Meeting Martha Stewart
A story of when your public and private personas conflict...
Meeting my Heroes is an occasional essay series from Matt Carmichael.
Once upon a time, when I was a young music journalist and working at Advertising Age, I spent a lot of time in New York City, where we had a big office in the Daily Planet building. The cool thing was that if there was ever a reason outside of work that I wanted to go to NYC, I could just schedule a bunch of meetings and head there. So one day I got invited to a Yahoo! event featuring performances by David Bowie, Alanis Morissette and a couple of other musicians I really liked. It was in New York so I sent some meeting invites and booked my trip.
One of those meetings was of course with my editor at the time. He’d just interviewed Martha Stewart at her office that afternoon. He said she was icy and could shift between that and her public persona as an elegant, well-mannered hostess in a flash.
And then a funny thing happened. I’m in the VIP area before the show later that night and low and behold, there’s Martha Stewart!
Now my mom loves Martha Stewart. Cook books, design shows, Martha Stewart Living, you name it. If Martha’s involved, she will think it’s a good thing. (“It’s a good thing” is a Martha reference, just so you know.)
Martha was standing chatting with a small group of people and generally in these situations, you’re supposed to leave the VIPs alone and ignore them. Because of course you’re all in the VIP area together so you’re supposed to pretend you’re just as cool as they are. But I saw my chance, and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned on me and in her eyes I could tell she didn’t appreciate me doing so but also was conflicted because she is the consummate hostess. She had to be polite even as I was breaking some social norms.
I had asked her politely to sign my program for my mom and she did and went back to what she was doing.
My point here, and this will be a bit of a recurring theme, is that good (or those who pretend to be good?) people like to be helpful. Sometimes, maybe even often, you have to ask for that. Sometimes that means you have to be bold. But it also means that when people tap you on the shoulder, and when people ask for your autographs, you have to put on your best Martha Stewart and pay it all back.
Later I got to meet her again when I was assigned to shoot her book signing. I did not bring up our first encounter.