Who

Stewart is the founder of an eponymous media empire that encompasses magazines, TV shows, books, and serving spoons. And in case you were living under a rock in 2004, she's also a convicted felon.

Backstory

Martha Helen Kostyra wasn't born into a family that nibbled on foie gras and sipped Sauternes. One of six kids born to working class Polish parents, Martha grew up in Nutley, New Jersey and ate Gulden's mustard on white bread as an after-school snack. "Marty" (as she was known then) modeled her way through high school, continuing to pose for shoots on the side when she moved to the city to attend Barnard. By the late 1960s, she was married, the mother of a young daughter and working as a stockbroker; she later quit her job to live the life as a Westport housewife, dabbling in gardening and interior design.

In the mid-'70s, she launched a small catering business out of her Turkey Hill Road home with a partner named Norma Collier; when the duo catered a party for her husband's publishing firm, she was introduced to Alan Mirken, the head of Crown. The meeting led to her first book, 1983's Entertaining. Several other books followed in the '80s—as did regular appearances on TV shows like Today—and in 1990 Time Inc. signed her up to publish a magazine, Martha Stewart Living. Her weekly TV show came along three years later.

After buying back the magazine and other assorted media assets from Time Inc in 1997, she took the media and publishing juggernaut public on October 19, 1999, making herself an instant billionaire. (And she accomplished it all, she says, on only four hours of sleep a night.) The Martha Stewart Omnimedia empire now includes five magazines, two television shows, a satellite radio channel, and countless lines of junk, manufactured at sweatshops in Asia and cheerily stamped with Martha's name in big, block letters.

Keeping score

Stewart is worth an estimated $600-$700 million. In 2007, Forbes ranked her the third-richest woman in entertainment.

Of note

As you undoubtedly remember, Stewart was accused by the SEC of insider trading in 2003. The story in a nutshell: Federal prosecutors alleged that Martha had sold shares in the biotech company ImClone after receiving inside information from her stockbroker, Peter Bacanovic, and Sam Waksal, the CEO of the company. The stubborn Martha decided against accepting a plea bargain and challenged the government's case, which led to the most public trial of 2004; a decidedly lackluster defense by her lawyer, Robert Morvillo, resulted in Stewart being convicted of obstruction of justice. Her sentence was significantly steeper than any plea she could have negotiated: five months in prison, five months of house arrest, a $200,000 fine, and a prohibition from serving on the board (or in an executive position) at a public company for five years.

Following her indictment in 2003, Martha stepped down as CEO, handing the reigns to Sharon Patrick, a longtime business associate. (Patrick left the job in 2004 and was replaced by Susan Lyne, who resigned in June 2008.) But while Martha is officially prohibited from running the company that bears her name (she won't be eligible to return as CEO in 2011 at the earliest), that hasn't stopped her from diving back into the business with gusto. She's been working with Lyne on dozens of new deals, although this time around the company has reduced its reliance on the cult of its famous founder. (You'd need a magnifying glass to find her name in several newly-launched mags.) Over the past few years, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia has unveiled mags like the downmarket Everyday Food, eco/health-focused Body + Soul, and home design rag Blueprint (which has since folded). There's a new book, naturally—Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook—and a new satellite station with Sirius. Then there's the slew of new business deals. In addition to her deal with Kmart, she's partnered with Lowe's on a line of interior paints (which debuted in April 2007), a paper crafts line for EK Success, and there's now a range of Martha-approved housewares at Macy's.

As for Stewart herself, she's been stiffly smiling her way through the daytime talk show Martha since 2005. Alas, her experiment with primetime TV wasn't quite as successful: The Apprentice: Martha Stewart crashed and burned after a couple of months and Martha ended up in a war of words with Donald Trump.

In person

Cruel, heartless, and verbally abusive: Martha has long been known as one of toughest people to work for, and she's had countless falling-outs over the years. (Her professional rifts go back as far as Norma Collier, with whom she started her first catering company in the mid-1970s.) Many more details about Martha's cold-hearted ways (such as how she went shopping right after her dad's funeral) and unethical behavior (such as how she stole recipes from others) can be found in Jerry Oppenheimer's 1997 book Just Desserts: An Unauthorized Biography of Martha Stewart. Or you can pick up Martha Inc. by Christopher Byron and read about how she once ran over a kitten, was a terrifying trick-or-treater as a kid, and has an annoying habit of honking her horn at fellow motorists.

Pet cause

To boost her image after her jailbird stint, Stewart has been donating generously to various charities as of late. Her causes include the Northern Westchester Hospital and Mount Sinai, which set up the Martha Stewart Center for Living with her $5 million gift.

Personal

Martha divorced publishing executive Andy Stewart in 1990. But the marriage had reportedly fallen apart several years earlier as Martha became increasingly obsessed with her emerging empire (and as Andy started cheating with other women, including author Erica Jong). They have one daughter together, Alexis. Martha's dated a handful of men since her divorce. Most recently, she's had an on-again, off-again relationship with Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi, who dispatched his plane to pick her up when she was released from prison.

Habitat

Stewart's obsession with real estate is nothing new—she's just got a lot more of it these days. She spends most of her time at her 152-acre property in Katonah called Cantitoe Farm; she bought it for $15.2 million in 2000. (That's where she served out her house arrest; she also recently tried to trademark the name of the town for use in an upcoming product line.) She still owns Turkey Hill, the property in Westport that she's had for two decades, where she famously installed a TV studio to shoot her show. Half of the property (the main house, the guest house, the pool and the gardens) was put on the market for $4.5 million. In Manhattan, she dropped $16 million on Louise MacBain's full-floor pad in the Richard Meier-designed 165 Charles in 2007, but then decided she didn't want to live there and gave the apartment to Alexis. Stewart also owns summerhouses in East Hampton and Seal Harbor, Maine. She shuttles from home to home with a menagerie of pets: There's a French bulldog named Francesca, a Chow Chow named Chin Chin, several Himalayan cats (Teeny, Weeny, Mozart, Verdi, Vivaldi, Berlioz, and Bartók) and a pack of canaries.

No joke

Wanna live in Martha's manse? Now you can—almost. She's partnered with KB Homes to design down-scaled versions of her own mansions in a handful of subdivisions across the country.