Some Of The Many Anecdotes That Have Earned Martha Stewart A Reputation For Being, Well...
Stewart insists on personally approving the thousands of products that bear her name.
At a board meeting, Stewart was reported to walk in with a pot, slam it on the table, and say "This is crap. I don't want my name on it."
She really hates bananas.
Stewart's magazine stylists and art directors could spend a week on a shoot, only to have their work dismissed with one remark from Stewart.
“Martha would say, ‘Ugh, why are there bananas there? I hate bananas,’ ” an editor told NYMag. “There’s a list of things she loathes.”
She didn't let her daughter Alexis, sit on her bedspread growing up because it would get messed up.
Additionally, "her mother bribed her (all the clothes she wanted) to sit up straight," the Wall Street Journal reported. "The child of Martha and her ex-husband, Andrew Stewart, Alexis says she was grumpy as a child, and can be caustic now."
She told her daughter never to have ugly babies.
In Alexis' tell-all book, "Whateverland: Learning to Live Here," she says that a neighbor married an unattractive man and had a baby.
"My mother actually told me when I was a small child, 'Now Alexis, if this ever happens, you make sure you have sex with somebody else to have their baby. Don't have his baby.'"
She also invoiced her former best friend Mariana Pasternak after a trip to Europe.
Stewart would not pay for one penny of someone else's trip, according to Pasternak's book Best Of Friends.
Pasternak wrote of "her meanness when it came to traveling, billing her after a shared holiday 'down to the last penny.'
Stewart didn't let her company's ailing finances stand in the way of perfection.
Despite not being profitable for years, Stewart used company funds to "send staff members to, say, India, to obtain a certain piece of fabric," New York Magazine reported.
She changes her sheets every day.
According to her daughter's book "what she really means is that she has her sheets changed every day."
She took on Eddie Lampert, who wanted her Kmart products for cheaper.
The fiery hedge funder did not intimidate Stewart.
Watching the pair negotiate, a former Kmart executive told New York Magazine, was “like a cockfight; both of them were arching their backs and making points that weren’t really relevant.”
She ended up losing the deal.
One studio audience member said she made the crowd sit through her filming promos after the show.
"Martha (who didn’t look up at, or acknowledge, the audience at all, never mind thanking us for coming) walked off and we were allowed to begin filing out," a studio audience member said. "She would rather inconvenience 120 people than herself."
She nixed potential partners like Jonathan Adler, The Knot, and Cynthia Rowley.
A lot of the deals were far along, and then Stewart would find something wrong with them. In some cases, she’d nix the idea at the last minute, after sitting down with the prospective brand owner, an executive told New York Magazine. As one former executive puts it, “She didn’t want anyone else in the kitchen.”
Her staff is allegedly afraid of choosing the wrong shade for a photo shoot.
“That women’s bathroom,” and editor told New York Magazine in 2011. “There are women in there crying literally all day long.”
Those who saw her tapings in the 1990's compared her to the main character in "Mommie Dearest."
"(Those) who have witnessed her TV tapings describe her as a 'Martha Dearest' who can erupt into a tantrum and then turn on the charm when the camera rolls," People Magazine wrote in 1995.
She called out Oprah for not visiting her in prison.
In her first interview after her prison release, Stewart told Oprah that she had "visitors all the time, very good visitors."
“Rosie O’Donnell came to visit me…. A whole lot of fabulous people came and visited me,” she said, noting that Oprah herself never stopped by. “I knew you were too busy, but, um…,” Martha said, her voice trailing off.
Oprah looked horrified.
You've seen Martha Stewart's perfectionism...
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