This Media Life

I Love Martha

But let's look at this through Martha's eyes. She sees this not, I suspect, as a horrifying, Joseph K.–type reversal of fortune but as part and parcel of the never-ending effort of the bastards to get an advantage over you. This is, of course, denial, a refusal to accept your own innate crookedness, and it's no doubt what the Dennis Kozlowskis of this world think, too. But let's also give truth its due -- it's business; people are out to get you.

So what do you do to stay in business?

If the overwhelming amount of your equity is built into the goodwill that attaches to the name Martha Stewart, then, by definition, by the time your trials (pre- and post-indictment or –plea bargain) are finished, the idea of Martha Stewart, exquisitely besmirched, will be valueless.

Prosecutors -- and other media -- are taking Martha's equity in the form of anti-Martha equity. It's black-hole stuff.

Martha in prison: That's the picture -- not just a stark one but a broadly comic one (the laughing-at-you-not-with-you thing is very bad in the image business).

This isn't like, say, Steve Madden, the shoe guy, whose name is on the door and the insoles, who has recently gone off to jail for various financial shenanigans. We don't know Steve. He's a pure brand -- he's only incidentally a person. (Many designers, after all, continue to design clothes long after they're dead -- so why not from a jail cell?)

Martha is more in a Pete Rose bind -- she's dirtied something pure. Of course, there's a lot of willing suspension of disbelief here -- we don't really believe that Martha or Pete or baseball is pure.

She may be more George Steinbrenner–like. In Steinbrenner, who pleaded to a felony charge in the seventies, you already had a quintessentially moneygrubbing, I-take-what-I-want sumbitch. Steinbrenner the felon is not that different from Steinbrenner the nonfelon. He could, therefore, after an appropriate time out, recommence his management of the Yankees.

Martha is, we know, also a moneygrubbing, I-take-what-I-want sumbitch. Susan Magrino, Martha's longtime PR consigliere, should get her head around this. A strategy here might be to jettison the old Martha image and suggest that a felony charge and conviction are a natural part of the Martha story. That being your own brand requires a nastiness and greediness and megalomania that make prosecution always a possible outcome.

More Martha

I Love Martha:

Martha Stewart Bar Crawl: Because in times of crisis, a stiff drink is a good thing.

I Love Martha: A 1998 interview with the home guru.

The theme is -- or should be -- My Way. Sinatra is of no small relevance here.

Most of the Sinatra career was under a cloud. At several points, it seemed sure he was headed for indictment. If Johnny Roselli hadn't ended up stuffed in an oil can, who knows what would have happened to Frank.

In part, Frank was tougher than the prosecutors (Martha's tough, but not in a let's-step-outside sort of way). But nobody can really be tougher than the Feds.

You can be more talented, though. Frank sang his way out of trouble.

Can Martha pot or darn or sauté -- I'm not sure I can quite get the parallel here -- her troubles away?

The point is about talent. The Feds are trying to make Martha out to be Kozlowski -- just your average business crook, ever fungible. Who will miss Kozlowski? Will the world be lesser without him? But Martha is, I believe, unique. She has vast, if eccentric, talent. For presentation, for look and feel, for brandedness, for media itself (I'd argue that it is so hard to make a successful magazine of any sort that if you do, you deserve a type of immunity). What we lose, if we lose Martha, is an extraordinary example of how to profitably express yourself. Martha is, I have to say, inspirational.

Hef could be instructive here.

Hef got into trouble in the eighties. It was gaming-commission stuff. His empire teetered. He lost the Playboy Clubs -- the empire's jewel.

Hef was as identified with Playboy as Martha is with Martha.

In many ways, Hef and the Playboy concept are the real precursors to Martha -- not only live the lifestyle, but Omnimedia-ize the lifestyle. Playboy, too, like Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, in a moment of hubris, became a public company. This was an error -- the greed factor, which is why, of course, Martha is in her present mess. Having a public company means that the world is going to be judging the monetary value of your identity instead of the quality of your talent.

What was necessary for Hef and Playboy -- and what may now be necessary for Martha and her enterprises -- is a period of debranding. (This may be a larger trend in an overbranded world -- AOL Time Warner is considering getting rid of the AOL.)

Playboy became a kind of generic concept of airbrushed girls rather than a heroic concept of a new lifestyle. Likewise, Martha will have to turn into a well-executed upper-middle-class design-accessory company rather than the incredible story of Martha herself.

Come to think of it, Martha, like Hef, should probably put her daughter in charge of the company. If she's going to be indicted, the deal she should really try for while she still has bargaining room is house arrest (not unlike Hef in the Los Angeles mansion) -- she could make a deal for six months and then go into a well-decorated, albeit lonely, exile.

But she'll still be Martha -- who paid the price for iconhood.

It won't turn out the way she'd hoped it would (although, in her wildest dreams, could she have imagined she'd ever come this far with the whole Martha deal?), but in a down market, the job is just to come out ahead -- even by a little.