I honestly don’t know how I’d survive without the friendships I’ve formed with other nannies over the years. You’d think it would be competitive, as there are so few elite nannies working the circuit, but that’s why it’s important that we stick together. An outsider can’t really understand the demands of our lives.
We are all from different ‘nanny tribes’, including newborn nannies, travel nannies, day nannies and ‘mannies’. It’s not unusual for a wealthy parent to employ more than one nanny, even if they only have one child. I am a traditional day nanny, and prefer to work alone because it’s far less complicated. However, when I’ve worked for royalty I’m usually just part of an entourage, and we each have different responsibilities.
The only tribe that doesn’t attend our Sunday sessions are the night nannies, who spend the daylight hours sleeping. We probably wouldn’t invite them anyway—everybody knows that night nannies are lazy, and their hearts aren’t really in it. They choose to work the night shift not because they’re naturally nocturnal, but because it’s far easier than caring for children during the daytime. You don’t have parents watching over you, and your duties are minimal; there’s no playing, no cleaning, no homework and you don’t have to chauffeur children across the city. A night nanny is paid the same rate as a day nanny for reading a bedtime story, keeping one ear on a baby monitor and rocking a child back to sleep if they wake up. I’ve worked as a night nanny in the past, but I didn’t enjoy it. It’s the easiest type of work, but it’s also the least fulfilling. Secretly we’re pleased that the night nannies can’t make it to our Sunday gatherings.
The only honorary non-nanny of the group is Fernando, an Italian make-up artist who I met through Alysha because she hires him for photo shoots and red carpet events. We bonded immediately, as we’ve worked for many of the same people and can compare stories of bosses from hell. Fernando is wonderfully indiscreet when it comes to his famous clients. We’ll flick through a celebrity magazine, and he’ll point out his clients. ‘She’s had a nose job, he paints on his six-pack, and she had her bottom ribs removed to give her that hourglass shape.’ He should know, because he’s the one in charge of covering every plastic surgery scar.
I’m sure Fernando’s clients know that he’s a gossip, but he gets away with murder because he’s the best in the business. He can make any woman look like Cinderella with a flick of his make-up brush. He is known for being brutally honest and tells clients exactly what he thinks, whether it’s criticising their new haircut, their new boyfriend or their latest movie. I’m far too nervous to speak my mind, so Fernando does my dirty work for me. ‘Alysha, do you really think dressing a five-year-old in a G-string bikini is appropriate? You may as well get her a garter and a stripper’s pole.’
I never get tired of hanging out with Fernando. He would be my ideal man, if he wasn’t secretly dating an in-the-closet male model. (You know, the one on the billboards in Times Square, holding a can of soft drink over his private parts. The one currently ‘dating’ an up-and-coming actress. Yes, that one!)
When I walk into the burger joint, Fernando jumps up from his chair. ‘Lindsay-La-La,’ he hollers as he envelops me in a bear hug, ‘tell me all about your life. What have I missed since I saw you one hundred and sixty-eight hours ago?’ He makes me feel like the most special person in the universe every time I see him.
We have a rule that he’s not allowed to ‘mwah’ me. I’ve worked in this town long enough to know that a Hollywood air kiss is a meaningless greeting, reserved for people you don’t really know or don’t really like, but need to network with. I want my authentic friends to greet me in an authentic way.
I slumped down into the booth with a sigh, sweeping a handful of Fernando’s fries into my mouth before my bum has even landed on the plastic seat. ‘Oh, you know, the usual rubbish,’ I mumbled through my mouthful. ‘I took Chanel to a 5 a.m. baby yoga class, then took seven-year-old Goldie to her ballet rehearsal. Alysha refuses to go because she says the lighting in the dance hall makes her look old. Then I spent the afternoon filling a piñata with twenty-dollar notes for one of the kiddies’ birthday parties. I counted about three thousand dollars into that thing. It’s totally crazy.’
