Ina and Martha Definitely Do Not Hate Each Other
For many years, we have been waiting for Ina Garten to reveal a bit more about herself. Now her memoir — Be Ready When the Luck Happens (the title is from a Liza Minnelli quote!) — is imminent. Today we learn from the advance press, a lovely and detailed profile in The New Yorker by Molly Fischer, that everything that many of us feared about her childhood was true. She is a gay icon not simply because she hangs out with gay people constantly but because she had to create her own adult life from nothing, with her husband Jeffrey, after her mother deprived her of food and affection and her father menaced her youth as a time-bomb tyrant. It’s such a relief when something you absolutely knew in your heart to be true is finally said out loud. But she’s also a gay icon because of her complicated relationship with Martha Stewart.
There has always been a touch of conflict in her relationship with Martha, who has spoken of Garten in alternately glowing and undermining terms. (I mean, we should all be so lucky!) Garten’s blockbuster debut cookbook is introduced by Martha, who writes that “it took a while, but I finally understood what motivated Ina, realizing that here was a true kindred spirit with really similar but unique talents.” The needless “took a while” is incredible.
Fischer writes:
Personally and professionally, Garten became a part of the Martha Stewart universe. Garten told me about a New Year’s Eve when Stewart invited her and Jeffrey over for dinner and, beckoning Garten into the kitchen, proceeded to snip the loops of a whisk with a wire cutter, prop a broom handle over two chairs, and, using the snipped whisk, drizzle caramelized sugar over the broom in fine golden strands. “She had made spun sugar!” Garten said. “She’s stunning.” (“Stunning,” like “fabulous,” is one of Garten’s favorite adjectives, but it can suggest a double edge. She writes in her memoir: “No one needs to know how to make spun sugar.”)
And then, Stewart drops in to say that Garten cut her off after Stewart was sent to federal prison for insider trading in 2004, which Garten denies. “When I was sent off to Alderson Prison, she stopped talking to me,” Stewart told The New Yorker. “I found that extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly.” After the interview, Stewart’s longtime publicist and friend, Susan Magrino, clarifies her client was “not bitter at all and there’s no feud.”
Nothing to The New Yorker if he was ever in the CIA.
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