BYRON’S BOOK, the latest in an increasingly popular shadow industry of Martha-the-shrew takedowns, doggedly seeks out the facts. It is an unflinching — and at times sensationalistic — account of Martha’s rise to fame and wealth. According to Byron, there’s a lot of foul play, financial trickery, and backstabbing in her history. She’s famous for using and abusing her friends. A few of the book’s juicy tidbits: Martha is so cold that she chose to have a hysterectomy after bearing her only child, Alexis. She screwed people, left and right, out of their fair shares. She treated her parents as props for her television show.

"I set out to write a business biography," Byron explains by phone from his home in Connecticut. But, he discovered, the personal aspects of the Martha saga are wrapped up in her finances and business practices. Martha the woman and Martha the brand are inseparable. And that may not be a good thing for her business — especially if something were to happen to her. Where would Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia be without Martha?

And that’s only one of the wrinkles in the MSLO business scheme. All apparently isn’t color-coordinated bliss in Martha’s house. While MSLO stock burst on to the scene with its IPO in October of 1999, reaching an intraday high of $49.50, these days, the price has plummeted to less than $20 a share.

And Kmart’s demise sure isn’t helping things. In early January, the discount-retail chain declared bankruptcy. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, that action had a profound effect on MSLO, whose merchandising division — the most lucrative piece of the pie — sells through Kmart. So it came as no surprise that, three months after the bankruptcy announcement, MSLO reported a 53 percent drop in first-quarter earnings. That’s certainly not a good thing.

In March, Martha started slashing positions at the Internet/direct-commerce division of her company. The tally so far is 40, out of 600 employees. As George Nichols, an analyst at Morningstar.com, told the New York Post: "Sales at the Internet and mail-order business have been particularly soft."

Proponents might argue that television and magazines are where it’s really at for Martha. But even there, things aren’t looking so great. Martha Stewart Living has a household rating of 1.4, compared to The Oprah Winfrey Show’s 5.9 and The Rosie O’Donnell Show’s 2.5 — a substantial gap, says Marc Berman, an analyst for Mediaweek. (Each ratings point equals a million households.) Even Sally Jessy Raphael, whose show will soon go off the air, beat Martha with a rating of 1.7. "Martha has half of the audience she had four years ago," says Berman. "She’s long since peaked."

Martha’s magazine has been pilloried, but it pioneered what’s turned out to be a lucrative genre (witness O and Rosie). On the face of things, the magazine appears to be doing well, boasting rising ad revenues. But as Byron notes, it’s merely a clever re-jiggering of the numbers: the magazine upped its circulation from 10 issues a year to 12, in addition to throwing in the occasional supplemental issue. "If you make that 11th [issue] a year available to subscribers who already have signed up for a full year," Byron explains, "it looks as if your advertising is increasing, but it really isn’t. You’re just adding another copy of the magazine." Investors Weekly reports that because the magazine raised advertising rates by 5.6 percent in January, "some analysts say [Martha’s publishing business] may show growth in coming months." But again, that may have more to do with financial finessing than true growth. At the same time, the magazine has fallen behind Oprah’s and Rosie’s in circulation, though Adweek lists the circulation at a still-high 2.5 million.

It appears that Martha herself has started to sweat. She recently sold three million of her shares in the company, reducing her total stake by nine percent (though with 60 percent, she still holds the lion’s share). "I think she’s scared to death of [Byron’s] book," a source told the New York Post’s Page Six. But the investment banker who handled the deal — and later took a seat on her board — attributed the sell-off to "estate-planning purposes."

One could simply blame it all on saturation: there’s not much room to grow when you’ve cornered the market. As Forbes magazine noted back in March of 2001, the reason for Martha’s declining revenues — especially in television, her company’s third-largest division — is "too much Martha, too often."

BUT IT ISN’T only on the business side that Martha’s garden appears a little wilted. As a cultural icon, she’s also starting to crumble.

While people like Erin Franzman may have thought their idolatry of Martha a dirty little secret as late as last year, the secret is now out. Transgressive as it may have seemed to harbor love for the mistress of all things crafty and Connecticut, loving Martha has become clichŽ. It’s, like, last year.

Byron compares Martha Stewart to Playboy. "Playboy’s great growth days were before it was okay to be seen in public carrying it around," he explains. "Once it became okay to do that, a lot of the novelty value and surprise aspect began to wear off. There may be an element of that in Martha Stewart Living as well. She may be overexposed."

Certainly there’s always been a strong market for people hoping to find fault with Martha — as with any woman shattering the glass ceiling. "People always want to see women fail," says Bust’s Stoller. "Not only is she is woman being successful, she is a housewife. It’s standard backlash."

Wherever one stands in the Martha debate, few are forecasting the end of her empire. The company is still relatively strong and diversified. "I think Martha will always be around in some way," forecasts Mediaweek’s Berman.

The question is, where? At the end of the day, Martha may have paved the way for others, scrubbed down the threshold, and written the postmodern primer on how to make and keep a nice house. But now it might be time to make room for friends.

Nina Willdorf can be reached at nwilldorf[a]phx.com