The Nanny
Mafia
ALL RIGHT, CHARLOTTE,
YOU GORGEOUS WHITE ANGLO-Saxon Protestant socialite, all you are
doing is giving a birthday party for your little boy with the E. S.
A. (Eastern Socially Attractive) little-boy bangs in his eyes and
all his little friends. So why are you sitting there by the
telephone and your old malachite-top coffee table gnashing on one
thumbnail? Why are you staring out the Thermo-Plate glass toward
the other towers on East 72nd Street with such vacant torture in
your eyes?
“Damn. I knew I’d forget something,”
says Charlotte. “I forgot the champagne.”
So gorgeous Charlotte twists around in
the chair with her alabaster legs and lamb-chop shanks still
crossed and locked together in hard, slippery, glistening skins of
nylon and silk and starts going through the note pad by the
telephone, causing her Leslie II Prince Valiant coiffure to hang in
her eyes so that she has to keep blowing the strands away, snorting
and leafing through the note pad.
O.K., Charlotte. Champagne for your
little boy’s birthday party?
“You’re damned right,” she says. “For
all the nannies. I’m not kidding! If we ever tried to give a party
for Bobby and his little friends without champagne for the nannies,
we might as well, you know, forget about it.
“Bobby’s nanny is mad enough as it is.
All she can do is drop what are supposed to be very subtle hints
about the V————’s party for little Sarah. Do you know what Van gave
each kid as a party favor? An electric
truck. I’m talking about a real electric
truck. Of course, they’re nothing much really. They’re
smaller than a Jaguar. By a little bit. The
kid can get inside of it and drive it! They cost five hundred
dollars, five hundred dollars! Can you
imagine that? We had to carry the damn thing home. You should have
seen us trying to get it in the cab. Of course, Van is absolutely
petrified of the nannies.
“Well, I was damned if we were going to
do anything like that. Robert had to take the whole afternoon off
Tuesday to go to Schwarz. This was precisely the afternoon the
Swedes came in with some bond thing, of course. The Swedes wear the
worst clothes. They all look like striped
cardboard. They think they’re very European.
Anyway, Robert got some kind of bird with a tape recorder in it, I
don’t know. The kids can talk into it and it records it and says it
back. Something like that. You know. Well, I don’t care, I think
it’s a perfectly cute party favor, but our Mrs. G———is not going to
be happy with it, I’m sure of that.
“She wanted us to have the party in
Robert’s father’s house on 70th Street in the first place. I’m
serious! She doesn’t like this apartment! It
embarrasses her! Do you know what it is? Do
you know who runs the East Side of New York? The nanny mafia.
There’s a nanny mafia!”
The nanny mafia! At this moment, the
nannies, the leading nannies, are all gathered down in Central
Park, in the playground just over the stone wall next to Fifth
Avenue, at the foot of East 77th Street. Down there, through the
pin oak, birch, beech and sweetgum leaves, in the sun and dappled
shadows, on this green-and-gold, bluebottle-fly afternoon, you can
see the nannies sitting on the benches around the oval that the
playground fence forms. In the middle of the oval are their
charges. All these little boys and girls are either in English
Brabingham baby carriages or else they are playing about the swings
and the seesaws in Cerutti shorts and jumpers with only the most
delightful verandah-in-Newport, Sundays-in-North Egremont sort of
gaiety. The oval fence has high and rather graceful spikes and
stands as a kind of genteel stockade against the customary terrors
of New York life. In fact, the playground at the foot of 77th
Street is the kind of place all the New Yorkers who feel like
hopeless DPs from the genteel style of life can walk by and look at
and recharge their gentility cells and walk on. Down there in the
sun and dappled shadows, after all, are the nannies, fillers of
these little vessels of the Protestant ethic, angels in starched
white, gleaming in God’s daylight.
Nannies are generally middle-aged
women, or old women, whom upper-class families in Europe have hired
over the last 125 years to look after the children up through age
six or seven. Nannies have a higher standing than a nursemaid,
since they have the power to impose discipline and manners on the
child. But they have a lower standing than a governess, in that
they undertake no real education. But, mainly, in Europe and in the
United States, they have become a symbol of the parents’ status.
