Read You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny Online
Authors: Suzanne Hansen
And right there on the board in big letters was written the cardinal rule, staring us in the face every day and stated and restated as often as possible:
Another student named Mandie and I became close friends. She was only two years older than me, and she had silky black shoulder-length
hair and a warm smile that made her approachable. I grew very fond of her. It might have been my mothering instinct that drew me to her—I felt the urge to take her under my wing. She seemed so alone, having driven all the way from Montana by herself. Her father, a lawyer and a man of few words himself, had given her only one piece of advice as she started her journey: “Count to ten before you speak.” I didn’t know it at the time, but soon Mandie would become one of the only friends I would have in a very foreign land. She would, one day, save my sanity.
Sitting in that classroom on the dingy side of Portland, I didn’t fully grasp the possibility of nightmarish nanny scenarios. Sure, I listened to stories like that of a British nanny who went to work for the royal family in Saudi Arabia. The girls she watched grew obese from being force-fed—to get them “strong” for childbearing. One seven-year-old child weighed 165 pounds. The nanny was freaked out by such strange practices and was scared by the police who stopped her for some wayward blond hair poking out of her headscarf. She eventually ran to the British embassy to get escorted out of the country. It sounded awful, but awfully different from how I pictured my job. Surely in the United States everyone had the same sort of basic ideas about raising kids. Didn’t they?
A few weeks into class, Mary, the family dynamics teacher, asked me to help take care of her own two girls and the special-needs foster children she cared for. She told me that, after careful consideration, she had chosen me from all the girls in class because of my maturity. I’d always felt I was the most responsible among my peers. As Jeff Foxworthy says, I was usually elected as the “spokesperson” to answer the door at our high school parties when the cops showed up. And what else could explain the fact that I had been chosen as the head of the fire-drill exercises in second grade and as the attendance-taker in the third grade?
I wasn’t, however, nominated for a home-ec medal. Though we weren’t expected to cook as nannies, Carolyn and Linda knew there would be exceptions. So we were required to prepare a meal, a personal favorite, for one of our practicum families to see if we could buy the groceries and make a dinner while caring for the kids at the same time. My personal favorite at the time was also the
only one
I knew how to make,
unless you counted bologna boats. It was a casserole, with broccoli, cheddar cheese, a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup, mashed potatoes, two cubes of butter, and a pint of half-and-half. This was all layered over a couple of pounds of fried hamburger. My grandmother used to make it for me every Sunday night. But somehow I had never noticed how long she slaved in the kitchen. I felt great nanny guilt for sticking my practicum children in front of the TV (educational programming, of course) while I stood over the stove. It took hours to assemble, but I thought it turned out great.
The six-year-old refused to eat it. He said it looked like throw up.
My four months of schooling went quickly, and by December I had graduated. I’d logged more than four hundred hours in classroom and practicum training and had passed my certification test with flying colors. I was now a highly trained and qualified childcare professional. I figured I could do that anywhere in the world—children are children, after all. So I set my sights on Southern California, the land of milk, honey, sunshine, and money. To my surprise, within a week I had several interviews lined up through a domestic placement agency in Santa Monica.
There was no doubt in my mind that it was time to leave the northwest. I knew that I’d miss my parents, my two sisters, and all my friends, but I had adjusted to life in a big city—well, Portland. It was time for bigger things. And there was no romance anchoring me in Oregon, anyway. Okay, there was my first love, Ryan, and our intense on-again, off-again relationship, but it was off now, and I suspected he probably couldn’t wait for me to disappear so he could start dating the homecoming queen. I had never before made it three entire months without running back to Ryan. But now I felt strong and confident. I was ready for a new life.
Good-bye, covered-bridge capital of America.
I was off to the film capital of the world.
My friends who are actresses and who have babies are with them every day. You can work and still be totally involved with your baby.
