Mainers who watch Netflix’s hit new documentary about Martha Stewart might learn a lot about her, but they won’t find much about her life here in Maine.
Titled “Martha,” the two-hour film about Stewart, who has owned and summered at the former Edsel Ford estate in Seal Harbor on Mount Desert Island since 1997, has ranked as one of the streaming service’s most-watched selections since it was released at the end of October. It charts her life and career from her childhood in New Jersey to the present, featuring challenges and successes she experienced along the way.
What’s not included is any overt mention of Maine, including some of the things she has gotten local attention for here in the Pine Tree State — though the film does highlight aspects of her life that have played into the Maine headlines, such as her sometimes prickly personality and her legal problems.
Stewart was interviewed on camera for the film at her Maine summer cottage, called Skylands, but that location is never disclosed to viewers. Some of her personal photos that were taken in Maine are also shown in the film, such as one of her and her former billionaire boyfriend Charles Simonyi on a boat in Seal Harbor.
But the parts of the documentary that show her outside tending to her gardens and grounds were filmed at her estate in Katonah, New York.
Much of the first half of the film is about her early career, delving into aspects of her personality that contributed to her business success but didn’t always endear her to others.
Mainers found out that Stewart wasn’t as always welcoming in private as she was on television when, in the summer of 2000, she used her SUV to block in a limousine carrying bachelorette party-goers that had driven up her driveway in Seal Harbor after midnight.
Stewart “refused to move the car until police arrived,” the Associated Press reported at the time, adding that the driver initially was charged by police with trespassing. But the then-local district attorney, Michael Povich, declined to formally press those charges, saying that there weren’t any ‘private property’ signs posted and that Stewart herself could have potentially faced charges for not letting the unwanted visitors leave.
The major life event that gets the most attention in the Netflix documentary is when Stewart was accused in the early 2000s of insider trading. Stewart, who was friends with the owner of a company she owned stock in, sold that stock a day before information was released that made its value drop — but she denied having advance information.
Eventually, after a highly publicized jury trial, she was convicted not of insider trading, but of lying to federal investigators about what she knew. She was sentenced in 2004 to serve five months in a federal minimum security prison in West Virginia — a sentence that Mainers said was a ‘raw deal.’
That same year, two Rhode Island men were arrested after showing up at Skylands and convincing Stewart’s staff that she had given them permission to get a tour of the property. After the men were shown around, a suspicious employee called police and the ruse was up.
A year later, Stewart’s federal conviction would have a minor impact on her status as a part-time Mainer when she was asked by organizers of the Mount Desert Island Marathon to signal the start of the race that fall. Often, such races begin with someone firing a starting pistol but, as a convicted felon, Stewart was not allowed to possess or use any firearms.
The solution? Stewart signaled the race with an airhorn, which is common equipment on boats in Maine and elsewhere, and which is not considered a firearm.
It’s also worth noting that Stewart is not alone among wealthy summer residents of Mount Desert Island in being accused of financial misdeeds and found guilty of crimes.
In 2009, Frederic Bourke Jr., co-founder of luxury leather goods brand Dooney & Bourke and a seasonal resident of Northeast Harbor, was convicted in federal court in New York of trying to bribe government officials in Azerbaijan to gain control of that country’s privatized oil company.
That same year, Anthony Marshall, son of the late philanthropist and New York socialite Brooke Astor, was convicted in New York of stealing from his mother’s nearly $200 million fortune as she grew older and began to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. Marshall inherited his mother’s summer home in Northeast Harbor when she died in 2007 at the age of 105.
