Feature

The Friends of Martha Stewart

But we mustn’t jump too far ahead. Back in the nineties, Waksal, her daughter’s former lover, became Martha’s close friend and frequent escort (escort: so nineteenth century). If not for that friendship, she never would have owned shares in Waksal’s company. And if not for the allegation that she was told, at the behest of her broker (and quasi-friend) Peter Bacanovic, that her friend Waksal had dumped some of his holdings in ImClone, she would not now be a convicted criminal. Her friendships got her in trouble.

And another friendship made the trouble worse. It is her former sidekick Mariana Pasternak who is the great betrayer in this tale. Pasternak testified in court that Martha said to her after the cell-phone call about Waksal’s hasty selling, “Isn’t it nice to have brokers who tell you those things?” Just as Pasternak’s name is like the droll fabrication of a novelist, so was the text and subtext of her testimony. She was weirdly, hilariously addled, Megan Mullally as Miss Havisham, Gracie Allen as Judas. On cross-examination she admitted that the damning isn’t-it-nice quote was actually just “a string of words that I recall.” “I do not know if Martha said that, or [if] it’s me who thought those words . . . I do not know whether that statement was made by Martha or was a thought in my mind.” The third time she was asked about the memory she flip-flopped back again, deciding she did recall that Martha had indeed uttered that particular string of words. Perhaps she was a person so desperate and bedazzled to have been in the presence of her famous friend that she lost track of the boundaries between her own teetering Fairfield County life and that of Martha, between the real and the imaginary. Pasternak’s inconsistency on the stand could also be construed as her kooky, farcical version of nervous, fussy, Martha-esque perfectionism—as when the CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia altered a telltale phone record on her assistant’s computer, then had the assistant change it back again.

But the profound moment in Pasternak’s testimony was when she recalled under oath that Martha had seemed rueful about selling her ImClone shares—not because the sale may have been unwise or illegal but because she worried that it was an abandonment of beleaguered Sam Waksal. “It was a question,” Pasternak said in the course of her disloyal testimony, “of loyalty to her friend.” Pasternak was a friend of Waksal’s as well.

“The Martha story is like an old-fashioned social satire. it’s school of Disraeli or Dickens or—especially—Trollope.”

Douglas Faneuil, Peter Bacanovic’s assistant at Merrill Lynch, is a familiar character in the nineteenth-century novel: young, conceited, spineless, resentful of his masters. When he was asked on the witness stand if he had considered Bacanovic a friend, Faneuil said no, not really, but “we did things socially.” Bona fide friends of Faneuil’s were brought on to testify he had told them that he felt obliged to lie about his call to Martha Stewart. And that pressure made Faneuil, one of the friends said, “very stressed out.”

In The Way We Live Now terms, Bacanovic is Hamilton Fisker, the slippery American stock promoter and partner of Melmotte’s who connives to befriend the rich and well-born of London. Was Bacanovic a real friend of Martha’s before their indictment as co-conspirators? It seems unlikely she thought so. Their relationship is a rather standard one, however, in fiction and on the Upper East Side—the unctuous, well-groomed, socially ambitious young courtier attending carefully to the needs of an important lady of a certain age. And since the jury has found that relationship criminal, what will become of their friendship (or “friendship”) now?

Appropriately for a trial concerning the vicissitudes of friendship, displays of affection for Martha were conspicuous in the courtroom—especially conspicuous because several of her intimates who came to give moral support (Bill Cosby, Rosie O’Donnell, Brian Dennehy) were fellow members of the fraternity of the famous. And here’s another irony: If Martha were not so well known, she almost certainly would have escaped prosecution.

More than almost any celebrity, Martha Stewart has always been notable for her legion of enemies, people who despise her meticulous rich-Yankee aesthetic and people apt to call almost any successful female executive a bitch. (The caricature of Martha is that very modern and paradoxical hybrid, the Stepford dominatrix.) But it turns out she also had friends. Not just the decorative swarms of friends we saw in photographs in her magazine—friends in a garden at sunset holding cocktails, friends around an antique table laughing over saffron salmon—but friends who took advantage and bragged and pushed and panicked and tattled, the way friends unfortunately sometimes do in real life. One wonders which of her friends will stand by her now.