same Laura Ashley dress she sports on the cover of Martha Stewart’s Hors d’Oeuvres to my wedding-rehearsal dinner (hers was yellow sateen, mine was blue jacquard), and that wasn’t deliberate — it just shows how tuned in Martha is to the Zeitgeist. I’ve bought and used her cookbooks, read biographies about her, attended a taping of her shortlived television show, and once even interviewed her, by phone, for a large media company. I subscribed to Martha Stewart Living magazine for years, because that woman’s aesthetic is unparalleled. She may be tuned in to the Zeitgeist, but she doesn’t fall for fads. Martha’s taste — It’s A Good Thing.

However, as someone who has always been tuned in to book publishing, I realized the minute I learned Martha’s husband was Andy Stewart that Martha had a super-duper “in” to getting her early books published.

Andy Stewart, a graduate of Columbia University and Yale University’s law school, became CEO of Harry N. Abrams and then Stewart, Tabori, & Chang. His third wife, Shyla Stewart, is the CEO of Fieldstone Publishing, where Andy Stewart is Publisher Emiritus [sic]. In other words, Stewart knows publishing, publishers, and everyone involved in the Manhattan-based book-publishing industry.

Of course Martha Stewart would think about publishing books of her recipes. Of course Andy Stewart would help her get them published. Of course once her books started selling well, she’d get more book deals. Privilege can have a domino effect.

Privilege can also be instructive. As we all know from Martha’s documentary and her many interviews over the decades, she grew up in a household with lots of siblings, painfully strict parents, and a tight budget. As she began to model, then entered Barnard, then met Andy Stewart, she—like so many young people with ambition—paid attention to upperclass manners and mores.

Martha hasn’t forgotten where she came from. In the documentary, she freely discusses her father’s rigid, angry treatment of her and her siblings. But she may not be fully aware of how quickly and totally she jumped social class when she married. She may not realize how easily that class-jumping made her entry into the media world that she has conquered, lost, and conquered again.

Publishing rewards privilege so much and so often that even those of us who have failed at it again and again, like me, forget that we’re allowed to start over and over because of socioeconomic, educational, financial, marital, and collegial privileges.

It’s not just Martha who needs to recognize this. It’s me. And you. And all of our colleagues. Let’s spend less time keeping things business as usual and more time lifting up people who might not otherwise know how to enter the fray. Bob and Carol Brady were clueless parents. People who have influence in book publishing don’t have to be like them.