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" Martha Stewart takes a forkful of lemon pie and savors it. &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t this good?&amp;quot; she asks in that trademark low, plummy voice.  We&amp;#039;re lunching in her office at the Manhattan TV studio where she&amp;#039;s just finished hosting a live broadcast of The Martha Stewart Show, her Emmy award-winning daily program. She sits at one end of the sleek rectangular table that serves as her desk, having closed and set aside the silver laptop \u2014 with its Martha-blue mouse \u2014 on which she&amp;#039;d been answering some of the 55 e-mails she&amp;#039;s already gotten today. (The Martha Stewart no-nonsense approach to e-mail: &amp;quot;If it&amp;#039;s important, I answer it. If it&amp;#039;s not, I don&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot;) Still dressed in the beige slacks, crisp white shirt, and thin navy-blue pullover she wore on the show, she looks fresh and rested even though she&amp;#039;s been up since dawn and sleeps just a few hours a night. Her only jewelry is a pair of sparkly aquamarine earrings; her nails are kept short, as befits a gardener and cook.  We&amp;#039;ve dined on perfectly steamed halibut and a salad of mixed greens with hearts of palm, prepared by her TV test-kitchen staff. Stewart made our dessert on the air earlier today with her guest Cheryl Hines, the actress who plays Larry David&amp;#039;s wife on HBO&amp;#039;s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Hines is not a cook. (&amp;quot;You know how to use a knife, right?&amp;quot; Stewart cracked after Hines told her she never makes dinner and has never used her food processor.) So Stewart supplied a traditional Shaker pie recipe, throwing in a few details about the dwindling, simplicity-loving Protestant sect whose sense of design she so admires. &amp;quot;I love dessert,&amp;quot; she says cheerfully. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t be guilty about it because I have to taste everything. I experiment.&amp;quot; I ask her if she ever goes on a diet. &amp;quot;Oh, all the time,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Some days I just don&amp;#039;t eat.&amp;quot; Why? &amp;quot;So I can zip my pants up,&amp;quot; she says with a little laugh.  It&amp;#039;s a wonderful pie, a pastel-yellow ode to refined sugar with lots of tangy lemon zest in it. I tell Stewart I love that. &amp;quot;It has the real peel,&amp;quot; she says with pleasure. As everyone in our solar system knows, these things matter to Stewart \u2014 the real peel, not just a squirt from a bottle; the telling touches and careful choices that make a pie or a house or a life that much better. Still, I&amp;#039;m fascinated to see for myself how deeply she cares about the details, to witness what she calls her &amp;quot;enthusiasm for everyday things.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s what gives her the authenticity that her fans love, what more than makes up for a manner that, as has been noted, can be bossy sometimes. During our talk, Stewart is poised and in control, sitting with perfect posture in her office chair, never fidgeting. But there&amp;#039;s nothing stiff about her. At 66, she&amp;#039;s straightforward, occasionally blunt, often wry, with humor in her brown eyes and a youthfulness that may be in part a genetic blessing \u2014 she&amp;#039;s always had terrific, glowing skin \u2014 but also comes from attitude, a buoyancy that has seen her through a spectacular public disgrace. Some people might have banished themselves to a humiliated early retirement. But in the two and a half years since her release from Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, where she spent five months for making false statements to government investigators about her role in the ImClone insider trading scandal, Stewart has jump-started her stalled company and moved forward full-throttle into a rich, packed, larger-than-life life. &amp;quot;I was ready to go the moment I stepped out of Alderson,&amp;quot; she says. No momentary dip in self-confidence? No fleeting panic? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve always been fearless,&amp;quot; she says, and you believe her.  After prison came more than five months of house arrest at her 153-acre estate in Bedford, NY, during which Stewart wore an electronic ankle bracelet. By the end of the ordeal, she&amp;#039;d resigned as chairman and CEO of her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (traded as MSO on the New York Stock Exchange), and \u2014 when MSO stock took a nosedive \u2014 lost hundreds of millions of dollars of her personal fortune. Her first TV show was canceled, and her face disappeared from the pages of Martha Stewart Living, the magazine she&amp;#039;d founded. &amp;quot;I will be back,&amp;quot; she said, famously, standing on the courthouse steps just after being sentenced in July 2004.  