By GEORGE RUSH NY DAILY NEWS GOSSIP COLUMNIST
Someone get Martha Stewart another aspirin. Having been barbecued in two unauthorized biographies, the domestic diva can look forward to another turn on the spit in a novel thinly glazed as fiction.
New York publishers and Hollywood studio execs are looking at a proposal for a wicked book by a former assistant to the publisher of her Martha Stewart Living magazine.
'Reply to All' is the tale of a 28-year-old MBA grad, Marcus Holt, who goes to work for Jillian Sanders, imperious head of Conquest Media and Marketing.
Marcus finds himself trying to manage Jillian's 'mania, hide her pharmaceutical [and] control her self-absorbed habits,' J.R. Martine writes in his proposal.
Martine did not work for Stewart. But, according to a friend, he saw plenty working for her magazine's former publisher Shelley Waln.
Martine writes in his 65-page pitch that Marcus discovers working for Jillian has some peculiar aspects:
'I buy panties for this woman, and messenger them to her when she is at home in the morning and all her 'favorites' are at the dry cleaners.'
'I can never - ever - stock up enough on weird things my boss might ask for.' Among the contents of his desk drawer are 'four tapes of recorded telephone conversations, two boxes of marbles, vinegar, hem tape.'
Though Jillian calls him incessantly, she rarely listens to what he says. 'She's already moving on to ... the next speech, the next meeting, the next deal.' Martine's agent, Dan Strone, points out that 'nowhere in the proposal is Martha Stewart mentioned. That's part of the fun.'
Stewart hasn't been having much fun lately. She's the target of a criminal investigation into her perfectly timed sale of ImClone stock, and the scandal has decimated her own company's stock.
She's already been the subject of two unflattering biographies, including the recent 'Martha Inc.,' which NBC is rushing to turn into a TV movie.
Martine's former boss, Waln, no longer works for Stewart. Last year, she filed a $5 million lawsuit against Merrill Lynch and Stewart's broker, Peter Bacanovic, over the loss of stock options.
Merrill Lynch has called the claim baseless.
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