The first time Mariana Pasternak met Martha Stewart, she was suspicious. The future Goddess of Good Things had shown up at her new neighbour's house, demanded a glass of water, inquired about an attractive doctor (who turned out to be Pasternak's fiancé), and then held her empty glass out in front of her, waiting for someone to whisk it from sight.
Who was this woman, so attractive, icy and self-assured? Pasternak didn't know, but she didn't like her. She was drawn in, though, and over the next 20 years the two would become close friends, their relationship characterized, like most, by ups and downs, marriages and divorces, the birth of children, career successes and personal failures. The relationship will feel familiar to anyone who has encountered the Stewart and struggled to grasp with whether she deserves to be admired or feared, questions Pasternak attempts to answer in her new book about the TV personality, The Best of Friends: Martha and Me.
Stewart, along with the subject of this year's other two other hot, hardcover take-downs – Oprah Winfrey and Angelina Jolie – occupies a strange space in our collective opinion of successful women. All three seemed born for the spotlight: talented, driven, camera-friendly; each embodies a contradiction that makes them as polarizing as popular.
Stewart built an empire by creating inviting home environments, but personally generates the warmth of a frozen pot pie. Oprah is marketed as the everywoman's best friend. But her success has turned her into one of the world's richest people, elevating her beyond the reach of mere mortals and allowing her Midas touch to impart untold wealth to a variety of disciples. And Jolie, the beauty with a Hollywood pedigree, created a brand of super celebrity by revealing just the right amount of skin and bizarre personal information and then cloistering herself in a world of international philanthropy, Brad Pitt and their brood.
We are drawn to these woman, but we are suspicious of them. They can't possibly be as poised, as nice, as attractive or generous as they present themselves to be. And publishers are certainly betting that there is an audience for their public dissections.
The 544-page Oprah biography (called, creatively, Oprah: A Biography), to be released next month, is written by Kitty Kelley, who has stabbed her poison pen through the hearts of such U.S. legends as Frank Sinatra and Jacqueline Onassis. Described as a “professional sensationalist,” Kelley's work has been consistently greeted with demands for retraction. Sinatra initiated a $2-million (U.S.) lawsuit after her book described his alleged mob ties; and former U.S. president Ronald Reagan slammed her journalistic credibility after she wrote an unflattering portrait of his wife, Nancy.
Kelley has been working on her Oprah book for three years, and her publisher says she has conducted more than 850 interviews about the talk-show host, although her staff has apparently been banned from talking. But while the author says she is “full of admiration” for Winfrey, some of those approached for information said she seemed to be sniffing for blood.
In August, Jolie comes under the powerful lens of Andrew Morton, who gained notoriety through his books about Princess Diana, for which the Royal reportedly co-operated. Since then, he has received six-figure advances for his scandal-filled books on Madonna and Monica Lewinsky. But the stories he weaves are considered to be full of rumour and innuendo. His unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise suggested that the actor's daughter, Suri, was conceived using the sperm of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. The book was not published in the U.K., because of the country's libel laws.
