It’s a roots thing, after all, a perfect Act Three, where the poor girl from Nutley, the one who ate mustard sandwiches for lunch and washed her hair in the kitchen sink, triumphs once again over adversity. Martha is back in touch with who she once was, with new insight into her shortcomings. She’s no longer so afraid of intimacy that her closest relations are with greasy social climbers or her stockbroker, her chickens, her chows. She loves people again—convicts. “She’s got a lot of friends, such a wide range of women, some of whom are not unlike women that she grew up next to,” says Lyne.

Lyne would not be one of these women. She grew up in the Boston suburb of Chestnut Hill as the oldest of four sisters and a brother, with what she’s called “the only Irish-Catholic Republican parents in Boston.” They were like the Minots; people called them the “Fabulous Lyne Sisters.” She went on to drop out of UC Berkeley and became a sixties hipster. “I dropped out many times,” she says. “I wanted to be in the world.” She became an assistant at Francis Ford Coppola’s City magazine, before landing a job at New Times on the strength of a jailhouse interview with the Symbionese Liberation Army’s Bill and Emily Harris.

In New York she became managing editor of the Village Voice from 1978 to 1982, when Rupert Murdoch owned it, and he made her editor when he founded Premiere in the U.S. Like other editors-in-chief, Lyne spent a lot of time making sure that they could do stories they wanted to do without being shut down by publicity firms like PMK, and became a masterful politician. She liked being around power people—and gossip. “We would have story meetings with the reporters in L.A. on the speakerphone, and when they were over she’d say, ‘Okay! Now let’s dish!’ ” says a former employee.

Burnett persuaded Stewart to do the reality show by sending her a tape of outtakes from her show and appearances on late-night shows. She was great when she was loose and spontaneous, he argued.

There’s something about Lyne that has always made her a good manager. “There are a lot of things I wouldn’t do for myself,” says a former staffer. “Susan was better to me than I was to myself.”

It’s this quality that the MSLO board picked up on when she began to serve in June. The board had been reconstructed after the departure of chair Jeffrey Ubben, the director of Value Act Capital and the second-largest shareholder after Stewart, and an effort had been made to diversify with people from all sorts of businesses. The former North American chief of EMI, Charles Koppelman, now a kind of freelance business mercenary with a taste for troubled entities—he’s spent the past few years as chairman of the board of Steve Madden, and has been representing Michael Jackson as he sells his share of the Beatles catalogue to Sony—emerged as the most active member. He’s now Lyne’s right-hand man.

Those close to the company say the board was taken with the notion of Lyne as CEO, believing that she “got” Martha. Martha, in fact, was the blueprint for the most delicious character on Desperate Housewives—the recently separated, emotionally disengaged Bree Van De Kamp, who makes basil purée and insists on fixing a dangling button on her therapist’s coat. In an early episode, she brings baskets of muffins baked from scratch to a grieving family. “It was no trouble at all,” Bree tells a son. “Now, the basket with the red ribbon is filled with desserts for your guests. But the one with the blue ribbon is just for you and Zachary . . . Of course, I will need the baskets back once you’re done.”

Lyne’s optimism was also a welcome tonic—she had faith in Martha. “My feeling from the time I walked onto the board was that the company would live or die by virtue of its key brand,” she says.