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Martha Stewart has spent four decades teaching America how to handle a knife. This week her subject was Meghan Markle, and by the time Martha had finished, the Duchess of Sussex’s lifestyle dream lay on the counter in neat, translucent slices.
The occasion was Martha’s 85th-birthday cover interview with People. Asked an innocuous question about what she’s like at a party (she is, her friends say, “LIFO: last in, first out”), Martha volunteered, entirely unprompted, that she had recently found herself at the same California dinner party as Meghan.
“I had dinner with Meghan Markle the other night,” she said. “We were both guests at a dinner party in California. And she had just gotten back from the palace. I didn’t talk to her really more than to say a couple words, but I know she was talking about it.”
“It,” of course, is the Highgrove summit, the private July reunion between Harry, Meghan, their children and the King, a meeting whose repetition depends on no briefing.
Meghan discussing a family meeting with friends over dinner doesn’t in itself wreck the arrangement. And so far, that is the beginning and the end of the story: Martha Stewart says she heard Meghan was talking about it.
But consider the mechanics. Stewart, by her own account, exchanged barely a couple of words with Meghan, and still came away knowing she was discussing her meeting with the King. That fact traveled across a dinner party, into Martha’s ear, and out into the pages of People magazine, which may explain a certain nervousness in royal circles, because it raises the obvious questions: whose house? Which night? Who else was at that table? And do any of them know any journalists?
It is also a neat illustration of why the palace has been so reticent about these reunions. The two camps now inhabit different worlds with different rules. In the circles the Windsors move in, nobody at a British dinner party would dream of relaying to a magazine what William or Kate had been discussing at the table; it simply isn’t done. In Montecito, table talk is a renewable resource. I’m quite sure Martha Stewart doesn’t think she did anything wrong, and she didn’t. That’s rather the point.
The other slice Stewart took out of Meghan was more deliberate. Asked about Meghan’s move into lifestyle television, she said: “If you’re an actress, it’s hard to then transition to a princess and then from a princess into a homemaking guru on a television show. It doesn’t sort of follow. So go from there.”
“It doesn’t sort of follow.” In five words, the woman who invented the modern lifestyle empire— the books, the Emmy-winning television shows; Martha Stewart Living; the Omnimedia colossus that made her America’s first self-made female billionaire—identified the structural flaw in Brand Sussex.
Nor is this a new theme for her. A year ago she told Yahoo! that she didn’t know Meghan well, adding pointedly: “Authenticity, to me, is everything, and to be authentic and knowledgeable about your subject matter is extremely important.”
The British sociologist Chris Rojek, in his landmark 2001 study Celebrity, distinguished between “achieved” celebrity, earned through accomplishment, and “ascribed” celebrity, conferred by birth or marriage. Martha is achieved celebrity in its purest form: forty years of observable competence. Meghan’s entire post-Megxit project has been an attempt to convert ascribed celebrity (she is famous because she married a prince) into achieved authority. Meghan is well-known. Martha knows things.
There is another reason Stewart’s words should carry weight for a troubled celebrity
In 2004 she was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and making false statements over her sale of ImClone stock (notably, she was never convicted of insider trading itself, but of lying about why she sold, dodging losses of around $45,000). She served five months at a federal prison camp followed by five months of home confinement, a $30,000 fine and two years’ probation. Her empire was supposed to be finished, and a delighted media picked through the bones with undisguised schadenfreude.
Stewart never apologized. She simply went back to doing what she did: cooking. Asked years later whether prison had been a “growth experience,” she was withering: “It’s a horrible experience… especially when one does not feel one deserves such a thing.” Her comeback was built not on a pseudo-redemption tour but on continuing to be, unmistakably and consistently, Martha Stewart: the same expertise, the same standards, leavened over time with a genuinely funny willingness to laugh at herself. Her brand survived a felony conviction because the competence underneath it was real.
The story shows that life at this level of celebrity is a marathon, not a sprint, but Meghan has been sprinting since 2020, always chasing the short-term deal, the short-term headline, the short-term hit. I’m an actress. I’m a princess. I’m a philanthropist. I’m a businesswoman. I’m a homemaking guru. I’m a fashion icon. I’m just a mom. It is, as Stewart diagnosed, doesn’t sort of follow.
An alternative is available to Meghan. Disappear. Raise the children, which is what she has repeatedly said gives her the greatest joy. Stay off social media for two or three years, or five. Then come back with something true to say—an honest accounting of what went wrong—and the public would give her a hearing. A very large public profile is a strange sort of asset: when things go wrong, it becomes a liability in direct proportion to everything it once bestowed on you. But the silver lining is that, however badly things are going, second acts are available, as Martha Stewart proved from a prison camp in West Virginia.
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