Martha Kostyra was born to Polish immigrants in 1941. Her father was a PE teacher and her mother, also called Martha Kostyra, a homemaker who raised her six children as strict Catholics. They lived in a three-bedroom house in Nutley, New Jersey, sometime home to Mark Twain and Annie Oakley. 'My father had grand dreams that far exceeded his finances,' Martha once wrote. She says her mother has, though the pun is presumably unintended, 'an uncanny confidence with dough'.

Martha paid her way through her first year at university doing two jobs which set the tone for her future expertise - modeling and working as a maid and cook for two widowed sisters. At 19 she married Andy Stewart, a Yale law student whose mother was a talented decorator. They stayed together until Andy left her, 26 years later, while she was promoting her book Martha Stewart Weddings. Their only child, Alexis, was born in 1965 and could, said her mother, 'clean a bathroom faster than anyone' by the age of nine. When Martha's modeling career dwindled, she became a stockbroker. In 1973, after a number of friends lost substantial amounts on the basis of her recommendations, she turned her attention to her home. She baked pies, stenciled floors and sculpted pieces of netting into daisy-shaped hairpins. In the early Eighties she became a caterer, wrote a book on entertaining that became a runaway bestseller. She was "Madame Perfection" but, they hated her guts because she had class, savoir-faire, style, power and money! The French say: "Le peuple c'est la voix de l'anne".