—Jennifer Garner
Going from NNI to my marathon interviews in LA to my new job happened quite quickly, almost like one of those movie scenes in which a child grows up in the space of one well-chosen song. I returned to LA less than a week after the Ovitz family offered me the position. Josh Evans, who worked in the CAA mailroom, picked me up from the airport. He was a cute guy, just about my age. He seemed really nice, and we laughed a lot on the drive to my new home. Maybe we could date? I knew it was time to move beyond Ryan. I later learned that Josh was Ali MacGraw’s son with Robert Evans, who had once run Paramount Pictures and was now a notorious producer. It seemed strange that a celebrity child like Josh had to start in the mailroom at Michael’s company; I didn’t yet know that it was a time-honored tradition. Everyone in Hollywood, apparently, started in the mailroom—even Michael, who had started his career at the William Morris Agency before decamping to found CAA.
No mailroom for me, though. Just the playroom. But it didn’t take long to see that they were very similar.
You first had to realize who was boss.
My real bosses were less than three feet tall. And they had lungs of steel. Right away I learned that when charming, dimpled, three-year-old Amanda didn’t get her way, there would be hell to pay. Her temper tantrums were daily and lengthy. Her shrill screams reverberated like air-raid sirens. She would stomp and flail her arms as fat crocodile tears rolled down her cheeks, and the veins in her little neck would become engorged from shrieking. She carried on like a crazed Energizer bunny until she ran out of juice, which took a
long, long
time—up to two excruciating hours. Everyone had given up trying to stop her toddler fits.
I figured that with my institute-certified expertise, I could snap her out of it pretty quickly. But in all my experiences as a babysitter, I had never seen a child with such determination—or tonsil power. I had read every child development and parenting book that I could get my hands on, always wanting to be one step ahead of the kids. Sure, sometimes I had to hunt around for the solution—maybe a stern talk, a time-out, or chocolate ice cream. But in the end,
something
would work. This child, however, appeared immune to all of my maneuvers.
This was not the way I had planned to kick off my first job. But then again, I had planned to have all my stuff with me, too. Two days before I left Cottage Grove, I shipped my clothes and other belongings down to the house. I had the correct street address, but I assumed that my new home was in Brentwood, not Los Angeles. That naming nonsense again. Evidently, Brentwood was not its own city. As a result, all my earthly possessions ended up who knows where in California. It wasn’t until two weeks later that they finally arrived.
Looking back, that may have been an omen.
Yet I blithely carried on. As I tried to take a wiggling Amanda to her room for a time-out, I saw Judy watching, looking aghast and a little dazed. She walked away, shaking her head.
I was mystified. I thought disciplining the kids was part of my job. But I didn’t say anything.
Why didn’t I ask how she wanted me to handle problems? I didn’t have the nerve. Asking probably would have gotten me some answers, but at a price. Already I felt like a bull in a china shop. By the end of my first day I had come to dread Judy’s silent but oh-so-obvious disapproval
when I did something she considered foolish, like walking out to fetch the mail in my socks. Or when I returned what I thought was a garage door opener to her car. (How did I not have the sense to know that the “opener” was a buzzer that belonged in the dining room—so the family could summon the staff when they had minor emergencies, like needing more pepper?) And after I chatted about Ryan and how I missed him, she explained in no uncertain terms that she thought it was ridiculous to even think about having a long-distance relationship. In her opinion, they
never
worked out.
I quickly sized up the household as tense and tight, not the happy, laughing, rough-and-tumble place I’d been picturing. (How had I not noticed this during my interview?) Judy expected me to know all the answers already, and fielding more queries exasperated her. I figured the only way to operate was to forge ahead and ask for forgiveness later. Well, not that I planned to do much of that. I vowed to be the perfect employee. If that meant reading the minds of my forbidding Hollywood bosses, then bring me the crystal ball.
