Suzanne Hansen, best known for her experience as a "Hollywood Nanny", has also had a professional career as a high-risk labor and delivery nurse, lactation consultant and childbirth educator. As a national speaker and author she has brought attention to the serious issues regarding child care—from determining needs, finding solutions, and cultivating support networks, to appreciating the job nannies fulfill.
About Suzanne Hansen |
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Suzanne grew up in the small town of Cottage Grove, Oregon. After attending Northwest Nannies Institute in Portland, Oregon, she moved to Los Angeles and lived through a variety of high-profile nanny jobs. Reviews of Publishers Weekly
The Book Standard 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.” 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 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.
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