Martha Stewart was asked by People this week what she made of Meghan Markle’s move into the cooking-show business. Her answer, published on 5 August, was that going from actress to princess to homemaking guru on television “doesn’t sort of follow.” Then, characteristically: so go from there.

The line that doesn’t follow

Here is Stewart’s own sequence.

She modelled for Chanel as a teenager to help cover her tuition at Barnard, where she started in chemistry and finished in history and architectural history. In 1967 she became a stockbroker — her father-in-law’s profession. She left Wall Street in the early seventies, moved to Westport, and spent years restoring an 1805 farmhouse on Turkey Hill Road. In 1976 she started a catering business out of the basement of that house. Her first book, Entertaining, came out in December 1982, when she was 41.

Then: magazine, television, a media company that went public in 1999, a conviction for obstruction and false statements in 2004, five months in federal prison, and a third act as a pop-culture figure who records with Snoop Dogg and posed for the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue at 81.

Model to stockbroker to caterer to author to mogul to inmate to meme is not a straighter line than actress to duchess to lifestyle brand. If anything it is less straight, and the pivot into homemaking came later in her life than the equivalent pivot has come in Meghan’s.

The part about the marriage

There is also the question of how the door opened.

Stewart married Andy Stewart in 1961, when she was 19 and he was a law student at Yale. He went into publishing rather than law, eventually running Harry N. Abrams and later founding Stewart, Tabori & Chang, a house specialising in books on cooking, gardening and interior design.

In 1977, Abrams released the English-language edition of the Dutch Gnomes series, which became a substantial bestseller. Andy hired his wife’s catering company to work the launch party. At that party, she was introduced to Alan Mirken, who ran Crown Publishing. Mirken was impressed enough to come back to her later about a cookbook. That cookbook was Entertaining.

A publishing executive is not the House of Windsor, and it would be silly to pretend Andy Stewart handed his wife an empire. But he was precisely the right kind of connected for the career she went on to have, and he is the reason she was in that room. It is a strange background from which to raise an eyebrow at someone whose lifestyle brand is downstream of a famous marriage.

To be fair to her: the marriage ended long before the empire peaked. They separated in 1987 and divorced in 1990, and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia went public nine years after that. The connection got her a first meeting. Everything from the second meeting onward, she built.

What the remark left out

There is also a premise buried inside the comment that doesn’t survive contact with the record. The implication is that the lifestyle turn arrived from nowhere once the marriage did. It didn’t.

Meghan launched The Tig in 2014 and ran it for roughly three years, writing about food, travel and entertaining. She closed it in the spring of 2017, before the engagement was announced. She was doing it while she was still on Suits, which means the interest predates the tiara rather than following it. Whatever else the Netflix show is, it is not a woman waking up one morning in Montecito and deciding she likes recipes. The show itself picked up a Daytime Emmy nomination, which is not the usual return on cynicism.

Stewart has been consistent on this theme, to be fair to her. Asked about the brand last year, she said authenticity was everything to her and that knowing your subject matters. She was pointedly warmer about Gwyneth Paltrow in the same breath, which is presumably part of why the remark travelled as far as it did.

But consistency isn’t the same as standing, and the standard is a strange one to hear from this particular quarter. Stewart was a stockbroker eight years before she catered her first party. She has spent five decades demonstrating that a career can jump tracks and still arrive somewhere, and she is arguably the single strongest piece of evidence against her own observation.

So it is worth being precise about what happened here. Stewart was asked a question and gave a mild, slightly grudging answer about career paths, from inside a career path that zigzagged harder than the one she was describing. The internet turned that into an unmasking. It was never an unmasking. It was an 85-year-old woman with strong opinions about doing the work, saying so about someone she had met once, briefly, at a dinner party in California.