First of all, parents who have nannies to look after the children
have to have money. That is one thing. And parents who have nannies
lead their own lives. This gives them more status even in front of
their own children. They don’t have to appear in the ridiculous
role of martyred, harried creatures, forever ill-kempt and
ill-humored, waiting on the children like servants. They don’t have
to clean up after their tantrums, go fetch them crayons, mollify
their stupid fears or otherwise cast themselves in some demeaning
role. They can come on, say, a couple of times a day, as figures of
authority, charm, largesse, awe, smelling languorously of grape and
tonic.
Upper-class New York and Boston
families, still living within a European tradition, have adopted
the nanny system as their own. They hire English nannies, if
possible, always nice middling women with sensible hairdos,
sensible clothes and sensible shoes. Or, if not English nannies,
French nannies, which is just about as good, especially as it
enables a woman to report in an amused and tolerant way how many
French words her daughter has picked up.
The only funny thing is, the nannies
are the most complete and unabashed snobs in America. The rich
themselves have abandoned many of the symbols of status. They
really botch dinner now. They don’t dress. They don’t use the
finger bowls and all that great business at the end. The nannies
note and deplore it all. They are the products, the creations, of
an older, sterner status system and style of life and they bring
all of its conventions into the modern age.
“Do you know what she says about this
apartment? Well, you know, they get on the phone to each other,
it’s like a network. The phone rings all the
time around here, and it’s always the nannies. They call up and say
that little Sarah wants to say hello to little Bobby, and so the
kids whine at each other in those little cretin voices they have
for about 15 seconds and after that the nannies go on and
on.”
Anyway, one day after little Sarah
V————had been over here for something, Charlotte forgets what it
was, Miss S————, the V————’s nanny, she’s an absolute tyrant, Miss
S————was telling Mrs. G————, and the thing is, poor Mrs.
G————believes absolutely 100 per cent of every pronouncement that
woman makes, Miss S————was telling her, of course Charlotte could
only hear Mrs. G————’s end of the conversation, but you could
tell what she was saying, she was saying
that Charlotte and Robert have the kind of apartment where
everything looks cheap except what they got as wedding presents.
She thought she would die! “Don’t they have
the most fantastic frame of mind you ever heard of?” Charlotte
says. “We call Mrs. G————the Black Widow, very much behind her
back, I might add. But don’t you just know the kind of apartment
the nannies are talking about?”
You know, you’re invited to dinner,
says Charlotte, and this poor couple, as soon as you walk in, you
can see they’ve gone to a lot of trouble,
flowers and indirect lighting, yellow glows, city lights, and
they’ve hired a butler. The girl always has on some kind of
Ravish-Me hostess outfit and looks like Little Heidi of Switzerland
conscripted into a seraglio. So pathetic. And the furniture is
always sort of Department Store Louis, if you know the kind
Charlotte means. Then you sit down to dinner at this awful table and then suddenly here is this fabulous
silver and china, Winslow table settings, apparently the real
thing—fabulous! The comparison is just too crushing. It’s always
obvious where it came from. Their parents and their parents’
friends shelled out and gave it to them when they got married.
Haven’t you ever been in that kind of apartment? It’s too—Charlotte doesn’t know—it’s not even pathetic. Well,
Charlotte didn’t mean to go on about that. But that’s exactly how
the nannies think!
“I know that’s what the Black Widow
thinks about this apartment,” says
Charlotte, and her eyes start drifting over her own mountainscape
of chaises, commodes, pier tables, settees and the wall-to-wall.
“But what she’s really against is that this is a new building. She
thinks it’s awful. That’s why she wants to have the party over at
Robert’s father’s. She says Robert’s father will love it. He’ll hate it. The Taylors actually did that.
They actually gave the children a party at her parents’, on
Ninety-something Street, a lovely old place. Just so their nannies
wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of the other
nannies!”
