Apprentice in Wonderland by Ramin Setoodeh

Author:Ramin Setoodeh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

It wasn’t true that Trump “got along great” with Martha Stewart. He wasn’t on “great terms” with the self-made billionaire whom the country trusted for advice on how to maintain a happy home. The two New Yorkers became embroiled in a tabloid feud long before she endorsed his 2016 opponent. It all started, naturally, because of The Apprentice.

With the show’s ratings dipping in seasons 2 and 3, Mark Burnett was looking for a stunt to keep America glued to the premise of a megalomaniacal boss teaching mentees how to succeed in business. And even though Burnett’s partnership with Trump was supposed to be ironclad, Burnett was the kind of overachiever who was always looking over the shoulder of his dance partner, in case someone better walked into the room. Later, with NBC’s The Voice, Burnett kept ratings momentum going long after American Idol had fallen off by swapping out the original celebrity mentors Blake Shelton, Adam Levine, Christina Aguilera, and CeeLo Green in favor of a revolving door of pop stars that’s included Shakira, Usher, Gwen Stefani, and the original Idol, Kelly Clarkson. Burnett, sensing that doing business with Trump had an expiration date, hadn’t given up on the idea of rotating in new business moguls. Maybe what the boardroom needed was a refresh not of the contestants but of the person doing the firing.

Enter Martha Stewart. Like Trump, she was a beloved and feared celebrity figure with a knack for understanding the value of self-generated publicity. Unlike Trump, who had the benefit of family wealth, she’d managed to build her own vast enterprise, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. On the morning of the company’s initial public offering, Stewart served brioche and fresh-squeezed orange juice at the New York Stock Exchange. She leveraged her lifestyle lessons into a billion-dollar company in the late 1990s, informing baby boomer women about cooking, cleaning, gardening, decluttering, and hosting the perfect dinner party. She even served as the editor in chief of her own magazine, Martha Stewart Living, launched by Time Inc. (She later bought it back for her company on an $85 million loan.) But what intrigued Burnett the most about Stewart was her sudden, humiliating public downfall.

Stewart had been accused of insider trading involving a 2001 stock sale of ImClone Systems, a biopharmaceutical company, in the amount of $229,513. It was a drop in the bucket for her, but in July 2004 a judge sentenced her to five months in prison, in a wall-to-wall media circus that dominated the airwaves. Later, Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise would feature numerous white-collar crime trials, but years earlier, Stewart was the realest housewife of all. On late-night TV, Jay Leno and David Letterman couldn’t tell enough jokes about this snobby perfectionist in an ill-fitting orange jumpsuit.

“Perhaps all of you out there can continue to show your support by subscribing to our magazine, by buying our products, by encouraging our advertisers to come back in full force to our magazines,” Stewart said on July 16, 2004, outside the courthouse in downtown Manhattan shortly after she’d been sentenced.

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