Praise for Suzanne Hansen
and You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again

"Filled with juicy tidbits that will be enjoyed by anyone who loves to read about the bad behavior... of the rich and famous."

—LA Times

"[A] story that Hansen tells with real comic energy, sparing no unlibelous detail."

—Boston Globe

"After the publication of Hollywood nanny Suzanne Hansen's memoir, former employer and hardballing Uber-agent, Michael Ovitz might swear bitterly: You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again."

—Vanity Fair, January 2006

"Think The Nanny Diaries, but juicier—and it's all true! Suzanne Hansen's tell-all book about her real-life adventures in Tinseltown babysitting (she was the nanny to the kids of super-scary super-agent Michael Ovitz) will have you howling with laughter—and rage."

—Marie Claire magazine

"Veterans of the serving class ourselves, we thought we'd seen it all, but You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again offers an intriguing peek into the never-before-revealed family lives of Hollywood's elite. Hansen's memoir poignantly proves that truth can be more powerful than fiction."

—Leanne Shear and Tracey Toomey, authors of The Perfect Manhattan

"Just when you think you've heard everything about the behind-the-scenes world of celebrities, along comes You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again, a humorous yet down-to-earth account of the vagaries of warped Hollywood parenting. Author Suzanne Hansen's experiences as an L.A. nanny expose the absurd—and yet achingly funny—differences between the rich and famous and the rest of us."

—Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner, authors of Hollywood, Interrupted

"A funny, absorbing true tale that will once again leave readers wondering why anyone would want to work in the insane asylum that is Hollywood."

—Robin Lynn Williams, author of The Assistants

"Funny and engaging enough to be a novel, that You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again is true takes it to another level—a stunning exposé of our culture's impossible expectations of mothers."

—Ariel Gore, author of The Hip Mama Survival Guide
and The Mother Trip

"A jolly holiday with Mary it most certainly was not. At 18 years old, long before Nanny 911, Suzanne Hansen left the WiIlamette Valley of Cottage Grove to pair her au with late-'80s Hollywood excess... Hansen's just-released tell-all You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again chronicles her caregiving escapades with Debra Winger, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, and especially the Ovitz clan." 

 —Portland Monthly magazine

Reviews of
You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again 

Publishers Weekly
"Misadventures in nannyhood" is how Hansen, an Oregon teen who'd trained at the Northwest Nannies Institute, characterizes her amusing account of several years as live-in drudge to the stars. Readers of James B. Stewart's DisneyWar are already acquainted with her first employer, Michael Ovitz, then still the superagent commander of the CAA talent agency, and parent, with his wife, of three children. Hansen isn't a flippant writer; she doesn't try to score easy shots; and she cites her own inexperience and shyness, but it becomes increasingly clear through her account (backed up by the diary she kept) that the portraits drawn by other writers–of a cold, shrewd, controlling man–are accurate. Still, there was glamour, which at first made up for the grueling 24/7 workload and a curious chintziness. However, Hansen lasted just over one year. She later found work with the charming Debra Winger and left only because it became clear that the doting Winger didn't really need a full-time nanny. Her next and last nanny job was with the wonderful and thoughtful Rhea Perlman and Danny DeVito and their three kids. Hardly backstabbing, this entertaining book possesses a sincerity other nannying tomes lack. Agent, Sharlene Martin. (On sale Dec. 27) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Book Standard
A Nanny Works for Michael Ovitz and Lives to Tell About It—Her Harrowing Life as a Hollywood Live-In

November 07, 2005
By Kimberly Maul

Ovitzes, Wingers, DeVitos—and the Hollywood live-in babysitters and all-around household gofers who make their busy lives bearable—are the subject of former nanny Suzanne Hansen’s You’ll Never Nanny in This Town Again, to be released by Crown on Dec. 27. In her frank, chatty memoir (and self-publishing crossover success story), Hansen may have the last word with some former bosses—the title was inspired by the words of one particularly despotic employer. The marketing and publicity departments at Crown, a division of Random House, are currently organizing a major marketing campaign, and the film and TV rights, sure to ultimately be a coveted prize for the acquiring production company, are still on the table.