The nanny mafia! Nannies are rarely
brilliant, shrewd or conniving people. They come out of the British
low-heel, twist-weave suit, Kind Lady tradition. But they are very
firm on all social matters. The nannies’ hold on the East Side
comes first from the fact that they keep holding up status values
to their masters. If left alone, people can ignore status symbols
to some extent. But if somebody keeps thrusting them in their face,
and the claims seem to be at all valid, people wilt. They start
getting nervous. They do what the nannies, the little old status
pharisees, say about children’s clothes, children’s parties and the
size and decor of a fit parents’ apartment in New York. Second,
there is the nannies’ network. They all seem to know each other.
They all seem to live in the same section of the Bronx, around
Mosholu Parkway up near the Zoo. They all seem to have supper
together on Wednesday, their day off. They all seem to send each
other cards, supposedly from one child to another but all written
by the nannies and really just part of the nannies’ network. They
all spend half their working day with one another by telephone or
else out in the stockade in Central Park. All this time they are
trading information. Such information! Never mind politics,
industry and culture. The nannies deal in intelligence that lies
close to the soul. Who was seen insinuating his trembly knee
between whose silky shanks in the crush at whose party. The nannies
are most explicit, for Kind Ladies in hob heels. There are people
who count on hearing what went on at their own parties from their
nanny, who heard it from other nannies, who overheard it from the
mouths of the principals themselves. And finances! They can smell
the stalking of poverty in high places so thoroughly they must have
been bred to sniff it out. So naturally everyone puts on the best
possible face, the best possible performance, for the nannies,
because everything is going to be broadcast all over the East Side
via the nanny network.
“I wasn’t planning on having a nanny at
first,” Charlotte says. “Robert’s father offered to pay for it so
we could have one—you know—but I didn’t want to do that, and I
didn’t want to have anybody else around the house all the time, and
I was going to be independent about this and that, blah-blah-blah.
Then there was this very funny day, right after we moved here, and
I decided to take Bobby down to the playground in Central Park,
down at 77th Street.”
So she just put Bobby in the baby
carriage and wheeled him on down. You go in the entrance at 76th
Street. It was a Monday, Charlotte believes, because they had just
finished moving in on the weekend. And here was this nice
playground, and all these nice little children, and all these nice
ladies sitting around those benches around the edge. She knew most
of them were nannies because they had on white uniforms, but others
just looked like sort of these aging women at a country weekend or
those women who stay back in the living room and they are just
sitting there talking when you go out to go sailing. Anyway, she
came rolling in with Bobby in the baby carriage and bygod she had
never been so frosted out in her life! They stopped talking when
she came by, they started whispering, nudging, giving her the most
malign looks, it was unbelievable!
“Well, now I know why, but then I just
didn’t know what was going on,” Charlotte is saying. “You see, the
nannies have this very set social hierarchy. The English nannies
rank highest and maybe the French, all depending, but anyway, they
are very cliqueish. Irish nannies try to act British. The German
nannies are accepted if they’re old enough or confident enough. But
the poor Negro nannies, they haven’t got a prayer, I don’t care
what they’re like. There is just an absolute color bar, and the
poor Negro nannies just have to sit off by themselves. But there is
somebody—and I can tell you this from first-hand experience—there
is somebody lower than the Negro nannies, and that is a mother who
brings her own baby into the 77th Street playground. I mean it! At
least the Negro nanny has probably been hired by a reasonably good
family. But a mother who has to bring her own baby into the
playground is absolutely nothing!”
The only time a mother can go in there
is on Wednesday, the nannies’ day off. So all the mothers go in on
Wednesday and talk about the nannies. It’s the uppermost thought in
their brains. So there Charlotte was that time in a pen full of
nannies. And that was not nearly the end of it. She had the wrong
kind of baby carriage. It was white. It was too shiny. The wheels
were too heavy-looking. It was made in America. They looked at the
thing the way people look at Cadillacs or something.
“The only acceptable one is this
Brabingham,” says Charlotte. “It’s a very old make. They have to be
shipped in from England. It costs a fortune. They’re dark blue with
all sorts of fine hand work, you know, and, oh, I don’t know, all
these little touches here and there. I don’t know what we did with
ours or I’d show it to you.”
Lord, the nannies are absolutely
dictatorial about what you have to buy. Charlotte remembers that
first day, when she went into the playground by herself, there was
this poor little girl, about six, who came in with her nurse. The
nurse was a colored girl. Neither of them knew a thing, poor dears.
