You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny (8 page)

These, of course, were just the
stated
rules. There were many, many other unwritten rules, but I’d stumble across those later. Meanwhile, I consoled myself with the thought that other people had it worse. I’d heard at school about a nanny whose boss had a tremendous irrational fear of dirt and made her don plastic booties and gloves each day when she arrived. No Saran-Wrap wellies for me! Just oodles of rules.

I was also trying to follow the guidelines I’d learned at NNI. I struggled from the very beginning to keep in mind one of the foremost principles that I had learned there: a nanny should not make her employers her friends. As a former teen social queen from a small
friendly town, I found such a distinction difficult to make. When Judy left a couple of fashion magazines by my bedroom door, I thanked her several times. I was so touched that I studied the magazines thoroughly, wondering if she was trying to subtly pass on some beauty tips. Maybe this was her way of taking me, a young, unsophisticated girl, under her gilded wing. But apparently not. She smiled each time I thanked her but didn’t follow up on my attempts to be friendly.

I couldn’t figure her out. Cool and distant, yes, but high-maintenance socialite, no. She didn’t seem to shop much on Rodeo Drive or “do lunch” with the girls like I’d expected. She didn’t generally give her itinerary to the staff (I was getting used to the fact that I was part of the
staff
), but she flitted in and out most days, perpetually busy with something. I assumed it must be charity work. Routinely the two of us ate dinner with the kids, but the conversation always felt strained, like I was meeting my potential in-laws for the first time, over and over again. I kept trying not to say anything stupid. I kept failing. She would wave her hand dismissively, saying, “That’s not at all what I meant, Suzy,” when I ventured an opinion that didn’t suit her. To add to the tension, I found it odd to sit at your own dinner table and buzz the kitchen to have someone bring you ketchup in a shiny silver boat.

I should have expected all this. Not a friend, and not family. As the experts at NNI had said, “The nanny is taking care of part of the family, but she is not a
member
of the family.” Sure, I understood it intellectually. But it was a hard concept to remember when I was with these people twenty-four hours a day. We shared a roof; shouldn’t we share more? I wanted to be treated as both a professional
and
as a part of the family. I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel that way, but being so far away from my own family for the first time made me want to cling to this new one.

And yet there was so little to cling to. Judy was often gone, and when she was home she seemed distracted, busy, or generally unavailable. And I hardly ever saw Michael. He usually left early in the morning and returned about ten or eleven most nights. He didn’t walk, he darted; he gave the impression of being a mover and a shaker. He spoke to me cordially but it was always quickly, in passing.

There was no time for me to bond with them; but there was plenty of time for me to try to bond with the kids. So much for my expectation of clocking out at six or seven
P.M
. Actually, I was learning that I would rarely clock out at all. I had naively assumed my job would end in the evenings. But Judy’s idea of a nanny was a twenty-four-hour-a-day on-call presence. Eager not to be seen as a slacker, I didn’t have the nerve to question her assumption.

I soon learned other employees didn’t ask questions, either. It took nearly a village to support this household. Besides me, there was Carmen (the live-in cook), Delma (the live-in housekeeper, relief cook, and weekend nanny), Gloria and Rosa (the weekday housekeepers), a weekly gardener, and the guy who detailed the cars. Various other people passed through for extra gardening and little household fix-it jobs.

Carmen, the seven-year veteran, immediately became my friend and gradually, as time went on, a kind of mother figure. In her early forties, Carmen was short and pleasantly plump, with jet black hair and thick glasses. She usually wore white nurse shoes and a blue-and-white-striped shirt that hung over her white pants. I also grew close to Delma, who was only twenty-four, fairly close to my own age. Straight black bobbed hair framed Delma’s round, full face, which usually had a sweet expression. She had already worked for the family for three years.

The support staff at Michael’s office—including his assistant Sarah, who handled Michael’s personal matters; a second assistant, who took care of his clients’ needs; and Jay, who was Michael’s assistant/agent-in-training—soon became other members of my little family. They were my sounding boards, my confidants, and they occasionally offered a shoulder or two to cry on.

They understood. We all had to meet the family’s expectations. And Michael held
high
expectations. When Gloria began wearing rollers in her hair to do her work in the morning, Michael had his wife speak with her. Even though no one outside the house saw the maid who cleaned his bathroom and emptied his trash, Michael wanted her to look professional. Look professional, and perform like a perfectionist. The brass door knocker and the black lacquer doors it adorned had to gleam. The Plexiglas child-safety guards on the stairway must be wiped clean of
children’s fingerprints (a totally impossible job, as most anyone with kids can attest). The marble floors had to be kept as smooth and clean as poured cream. Each morning Rosa’s first job was to remove all the lint off the dark emerald green carpeting on the stairs. As far as she was concerned, the handheld vacuum that was used on the stairs was not good enough. So she stooped down and snatched any errant specks of fuzz with her fingers.

