Despite her mother’s best efforts, Alexis Stewart, the chronically crabby daughter of Martha, chose not to go into the family business, because she wanted to do her own thing. “She’s her own person,” her mother tells WSJ. So far, Alexis’s attempts to distance herself from her mother consist of creating a television show on the Fine Living Network, Whatever, Martha, in which she watches her mother’s show on television and provides caustic commentary, and submitting to mother-daughter interviews that make the reader feel like they are at one of the most awkward family dinners ever.
Like this one:
“She is faking it when she says she likes me,” Alexis says of her mother, sitting across a giant desk from her in the television studio on the west side of Manhattan where the elder Stewart tapes her show. It is impossible to tell if she is serious — or merely trying to provoke. Martha Stewart is gentler on the topic of her daughter: “I like that she is very strong and can do many physical things,” Martha says. “I like that she has a vast library of books and absorbs a lot of information. I like how she lives.” She pauses. “Well, I don’t totally love how she lives,” she says.
“What the f— does that mean?” asks Alexis, whose marriage to John Cuti ended in divorce in 2004. “That I don’t have a husband and a big ring and children?”
Later, the interviewer asks if she would one day like to run the company.
“Is that the dead mother question?” she asks.
Yes, that is indeed hilarious. We wish we could go to Christmas at the Stewarts’ — it must be a barrel of hysterical high-pitched laughs.
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Mother Superior? [WSJ]