Is she ever. Stewart has rebounded to a degree that perhaps only her fiercest fans believed she would. True, MSO reportedly hasn&amp;#039;t turned an annual profit since 2002, the year her name was first publicly linked to the securities fraud investigation. Her version of The Apprentice, which aired six months after she was sprung from home confinement, failed after only 13 weeks on the air. And The Martha Stewart Show hasn&amp;#039;t had stellar ratings. But it&amp;#039;s been renewed for another year, and this spring earned five more Emmy nominations. MSO stock has held its own, and Stewart is still the driving force in the expanding company, though now her title is founder, not CEO. The number of advertising pages in Martha Stewart Living is climbing, and Stewart is a presence in the magazine once again, photographed squeezing a pastry tube and hanging framed maps on a wall in her Maine vacation home. Fans can listen all day to her Sirius satellite radio channel, read Blueprint (her new magazine for younger nesters), and find the answer to every conceivable domestic question in Martha Stewart&amp;#039;s Homekeeping Handbook, an encyclopedic 744-page guide published last year. They can even move into Martha Stewart houses, built in partnership with KB Home; 10 developments will be finished by the end of the year in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Reasonably priced, the homes are inspired by Stewart&amp;#039;s places in Maine, East Hampton, and Bedford. If they like, the owners can paint those houses with Martha Stewart Colors (available at Lowe&amp;#039;s), lay down Martha Stewart carpet tiles or area rugs, and preserve their memories with a new line of scrapbooking supplies, unveiled on her show this very day and available, she reminds her viewers more than once, at Michaels crafts stores around the country. Beginning next year, they can even tuck into a Martha meal, from an array of fresh, refrigerated, and frozen foods to be sold at Costco. Her current high-visibility venture, launching in September, is an upscale line of home products \u2014 kitchenware, dishes, bed linens, towels, and holiday ornaments \u2014 to be sold exclusively at Macy&amp;#039;s stores. The announcement of the partnership reportedly sent MSO stock up nearly 12 percent.  Stewart credits colleagues and employees \u2014 &amp;quot;so many people who stuck by me&amp;quot; \u2014 with steering her enterprise back on course. But the case could be made that her hard-charging ambition and utter commitment to her company are most responsible for MSO&amp;#039;s revival. When she shows me some of the Macy&amp;#039;s items, she talks about them with genuine excitement. &amp;quot;Look at that beautiful, delicate rim,&amp;quot; she says, holding up a porcelain plate, then presenting the scalloped-edge sheets, the glassware (&amp;quot;Polish crystal, which I love&amp;quot;), and a reproduction antique spice rack (&amp;quot;This was an old tobacco sorter that I discovered at an antiques show probably 30 years ago&amp;quot;). She rubs a bath towel between her thumb and forefinger. &amp;quot;Feel that nice quality,&amp;quot; she says.  It&amp;#039;s natural to wonder whether this display of delight is only a form of salesmanship. But Stewart is never just pushing product. She loves these items and the life they represent. For her, work and play are one. She takes deep pleasure in all those Martha things that show up on her calendar \u2014 spring-cleaning the canary cages, moving her citrus plants outdoors for the summer. And she can sound like a precocious child when she proudly lists all the activities in her chockablock weekend. Saturday morning, she tells me, she relocated her bees. &amp;quot;I have three hives. We&amp;#039;re building a new greenhouse and I don&amp;#039;t want to disrupt their pollinating. So I got dressed up in my bee outfit, cleaned the hives, and moved them up by the vegetable garden.&amp;quot; Then she went to see an &amp;quot;amazing&amp;quot; stand of maples at a friend&amp;#039;s house, after which she came home and oversaw the planting of some trees of her own. &amp;quot;Oh, and I drove!&amp;quot; she remembers. &amp;quot;I drove my carriage for an hour in the afternoon.&amp;quot; She means one of the three turn-of-the-century horse-drawn vehicles she expertly guides down the lanes of her Bedford estate. Somewhere in there she took a lesson on a fancy new sewing machine from SVP Worldwide, whose Singer, Pfaff, and Husqvarna Viking brands she endorses. It&amp;#039;s one of five machines, including her 1961 Singer, that she keeps in her new third-floor crafts room, which, she tells her TV audience, she has taken to organizing at 11 o&amp;#039;clock at night.   To be sure, the crafts room appears this month in the pages of her magazine, but it isn&amp;#039;t just for show. Says Susan Lyne, CEO and president of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, &amp;quot;I was there a couple of weeks ago, and she was sewing this extraordinary fabric into pillows for the couches in the dining room. She was doing it because she loves it.&amp;quot; Plenty of things Stewart does in her spare time \u2014 garden tours, visits to plant nurseries, hiking \u2014 aren&amp;#039;t meant to be turned into a feature in her magazine or a segment on her show or a line of bath towels. She just enjoys them, or thinks they&amp;#039;re important. For example, Stewart&amp;#039;s involvement in finding top-notch health care for her mother, &amp;quot;Big Martha&amp;quot; Kostyra, who turns 93 in September, has led to her donating $5 million to Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, seed money for the Martha Stewart Center for Living, a geriatrics center. Opening in November, it will offer comprehensive clinical care and develop new treatment approaches. