SHE was the best of broads. She was the worst of broads. Circus Marthamus – Manhattan’s premier location for spotting celebrities, taking in a live fashion show, or experiencing the ugliest traits possible in human behavior – yesterday added a fourth ring to the spectacle.
Now, you might pick up a literary education, of sorts, along with the odd roster of amusements available at the trial of Martha Stewart and Peter Bacanovic.
Yesterday’s lesson, class: A Tale of Two Broads.
It was during intermission. The actor Brian Dennehy, who’s played Willy Loman in the theater classic “Death of a Salesman,” and a bartender in the movie “10,” was holding class in the federal court hallway. “She’s a great broad,” Dennehy, a towering fella, opined about his old friend, Martha.
Well, he seems to have gotten it partly right. Most every other man who’s ever been crushed up against the diva of domination and her surly temper would likely agree with the “broad” part of the actor’s assessment.
Martha and Brian worked as stockbrokers together 30 years ago. “I sucked,” said Dennehy, exhausted after rising at 3 a.m. in Providence, where he’s in a play. Which might explain his next, ill-considered statement: “Martha was really good.”
Inside the courtroom, prosecutor Michael Schachter would agree, wholeheartedly, that Martha was nobody’s fool.
The defense has painted Martha as a victim of a government that’s out to get a powerful lady. But Schachter, who could pass as an underage Eagle Scout, instead, painted a picture of a conniving, scheming, criminal broad.
A broad who “conspired to tell a series of lies.”
He talked about the damning telephone message that Martha erased with her own hands.
“The defense says it’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ ” said Schachter. But he said, “It’s devastating evidence that she committed the crime.”
Later, Bacanovic lawyer Richard Strassberg had a turn. Talking in an impossibly falsetto voice – was he Woody Allen? Or Minnie Mouse? Asked the courtroom wags – Strassberg argued, convincingly, that his client was victim of a “rush to judgment.”
So now it just might be time to take responsibility for your actions, Martha.