SHE'S MARTHA AND YOU'RE NOT | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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She's a shark. While in her late 20s, after she'd spent a few years as a housewife and mother, Martha eagerly set out on the next phase of her work life and became a Wall Street stockbroker. It was yet another gear in the machine that would become Martha Inc., and a chance for her to temper her homey skills and pretty-face image with some serious business savvy. On Wall Street, Martha cultivated her competitive, aggressive salesmanship and got her first real taste of power. They were talents she would parlay into big bucks someday -- first as a professional caterer, then through a series of hugely successful food and entertaining books, through videos and a television show, through merchandising deals and, eventually, through the gutsy split from monolithic Time Warner to form her own corporation -- one with the grandiose name of Martha Stewart Omnimedia.

Aside from learning how to keep herself in Wedgwood and Egyptian cotton well up until the time that the sun is a cold dark lump of celestial matter, Martha's shrewd business dealings have also given her something else, something she likes quite a lot -- control. The same hunger that powered her as a broker is evident in her current trademark chutzpah. However much she's got, Martha wants more. And she wants it her way and in her world, not in the balls-out boy's club realms of real estate or technology, but in the delicate land of doily hearts and wedding cakes.

By her success, she's given value -- not simply cultural but nitty-gritty financial -- to the domestic. She has a magazine, a television series, a newspaper column, a Martha by Mail catalog, a Web site, a line of paints and housewares and a radio show, and she's a contributor to "CBS This Morning." She has turned home life into big business. No wonder she claims to get by on a Spartan four hours of sleep a night; she's got a whitewashed and lavender-scented world to run. When Time magazine declared her one of their 25 most influential people two years ago, she declared unapologetically, "It is our intention to own areas in communication. I don't mean to sound egomaniacal, but Perry Como used to own Christmas on TV. By 'own' I mean monopolize and influence." But the small-town Catholic girl won't stop at Christmas. Just to make sure she's got everybody covered under her big damask tent, the December issue of Martha Stewart Living obligingly offered tips on how to have a very Martha Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanzaa.

She's MacGyver. Martha makes you believe that she could decorate her way out of a meat locker, armed only with a hot glue gun and some mosquito netting. She has spent her lifetime fulfilling the declaration she left in her high school yearbook, "I do what I please and I do it with ease." Because all of her enterprises are so individual-identified, she willingly promotes the image of one woman serenely alone in her kitchen, whipping up curried seafood tomato bouillabaisse for 250, with time left over to refinish the dining room chairs and turn the mattresses. She makes it look simple, a crime for which most of us dearly hope that she will be at least a little punished in the next world.

Several years ago, she did a Christmas special with Julia Child. Julia, bless her slobby heart, was not five minutes in before she had stains on her apron and buttery smears everywhere. Martha, poster girl for anal retentiveness that she is, never broke a sweat. They labored side by side on twin versions of the same ceiling-scraping dessert, and in the end, Julia's was a tipsy mess of dough and Martha's was an impeccable tower of holiday fun. Bitch.

But she's not without a sense of humor about her pathologically detail-oriented nature. She's appeared in American Express commercials lovingly tiling her swimming pool with discarded credit cards. She cheerfully does "Letterman." And when she appeared at the MTV Music Awards with Busta Rhymes, she smiled primly at the crowd while the colossal, tattooed rapper who sang "Dangerous" looked distinctly unnerved.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Martha's godlike qualities