(Photo: From left, Getty Images; Patrick McMullan)

At the Everyday Food TV launch, one speaker said, “Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia means we have all been to the same finishing school, we all have that discipline.” Lyne didn’t need to go to finishing school. Martha may be a sui generis Manhattan outsider, but Lyne is a member of Manhattan’s media tribe—a close friend of literary power couple Amanda “Binky” Urban and Ken Auletta. “Susan is a rarity among high-powered women because she doesn’t need to switch gears between office and home,” says Urban. “She treats business associates with the same generosity of spirit as she does her family, and is as respectful of her family as she is of her associates. She has good manners and probably good penmanship, too—both antiquated and underrated characteristics.”

The pulpit belongs to Lyne until Martha’s release on March 6, after which Martha will spend five months under house arrest at her 153-acre Bedford estate. (Peter Baconovic, who is serving the same sentence, left in January for jail in Nevada.) She will wear a monitoring anklet, but she can work 48 hours a week off the compound, and plans are already being hatched to film gardening segments for her new weekday morning show on the property—planting season takes place in the spring, after all. Then there’s her appeal—Martha isn’t fully convinced that she can’t win that, and certainly if she did it would help with the possible Securities and Exchange Commission civil suit that seeks to bar her from taking a director’s or officer’s position in her own company.

Then there’ll be two blondes sharing the spotlight, each with her role to play. So the narrative of Martha Stewart moves forward. One thing that makes Lyne perfect for her job is that she knows a good story when she sees one. And whether it has been about the origins of alpaca, the quotidian life of a midwestern beekeeper, or a $60 stop-loss order, Martha Stewart’s company has always been about storytelling.

Martha has had five months to mull over what she’s done and how to make it better,” says Lyne. “One of the things when you go visit her now is to see how comfortable she is, in an odd way.”

In the three years since Stewart’s ImClone sale was first questioned, the story has been bleak. Martha Stewart Living magazine, the company’s core business, is down 70 percent of its advertising revenue and 500,000 of its 2.3 million rate base as of 2004. Martha is still majority shareholder at the company, currently holding 59 percent of all shares, but until recently she had seen her holdings dwindle to under $250 million from a high of $1.2 billion on the day of the IPO. Kmart, with whom she has a $49 million annual licensing deal, emerged from bankruptcy and then merged with Sears in a deal that sounded like good news but analysts say has little chance of increasing Martha’s take. Meanwhile, while Stewart was occupied with the details of her trial, the bourgeois-paradise category that she pioneered has burgeoned, with do-it-yourself or just-think-about-it titles like Real Simple emerging as real competition, and more (Veranda, a home-design magazine from Hearst, Condé Nast’s upcoming Domino) on the way.

As the stock price plummeted and Stewart lost focus, the responsibility for moving the company forward fell on Sharon Patrick, president and COO. Patrick is another blonde who might also be mistaken for Stewart from across the room. A look-alike bosom buddy may somehow appeal to a deep streak of narcissism. (Oddly, there is also a distinct resemblance between Martha and Susan Magrino, Stewart’s upbeat longtime publicist. Magrino was married in the Bahamas the weekend before Stewart left for jail; Stewart was photographed walking sullenly on the beach in a black one-piece, alone.)

Patrick is the daughter of a United Airlines sales manager, raised in Southern California and once a Sea Maid at San Diego’s Sea World. Nevertheless, she’s not a mellow presence—brash, argumentative, tenser than Martha at times. She liked the stuff that Martha liked—her pets, home decorating, and got so excited about the Queen Mary 2’s coming to town that she had a welcome sign hung up outside the Starrett-Lehigh building. But there was no good cop and bad cop with Sharon and Martha—they could both be equally interested in informing others about the fly in the ointment. Patrick’s voice was louder—Martha, despite Cybill Shepherd’s characterization, gets quieter as she gets angrier.