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s something I can do for the rest of my life,&amp;quot; Stewart says. &amp;quot;I can keep learning about all the different technologies.&amp;quot; She is endlessly curious. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s my most telling characteristic,&amp;quot; Stewart says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m interested in trying anything new.&amp;quot; If there is something childlike in her busyness, there is also something appealingly eccentric. If you didn&amp;#039;t know who she was, if someone told you about this local lady who drove a carriage and tended bees, who kept canaries, three dogs, five cats, three donkeys, and five horses, who planted 45,000 daffodils and did so much remodeling she built her workmen their own lunchroom, you might think, Well, there&amp;#039;s a real character. Stewart clearly doesn&amp;#039;t care what anybody thinks. She does exactly as she pleases, and you can&amp;#039;t help but notice how many of her activities are performed solo. There are lunches and outings and benefit dinners and glamorous trips to exotic places with her friends (who include Kevin Sharkey, decorating editorial director of Martha Stewart Living, and Connecticut landscape gardener Memrie Lewis). There are frequent calls to and weekly visits with her daughter, Alexis, 41 \u2014 the only child from her only marriage, which ended in 1990 \u2014 who lives in New York City and whom Stewart calls her best friend. (&amp;quot;I probably am,&amp;quot; says Alexis, the droll cohost of the freewheeling Sirius radio show Whatever. &amp;quot;People think we don&amp;#039;t get along because we&amp;#039;re constantly arguing. She can trust me implicitly. I&amp;#039;m not afraid to tell her the truth,&amp;quot; she says, adding affectionately, &amp;quot;much to her dismay.&amp;quot;)  But Stewart&amp;#039;s on her own a lot, happily so, making herself a salad for supper, catching up on computer correspondence late at night, watching movies from Netflix even later. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have time to have friends come and stay,&amp;quot; she says matter-of-factly, &amp;quot;except on weekends in Maine. I invite a lot of people to come to Maine.&amp;quot; She likes living alone. &amp;quot;I chose that,&amp;quot; she says pleasantly. She seems to need a solo life. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re not tripping over people.&amp;quot; That goes for Charles Simonyi, her beau (and, she says, the only person she e-mails socially). Stewart has known the 58-year-old self-made software billionaire for about 13 years, and they&amp;#039;ve been dating for the past few. She&amp;#039;s not one to go all girly talking about a man, but she does speak warmly of Simonyi. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s a self-professed nerd,&amp;quot; she says fondly. &amp;quot;Very nice, very thoughtful, very smart&amp;quot; \u2014 and with a bachelor&amp;#039;s fixed habits. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s very compartmentalized; he knows exactly where he&amp;#039;s going to be when,&amp;quot; says Stewart, who finds his life a little too &amp;quot;beautifully planned&amp;quot; and suggests that this limits their opportunities to get together. She shrugs. &amp;quot;I just let it be that way.&amp;quot; When I ask whether she&amp;#039;d ever consider living with him, she responds straightaway, as if the answer is obvious: &amp;quot;Well, he lives in Seattle and I live here, so it&amp;#039;s kind of impossible,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;He can stay on his boat for six months at a time, and I have a job.&amp;quot;   In April, Simonyi became the fifth space tourist to fly by rocket to the International Space Station, a 14-day adventure. He likened the journey, Stewart says, to her time in prison. &amp;quot;When he first decided to do it,&amp;quot; she recalls, &amp;quot;he told me, &amp;#039;It&amp;#039;s sort of like what you did, Martha.&amp;#039; None of that trip was in his control, and neither was mine. He was so admiring of me for having done what I did so well that he wanted to have that kind of experience&amp;quot; \u2014 being flung into very unfamiliar territory. &amp;quot;His was much more interesting,&amp;quot; she says of their sojourns, then pauses for comic effect. &amp;quot;Obviously.&amp;quot;  Her months in jail didn&amp;#039;t change her, Stewart insists. &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t need that kind of ordeal to change,&amp;quot; she tells me briskly. &amp;quot;That should not be the stimulus for change, and it wasn&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; But Stewart is an ardent fan of the idea of transformation. &amp;quot;When you&amp;#039;re through changing, you&amp;#039;re through,&amp;quot; she often says these days. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s my new motto, and I&amp;#039;m imposing it on everyone else.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s such a believer in change \u2014 by which she mostly seems to mean learning new things, tackling a new project or idea \u2014 that she won&amp;#039;t give what she sees as her unfair trial and imprisonment the least bit of credit for helping bring about anything so positive.  