The little girl saw these other little girls her age, and, oh, she
wanted to go play with them. Her little eyes lit up like birthday
candles in her little buttery face and her little legs started
churning, and there she was, the original tabula
rasa of joy and friendship. Did they let her have it! Rather! The first girl she came up to,
Carey K.————’s little girl, a real budding little bitch named
Jennifer, if you wanted Charlotte’s frank opinion, just stared at
her, no smile at all, and said, “My shoes are Indian Walk T-strap.”
Then another little girl came up and said the same thing, “My shoes
are Indian Walk T-strap.” Then Jennifer says it again, “My shoes
are Indian Walk T-strap,” and then they both start whining this at
the poor little thing, “My-shoes-are-Indian-Walk-T-strap!” And the
little girl—all she had done was come into the playground, to try
to make friends, with the wrong shoes on—she’s about to cry, and
she says, “Mine are, too,” and little Jennifer starts saying in
that awful sarcastic sing-song kids pick up as one of their early
instruments of torture: “Oh-no-they’re-not—your shoes are
garbage!” So the other little girl starts
saying it, and they start chanting again, and the little girl is
bawling, and the colored girl can’t figure out what’s going on—and
the other nannies, Jennifer’s nanny, all of them, they’re just
beautiful, as Charlotte remembers
it.
“They just sat there through the whole
performance with these masks on, until their little terrors had
absolutely annihilated this poor kid, and then they were so concerned.
“‘Now, Jennifer, you mustn’t tease, you
know. Mustn’t tease.’ The whole time, of course, she was just
delighted over how well Jennifer had learned her
lessons.”
The nannies dictate that kids have to
have Indian Walk shoes. They have to get their hair cut at this and
that hotel. And clothes! Charlotte gives up on clothes. There is no
such thing as knock-about clothes in the nanny’s entire rubric of
life. There is all this business about herringbones, Shetland
weaves, light flannel, heavy flannel, raw silk even, Danish
sweaters. The only thing that saves even the wealthiest family from
total bankruptcy is that the kids start going to school and
watching television, after which they demand dungarees and their
tastes in general deteriorate medievally. Until then, however, the
nannies have all picked Cerutti on Madison Avenue, and so all the
kids go trooping off to Cerutti for clothes.
“Of course,” says Charlotte, “there’s
this place in England the nannies really prize. They get
practically emotional over it. There’s a photograph of the Duke of
Windsor as a baby, on the wall, and it’s signed, something like,
‘Best of luck to my dear friends, Sincerely, Edward, Duke of
Windsor.’ Do you see why they love the place? The message,
naturally, was written by his nanny. So here is the nanny mafia
speaking through the throne of England!”
A nanny will do anything to get you to
go to England, just so you can get to this damned
store.
“Robert, you know, is always handling
these bond transfers, for the Swedes, and he goes off to Stockholm,
for the Belgians, and he is off to Brussels—everywhere, for some
reason, except England. If the Black Widow doesn’t let up, I swear
he is going to crawl in there on his hands and knees one day and
ask to be sent to London. I’m only kidding about that. Actually,
Robert is rather level-headed about Mrs. G————. It’s me who—well,
these are formidable people. They have power. I’m sure some of
these people, like the party caterers, for example, wine them and
dine them. They ought to, if they don’t … .”
The phone rings and Charlotte wheels
around again, those alabaster shanks still crossed, locked, silken,
glistening. She twists around in the chair to pick up the
phone.
“Hello, Robert … Well, all right … I
suppose so … that’s fine … I guess that’s fine … All right …
Good-bye.”
She untwists and faces me again,
looking kind of blank. “That was Robert: He’s been talking to his
father about the party …”
And out in Central Park, in the 77th
Street playground, within the leafy stockade, amid a thousand
little places where the sun peeps through, the nanny mafia rises
and stretches and the Black Widow tucks little Bobby’s bangs—one
thing in that family has gone right, anyway—up under his
eight-piece Shetland herringbone cap, matching his four-button
coat, to be sure, takes him by the hand and heads for home, the
white brick tower, the tacky Louis chaises and the gathering good
news.