I never did discover any rules regarding the children’s behavior. Apparently, they didn’t use time-outs, parenting with love and logic, attachment parenting, or any of the other concepts I had studied. So I tried to make up my own rules. But Judy didn’t seem pleased with any of them. She certainly hadn’t liked my giving a time-out, and candy or other food bribes were forbidden in this house (more on that shortly). I wasn’t sure what
would
please them; I didn’t see one parenting book in the entire house. But this family did have rules about other things. Lots of them.
Even in the bathroom. On my second day, when I went to turn on the tap for Joshua’s nighttime bath, I noticed that the spout was covered with what looked like a giant condom. Now, why in the world would someone want to protect their faucet? No idea. I pulled it off. How else was I going to run the water?
As with most things in the house, there was a reason—it just wasn’t evident to me. After the tub was half-filled, I told Joshua to get in while I helped Amanda get undressed in the connecting bedroom. Within seconds there was a wailing that nearly rivaled Amanda’s shrieking hissy fits. Heart pounding, I turned to see Joshua sitting in the tub, clutching his head and screaming, “You idiot! You’re so stupid! I hate you!”
I realized that the cover had been placed there to protect the
children
, not the spout. Fortunately, the incident didn’t require stitches, but in Joshua’s six-year-old mind, I had committed an unpardonable sin.
Would I ever get the hang of this?
I decided to approach it like school. After all, I was getting tested constantly, so I might as well study. I began carrying a well-worn notebook, hastily scribbling every time I learned something new about their preferences, propensities, and peculiarities. I was
not
about to get caught without a smile on my face and a helpful attitude. I was determined to win their approval.
During the first week of my tour of duty, I added several major rules to my list:
•
DON’T TOUCH THE ARTWORK
. This one had me truly rattled because artwork was
everywhere
. It seemed there were few places safe to touch. I was petrified. What if the kids fell into a million-dollar painting? Would I be held responsible? Oops! Liability—yet another thing I had forgotten to clarify during my interview.
•
KEEP THE FRONT/SIDE DOOR UNLOCKED
. I assumed this was because they had so many employees coming in and out, including a never-ending fleet of construction workers conducting some kind of renovation. It might have seemed less than security-conscious, but there
was
a fence and a gate.
•
NEVER ACTIVATE ALARMS
. Under no circumstances was I to set off the security alarm or motion detectors. I wasn’t exactly sure what would set them off, so I just decided to tread with caution. But there was a tiny problem with that plan. I was a sleepwalker. Throughout my childhood and into my teens, my mother would regularly find me wandering about the house in the middle of the night. I had once been discovered thoroughly washing my Ken and Barbie in the bathroom sink at 3
A.M
. When I was a teenager, I would plug in my curling iron and get in the shower at 2
A.M
. to get ready for school. So I was completely paranoid that one night I’d cruise around the Ovitz mansion in my pajamas and somehow
set off a three-alarm fire bell. I thought I had a solution, though. I would lock myself in my room. Hopefully my sleepwalking self wasn’t alert enough to figure out how to unlock the door. Years later I would hear Kathie Lee Gifford tell the story of how her husband, Frank, had mistakenly wandered—totally in the buff—into their nanny’s room in the middle of the night, but at the time I mercifully didn’t know of that possibility. Could anything be more excruciatingly embarrassing, at least for the nanny?
•
DO NOT FEED THE KIDS FAST FOOD
. The family followed a strict low-fat, low-salt diet that did not include French fries or Happy Meals. I assumed the cook got very creative with baby carrots and bananas.
•
ALWAYS CHECK WITH JUDY BEFORE GIVING BRANDON A BOTTLE
. She said she liked to feed him when she was home.
•
NEVER INTERRUPT MORNING WORKOUTS
. Michael was put through his paces every day by an ancient Japanese aikido master, or, once in a while, by Steven Seagal.
•
MICHAEL WILL ALWAYS TAKE CALLS FROM THE KIDS
. Ah. Exactly. See, this
was
the kind of family I wanted to work for: a family where the emotional well-being of the kids was the overriding concern.