Hansen moved to Hollywood in the late ’80s, after attending Northwest Nannies Institute, to begin a career as a nanny. She interviewed with Michael Ovitz—the much vilified and feared founder of Creative Artists Agency and, later, the controversial and soon deposed head of Disney—and admitted that she had “never heard of him.” For better or worse, she got the job—her first.

A harrowing year later—documented by the author with little discretion—Hansen had had enough of life with the former überagent-turned-studio-head and his wife, Judy, who, in the author’s depiction, is shrewish, vindictive and an inattentive, self-obsessed parent. Though claiming a close bond with the couple’s three children, Hansen decided to leave the family. She recounts the nanny’s confrontation with her employer:

“When [Michael Ovitz] realized that I wasn’t going to change my mind, his face grew ugly. ‘Do you ever plan to work as a nanny in this town again?’ he said, smirking.

“‘Um, yes, I think so,’ I said, surprised.

“‘Hmm, we’ll see,’ he chortled. With that, he turned in his $4,000 suit and walked down the hall.

“‘This has really fucked up my week!’ he barked to the staircase.”

After experiencing a string of apparent blackballing—in a campaign, the author coyly suggests, engineered by Ovitz—Hansen got a job with actress Debra Winger, whom she became very fond of, and later, Danny DeVito and his wife, Rhea Pearlman. Eventually moving back to her hometown in Oregon, Hansen attended nursing school, and now, as a mother of her own children, she offers a voyeuristic, titillating glimpse into the world of Tinseltown nannydom.

Hansen told The Book Standard that seeing the blockbuster success of Emma McLaughlin and Nicole Kraus’s autobiographical novel The Nanny Diaries, she thought, “I have lots of interesting stories! The cliché that truth is stranger than fiction is true.”

Hansen wrote and self-published You’ll Never Nanny in This Town Again without any intention of taking the manuscript to a major house. It wasn’t until the book sold 10,000 copies on Amazon that it occurred to her to solicit agents. After a mass-mailing to literary representatives, the manuscript caught the eye of Sharlene Martin, of Martin Literary Management—who, as it happens, was the founder of the Helping Hands nanny agency in Connecticut, before moving to Los Angeles to represent authors and the film and TV rights to literary properties.

In October 2004, Martin sold Hansen’s book to Crown. “We have high hopes for this book,” says Kristin Kiser, the publisher’s editorial director. “We all fell in love with the author's fresh voice and her real stories about nannies in Hollywood.” (In September, Kirkus Reviews said Hansen “surprises with sympathetic and nuanced analyses of the wealthy, and insights into parenthood and childrearing.”)

With Martin now shopping film rights for You’ll Never Nanny in This Town Again, buzz for the book has begun to mount. She told The Book Standard that she and the author have so far turned down one offer for a television development deal because they felt the proposal was not ambitious enough for the type of project they have in mind.

Pointing to the TV hits Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City, Hansen says she has a vision of a show that would follow four different women as they nanny for the rich and famous.

According to Martin, the true-story aspect of the book is what distinguishes the it from other nanny titles. “These are all real families,” she says. “We’re naming names and telling really funny stories that could only happen in Hollywood.”

Hollywood tell-alls can lead to some touchy situations, of course, among the often-egotistical glitterati. “Before I wrote the book, I really searched my soul. Is this my story to tell?” Hansen says. But the point, she explains, was to tell her experience and to encourage people to value and respect nannies more.

