Stewart’s Savior at Omnimedia
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Martha Stewart is off to her new home, “Camp Cupcake” as the minimum-security prison for women in Alderson, W.V., is known. She leaves Sharon Patrick, her best friend and business partner, at the head of her beleaguered media empire. Stewart is prohibited from conducting business on the telephone or during visits from colleagues during her five-month stay at the federal work camp, so Ms. Patrick, who became the company’s chief executive in 2003 when Stewart found herself increasingly entangled in the government’s investigation, will now be in charge as never before.
During the coverage of her trial, we learned lots of those revealing little details about Martha – from the way she dresses down junior employees to her taste in Birken bags – but far less is known about the woman who now must keep afloat the company Stewart spent years building.
Still Ms. Patrick, 61, a Harvard MBA who co-workers say is a “brilliant strategist,” has had some unique experience in swimming in deep water.
In 1964, she dropped out of Stanford and spent a year as one of the original Sea Maids at Sea World in San Diego, frolicking daily with dolphins and whales. In September she took part in the 40th anniversary celebration of the theme park and declared that her time in the tank “had a profound effect on the way I wanted to live my life. I didn’t want to be stuck in a cubicle. I wanted to spend my time around visionaries.”
The visionary she chanced to meet, under highly unusual circumstances in 1994, was Stewart. They spent six days together climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and discovered at around 19,000 feet that they saw eye-to-eye. “It was a bonding experience. It would have taken us years to get to know each other as well as we did in those six days. We just walked and talked,” Ms. Patrick has said. It was there they conceived a plan of wresting Martha’s magazine from Time Inc. and setting up a media and product empire.
“Sharon and Martha are very complementary,” says a former chief operating officer of Martha Stewart Omnimedia, David Steward, who more recently was chief executive of International Masters Publishing. “Sharon has a great strategic mind. She can pick up an issue like a globe and look at it from all sides. I have also seen her in action as a negotiator and she is pretty damn impressive. Very persistent and very clever.”
Others also praise Ms. Patrick’s business acumen. The associate dean at the Yale School of Management, Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, said, “Sharon is brilliant. She has an amazing track record.”
Before teaming up with Stewart, Ms. Patrick created a thriving communications practice at McKinsey & Company and then ran Rainbow Programming Holdings, a compilation of cable networks.
She came to a business career through a circuitous route. After returning to Stanford, she got a degree in history and acquired special education teaching credentials. She taught remedial education in Washington, D.C., and, in 1971, took part in a successful Title VII sex discrimination class action suit against a Maryland consulting firm where she worked evaluating job programs.
But friends say, the most important relationship of Ms. Patrick’s life – even more important than Martha – was with a German journalist, Ulrich Mulert. Says one longtime friend, “He was a handsome, exciting, fabulous guy. And she was madly in love with him.” Ms. Patrick followed him when he was transferred to Moscow and then New York. She has said she went to Harvard Business School so that she would have “portable skills” that she could use anywhere he was assigned.
Mulert died unexpectedly of a heart attack in the early 1980s. “After that,” says the same friend, “Sharon was all about business.”
Stewart and Ms. Patrick collaborated closely, even at some points sharing the same office. “Sharon was involved in every decision that Martha made. And she was always very protective of Martha,” says a former Martha Stewart Living editor, Carol Kramer, Still Sharon and Martha argued frequently. “Everyone argues with Martha,” Mr. Steward notes. And one friend comments, “I can’t believe the stuff Sharon had to put up with. Martha would call her every hour of the day or night. Personally, I think it was a symbiotic relationship. Martha needed Sharon to run things. Sharon needed Martha for glamour.”
Unlike the fault-finding and highly critical Stewart, company employees say that Ms. Patrick is “likable” and can be “lively with an irreverent streak.” Several years ago at an industry dinner, she cheerfully recounted how she had told off, in colorful language, the chief executive of a competing magazine company.
Ms. Patrick’s strategy has always been to separate Martha Stewart the person from Martha Stewart the brand. Recent events accelerated the process. Stewart has little visible role with her flagship magazine, and the Martha Stewart Living tagline has been removed from the company’s newest launch, the pocket-sized Everyday Food.
Still, Ms. Patrick’s biggest problem remains luring back advertisers who abandoned the magazine in the wake of Stewart’s legal troubles. The October issue of Martha Stewart Living, at 160 pages, is barely half the size the October issue was two years ago and includes only 29 pages of ads. Advertising revenue has fallen more than 50% in the last year.
Ms. Patrick, insiders say, encouraged Stewart to get her jail time over for the sake of the company. She sees it as the best way to move forward and attract advertisers back.
The company has made a couple of forward-looking moves in the last months. The television division is producing a show based on Everyday Food that will launch in January on PBS. And Martha Stewart Omnimedia paid $6 million to purchase “Body & Soul” magazine. Ms. Patrick said at the time of purchase that, “The magazine really lends itself to our business model. We are looking to take it to our usual suspects.”
“I think Sharon is managing in tough times with a great deal of grace and effectiveness. Getting a TV show for Everyday Food was no small feat,” said the editor-in-chief of Family Circle Magazine and a past president of the American Society of Magazine Editors, Susan Ungaro.
Ms. Patrick is also stepping out a bit more into the public eye. She attended the celebrity-filled lunch at the Democratic convention that Tina Brown hosted for Senator Clinton. According to her press representative, this week she was traveling and could not be reached for comment. She was attending Fortune magazine’s “Most Powerful Women Summit” for female leaders in Dana Beach, Calif. And next month, Ms. Patrick will be speaking at a Harvard Business School Media Guru breakfast and at Brandeis University’s international business school.
Stewart will be back in just five months. Before heading off to Camp Cupcake, she signed a new five-year contract as chief editorial and media director of Martha Stewart Omnimedia. The contract guarantees her a base annual salary of $900,000, $100,000 a year in expenses, and a car and driver when she gets out of jail.
Can Ms. Patrick and Stewart scale the heights once again? Says David Steward, “I’d never underestimate Martha, and I’d never underestimate Sharon Patrick.”