On an unseasonably hot Thursday, Martha Stewart presided at the head of a long patio table (from one of her furniture collections) at her estate in Katonah, New York. She was sorting through a tub of gifts made and brought by twenty-nine social-media “superfans” whom she had invited over for the day. The items included a giant potted fern, which had been driven from Wisconsin; a jar of “Martharita” jelly; and a tea towel printed with the same sycamore tree that Stewart uses as her estate’s logo.
“Who made this?” Stewart asked.
“Right here, Martha!” a woman said, shooting her hand in the air.
“These look familiar—from my magazine,” Stewart said, inspecting cookies garnished with sugared flowers.
“They’re made with the ponderosa lemons you like!” a man with dots of perspiration garnishing his forehead said.
“Did you see the faux-bois pants?” someone asked. A youthful man jumped up to show how his tan trousers matched a line of faux-bois plates that Stewart had designed for Martha by Mail.
“If anyone knows a faux-bois artist, let me know,” she said, matter-of-factly.
As her guests, selected from among the most faithful followers of the Instagram fan account Martha Moments, finished glasses of Stewart’s signature green juice, she asked a helper to move croissants and hard-boiled eggs—from her heritage chickens—into the shade. Despite the heat, and a broken toe (“Jalen stepped on it in the front row of a Knicks playoff,” Stewart said), it was time for a tour. She joined her guests as her head gardener led the way. Stewart pointed out hydrangeas climbing maple trees and noted that her seven hundred and eighty peonies bloom early. Although she doomscrolls political news in bed, she did not dwell on her climate-change anxieties. (Her U.S.D.A. gardening zone recently changed from 4 to 5—an unencouraging sign.) The boxwoods, she said, needed a haircut, and she showed off her finicky new robotic lawnmowers.
“Have you named them yet?” one superfan asked.
“I won’t name them until I know I like them,” she said.
By some garden beds (“Do not pick vegetables unless authorized,” a sign warned), she extolled the asparagus and ordered immediate watering. Then, as she left the group to make some calls in her house, she spied a piece of trash on the grass. “Uh-oh,” she said.
The superfans, most of whom were about four decades younger than Stewart, who is eighty-three, continued their tour. The sights included fenced peacocks, pheasants, geese (some bite, they were cautioned), chickens, and, in a massive stable made of local stone, miniature Sicilian donkeys and Friesian horses.
Brian Utz, a thirty-nine-year-old event planner from Dallas, knew a little about the horses. “Her oldest is Rinze,” he said. “He’s twenty-eight, and when she rides him the others stay back.” Utz, who was wearing a cowboy hat with an image of Rinze branded on the brim, said that discovering Martha Stewart Living, in 2005, was like finding Jesus. “I was a geek interested in learning, and that’s why I call Martha ‘America’s favorite teacher,’ ” he said. “She taught us all the things our parents and grandparents couldn’t teach us.”
“Martha was my TV mom,” Jordan Munn, a private chef from Montreal, said. As a child of a single mother, he couldn’t afford Stewart’s copper cookie cutters; now he works on luxury yachts. “She taught me to make my first Pavlova when I was ten.”
In 2o14, Stewart, a Barnard graduate who worked as a model and a stockbroker before finding her calling, ended up serving five months at Alderson Federal Prison Camp, for alleged obstruction of justice. These days, she claims to be less of a perfectionist, but she still has standards, and dislikes the word “pivot.” She said that being in jail—which she called “Yale” when she was a guest on David Letterman’s show—liberated her inner bad girl.
“Everywhere I go, the kids know who I am,” she told the superfans, over a poolside paella lunch. “Kids want to learn.” She imagined a Martha A.I. avatar asking children what they want to make and spitting out a recipe for rock candy. She fielded questions about her upcoming memoir, a restaurant that she is starting at Foxwoods casino, and a collaboration with TJ Maxx. One guest said that she’d found her beloved Martha Stewart hydrangea shower curtain at a thrift store. Carey Lowe, who makes letterpress wedding invitations in Chico, California, showed off embroidery that she had stitched on her chore coat from Tractor Supply (another Stewart collaborator).
“The crème caramel is coming,” Stewart trilled, just before dessert was served.
Several guests declared it a “Martha moment.” When they applauded, she waved off the accolades.
“You deserve it!” several fans cried.
“Oh, blah blah blah,” she said. She was reading a text from her grandson, asking her to get him tickets to the FIFA Club World Cup—regular seats, not box. “He likes to sit with the people,” she said. ♦