Fair enough—but what’s the dirt? Working with “the first family”—the Ovitz clan—was the most difficult of her Hollywood nanny jobs, Hansen says, and her book backs that up with amusing, sometimes outrageous anecdotes from her time there. The parents, Judy in particular, who in Hansen’s account, routinely spent exorbitant amounts of money on parties and vacations, refused to shell out cash for more quotidian items, such as a new iron, she writes, though theirs had become an electrical hazard. (Michael Ovitz, when unceremoniously run out of Disney after 14 months in the job, received a $140 million severance package.) The Ovitzes can even seem to prize their art collection more highly, the author writes, than they do their three children: “Michael came on the [phone] line first, and the connection was awful. ‘Suzy, we’re calling you from somewhere in the Mediterranean. Is my art ok?’ he asked. Did he really just say what I think he said?”

But even under such exasperating conditions, Hansen always put the children first. “The hardest part was when I had to write about leaving the baby at the Ovitz family,” she says. Having her own children, she says, has made her see things through the child’s perspective and realize how difficult it must have been for the Ovitz children, especially the newborn, Hansen having been his primary caregiver, as she describes herself.

And as for the DeVitos? “I really liked them.” she says. After moving back to Oregon, Hansen often returned to their home to help with the household and care for the children.

“Everyone wants to know how to deal with child-development issues,” says Hansen. As for the celebrity appeal of the book, she says, “I think when we see their lives—perfect and beautiful—we wonder what it’s really like.” As moms, she says, it makes us feel better to see celebrity mothers who need help, too.

“There have been nanny novels written, but this is a true account about nannies working for high-profile people living in Hollywood,” Kiser says. “We get a real glimpse into the lives of how the rich and famous live and raise their children, from a woman who was actually there.”

Boston Globe
I must confess that I have a real weakness for seeing awful people, fictional or otherwise, portrayed in all their monstrousness. This being the case, I was immediately drawn to Suzanne Hansen's You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny (Crown, $22). I read it through in one sitting, feeling ashamed of myself for getting such pleasure from the rich and powerful being exposed as the mean-spirited, exploitative vulgarians they so often are. Could this feeling be based in the ressentiment of which Friedrich Nietzsche wrote so unflatteringly? I'll leave that question for another day, and say that this is an account of Hansen's stint as a nanny in the mid-1980s for a few Hollywood big shots, with special emphasis on her year working for then super-agent Michael Ovitz and his wife.

Hansen arrived in Hollywood from a small town in Oregon with a certificate from Northwest Nannies Institute, two unsuitably warm dresses, and the ability to cook a casserole of broccoli, cheddar cheese, Campbell's cream of chicken soup, mashed potatoes, butter, and half-and-half. She also came with a love of children and a desire to please, both of which were ruthlessly exploited by the Ovitzes. It is this story that Hansen tells with real comic energy, sparing no unlibelous detail. These people are simply too ghastly for words, representing the excess and brute selfishness that took hold in the 1980s and that flourish today in all their glory.

Hartford Courant
Sometimes you want to read a book that uplifts, inspires or informs. And sometimes you just want an author who will dish shovels-full of dirt. Suzanne Hansen does the latter in her gossipy gloss on the family life of the rich and famous in You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny (Crown, $22), in stores this week.

Hansen, a graduate of a school for nannies in her native Oregon, landed a job with the Michael Ovitz family, taking care of the three kids of the mega-mighty Los Angeles agent. Soon she learned the ways of the Tinseltown servant class (way too much work and responsibility, way too little pay for same) and the ways of the wealthy but chintzy:

$20,000 private cruise. Parents don't give it a second thought.

$15 phone call to check on the kids. Parents think this is way too spendy.

It wasn't all bad. Hansen had much better experiences in subsequent nanny jobs with Debra Winger and the Danny DeVito/Rhea Perlman families, and she got to meet such stars as Sylvester Stallone, Sean Connery and Paula Abdul.

Well, OK, maybe it was all bad.

But she tells her tales of the hollow life in Hollywood with verve in this insider's look at what happens to the kiddies when famous parents are busy puttin' on the glitz.