Sounds like Martha Stewart showed off more than her hydrangeas when guests visited her Connecticut home.
The national treasure kinda sorta denied a long-running rumor that she hosted nude swimming parties there 1970s — in a way that mostly made it sound as if it was true.
“I don’t know where this comes from,” Stewart told Fern Mallis at 92nd Street Y when she brought up the decades-old rumor. “I never had a nude pool party ever!”
She added, “I think people swam in the nude. But it was never a party.”
Stewart’s close friend, the late Norma Collier, told an author in 1997 that Stewart hosted naked pool parties at her Westport spread, Turkey Hill, that turned into raunchy “key parties.”
“Certain guests, on arrival, were asked to place their house keys into a fancy bowl and at the end of the evening, [a woman would] retrieve a set of mystery keys and go home with the owner,” Collier told author Jerry Oppenheimer for his 1997 book “Just Desserts.”
Meanwhile, Stewart told Mallis about the anguish of splitting from her husband, Andrew Stewart, in 1987 — right in the midst of the book tour for her hit tome “Weddings.”
“Now, take that — that was so cruel!.” Stewart told the crowd on the Upper East Side. “Having to talk about weddings while you were in the middle of not a very nice divorce.”
The couple had a bitter split that was not finalized until 1990. The pair share daughter Alexis.
Adding insult to injury, Andrew went on to marry Stewart’s assistant, though that marriage also did not last. He is now married to Shyla Nelson Stewart.
