Producer Mark Burnett introduces the new Martha Stewart TV show as Susan Lyne looks on. (Photo credit: AP)

Patrick and Martha built the company together—the two of them in Martha’s kitchen in Turkey Hill, and later in the same office at the Omnimedia empire. The division of labor was Patrick as the businesswoman, Martha the creative force and front woman. It was Patrick who told Stewart, on a hike with Sandy Pittman to Mount Kilimanjaro, that she should buy the magazine from Time Warner and build her own empire. They IPO’d in October 1999. “Standing on the stock-exchange podium together was standing on our dreams,” says Patrick. “It was the rarest of moments—pure validation. We were told that it was the first time in NYSE history that the women who started the company actually were the ones to bring the company forward. We elevated domestic arts to a well-deserved seat at the table. To celebrate, Martha served brioche to the entire exchange.”

But as the company drifted, Patrick was forced to preside over a debate about whether to take Martha away from the product. The operating principle was that Martha’s image as Mother of those domestic arts might be too intertwined with the company for it to survive with her. “People just think it’s Martha doing all this stuff,” says an editor. “We would get letters saying ‘Thank you so much for your towels and I love how you wrapped them.’ ” Martha did approve almost everything that had her name on it—all products, the magazines. She’d put her own special stamp. “One buyer presented her with a straw decorative deer, to sell as a decoration for the holidays,” says a former catalogue manager. “She looked at the deer and said, ‘Who the hell would want deer? They’re eating all my vegetables in the Hamptons! Everybody hates deer now!’ So the deer became polar bears.”

The vision of Martha’s role after her indictment was akin to that of Ralph Lauren to Polo—not absent, exactly, but not fully present, either. She’d no longer be the matriarch; more like the godmother.

Patrick was the driving force behind Everyday Food, which she took pride in launching in this difficult media environment; the purchase of Body & Soul, a magazine about yoga and herbs; and the shift in titles of Martha’s two weekly newspaper columns, distributed by the New York Times Syndicate—“Ask Martha” became “Living,” and “AskMartha Weddings” is now “Weddings.” Martha’s monthly calendar at the magazine and her “Remembering” column were excised—no longer were we regaled with memories like “Before and after lunch . . . we children, and there were lots of us, rocked in two canvas hammocks hung in the shade, and quietly talked about school and dreams and the future.” The words MARTHA STEWART were shrunk on the magazine, and a new ad campaign was launched: “Take a New Look at Living.”

It was Patrick’s shrewdest maneuver that was possibly the last straw. She argued forcefully for Stewart’s serving her term early, and as Stewart’s longest-running confidante, she was the one Stewart ultimately trusted. The comparison was DeDe Brooks, the Sotheby’s price-fixer who avoided jail and for that remained disgraced. But telling someone to go to jail is kind of like telling a friend you think she shouldn’t marry the guy she wants to marry. Martha was already in jail on the day in mid-November when it took hours for Patrick to negotiate her exit from the company, but in the end, Lyne was anointed.

The tulips in front of Susan Lyne are so fresh you can smell them across the room. Last Thursday morning, on the 24th floor of MSLO’s offices across from the New York Public Library, she wore an outfit that was perfectly matched—the gold in her hoop earrings picks up the buckle in her belt, the glasses perched atop her head the same black as her slim slacks. Lyne is comfortable in her skin, long legs crossed carelessly under a table, unmanicured hands gesturing here and there, but she talks with a highfalutin accent and at a snail’s pace as she considers Martha’s for-toon.

“Martha wants absolutely nothing more than to get back to work,” says Lyne. “Coming home is a huge release, and I think she will come out with a thousand ideas, more than she will be able to accomplish immediately. She has had five months to mull over what she’s done and how to make it better and where there are opportunities.” Earlier she said, “One of the things to go visit her now is to see how comfortable she is, in an odd way.”