You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny (36 page)

But no. As I hid in my room and licked excess chocolate off my thumbs, I heard the house manager in the kitchen. “Who ate the cookies? I bought these special for Rhea,” she yelled. I ventured into the hall, where I stood next to Lisa, who was thin and tall and didn’t look at all guilty. We both pleaded ignorance. I discreetly tried to check for crumbs on my shirt.

What was happening to me? I was pathetic, a caricature of the frumpy nanny. Now that the fat had caught up to me, I seemed powerless to stop it. And to top it off, I heard from Tammy again. She spent her twenty-first birthday on a movie set, where Sally was kind enough
to have the whole cast and crew, including Julia Roberts, surprise her with a birthday song serenade.

Bitterness is not becoming, Suzy
.

After the television taping season ended for the year, Rhea and I stayed at home during the day with Max. Since the DeVitos had so many cars, I let Ryan use mine. But I had given away more than just my automobile, I realized. This was just one more way I had ceased caring about myself. I was chunky, I didn’t leave the house, and I’d even stopped wearing makeup.

One day, Peggy spotted a picture of me in my room, a glamour shot Tammy and I had taken for fun a few months before. I was wearing a blue sequin top and a feather boa (it seemed like a good idea at the time).

“Who’s this? Is that yoooouuu?” she said incredulously, looking me up and down as if to say,
How is that possible?
Peggy had never been all that kind to me, but this tipped the scale, so to speak.

“Maybe you should wear this much makeup more often,” she said, laughing quietly to herself.

I was considered a hot number back in my day!
I wanted to retort. Oh my God. My day was only a couple of years ago. I had to put myself back together. I already looked like a haggard housewife, and I wasn’t even married!

It didn’t add up. I loved the way that this family really enjoyed every moment of their lives. They were hardly ever in a hurry. That was what I’d craved at the Ovitzes’, right? But just being around them wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stop thinking about all my friends whose lives were moving forward, to a future. I knew I wasn’t getting any closer to where I wanted to go in my life—wherever that was—by staying here and working as a nanny. And as I read self-help books about weight, I knew that this was a big part of the problem. My heart was hungry.

Rhea, on the other hand, looked great. She left the house bright and
early each day for the gym near their house, or sometimes she would go to the studio on the lot to work out with a personal trainer and do Pilates. When the girls complained that she was leaving, she would remind them, “A mom can’t be a good mom and feel good about herself if she doesn’t exercise.”

It was hard to believe she was turning forty. To mark the occasion, Danny was concocting a huge surprise party for her in their backyard. Lisa, who was much more hip than I (as if that would have been difficult), knew all the latest music, and she suggested that Danny hire a local band to play for the party, one she’d heard at a club and thought was very good. Danny said he’d never heard of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and didn’t think he could risk having a no-name group for such a special occasion. He looked at me and asked my opinion; I nodded in agreement and said that I’d never heard of them, either. I see now that I couldn’t have made it as a trend spotter: Kevin Costner, now the Red Hot Chili Peppers—0 for 2.

Several nights before the party, I was in my room when I heard Danny’s voice coming from their bedroom next door. I heard him call Michael by name, so naturally I stood at the door of my bedroom to listen in on the conversation. From what I could gather, Danny had never called him for a reference when they initially hired me. I guessed that he had meant it when he said they’d just try me out for themselves.

The two of them must have been discussing a business deal, and then Danny got quiet. I froze. For all I knew, Michael had purposefully tracked me down and called Danny to try and get him to fire me. I heard Danny say, “I know. Wasn’t that a coincidence? Rhea found this nanny and she used to work for you … uh-huh.” There was a moment of silence as Michael said something, then Danny replied, “Oh, so you’d pass on this one, eh?” as if he was still in the interviewing stage. “Yes, okay. Okay. Got it. I’ll talk to you later. Thanks for the tip, Michael. I’ll let Rhea know.”

I was starting to wonder if I might have been able to leave on better terms with the Ovitz family. Michael had made it clear that he valued me. What would have happened if I had tried harder to make things work out? Had I made a mistake by leaving? Sure, I hated confrontation, but maybe I could have talked to him like he was a real person, not a mogul. Maybe if I had gone to him and told him what was really bothering
me—that I thought Judy didn’t like me, the lack of time off, Josh’s lack of respect—this nasty war could have been avoided. I was starting to think that I shouldn’t have seen the situation in such black and white terms: stay and be unhappy, or leave and be happy. Lately I’d been doing a lot more thinking about the choices I had made. I now saw that I had been a little depressed ever since I had left the Ovitz family. I needed to start journaling more. It was the only kind of therapy I could afford.

This was so hard to admit. Here I was at a great nanny job, and I had carried my past mistakes with me. No wonder I was depressed.

I poured out my feelings to Mandie, who was still dealing with economic issues. This time, however, she was the one spending the big bucks. The Goldbergs had taken Mandie and the kids to France, where Mr. Goldberg conducted some business and Mrs. Goldberg shopped. Well, “shop” made it sound so benign. These were spending expeditions of monumental proportions. On the first outing, Mandie fell in love with a $400 purse. She lusted after the purse like she was Dolly Parton in a wig shop. The problem, of course, was that she didn’t have Dolly Parton’s budget. It was out of the question. Or was it? She approached Mrs. Goldberg, desperately trying to find some rationale for buying the overpriced bag. Mrs. Goldberg agreed that it was beautiful, but even
she
felt it was far too much to pay for a purse. Not the least discouraged, Mandie
found a phone and called Montana (never mind that the charges for the overseas call would have paid for a large part of the purse).

