Martha Kostyra was born on August 3, 1941 in Jersey City, New Jersey. Her dad, a pharmaceutical salesman, was considered quite bright and known as “Eddie the dictionary” because of his extensive reading. But Eddie Kostyra felt his status as a Polish immigrant had hindered his ability to get ahead. It led him to groom his favorite child for a better life as the consummate, wholesome girl-next-door type.
When she was thirteen, Martha’s favorite TV show was the sitcom Father Knows Best. To her, it was the model of an idyllic family life that she never knew in Nutley. But in Martha’s mind Eddie was Robert Young, her mother was Mrs. Anderson and she was Betty Anderson–the perfect daughter, in the perfect family, with the perfect home. That is the imagery that was to pervade the work of Martha.
In elementary school, she befriended a teacher, Irene Weyer, who became a role model. Fashionable, fastidious and highly feminine, she was worldly and dressed with the elegance of a professional, in sharp contrast to Martha’s matronly mother who never left the kitchen. Weyer was everything Martha aspired to be and she became a surrogate mother figure to Martha throughout her school years.
In 1959 at age 17, Martha graduated from Nutley High School where she excelled in academics and social activities. She entered Barnard College on the campus of Columbia University in New York City. During her college years, Martha earned a total of $30,000 modeling, and that income combined with a partial scholarship enabled her to pursue her studies in art history. Her good looks and meticulous attention to detail in her dress kept her in strong demand as a model, and in her sophomore year at Barnard, she won Glamour magazine’s Best Dressed College Girl. In July 1961, she married Andy Stewart whom she had met on blind date when he was attending Yale Law School. She returned to Bernard a year later and graduated in 1964 with a B.A. in Art History.
In 1967, Martha began a career as a stockbroker with the brokerage firm Monness, Williams, and Sidel, and quickly became a star performer earning as much as $135,000 a year in the late ’60s. However, when the markets tanked in the early 1970’s, Martha became distraught and attempted to redefine her goals by partnering with her friend Norma Collier in a catering service that they called “The Uncatered Affair.” Meanwhile, husband Andy who had become President of Harry Abrams Publishing Inc. asked Martha to cater a big Manhattan party for the launch of one of their books. Attending was the President of Crown Books, Alan Meiken, who was taken with Martha and her ability to cater. He suggested she write a book on the art of catering and entertaining. The book, titled Entertaining, became a best-seller with sales exceeding 500,000 copies. Martha had understood what women in the early ’80s needed was–not a cookbook, but a fantasy about gracious “home-and-hearth” living. She knew what women wanted and she leveraged that knowledge into an empire that fed the fantasies of a generation of American women.
