Meanie Martha Made a Mess
By Tina Brown
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Among women I know in Manhattan, the stock on Martha Stewart's reputation has been trading downward again.
Water-cooler fascination with her case has been replaced with a strange combination of sorrow and embarrassment. There's a desire to look away.
At an early-evening gathering at Marlo Thomas's Park Avenue apartment Monday night in aid of the White House Project -- a cause sponsored by Marie Wilson and Eve Ensler dedicated to getting out the women's vote and grooming more women leaders for office -- Martha's name elicited only gloom or silence.
A few months back when Martha was on her pretrial charm offensive, appearing on "20/20" with Barbara Walters and "Larry King Live," there had been a drift toward united feminist outrage. The notion that a woman of towering achievement should lose her billion-dollar business and possibly go to jail over the coverup of a puny financial misdemeanor, the fact that she was so clearly being scapegoated by her celebrity and gender for all the corporate excesses of the '90s, rose above individual misgivings about Martha the Meanie.
Douglas Faneuil's testimony last week brought back all the bad vibes. The broker's assistant with the Cupid's-bow mouth who referred to himself as "Baby" in the e-mail to his boyfriend suddenly reminded a lot of Upper East Side women of the sons they had just packed off to college.
Forget the lying. Forget what was confirmed in Tuesday's testimony by Stewart's assistant Ann Armstrong about the sneaky falsification, and quick restoration, of the text of a phone message from Faneuil's boss, Peter Bacanovic, that "ImClone is going to start trading downward." The testimony no loyal supporter wanted to confront was Faneuil's horribly true-sounding mimicry of Martha -- how she slammed down the phone on him, how she made the sound (as he put it memorably) of a "lion roaring underwater," how she railed about the inadequacy of the Merrill Lynch phone operators ("Do you know who the hell is answering your phones? You call and you know what he sounds like?").
Martha's friends couldn't help but imagine their own sons accepting the Park Avenue version of affirmative action, a job at a friend's brokerage house, and being yelled at and humiliated. Instead of everyone sympathizing with the travails of Martha, uptown conversation was consumed with tales of fat-cat bosses who abuse the nice kids who come to work as their executive assistants. Not good. ...
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35268-2004Feb12.html]
Carl
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