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.”
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
Is Everyone cheating?
Has cheated?
Why is Martha dragging all this up decades later?
She is running her own image down, IMO.
Hard.Pass. on all Martha updates from here on out for me.
LOL then by her definition, she too is a piece of shit as she’s admitting to decades of infidelity here. She’s an astonishingly arrogant woman but I’ll probably watch this for all the tea.
So, now it comes out that both Martha and Andy cheated during their marriage.
Turkey Hill was a place that was hopping with cheating. All while Martha pretended to be “The lifestyle to aim for”
She spent decades building her “Brand” and all this just shows her to be a hypocrite and a bold faced liar about her private life. Her $$ and brand was built primarily on her WASP private high lifestyle.
The list of “There goes my Hero” that have fallen off their pedestals, continues to grow.
Damn, I used to have a tshirt “I want to be Martha. That B*tch has 5 houses.”
I watched it last night and it’s pretty amazing to see the difference between the woman she puts out into the world and even who she is when she is being interviewed, juxtaposed with the woman writing all of her letters to her husband after he left her. Which I think is the point of the film. Though it also drives home just how incredible it is that this woman from a very normal family in New Jersey became a self-made billionaire and all the ways the men around her tried to control or ruin her along the way. Fun fact: James Comey was the lead investigator/prosecutor who charged her with lying to the FBI! I forgot that little nugget but it really drives home the idea that she was targeted because she was so unapologetically successful and not a particularly nice person, two things women aren’t supposed to be. He really hates women who aren’t trying to please everyone. I also forgot that they didn’t charge her with insider trading, because it was clear that she didn’t do insider trading, they charged her with lying to the FBI. It was such a witch hunt.
The only thing I didn’t like about the film was that it takes most of the run time to get from her teenage life to her trial and then races through the last 20 years of her life as if those years were less important. She has done a lot in those 20 years but the film basically shows her as struggling until she met Snoop Dog who then somehow raised her profile and cultural cache. She’s so much more than that! But the first 2/3rds are quite good.
James Comey hates women: he targeted Martha, Hilary, & the female employees at Bridgewater. Maybe they weren’t “demure” enough, but they sure as hell didn’t deserve to lose their careers because of his misogyny.