She used her incarceration as a hiatus, she says. &amp;quot;It gave me an opportunity to read, to think about a lot of things \u2014 my farm project [at her Bedford estate], my whole company, and what I wanted it to be.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s never contended that she wasn&amp;#039;t sometimes disheartened \u2014 days after her sentencing, she told CNN&amp;#039;s Larry King that she felt &amp;quot;shamed,&amp;quot; and that the trial had &amp;quot;been really devastating.&amp;quot; She seems philosophical about having been what she terms &amp;quot;beleaguered,&amp;quot; suggesting that hardships go with great success. And she&amp;#039;s proud of the way she coped. &amp;quot;I kept my chin up and my stomach in,&amp;quot; she says.  I&amp;#039;m reminded of her extraordinary will, and of a remark she once made to Oprah: &amp;quot;I can almost bend steel with my mind,&amp;quot; she said. I repeat it for her. &amp;quot;I got in trouble for that quote,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But you have to think that way when you do the kinds of things that I have to do.&amp;quot; Of course, she brought more to her hard times than dead-on determination. If that were Stewart&amp;#039;s chief survival technique, she would have been successful in life only as, say, a Marine drill sergeant. She approached difficulties with an enviable equilibrium \u2014 &amp;quot;The more you adapt, the more interesting you are,&amp;quot; Stewart says \u2014 and a reliance on family. Daughter Alexis was &amp;quot;tremendously helpful,&amp;quot; Stewart says. &amp;quot;Because I could discuss things with her, I could put up with everything. She&amp;#039;s been through the fire with me.&amp;quot; Stewart&amp;#039;s love of physical activity stood her in good stead during her trial: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d go build my farm or plant a tree; I had lots of fabulous distractions.&amp;quot;  She was also helped, then and after sentencing, by her gift for excising unhappy thoughts. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a very good editor,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I can edit out the bad, the hurtful.&amp;quot; Indeed, she&amp;#039;s said that she actually doesn&amp;#039;t remember exactly what crime she was prosecuted for. More than any other quality, what seems to have sustained Stewart in tough times is an innate belief in herself. &amp;quot;Just knowing in your heart that you are a good person \u2014 an honest, good person \u2014 can get you through an awful lot of crap,&amp;quot; she says. At Alderson, Stewart reached out to the other prisoners, urging them into activities. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d have picnics&amp;quot; \u2014 Stewart and the other prisoners were free to roam the prison camp&amp;#039;s 100-plus acres during the day \u2014 &amp;quot;and we&amp;#039;d have dinner parties,&amp;quot; she says. She and about eight other inmates regularly exercised together. &amp;quot;We did 500 sit-ups every night, and I taught yoga.&amp;quot; She still practices yoga, and works out with a trainer at 6:30 a.m. three days a week. &amp;quot;And I told stories about what it&amp;#039;s like to work and about good business behavior. I was a role model for a lot of these women.&amp;quot; She also got to know many of the children who visited their mothers in prison. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;d come up to her and show her something they had made,&amp;quot; Susan Lyne recalls. Once, in the visiting room, Lyne saw Stewart watching a little boy sloppily stuff a board game into the closet. &amp;quot;He looked up and saw her. All she had to say was his name, and he started putting all the pieces where they belonged.&amp;quot; I ask Stewart if she&amp;#039;s done any work on sentencing and prison reform, which she discussed in a letter posted on the Internet while she was in Alderson. &amp;quot;I am outspoken about it, but I don&amp;#039;t want to concentrate on it now,&amp;quot; she says. Building her company has priority at the moment, and she&amp;#039;s loving every minute of the long hours she puts in. &amp;quot;I went through three years of extreme torture, and now I&amp;#039;m feeling so much better,&amp;quot; she says thoughtfully, with no distress. It&amp;#039;s not her way to brood over unpleasantness or the past. Stewart is all about relishing the present and looking ahead to the future. &amp;quot;Aren&amp;#039;t these delicious?&amp;quot; she says, offering a plateful of shortbread cookies that had appeared with the pie. &amp;quot;Take some home.&amp;quot;  Win a Martha Makeover for Your Home! From bed linens to bath towels to kitchen gadgets you didn&amp;#039;t even know you needed, the Martha Stewart Collection, sold exclusively at Macy&amp;#039;s, has something for nearly every part of your home. (Special occasions are covered, too; Martha&amp;#039;s collection includes holiday ornaments and decorations.) Five lucky readers will receive an abundance of very good things: a wide array of flatware, dinnerware, and professional-grade cookware; a full range of bathroom essentials; and a set of bedding. Enter online for your chance to win! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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