‘That’s nothing,’ piped up Mimi. ‘I have to chaperone Kabbalah summer camp for the next fortnight with over fifty children, one of whom got a prayer bead stuck up her nose. And today my boss told me off because she’s decided her five-year-old’s skin isn’t youthful enough, so now I have to moisturise her face every hour, on the hour. I have to set an alarm so I don’t miss an application.’
While Mimi and I traded stories, Opal, who looked utterly exhausted, was anxiously shredding a paper napkin onto the table. She had spent the last week chauffeuring four children back and forth to a rehab facility, where their pop-star mother was currently incarcerated. ‘The three-year-old keeps crying because she doesn’t recognise her mom,’ moaned Opal. ‘I’ve tried to explain that Mommy just shaved her head, but the little girl keeps running away. I’ll have to go shopping for a blonde wig tomorrow. The mom’s freaking out because her ex-husband wants custody of the kids, even though they’re not his biological children and they were only married for 24 hours.’
At this, Fernando broke into a round of applause. ‘Opal wins this round!’ he cried, ‘Congratulations, sweetheart, your boss is officially the most insane.’
It was our favourite Sunday night game, trying to outdo each other’s horror stories, although we were always careful to use codenames when it came to our bosses. We secretly referred to Alysha as ‘Cake Face’, because she wears so much make-up, and Mimi’s boss as ‘Tupperware Box’, because her face is so plastic from surgery and Botox.
We had to keep our voices down, and always chose the booth tucked away in the corner, because it’s not unusual for gossip columnists to target groups of nannies to try to unearth juicy stories. It’s also not hard to spot a celebrity nanny, if you know what you’re looking for. When I’m off duty I usually dress in jeans and a T-shirt, but the clues are in my accessories. At first glance I might look like a university student, but I’m probably wearing a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of extras.
For Christmas, Alysha gave me a pair of Chanel studded pumps signed by Karl Lagerfeld. I own six Louis Vuitton bags and seven pairs of Manolo Blahnik stilettos. I have a silver tiara at the back of my closet, which I’ve only worn once, when I attended a royal gala. When Alysha gave birth to Harlow I was given a ‘push present’ of a white-gold Chanel watch, despite the fact I wasn’t even in the labour suite. I’ve since had it valued at $16,000, although that doesn’t stop me from wearing it when I make sandcastles with the children.
These might seem like generous gestures, but the truth is that many of our employers are on first-name terms with fashion designers. They get more freebies than they know what to do with, and have such short attention spans that they wear an item once and then it’s discarded, or re-gifted.
That’s why it helps to have the same size feet as your employer. If you happen to be close by when she’s throwing away leftovers, you might get lucky. In Alysha’s mansion the cleaner vacuums in Prada wedges, the security guards all have Cartier watches, and I’ve been known to change dirty nappies wearing a diamond ring worth $12,000. Recently Alysha was given a free pair of Gucci sunglasses, wore them once and then threw them away. When I was helping out the housekeepers by taking out the trash I spotted and rescued them, after checking that no one was watching. I’d estimate that, between the five nannies (and one honorary nanny) sitting around the table right now, our accessories alone add up to around $150,000.
I love these girls because they’re not lost in show business. They can relate to all my worries and see past the glitz and the glamour. Although we compete for the same jobs, they don’t feel like my rivals, and I’m happy to recommend them for work if I think they suit a family better than I do. The other VIP nannies working in Hollywood have become my surrogate family.
T
here is only one exception—a 26-year-old Australian who I privately call my ‘nannemy’. I don’t dislike many people, but Madge rubs me up the wrong way. I’m not the only person in our friendship group who has a problem with her. We hoped that, when Kate Middleton announced she was pregnant, Madge would go for the job, but if she did she didn’t get it. I would have been happy to have a couple of thousand kilometres between us, but I doubt that Madge will be going anywhere anytime soon. She currently earns $600,000 a year working for a talk show host called Doctor Jaz. It’s the show where couples air their dirty laundry with lie detectors and DNA tests. She earns a very generous salary even by elite nanny standards and won’t leave that job unless she is forced to. She should be careful, because she will be forced to if Doctor Jaz ever finds out she puts sleeping pills in his ten-year-old son’s dinner. ‘It’s just half a pill to calm him down,’ Madge said when she confessed this to us one Sunday. ‘The little brat needs to chill out after all those computer games.’
