As far as Martha Stewart is concerned, the new documentary about her life and career is not a good thing.
The lifestyle guru and self-made former billionaire has slammed the film “Martha,” which started streaming Oct. 30 on Netflix, as “lazy” and “not the story that makes me, me” at the Retail CEO Influencer Forum in September. “It’s more about my stupid trial, which was so unfair.”
And this week, Stewart doubled down in an interview with the Times, insisting that director R.J. Cutler focuses too much on her 2004 insider trading trial in the movie’s second half.
“The trial and the actual incarceration was less than two years out of an 83-year life,” she said. “I considered it a vacation, to tell you the truth.”
Indeed, those two years — from her troublesome phone call to her stockbroker as she was en route to Cabo San Lucas all the way to her final day in Alderson prison in West Virginia — take up nearly half of the two-hour doc.
Bitter Stewart is irate when she mentions the courtroom drama in the movie, which she participated in, saying the responsible parties, including eventual FBI director James Comey, deserve to be thrown into a blender.
“It was so horrifying to me that I had to go through that to be a trophy for these idiots in the US Attorney’s office,” she says of the high-profile trial.
“Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high. I was a trophy — a prominent woman, the first billionaire woman in America. ‘We got her.’”
When she begins serving her five-month prison sentence in 2004, actors read aloud her diary entries that criticize the food and staff.
“Physical exam,” she says on an entry from her first day. “Stripped of all clothes. Squat, arms out, cough. Embarrassing.”
Then she rails about the limited cafeteria fare available behind bars.
“What worries me is the very poor quality of the food,” Stewart wrote from the clink. “And the unavailability of fresh anything, as there are many starches and many carbs and many fat foods. No pure anything.”
In her first week in the joint — which forced her to hand over her contact lenses — she claims to have received a one-day stay in solitary confinement for accidentally touching a guard. (The Federal Bureau of Prisons disputes this).
“Today I saw two very well dressed ladies walking, and I breezed by them, remarking on the beautiful morning and how nice they looked — when I realized from the big silver keychain that they were guards. I lightly brushed the chain,” Stewart wrote.
“Later, I was called in to be told never, ever to touch a guard without expecting severe reprimand. Of course, I apologized but the incident was so minor when it occurred that I did not think about it for the rest of the day.”
The “Martha Stewart Living” founder says she was severely punished for the faux pas.
“I was dragged into solitary for touching an officer,” she recalls. “No food or water for a day. This was Camp Cupcake remember? That was the nickname. It was not a cupcake.”
And her relationships suffered. While locked up, boyfriend Charles Simonyi, the wealthy creator of Microsoft Office, only visited her one time, the film reveals.
“I don’t think he liked hanging out with somebody in jail,” she said. “He was out on his boat, floating around the world.”
And soon after Stewart became a free woman, he unceremoniously dumped her — under the covers.
“We were in bed and he said, ‘You know, Martha, I’m going to get married.’ He said, ‘I’m going to get married to Lisa.’ And I said, ‘Lisa who?!’,” Stewart remembers.
“I mean he hasn’t told me a word. ‘And, by the way her parents don’t want me to ever speak to you again.’”
“I thought that was the most horrible thing a person could do. How could a man who’s spent 15 years with me just do that? What a stupid thing to do to someone you actually cared about.”
Stewart also goes into messy detail about her and her ex-husband Andrew Stewart’s extra-marital affairs, and the resulting implosion of their marriage years before.
She first stepped out on Andrew — innocently, she says — when they were on their honeymoon in Italy and she was just 19 years old.
One day, Martha visited the Duomo in Milan alone while Andrew stayed back at the hotel, and there in the church she communed with a random gent.
“It was very romantic place, crowded with tourists, and [I] met this very handsome guy,” she said.
“He didn’t know I was married. 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 had ever experienced.”
She added: “It was like nothing I’d ever done before, so why not kiss a stranger?”
Martha maintains the secret smooch “was neither naughty nor unfaithful, it was just emotional. Of the moment. That’s how I looked at it.”
That wasn’t the only indiscretion, though. She also owns up to cheating again later on in the marriage.
“I had a very brief affair with a very attractive Irishman, and it was just nothing,” she says. “It was nothing. In terms of … I would have never broken up a marriage for it. It was nothing.”
Andrew, meanwhile, allegedly messed around on Martha constantly.
“He was not satisfied at home,” she said. “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 you think you’re happily married and your husband starts to cheat on you, he’s a piece of s–t. And look at him as a piece of s–t and get out of that marriage. But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t walk away.”
Eventually, Martha says, her hubby began sleeping with a female employee, assistant Robyn Fairclough, who lived on their Connecticut property.
“Robyn worked for me, and she had lost her apartment or something. And I said, ‘You could move into the barn on the lower two acres.’ We had a little apartment down there. And when I was traveling Andy started up with her,” she said.
“It was like I put out a snack for Andy.”
“I kicked her out immediately. ‘What the hell are you doing?!’ Andy betrayed me right on our property. Not nice.”
A friend admitted that Stewart was so distraught during this turbulent period that “at one point she showed me where she tore the hair out of her own head.”
Even as she achieved fame and boffo professional success, Martha wrote increasingly intense letters to her estranged husband who asked for a divorce.
The notes are rawly emotional, with messages such as:
“I cannot sleep. I cannot eat. My skin is worried and many lines that were not there are now there. I am agonizingly jealous of your other women.”
“Maybe you are planning to marry her and keep her with my money so that she can paint herself in portraits in the nude. It is very titillating isn’t it? Maybe she will paint you in the nude also. I’d love to see that painting.”
“I have to go to San Francisco and talk about weddings and my wonderful life. I hope you’re enjoying your freedom. And I hope my plane crashes.”
She hasn’t spoken to Andrew, with whom she shares 59-year-old daughter Alexis, in 20 years.
Clearly, “Martha” is a revealing portrait — sometimes painfully revealing — of an American icon that features a trove of eye-popping information.
But its subject doesn’t see it that way.
“R.J. had total access, and he really used very little,” Stewart told the Times. “It was just shocking.”
Cutler, meanwhile, has responded to her critique to The New York Times.
“I am really proud of this film, and I admire Martha’s courage in entrusting me to make it,” Cutler said in a statement. “I’m not surprised that it’s hard for her to see aspects of it.”
