You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny (13 page)

But Michael had offered to pay for my nails, and I appreciated it. I did not want to look this small gift pony in the mouth.

Two of my nails had broken by the time I returned two weeks later for a fill, and the woman in black spandex promptly repaired them. Grateful that the cost would be put on Judy’s tab, I thanked her and left without paying. By the following visit, I had broken several other nails. Only this time, after the woman fixed them she said, “You owe me four bucks.”

“Huh?” I said. “Judy said she was paying for it.”

“Sorry, girl, Mrs. Ovitz didn’t pay me for last week. So you owe me two bucks from then and two bucks for today. She said she wasn’t going to pay for broken nails, only for your fill. I guess Mrs. Ovitz thinks if you break them, you pay for them.”

I gave her the four dollars and a generous tip, and gave up on having my nails done. It wasn’t very practical, anyway.

A few weeks later, Judy and Michael called from the Mediterranean, where they had gone on a week-long private cruise with a group of friends.

“Hello, the Ovitz residence. This is Suzanne.”

“Hello, this is the overseas operator. Mr. and Mrs. Ovitz are calling.”

“Okay.”

“Go ahead, sir. The charges will be $3.52 a minute,” the operator said.

Michael came on the line first, and the connection was awful. “Suzy, we’re calling you from somewhere in the Mediterranean. Is my art okay?” he asked.

Did he really just say what I think he said?

“Yes, Mr. Ovitz. Everything is fine. Brandon’s taking his nap, and Amanda and Joshua are outside,” I told him as the connection broke up again.

“I couldn’t hear you, Suzy, bad connection. Is everything okay?”

“Yes, sir, everything is fine.”

“Can we talk to Joshua?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. He’s outside. Hold on a minute.” I put the phone down, ran outside, and called to Joshua. It took two or three minutes to get him to the phone.

“Hello. Are you there, Mr. Ovitz?”

“No, Suzy. This is Judy,” she snapped. “For God’s sake, where is Joshua? This call is costing us a fortune.”

She said a quick hello to Joshua, and then he handed the phone back to me.

“Hello, Mrs. Ovitz. Amanda …” Buzzzzzzzzzz. The line was dead. She’d hung up.

I tried to analyze what had just happened.

• $20,000 private cruise. Parents don’t give it a second thought.
  
• $15.00 phone call to check on the kids. Parents think this is way too spendy.
  

It baffled me.

I just could not understand the household’s money rationale. On one hand, Judy made Delma scrub stains out of a cheap T-shirt of Brandon’s instead of buying him new clothes. At other times they would spend money on oddball things as if they minted it in the attic. Catering for a dinner party could run more than $12,000 and no one would bat an eye. How did they decide what was important and what wasn’t?

A few days later, while they were still on the cruise, I walked into the laundry room and spotted Rosa using an iron with a frayed cord. It was so old that I could see a flash of the copper wire through the cloth
insulation, a definite health hazard, not to mention a fire just waiting to destroy the house. Never mind the inhabitants—think of the risk to the art collection!

“For God’s sake, Rosa, we need a new iron,” I said. “They must not know that this one is in such bad shape.”

“You know how Miss Judy is ’bout money,” called Carmen from the other side of the kitchen.

“I know, but I am sure they don’t know how bad the iron is. I’m going to the store where they have an account and charge a new one. I’m sure it will be fine,” I said with great authority.

The next time I was out, I bought a new iron with a coated electrical cord. Then I wrapped the frayed cord around the old one and put it in the garbage.

Two days later, when they’d returned, I overheard Judy talking to her friend Jane in the foyer.

“They sure love to spend all my money,” she complained.

“Mrs. Ovitz, I was the one who bought the new iron,” I interrupted, rushing in.

No answer.

“I insisted that we needed a new one,” I continued.
So my friends don’t get electrocuted and the artwork doesn’t go up in smoke
.

“We could have put a new cord on the old iron,” she explained. “Do you have the receipt, Suzy?”

Fortunately, Carmen had retrieved the old iron before the trash went out.

She knew Judy far better than I did.

Luckily, I was only a few days away from a much-needed reality check. My best friend, Kristi, called me from Eugene, where she was in her freshman year at the University of Oregon. She asked whether she could come visit me during her spring break. Finally, some company! I was ecstatic. Judy even agreed to let Kristi stay at the house. When Kristi arrived, she was wowed by her first up-close-and-personal look inside a Hollywood home. She thumbed through a book by Danielle Steel, her favorite author at the time. She was pretty surprised that it had a long personal message to my employers.

I gave her a tour of the house, the art gallery, and the grounds, where the gardeners were pruning the shrubs. We waved to them, and they smiled and waved back. I brought Kristi into the four-car garage to show off the car collection: the black Jaguar, the black Mercedes, and my own personal favorite, the Porsche. I waved my arm over it like Vanna White on
Wheel of Fortune
. I was trying to be smooth.

Then I set off the car alarm.

WAAAAA! WAAAA! WAAAA! WOOOP! WOOOP! WOOOP! WOOOP! WAAAA!

“Damn it! I can’t believe I set off the alarm!” I wailed.

“Are the police gonna come?” she asked.

“I hope not! Ohhh! I can’t believe I just did that!”

The gardeners came rushing up, pruning shears in hand. Then Carmen and Delma dashed out from the house.

“Soo-zita, was that you again?” Delma asked. (Okay, okay. I had set off alarms a couple of times before.)

“Yes! Michael and Judy are going to kill me.”

