Martha, the Martha Stewart documentary on Netflix, finally came out yesterday, and holy cow — it was everything I dreamed of and more than I possibly could have imagined! I mean, the first scene is director R.J. Cutler asking “What is something you don’t like?” to which Martha first responds with, “That’s hard to answer,”… before she goes on to list about 20 things she despises. I don’t mind a woman who knows what she does and doesn’t like, but why not just own it from the start instead of trying to demure or deflect? There’s an awkward tension throughout the whole film of Martha trying to present a certain narrative, but that really flies in the face of, um, well, reality. Never is that dichotomy more apparent than the moments that address the infidelities in her marriage. They happened on both sides, though Martha seems startled that Cutler tries to compare her affairs with her ex-husband Andy Stewart’s. But boy, things were happening right off the bat in both the marriage and the documentary, as People Mag captured for us:

Early in the film, Martha recalls kissing a “very handsome guy” in Florence’s Duomo on her European honeymoon while Andy was at their hotel.

“He didn’t know I was married,” she says of the stranger. “I was this waif of a girl hanging out in the cathedral on Easter Eve. He was emotional. I was emotional. It’s just because it was an emotional place. It was unlike anything I’d ever experience.”

Martha goes on to share that she once had a “very brief affair” with a “very attractive Irish man” while she was working as a stockbroker in the late ‘6os.

“It was nothing,” she says. “I would never have broken up a marriage for it.”

Andy told producers he “didn’t stray” until she had.

“He was not satisfied at home,” Martha says in the film. “I don’t know how many different girlfriends he had during this time, but I think there were quite a few.”

“Young women, listen to my advice, if you’re married and your husband starts to cheat on you, he’s a piece of s—,” she adds in a clip previously seen in the doc’s trailer. “Get out of that marriage.”

Later in the film, Martha’s friend Kathy Tatlock recalls rumors that Andy had “some sort of involvement with the girl who was doing the flower arrangements” at Turkey Hill Farm (the couple’s Westport, Conn. home).

“When I was traveling, Andy started up with her,” she says. “It was like I put out a snack for Andy.”

Martha says she confronted them about the affair. “I kicked her out immediately,” she says. “You know, ‘What the hell are you doing?’”

“Andy betrayed me, right on our property,” she continues. “Not nice.”

When Martha wasn’t up for speaking on camera, she provided filmmaker R.J. Cutler with personal letters that revealed her inner thoughts. “I am agonizingly jealous of your other women,” she wrote to Andy during this period.

They divorced after 29 years.

“He’s the one who wanted the divorce, not I,” says Martha. “He was throwing me away. I was 40 years old. I was gorgeous. You know, I was a desirous woman. But he was treating me like a castaway. He treated me really badly. And in return, I guess I treated him badly.”

[From People]

You guys, I’m gone. The epic theatricality of that moment in the Duomo! We need to resurrect Michelangelo so he can paint the tableau on a ceiling somewhere. She’s on her HONEYMOON and she KISSES a stranger?! In an Italian catholic cathedral at Easter?!? Che scandalo!! That honeymoon, by the way, was a five-month tour of Europe. I think what ended up being my favorite thing I learned about her was that Martha wrote down everything during that trip: every meal, work of art, historic architecture, she recorded it all. And then she had it all ready to go and incorporate a decade or so later when she began to build her empire.

But getting back to the marriage, it was fascinating to watch Martha of today being interviewed, and struggling to reconcile the suggestion that her affairs were akin to Andy’s. She’s dismissive of her own, like they didn’t mean anything, but then doesn’t seem to register that it might’ve been gutting for her ex to witness, just as she clearly was heartbroken watching Andy. Particularly with the florist Martha invited to stay in a barn on their land. And I believe Martha when she says she was devastated by that; it’s just puzzling that she only briefly and very reluctantly acknowledges that she and Andy each hurt one another.

And that’s just one section! Later on when they get into her trial she says, “Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high!” Seriously, the film is jam-packed. It’s a really, really good thing.

Photos credit: © 2024 Martha Stewart/Courte via Netflix Press, Getty images for Netflix and screenshots from Netflix