Martha Stewart Was Kicked Out of Her Country Club for Launching a Line at Kmart

From Town & Country

Martha Stewart suffers no fools—but that doesn't mean fools haven't tried. Back in 1997, the domestic goddess experienced one such incident, when, after purchasing Martha Stewart Living back from Time Inc. ("I just wrote the check myself"), she inked a deal with Kmart to launch a line of branded towels and linens.

In an interview with Harper's Bazaar, Stewart says that her Kmart wares were so offensive to the fools at her Connecticut country club that she was asked to leave. It was "because I was too downmarket," the mogul told the magazine.

The article also shed light on an earlier phase of Stewart's career, when, prior to making her name in the soft arts, she was something of a Wall Street shark. “We were the real thing. You saw the movie Wall Street? I lived it," she said. "I mean, every man on Wall Street was trying to get you. Every man was trying to touch you in the cab. We had martinis for lunch." In a particularly bizarre anecdote, Stewart noted that one of her colleagues locked women in his apartment (for "kinky reasons," as Harper's describes it), and that it lead her to adopt one of these housebound women's cats. “I adopted one of their cats because he wouldn’t let her go home to feed the cat,” she said. "So I got Magnolia."

And then there's the matter of of her workwear at the time. She wore velvet hot pants—short shorts “where you see plenty of leg and a little bit of your butt”—with an alligator belt and a tight sweater. “We would sit with our feet up on our desks, and I had high-heeled shoes on or boots. And that’s what we wore to work.”

If there ever was doubt that Martha Stewart was a real one, this profile will surely put that to rest.

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