Martha Stewart on golish parties at her country house in the 1970s

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It looks like Martha Stewart showed off more than just her hydrangeas when guests visited her Connecticut home. The national treasure, so to speak, denies a long-rumored rumor that she hosted nude swim parties there in the 1970s - in a way that makes it sound more like it was true.

"I don't know where it came from," Stuart Fern Mullis told the 92nd Street Y when she brought up this decades-old rumor. "I've never had a nude pool party!" She added: "I think people have been swimming naked. But it was never a party. "

A close friend of Stewart's, the late Norma Collier, told the author in 1997 that Stewart threw nude pool parties at her Westport villa, called Turkey Hill, which turned into explicit "key parties." "Certain guests, upon arrival, were asked to put their keys in a gorgeous bowl, and at the end of the evening [the woman] would take the set of keys and go home with the owner," Collier told author Jerry Oppenheimer for his 1997 book Just Desserts.

Meanwhile, Stewart told Mullis about the pain of her divorce from her husband, Andrew Stewart, in 1987 - right during a bookstore tour for her popular book "Weddings." "Now imagine - it was so brutal!" - Stewart told the crowd in Upper East Manhattan.

The couple separated with bitter differences that were not finally resolved until 1990. The couple is raising their daughter Alexis. Adding insult to humiliation, Andrew married Stuart's assistant, though these marriages did not last either. He's now married to Shaila Nelson Stewart.