Move over, pimply-faced Internet moguls: The ubiquitous cookie-maker has more dough than you do. Reportedly worth a mere $250 million when she awoke at her usual 4 a.m. on Oct. 19, Stewart saw her assets climb—on paper anyway—to $1.06 billion by day's end, thanks to the phenomenally successful public offering of stock in her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. (Time Inc., the publisher of PEOPLE, owns a small percentage of MSLO.) The value of her 60 percent stake is now around $1.15 billion—still more than enough for Stewart to have eclipsed her friend Oprah Winfrey as the wealthiest self-made woman in media and, for that matter, in the nation. Which begs a few questions: Will Martha go on a world-class shopping spree? Will potential suitors be even more intimidated? And, more seriously, can this irrepressible micromanager succeed as head of a major public company?
As for the first question, "I'm not a big consumer," insists Stewart, who does admit to a weakness for real estate. She owns six homes in tony spots: two in East Hampton, N.Y., two in Westport, Conn., and the others in Seal Harbor, Maine, and Manhattan. "I'm looking for another place in New York—a big place," says Stewart, adding that she hates leaving her two chow chows and eight cats behind when bunking at her one-bedroom pied-à-terre.
She'll certainly need more room if she finds the relationship she craves. "It would be fun to be remarried," says the divorcée, who admits to "sort of dating" Seattle-based Microsoft programmer extraordinaire Charles Simonyi, 51, whose $1.5 billion fortune makes him even richer than she is. "But if people think you're only going out with [one person], it cuts off other avenues."
Stewart is far too savvy for that. Those close to the lifestyle maven say that she has always been driven—and makes no apology for it. "When Martha and I had lunch for the first time," says Jane Heller, her personal banker since the 1980s, "I said, 'Everyone who comes with me gets to be rich and famous.' Martha said, 'I want to be rich and famous.' " Now that she is, Martha can't help but gloat. "We don't know of another woman who built a company from the basement, like I did, who took it public, who is chairman and CEO and is a billionaire on the first day of trading," she says.
She didn't get there by eating humble pie (though she probably has the recipe). "She has stepped on a lot of people climbing to the top," says a former colleague who asked not to be named. But few who have griped about Stewart—including author Jerry Oppenheimer, whose unauthorized 1997 biography Just Desserts portrayed her as a ruthless operator who stole ideas and ruined friendships—are dishing these days. Even James Downey, the coauthor of such parodies as Is Martha Stuart Living? has quit mocking Martha for now. "She's less ridiculous," explains Downey. "She's a serious corporate chieftain."
After all, who wants to diss a billionaire? Her 27 books have sold 9.5 million copies, and her magazines—Martha Stewart Living and Martha Stewart Weddings—boast nearly 10 million readers combined. Millions more tune in to her daily syndicated TV show, weekly Food Network cooking spot, regular segment on CBS's Early Show and annual holiday special, which this year airs Dec. 8. Then there's the syndicated askMartha column (in 233 newspapers nationwide) and radio show; mail-order catalogs; retail deals that raked in $763 million last year; and, just to be sure the sun never sets on her realm, a Web site that peddles such goodies as gardening tools and flowers. As a brand, says marketing expert Ed Lebar, "Martha is a killer."
And, at times, a killer boss. She has posted hand-written notes in the office bathroom demanding that it be kept clean, staffers say, and she once publicly scolded a caterer for laying out the wrong spoons. (On the other hand, Stewart can be quite generous: In October she gave most staffers who had been with the company a year or more at least $6,000 in stock plus options.) "Perfectionism is her greatest strength and greatest weakness," says Stewart's daughter Alexis, 34, an East Hampton gym owner.
"I'd rather be writing the books, cooking the pies, making the meringue wedding cakes," concedes Stewart, who routinely scours Kmart to check on the state of her name-brand curtains and cushion covers. "But [now] I have to do it by offering guidance and planning." To reassure investors, Stewart, who has been insured for $122 million, says she will delegate more to her staff of 400.
She is also cutting back on risky business outside of work. A few years back she was so unfazed by a Himalayan trek that her tentmate, Manhattan socialite Blaine Trump, recalls Stewart manicuring her nails at 3 a.m. and cooking up camp-stove crêpes suzette at 16,000 feet. But she is now reconsidering plans to watch the millennium's dawn from atop 1,532-ft. Cadillac Mountain in Maine's Acadia National Park, the first U.S. spot to see the sun. On a practice trek in February, Stewart and her guests found the "trails too icy, steep and circuitous," she wrote in her magazine.
Which is not to say that Stewart has gone soft. She still lives her own legend—sleeping four hours a night, enduring back-to-back meetings and photo shoots all day, then retreating to one of her homes to reseed the lawn or service the snowblower. Says Simonyi, who met her at a 1996 fundraiser in Manhattan and calls her a "good friend": "Life is her profession. When she entertains, it's done professionally. When she plays Scrabble, she plays to win."
She has pushed herself since her fabled childhood in working-class Nutley, N.J., where Martha Kostyra grew up the second of six children of first-generation Polish-Americans Edward (who died in 1979) and Martha, 85. Then came the modeling jobs that helped pay her way through New York City's Barnard College, seven years as a Manhattan stockbroker, and two decades of sweating with a smile as she built a catering business from her Westport basement into the conglomerate that bears her name.
Of course, not everything came up gardenias—there was the acrimonious 1990 dissolution of Stewart's 29-year marriage to publisher Andy Stewart, 61, the father of her only child, Alexis. (Andy left Martha and subsequently married her former assistant Robyn Fairclough; they have three children.) "I'm sure she has regrets about marrying someone who turned out to be such a creep," says Alexis, who no longer speaks to her father but says she and Martha are "very close; we talk at least once a day." Martha, for her part, remains determinedly upbeat. "According to my fortune-teller, I'm supposed to get married twice more," she says, adding with a laugh, "Wish for me!"
In the meantime, she counts her blessings. On the day her IPO soared, recalls Stephen Drucker, the editor of Martha Stewart Living, "she was the hostess of the biggest party in the business world." Later she attended a luncheon at the home of Talk magazine editor Tina Brown. "How're you doing, Martha?" Brown reportedly greeted her. "I'm rich!" came the triumphant reply.
"Did I say that? No," Stewart insists, with a twinkle. So how did she celebrate? "I went home and cleaned the chicken coop," she jokes. "No, I did nothing to splurge. What I want is intangible: more time." And more goods bearing the Martha Stewart stamp. The money, she says, "will allow me to expand." Is that, as she might put it, a "good thing"? "Yes, it is, dear," she says.
Anne-Marie O'Neill
Sue Miller in New York City
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