The time is Martha minus one hour and counting and Elizabeth Wimberley Bernbaum is beyond giddy.
“I am about to burst,” she declares breathlessly. “My skin cannot contain me!”
Bernbaum is eighth in line–in front of 300 other Martha Stewart fans who have swarmed to Robb & Stucky’s Altamonte Springs store recently to get a glimpse of the Domestic Diva, here to give a slide show on her latest furniture line.
And though the assembled crowd, clad in everything from blue jeans to Sunday best, is excited, few are more pumped than Bernbaum, a 32-year-old public relations professional turned stay-at-home mom.
“I had a Martha Stewart wedding, a Martha Stewart baby and a Martha Stewart home,” she says. The baby, technically, is not a Martha product, but 6-month-old Georgia’s nursery has been decorated with Martha colors and Martha linens.
Living the Martha way, however, has not been without problems. When Bernbaum showed florists the Martha arrangements she wanted duplicated for her wedding, several balked, saying she was stifling their creativity. And when she gave caterers Martha’s recipes, they too were aggravated.
When she and her husband moved to their new home in Maitland, he blanched at moving his wife’s collection of Martha Stewart magazines. Other than that, he doesn’t mind her Martha Stewart lifestyle. He doesn’t object to the Martha Stewart paint colorsthe Martha Stewart towels, vases and dishes and cookware, the Martha Stewart cookie decorating kit and the Martha Stewart mirror. Nor did he complain when his wife stripped the wood floors in their new house and stained them with a dark stain, which Martha suggests.
Bernbaum has even served a Martha Stewart Passover dinner, relying strictly on Martha’s recipes. “All of her recipes work,” she says. “You can’t say that about Williams-Sonoma.”
And last year, when Bernbaum heard that Kmart, which carries Martha’s housewares line, was declaring bankruptcy, she drove to the nearest Kmart and snapped up all of Martha’s white Egyptian cotton bath towels. Twenty-two of them.
And though she sounds as if she’s obsessed, Bernbaum rationalizes her Martha mania.
“She’s a perfectionist,” says Bernbaum. “She spends all her time figuring out what things look good together. That way I don’t have to.”
Bernbaum doesn’t know how to paint her walls or tile her kitchen. She clips pictures of Martha’s style and hands off the work to professionals.
It’s Martha’s style that Martha has come to Orlando to discuss. Staffers say she will not talk about her period of recent unpleasantness–the charge that she illegally traded ImClone stock with insider information. She will not talk about her company’s slumping finances. She is here to talk about her furniture line. Martha Stewart Signature Furniture with Bernhardt. Please get that right, the staffers say. It’s very important.
Martha’s appearance is carefully orchestrated. The visit–a few hours that culminates in a 45-minute slide and video presentation with a short question-and-answer period–has tied up the Robb & Stucky employees for weeks.
“You’d think the president was coming,” jokes one. To avoid a mob scene, the store mailed invitations to 2,000 subscribers to Martha Stewart Living, Martha’s monthly magazine, who live in Orange and Seminole Counties. But with room to seat only 340, the invitees had to respond quickly.
And they did.
“People got those invitations and called our hotline immediately,” says Debbie Sheaf, the store’s marketing director. Some called at 2 a.m. Others dialed the hotline four or five times to guarantee they would snag a reservation.
“I knew it would be wild, but I didn’t realize it would be like this,” Sheaf says.
Word of Martha’s visit trickled out, however, and spread as quickly as thin, cheap, non-Martha paint.
Rosemary DeRose, 72, and her friend, Marilyn Patterson, 64, arrive at 9:20 a.m. and, to their astonishment, they are the first ones in the parking lot. They park side by side and sit together in DeRose’s Lexus to wait for the doors to open at 10.
Truthfully, Patterson is more of a Martha Stewart fan than DeRose (“Her furniture’s kind of plain to me”). Patterson first discovered the joy of Martha 15 years ago, working with a friend in the catering business. While planning a wedding, they picked up Martha’s book on weddings and devoured every page of it.
DeRose and Patterson walk through the doors first, to be greeted by a phalanx of Robb & Stucky staffers, who direct them to a large conference room at the rear of the store. There, past the roped-off partition, 340 white wooden garden chairs await.
Patterson peeks into the room where the Domestic Diva will speak.
“I’m surprised she didn’t make covers for each chair,” she says, laughing. “She’s very good at that, you know.”
As they wait, they glance around at Martha’s furniture collection. Next to them is the cream-colored, $2,135 armoire with nickel-plated drawer pulls and drawers lined with Martha’s signature drawer paper. There’s the Martha sofa, the Martha map chest, the Martha Windsor chairs, all reproductions of antiques Martha has collected. There are Martha rugs on the floor, Martha lamps and Martha linens on the beds.
Even the fresh flowers have been arranged to Martha’s specifications, from photos sent by her New York staff.
“That’s what’s so neat about her stuff,” says Orlando interior designer Sam June. “It’s easily reproducible.”
Not everyone agrees. And unlike this crowd, not everyone adores the Diva of Domesticity. Parodies of her magazine have sprung up (“Martha Stuart’s Better Than You at Entertaining”), Web sites are devoted to vilifying her. Many feminists believe Martha has sold out women by peddling a return to Suzy Homemaker.
Martha’s fans suspect they know why she inspires such loathing.
“I think it’s because she’s so perfect,” says Barbie Heller, 70, of Maitland. “People may be threatened by her. You know–these mediocre people.”
As the line waits for Martha to arrive there is discussion of the real Martha versus Martha the Myth.
“I like her,” says one woman, “but I don’t think she’d be my best friend.”
Few even care about her stock dealings and possible insider trading scandal.
“When celebrities become as famous as she is, I think there are people just looking to injure them,” says antiques dealer Cis Gammons of Longwood. “What she did was wrong, but I just think she made a mistake.”
The fans, most of them upper-middle-class women in their 50s and 60s, do have a grip on reality. They recognize that Martha could not possibly tend the chickens, goats and gardens by herself. “We’re not that stupid,” says Gammons.
Before long, the fans are ushered into the conference room where they each receive a gift bag containing, among other things, three bars of –what else?–The Perfect Soap.
Martha, dressed in a yellow-green jacket with yellow silk slacks, quietly slides into her seat. When she approaches the podium, the whispers begin. “Ooo. Look at her great shoes,” they say of the animal-print slides she’s wearing. “Oh,” groans another. “We have all these big heads in front of us.”
Martha shows a video clip of Martha redoing her mother’s home with her new furniture line. Martha’s mom has sort of frumpy old furniture, which surprises the crowd. Why didn’t millionaire Martha redecorate her mother’s house earlier? some women whisper.
Martha shows slides of her five homes, which she describes as “laboratories” where she conducts experiments with color and decor and furniture.
But Martha pokes fun at herself too. “Even my cats are well-organized,” she says of a slide showing five antique Japanese dishes containing cat chow for her five felines.
Her fans applaud, they laugh at her jokes. Afterward, they line up so Martha can autograph their complimentary magazines.
Bernbaum’s nearly last, but she reaches the Goddess of Good Housekeeping right before she quits signing. “Now my life is complete,” says Bernbaum, clutching the magazine.
And that, Martha would say, is a good thing.
