With all the gongs handed out at this month's glitzy Oscars ceremony, perhaps there should have been one more: Best Performance by a Nanny in Hollywood. It could have been awarded to Suzanne Hansen, who's just published her memoirs of working for the rich and famous in You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again.
Suzanne was a starry-eyed 19-year-old when she left her small town of Cottage Grove, Oregon ('where the highlight of a typical resident's week was bingo at the Elks Lodge with a $250 pot'), clutching one of the first certificates issued by the new Northwest Nannies Institute, and went job-hunting in the hills of Hollywood. Though she wrote this book some years later, it's done from the view of a country girl who never loses her sharp eye for the contrasts between the lifestyles of ordinary mortals and those of the rich - and their incredible stinginess amid the luxury. And though each chapter is studded with stars, many readers will recognise the painful truths of the nanny-employer relationship that exist in any number of places besides Tinseltown.
The book is reminiscent of The Nanny Diaries by New Yorkers Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin (see Professional Nanny, March 2002). But while that was fiction, this story is more entertaining because it's only too real.
You just have to put aside any qualms about breach of confidentiality.
Most of the book involves Suzanne's first job caring 24/7 for the three young children of Michael Ovitz, founder of the most powerful talent agency in LA, and his wife Judy, whose job apparently is to attend clients'
parties and charity dinners between visits to the beauty salon. They are the type of couple who ring home from a private cruise in the Mediterranean and the father's first question is 'Is my art collection okay?' while the mother hangs up before all her children can get to the phone because the call is costing all of $15.
Yet Suzanne shows these people as genuinely human, if only through her surprise at their rare moments of generosity or appreciation for her work, when she thought they took her for granted. She's embarrassed when, for once, Judy says she'd like to put the baby to bed herself, and has to ask Suzanne 'How do you do it?' - Suzanne panics that her employer won't even know how to put the side of the crib down. ('She didn't seem confident about meeting the needs of her own baby, but I knew she could do a fine job. She just didn't know it because she had given all the responsibility - and joy - to others.') Suzanne is candid about her mistakes - including the typical nanny errors of being so impressed by the family's wealth that she forgets to ask for a contract of employment, and getting too emotionally attached to the children, while feeling obsessively paranoid about what her employers think of her. She fails to remember being taught at the Institute that a nanny is neither friend nor family to them. In one hilarious after-dinner scene, she breaks her cardinal rule of never getting involved in a shouting match with a child ('I had somehow started a food fight with a six-year-old!') and goes to chill out with a dive into the family swimming pool, slips and cuts her head open on the tiles (all she can think of is newspaper headlines like 'Nanny Accused of Throwing Butter at Six-year-old - Apparently Commits Suicide to Avoid the Wrath of Superagent Ovitz'). Her boss sends her to his acupuncturist to treat her injury and she has to pay the bill herself.
Holidays are worse than staying home, as the jet set tend to travel as an entourage with their family friends and dump all the children on one nanny.
When her hometown chums envy her travels, Suzanne shouts back, 'I pack up all the kids and get criticised for what I choose to pack. I travel with a family that never experiences any joy. Everything in their life is a hassle to them. Everyone they encounter is out to screw them over.'
However much Hollywood values disgust her, Suzanne remains starstruck in a house where any time she picks up the phone she might find herself chatting to Tom Cruise or Dustin Hoffman. This seems to be what makes being on duty 24/7 bearable for her, though she feels as though she's invisible to her employers. Like many young nannies, she is ironically too scared to leave because she knows her boss will be angry and won't give her a reference - she just doesn't expect, when she does give in her notice, for him to say 'Do you ever plan to work as a nanny in this town again? Hmm, we'll see!'
(hence the book's title title - which is an echo of an earlier Hollywood expose, You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by film producer Julia Phillips).
Suzanne does find herself blacklisted for awhile, until the nanny agencies get her much happier new jobs with more generous employers like film stars Debra Winger and then Danny DeVito and his wife Rhea Perlman (Carla in 'Cheers'). Surprisingly, once everybody is being nice, the book becomes less interesting.
Nowadays Suzanne is living back in Oregon, married with two children. She gave up nannying to go into maternity nursing and worked as a breastfeeding advisor. She has never left her own children with a nanny - not because she doesn't trust nannies; indeed, she says she wrote the book as a plea for people to respect and value them more. But her years in Hollywood couldn't shake her original disbelief - 'It had never occurred to me that there were people who really didn't want to spend as much time as possible with their children. That there were parents who did not hurry home after work so they could tuck Janie and Jack into bed. That there were plenty of little Janies and Jacks in LA whose first words were uttered in Spanish, because they spent virtually all of their time with the Hispanic staff.' Suzanne says she sees money as something that buys a parent time with their children, not time away from them.
So the next time some celebrity appears on TV gloating about how motherhood is her most demanding role, consider who the award really should go to - the nanny behind the scenes who made the mistake of thinking a life of luxury was going to be easy.
You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: the True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny by Suzanne Hansen (Crown Publishers) is not yet published in the UK but can be purchased on www.amazon.co.uk.