The alarm was still ripping through the air—WAAAA! WAAAA! WAAAA! WOOOP! WOOOP! WOOOP! And it seemed to be getting louder. Or was that my imagination? What was I thinking when I went near that car?

“I feel like such a dork!” I yelled over the noise.

“You’re not a dork,” Carmen said. “I’ve done it, too. There are a lot of alarms ‘round here. But don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it.”

“I know the routine!” Delma shouted. “Come on out of the garage. I’ll call Sarah and ask how to shut it off and reset it. Michael does not have to know you did it.”

Everybody left the garage, and we shut the door behind us. Thank God it muffled the horrible wailing.

She put her arm around my shoulder. “Anyway, Soo-zita, we’re like a family here. A
familia
within
la familia
, you know? We look out for one another.”

But even my friends couldn’t bail me out every time. On the third day of Kristi’s visit, we took the kids on a walk. Little Brandon was sprawled out in his giant, fuddy-duddy English pram—a baby accessory that was all the rage with movie-star moms—and Joshua and Amanda
were walking alongside it. At one point, Joshua insisted on pushing the pram. I hesitated, but he was being so bratty and demanding that I finally gave in to avoid a scene.

“Only for a minute,” I said. “This baby carriage is very big and heavy. It’s not really meant to be pushed by little boys.”

“I’m not a little boy!”

Great. I had just committed the cardinal sin of all sins in nannyhood. Always call a little boy a big boy, or don’t say anything at all. “I know you’re not, honey; I forgot. You’re a big boy,” I said, praying that groveling would work.

“I’m not a little boy!”

“Okay, Joshua, I said I’m sorry. Now here you go.” I stepped out of the way and let him get in front of me. Then he started to push the pram a bit too fast. I picked up my pace to keep up. “Joshua, not so fast; be careful.”

“I don’t have to be careful,” he whined. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

“Yes, I can, honey. And you
do
have to be careful.”

“I know how to do it!” he yelled. The next thing I knew, he was popping a wheelie. It all happened in one frightening flash: the top-heavy pram started to tip over and the baby slipped forward, feetfirst, heading straight for the pavement. My heart jumped in my throat. I rushed in and scooped up Brandon before he fell. Then the pram went crashing over sideways, its wheels spinning in the air. I was so scared that I didn’t even reprimand Joshua. As we walked back to the house, stunned, my arms shook so much that Kristi offered to carry Brandon for me. I didn’t dare put him back in that pretentious—and dangerous—pram. When we reached the gate to the house, my heart was kicking against my chest like in
Alien
before the creature popped out.
My God, I can’t control these kids
, I thought.
I can’t take them anywhere and keep them safe because they won’t listen to me
.

Inside the house I told Judy about the incident. Furious, she immediately shouted, “Go to your room, mister!”

“I won’t go to my room!” Joshua yelled back. “Don’t tell me what to do!”

“You don’t tell me what to do! I’ve had enough of this disrespect from you,” Judy shouted.

“You don’t know anything,” Josh spit out.

“How can you say that to me? You’re so incredibly condescending!”

“No, Mommy, you’re credibly sending!”

“Oh God, I can’t believe you act like this. Forget it!” Judy stormed off and slammed the side front door.

Joshua just stood there grinning, knowing he’d won the battle.

The scene felt familiar. Day after day, Joshua would do something that just begged for discipline, his mother would give him a time-out, he’d refuse to go, and then she wouldn’t follow through. I don’t think she knew what to do, so his behavior just got worse. How was I supposed to get anywhere with a child whose own mother didn’t know how to claim her authority over him? She fought with Joshua the same way he fought with his sister. Amanda often witnessed these scenes, and she was climbing on board the bratty train, too. I could see that sweet little Brandon would probably model his older brother’s behavior once he got old enough to understand how things worked in the household.

Having inadvertently shown Kristi some of the trickier aspects of my job, I wanted to also show her the bright side of living in Hollywood. We decided to splurge on a fancy dinner, so I called Sarah and asked her where we should go. She offered to make a reservation at Spago, a trendy place where we were sure to have some star spottings. Fantastic. We were both excited since neither of us had ever been to a place like Spago. Kristi had been wearing nothing but jeans and sweatshirts most of the time at college, and I spent most of my days in shorts and T-shirts, so we dolled ourselves up as if we had been invited to the Oscars. I didn’t think much of it until we got to the restaurant. Almost everyone in there wore jeans, T-shirts, and khakis. And there we were, me in my fits-all-occasions black cocktail dress and Kristi in a similar dark blue number with a strand of pearls around her neck.

At least we weren’t wearing pantyhose.

Sarah had listed the reservation under Hansen/Ovitz so that they would give us special attention. As for star sightings, we picked a dismal night; lesser luminaries, such as Sally Struthers and Ricardo Montalban, were the only ones on view. The meal, however, was excellent. I had free-range rosemary chicken; Kristi tried one of Wolfgang’s famous goat-cheese pizzas. Then they brought us a great dessert and made a
point of telling us that Michael had paid for it. How nice. I took out my checkbook and paid the rest of the bill. I had planned on thanking him the next day, but I didn’t see him until the day after that, and then only briefly. By the time I did express my gratitude for the desserts, he seemed a little confused.

“They were supposed to put the entire meal on my tab. So you paid for it with your own money?” he asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“Hmm. I told them to pick up the whole thing. Here …” And with that, he pulled out his checkbook, asked me how much it had been, and wrote me a check. I thanked him profusely. Maybe this was Michael’s way of showing his appreciation for all the care and love I gave the children.