But Carmen had the most status with Michael. Our nightly three-course dinners stood up to anything you’d find at Jacques LaRivière’s restaurant. Twice a week she restocked the Sub-Zero refrigerator with fresh food bought at an upscale market, which she whipped into sophisticated and artful menus. The food was low-fat but truly delicious, and health-conscious Michael prized her culinary ability. Carmen was not shy about using his allegiance to her advantage. The rest of the staff grumbled a little when Carmen sat reading
Gourmet
in the kitchen while they scurried around the house, but she wouldn’t budge. Why should she? She knew her job was secure.

Michael paid her a generous salary, but I learned that every couple of years she got fed up with her resident status and asked to live off the property. Carmen owned a home, she had a boyfriend, and she wanted to spend time with her family. In short, she wanted a life. But Michael wouldn’t hear of it. He only allowed her to stay at her own house two nights a week, on her days off. Her high salary kept her in golden handcuffs. Carmen told me she would never be paid as well anywhere else, and she said that Michael’s vindictiveness was well-known. She was convinced that if she left, she would be sent on her way without a reference and would have a hard time finding another job. I figured she was exaggerating. She had to be. They had stolen her right out of Neil Diamond’s kitchen, hadn’t they?

I felt pretty homesick by the end of my first week. One night I opened the drawer beside my bed and pulled out the journal that Kristi’s parents had given me as a graduation present. “Wishes and Dreams” was scrawled across the cover in flowery script. I opened it up and reread the inscription:

I was suddenly aware of the enormous distance between me and the people who loved me and had watched me grow up. Here in Hollywood, I was an unknown. Sure, I was making some friends—Carmen, Delma, Sarah—but I was still lonely. It seemed the perfect time to christen my present and start recording my new life. Over the course of my stay in Hollywood, I would turn to this book almost nightly to pour out my decidedly mixed bag of thoughts and experiences.

In fact, I was probably wasting precious beauty sleep writing.

It wasn’t long before I started to feel more at ease, thanks to Carmen and Delma and the rest of the staff. They clued me in to the complex workings of the house, and showed me which goofs you could laugh about and which mistakes were cause for alarm. As I grew closer to them, they told me often what a great job I was doing. When I was beside myself with worry about Amanda’s tantrums, they would assure me that it had always been that way. When I was depressed because Judy was hard to please and quick to criticize—“What’s that car doing parked in front of our house?” “Why is there no lettuce in the refrigerator?”—they would teach me that whatever our answer was (“I’m driving my brother’s car today”; “The lettuce is in the crisper”) wouldn’t ever be quite good enough, and I had to let it go. I appreciated their kindness; and they, in turn, loved the fact that I treated them kindly. I gathered that the previous nanny had felt somewhat “above” the other staff. I didn’t feel that way at all—friends were friends.

The atmosphere in the house was generally much less stressful when we had it all to ourselves, which was after Judy took the kids to school and stayed out for the rest of the day. The heavy feeling of being watched and critiqued lifted for a bit, and we didn’t have to be on our
toes every single second. As the days slid into weeks, it got easier, but I was still dismayed at how awkward and stressful it was. Sure, I’d heard horror stories from NNI and from nannies I’d met in the local Brentwood Park. I listened to tales of nannies drawn into bitter custody battles, courted by both sides to testify on each parent’s behalf when, in reality, both were neglectful and spent far too little time at home. I’d brushed off such difficulties as rare exceptions. But other issues—like feeling comfortable, welcome, and wanted—never entered my mind.

Not that I had much time to think. Brandon kept me busy all day long, as infants do, with constant feeding, burping, and changing. I didn’t mind, really. I loved snuggling with him. And Brandon was still so little that I usually just carried him around the house all day long. Judy really seemed to enjoy doing things with the older children, and they hungered for her company. But she told me that taking Brandon along with the other two was too much for her, with the diaper bag, stroller, bottles, etc.

So I was in charge of Brandon nearly twenty-four hours a day. Like many other highly positioned Hollywood families, the Ovitzes had hired a baby nurse for the first few weeks of Brandon’s life. She fed him, changed him, rocked him, and cuddled him, basically everything you’d think a new mom would do. She had left just days earlier, and I eagerly slid into her role.

We explored Brentwood together, often beelining for Brentwood Park and taking long walks through the neighborhood, which was charming and full of gorgeous homes that screamed “old money.” Most were set far back from the road, many behind forbidding high hedges. A gate and an intercom system protected almost every one, and at least one house on every street was under construction. I learned that people in LA were fond of buying teardowns: multimillion-dollar mansions they razed and replaced with even bigger palaces that stretched right to the edge of the property lines. Countless fleets of construction vehicles passed through, prompting an array of “roach coaches”—a derogatory term for vans that served hot food and drinks—that parked on every block to attract the mainly Hispanic service people. It was on one of these strolls that I realized I now lived only a block from the O.J. Simpson estate on North Rockingham.

Despite my difficulties adjusting to the job, I was thoroughly enjoying my sneak peek into the lives of the rich and famous.