‘Watch out! The nannemy has entered the building,’ Fernando whispered, gesturing to the restaurant’s entrance. As usual Madge was completely overdressed for a burger joint. Today she was wearing a skin-tight Hervé Léger bandage dress that made it laughably difficult for her to squeeze into the booth beside us.
‘I’m so, so sorry I’m late,’ she gushed. ‘I’ve just left my new agent!!! We were planning my media strategy!!!’ This is how Madge always speaks—in exclamation marks and exaggerations, which makes it very hard to take anything she says seriously.
‘Oh, and guess what?’ she continued. ‘On the way here two fathers asked for my autograph. They recognised me from my movies and wanted childcare advice!!! Isn’t that adorable?!!’
To put this into context, by ‘movies’ she means the five-minute YouTube clips that she films on a webcam and then bullies the fifteen-year-old that she cares for to retouch before she uploads them. It’s not exactly primetime television; however, Madge never lets the truth get in the way of a good story.
She is the first to admit she wants to be famous herself, which is the worst trait a VIP nanny can have, as far as I’m concerned. She claims to get 20,000 hits a month on her YouTube channel, but I’m sure most of those are from fathers who couldn’t care less about her childcare advice. It’s like a webcam show, with Madge pouting and puffing up her breasts for the camera. She posts videos on everything from how to get a child to sleep through the night, to kiddie yoga poses and tried-and-true recipes. Some of her tips are obvious, and some are outright dangerous. When she self-published a fitness book for children it had to be pulled from Amazon and the front cover totally redesigned, because the original had a photograph of a toddler attempting to lift a kettlebell. Fernando was the one to point out that this was a health and safety hazard.
The other thing I dislike most about Madge is that she has no concept of nanny solidarity. She once gave an interview to a magazine in which she claimed that all nannies are home-wreckers who sleep with their bosses. She also once stole a job from my friend Rachael and nearly ruined her reputation. At the time, Rachael was working for a single father whom Madge had a serious crush on and wanted to get close to. One day the dad was emailed a photograph taken on a mobile phone from an anonymous sender. It showed Rachael ‘smacking’ his two-year-old son when they were at the beach together. The email read, ‘Is this the kind of person you want taking care of your child?’ The only other adult on the private beach that day had been Madge and, in actual fact, Rachael had been brushing sand off the child’s bottom. When Rachael was fired, guess who got the job? That’s why I’ve never said anything about Madge attending our Sunday catch-ups: I’m worried about what she’d do for revenge.
I hate to admit it, but I’m a bit intimidated by Madge. The girl has no volume control, and I find myself growing quieter in her presence to balance out her loudness. Every time I spend time in her company, I leave feeling worse about myself. She has this magical ability to find a person’s raw nerve and she goes out of her way to hit it. She once told me her motto is ‘There’s always a nice way to say something mean.’ That says it all, really.
‘Lindsay, I was just thinking about you this afternoon,’ Madge crowed, swivelling in her seat to face me. My heart sank and Fernando squeezed my knee in solidarity under the table as Madge continued: ‘I took the children to watch an episode of Doctor Jaz’s talk show being filmed and it was all about fertility. He was talking to girls in their late twenties who thought they had all the time in the world to become mothers. Then they tested their eggs and found out they hardly had any. They were devastated, as you can imagine.’
I was aware that everyone around the table had puzzled looks on their faces, probably wondering where this conversation was leading. In our group, we never discussed the topic of having babies of our own. When you’re a nanny you have to bury your own broodiness, otherwise every day would be like window-shopping when your credit card is maxed out.
‘It just reminded me of you for some reason,’ continued Madge. ‘I think you’d make such a lovely mother. But, as Doctor Jaz said, you’re only born with a certain number of eggs and every day the numbers are dwindling. How old are you now? Thirty-four or thirty-five?’