“Of course, dear, you must buy it. When will you
ever
be in France again?” her understanding mother responded. Buoyed by this very sensible argument, Mandie went back to the store and maxed out her Visa card. That night she slept with the purse on the pillow next to hers.

Not to be outdone, the next day Mrs. Goldberg spied a Jackie-O-style small clutch purse about the size of two cigarette packages. While forking over her platinum, she remarked, “I’m on vacation. I should be able to do this.” The cost of the purse? Six thousand U.S. dollars! Later that afternoon, she paid $343 for a key chain.

Even in my unhappy state I couldn’t help but laugh.

Ryan was his usual happy-go-lucky self and he was enjoying LA. He briefly worked as an ironworker, but he decided that the hard physical labor didn’t really appeal to him. So he spent a lot of time hanging out in the evenings with me at the DeVitos’. I had weekends off on this job, and on Friday nights I left to camp out in the Brentwood box with him for a couple of days.

Danny invited both of us to Rhea’s birthday party. I had it pegged as a dressy event, and Ryan was not happy about the dress code. I finally managed to find a jacket, white dress shirt, and tie for him to wear. (The last time I had made him wear a tie was our homecoming dance, and he had stuffed it in his pocket ten minutes after we had arrived at the gymnasium.) After arguing at Nordstrom’s for a half hour about some dress shoes (it was a draw; he bought them but refused to wear them when the time came), we went back to my sister’s to get ready for the big party. I pulled out my good ol’ standby black dress once again, but I couldn’t get the zipper zipped. I decided there was no way I was going to get the dress on without busting a seam, so I gave up.

I heard Ryan in the living room talking to Cindy. “Suzy just doesn’t think my Nikes go with these khaki pants.” I rolled my eyes in irritation. Why didn’t I just admit it? I was dating Jethro from
The Beverly Hillbillies
. I threw on something of my sister’s, an odd garment that was a cross between a skirt so short a hooker might wear it and a white jacket that made me look like I belonged in a medical office. My sister, bless her
heart, normally doesn’t own any clothes that are in fashion for the current decade. This was no exception. So, I had to go with the nurse/call girl/dancer look.

Several valets were waiting to park our car when we rolled up. I stepped out and pulled the knit skirt down for the eighteenth time while my sidekick fidgeted with his tie as if he had a noose cinched around his neck. It was just getting dark as we entered the outside gate, but I could clearly see that we were the only ones dressed up. The rest of the guests wore shorts, golf shirts, and sleeveless blouses. I felt my mood sink even further. Once again I’d forgotten about the chic-casual LA style. After he’d gotten a gander at the crowd, Ryan turned to me with a knowing smirk and hastily bid adieu to his tie and coat. He rolled up his long sleeves as if he were Popeye the Sailorman.

Looking around the patio, I could see that all the
Cheers
people were present, as well as Michael Douglas and Danny’s old buddies from
Taxi
, Marilu Henner and Tony Danza, and, oh my God, the last person on earth that I wanted to see—Michael Ovitz. He was still in his office uniform of crisp white shirt and conservative tie. I scanned the crowd for Judy, but I didn’t see her anywhere. I kept looking over at him, and I was sure he kept looking back in my direction. Maybe he didn’t recognize me? Maybe he didn’t remember me! I was really thinking rationally now. But he gazed directly at me, so I made sure I kept enough bodies between us so that I wouldn’t have to talk to him. Finally, with a sigh of relief, I spotted him making his way toward the valets. Thank God he had only stopped by to put in a brief appearance.

Ryan saw a major movie star come out of the bathroom with two other people, wiping his nose. “They were snorting coke, Suzy,” he told me. I refused to believe it, even after hearing Sheila’s stories about piles of cocaine. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around people doing drugs in the bathroom of the house I lived in.

Tammy called to let me know she was back from her trip to Aspen. She wanted me to know that Sally’s family had gone out to dinner with the Ovitzes, and she had seen Delma and the kids.

“How were they? How did the kids look?” I grilled her for
every
possible detail.

“Well, Mrs. Ovitz didn’t recognize me at first. When she made the connection, in the middle of dinner, she gasped, ‘
Oh
, you’re
her
friend!’ ” Tammy giggled. “She pointed her finger at me as if I were a plague-bearing rodent. The kids looked up at her, then me, in alarm. It’s as if she had figured out that I was a part of that ‘nanny mafia’ that’s responsible for so much trouble in Hollywood. ‘That Suzy,’ she spat, ‘she left us high and dry!’ ”

According to Tammy, the disparaging remarks and finger-pointing continued while Sally and Alan attempted to steer the conversation elsewhere. As soon as they got into the car, Sally made it clear to Tammy that they had attended the dinner for business reasons. She apologized for the uncomfortable incident.

“I’m sure that your friend is a very nice girl, because she helped us find you,” she said.

There’s a good reason why people really, really like Sally Field.