I was very surprised to hear that, but I heard her say it with my own ears. She was guest host, with Robert Osborne, Friday evening, Nov. 30, on Turner Classic Movies.
The reason Spam came up was because one of the movies she chose for the evening, one I had not previously seen, was
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, released in 1948 (dream house: appropriate choice from Martha, don't you think?). In the film Cary Grant worked in the advertising industry, and his client made a product they called Wham, obviously a thinly fictionalized version of Spam.
The film is a comedy, but I found it only mildly amusing (not
really funny like Cary Grant in
Arsenic and Old Lace). However, I've become fascinated by movies like it, films released in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, that take place in the "present day" when they were released, for their value as a glimpse into the period. I'm not just talking about ideas and attitudes here, but also simple material culture things, and what life was like.
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is a good example.
At the beginning of the film, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy have a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. They have a housekeeper. They have a car. Myrna Loy's character apparently does not work outside the home. Their two daughters attend a private, "exclusive" school. Then they buy 35 acres in Connecticut, demolish the old house on it, and build a new one (for less than what I paid for my one-bedroom condominium in 1995). They do all this on Cary Grant's princely advertising salary of
fifteen thousand dollars a year. Imagine. That must have been considered a lot of money for the late 1940s because the sum gets repeated a couple of times.
Anyway, I'm still surprised that Martha Stewart likes Spam. How 'bout that, I have something in common with Martha other than the sheets I bougt at K-Mart that had her name on them!