I could have said, ‘I’m only twenty-seven years old, thank you.’ I could have said, ‘I don’t even know if I want children.’ I could have said a lot of things, but instead I took a huge bite of bacon double cheeseburger so that my mouth was full, and tried not to show that she’d sparked my insecurities.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Fernando as we left the restaurant an hour later. He had expertly changed the subject by asking Madge about her new Alexander McQueen bracelet, which was a leather band with a gold crystal skull hanging from it. She was all too happy to tell the group how her banker boyfriend bought it for her. Unlike the rest of us, Madge is not modest when it comes to her accessories and loves to show them off. She is also one of the few nannies who manages to juggle a boyfriend and her career, mainly because she doesn’t worry about neglecting the little boy she cares for. The ten-year-old is only too happy to sit in her boyfriend’s study playing computer games when he should be at his cello lesson. She bribes him with candy not to tell his father.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ I told Fernando. ‘I know she’s just trying to hurt me. It doesn’t mean anything.’ He raised one eyebrow but didn’t push the subject, and I went home to lick my paws—and google statistics on fertility.
I tried to push the conversation from my mind, but it wasn’t to be. The funny thing about children is they have a magic way of drawing attention to your weaknesses. If you’ve put on a few pounds, you can bet a little kid will tell you. If you’re trying to feign happiness, they’ll see straight through you.
The next day I was playing Barbies with Lavender, whose doll collection is so large it has its own bedroom, with an electric train that drives the dolls around a village of houses. ‘Let’s make a family,’ Lavender instructed. ‘We can dress up a doll for each of us and have a tea party.’ So together we searched through the plastic figurines for a Mummy doll in a tennis costume, a Daddy doll in a director’s chair and six tiny dolls to be the sisters.
‘Now we need to find a Lindsay doll,’ said Lavender, reaching into her toy box and pulling out a figurine. ‘This one looks like you . . .’
Of all the dolls, she’d chosen pregnant Barbie complete with a baby bump, wearing a maternity smock. It even came with a tiny blow-up birthing pool.
Either the universe was trying to tell me something, or I needed to lay off the Sunday night hamburgers.
5
Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in an episode of Toddlers & Tiaras, because I’ve accompanied so many children to auditions, television sets and photo shoots. I’ve applied fake tan and false eyelashes to five-year-olds and put a toddler in stilettos. Sometimes, when you look around a pageant hall, it’s like someone has shot a shrink-ray at a strip joint. I don’t enjoy being part of the process but I have
to follow the orders of the parents, who are often keen for their children to follow them into the family business.
The three eldest Appleby sisters, Goldie, Harlow and Cherry, had been asked to star in a commercial for a ‘healthy’ fast food chain where the bean burgers are served in gluten-free buns and the chips are made from sweet potato fried in coconut oil.
The kids were excited because all of the ‘talent’ who appeared in the advert received a ‘milkshake credit card’, which bought them unlimited drinks at the restaurant. They’d also be paid, but only Alysha and her agent knew how much and where this money went.
I was glad that the commercial Alysha had signed the girls up to was a group shoot at least. There would be twenty or so children there, so the focus wouldn’t be on the Appleby girls. They hadn’t even had to audition, because the director played golf with Sir Cameron. This was also how Cherry became the face of a breakfast cereal, how Lavender became an extra in Glee, and why little Chanel was appearing in a romantic comedy as Kate Hudson’s love child.
You usually see the same children at these types of jobs, and when we arrived at the restaurant where the commercial was being shot I instantly recognised the twin daughters of a country and western singer, and the three sons of a Wimbledon winner.
You can spot a pushy parent from a mile away. At one end of the room, a mother was strapping her five-year-old into a corset while muttering ‘This is all your father’s fault for giving you that bag of potato chips last month.’
In another corner, a mother was applying a ‘tooth flipper’ to a little girl’s mouth to hide the fact she’d recently been visited by the tooth fairy. I once heard a pageant judge call a three-year-old’s tooth gap ‘unsightly’. In pageants, girls could also be marked down for having dimples that are ‘too symmetrical’ or ‘over-elongated eyebrows’.
Nanny Confidential Page 4
