‘Lindsaaay, the chef has quit. You’re going to have to cook until we find a replacement.’
As if my life wasn’t busy enough, now I had to add chef to my repertoire. You’d think that Alysha would be able to find another cook in a heartbeat, but she’s particularly picky when it comes to her kitchen hands. The last chef had been headhunted from a Michelin starred restaurant in New York City. Her last words, as she stormed out of the house, were ‘I’d rather work at McDonald’s than around this madness!’ The reality television producers loved the drama and asked the chef if she could do a second take, but this time look even angrier. ‘Maybe you could throw a punch at Alysha as you walk out the door?’ asked the producer hopefully. The chef didn’t agree, although it must have been tempting.
Her resignation was brought on by Alysha’s latest weight-loss regime, which was called the ‘air diet’ and was more of a non-eating plan. The chef had to prepare Alysha’s favourite meals, which she would then hold to her nose and sniff, but not eat. For the chef, this latest diet was the final nail in the coffin. She saw it as an insult to her culinary talents—and who could blame her? It reminded me of an actress I worked for who would buy all of her favourite foods—meat pies, doughnuts, tubs of frosting—and then stand at the kitchen sink, chew mouthfuls and spit them down the plughole. She claimed it was the secret to her sixteen-inch waist, as she could satisfy her tastebuds with none of the calories.
I wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of cooking for six children and a staff of twenty, but it’s not unusual for a nanny to be asked to flex her culinary muscles.
A lot of wealthy mothers have never made a single meal for their children; even something as simple as chopping up an apple or mixing a bottle of formula. They’ll insist they don’t have the time or the skills, which might be the case, but when they’ll happily take singing and acting classes, even ‘American accent classes’, while insisting they don’t have time to take a short cookery course, it’s clear that it’s really a matter of priorities.
As with all Alysha’s food fads I knew the air diet wouldn’t last long, so I wasn’t too worried about the dangers. My size-zero boss was just having a crisis of vanity, because she’d seen the first cut of her television pilot and thought she looked fat. ‘We’re going to have to reshoot it all,’ she ordered the producer, who looked like he was going to have a heart attack, and then asked me if I could get the contact details for Sharon Osbourne’s gastric band surgeon.
She’d also put a padlock on the fridge and kitchen cupboards, which only the chef had the key to. I tried to turn this into a game for the children so they wouldn’t need therapy. ‘We can pretend we’re pirates,’ I said. ‘It’s like a treasure hunt and this is our treasure chest!’ I don’t think I convinced them, as seven-year-old Goldie had given me a disbelieving look and asked, ‘Did Mommy stand on the bathroom clock and get angry again?’ In the end I figured out that by ‘bathroom clock’ she meant the scales.
One of the trickiest aspects of my job is dealing with bizarre Hollywood diets, especially when these rules and restrictions are forced upon the entire family. It can be a nightmare trying to keep up with the latest celebrity food fads, and it was a sour subject that often came up at our Sunday-night nanny gatherings.
Last week, at the burger bar, Rosie had begged for my advice on how to handle her boss’s culinary commandments. Her A-list employer was slimming down for her latest rom-com and had put the entire household on a vegan diet, including her three- and eight-year-old daughters.
‘It’s bloody ridiculous,’ vented Rosie, whose British accent gets posher when she’s angry. ‘I wouldn’t care if she actually had a moral issue with slaughtering animals, but this is just another fad. Every week it’s something different.’ Prior to veganism her boss had been a devotee of the Paleo diet, during which time Rosie had been sent to South America on a private jet to pick up a crate of beef jerky. The week before that she’d put the kids on a three-day fruit cleanse, but all the fruit had to be grown and picked within fifty kilometres of their house. When Rosie asked why, her boss answered, ‘Because I watched a documentary on it,’ but didn’t elaborate any further.
It was no wonder Rosie was struggling to keep up with the ever-changing fitness fads. ‘As soon as I get a grasp of one diet she moves on to the next,’ she moaned. ‘It’s playing havoc with the kids’ digestion, and the chef is having a major meltdown. I don’t know what to do, Lindsay, help me!’
Whenever one of my nanny friends butts heads with a mother about dietary regimes the first question I ask them is whether the children are actually in danger or whether the mother’s demands are simply inconvenient. If it’s dangerous then it’s their duty to speak up, even though this can be difficult when faced with a famous mother with strong opinions and who is not used to being challenged. On the other hand, if the children aren’t actually at risk, the best option is often to stay silent and wait for the fad to pass, as frustrating as that is. ‘You have to play the game,’ I told Rosie. ‘I know it’s difficult when you disagree, but you just have to do what you’re told and try not to overthink it. You are hired to be a surrogate parent, but no mother actually wants you to challenge her opinion. The parenting decisions are still up to them.’
This might sound overly submissive but I’ve learnt over the years that a nanny has two options when faced with a difficult employer. ‘You either have to accept the situation or leave the situation,’ I told Rosie. ‘If your boss is really too much to handle then it could be time to move on, rather than try to change their ways. If not, you just have to suck it up!’
I did feel sorry for Rosie because I could appreciate what she was going through. Alysha’s tastebuds are equally erratic. If a celebrity is photographed in a magazine carting a smoothie or a takeaway food container, she zeroes in on the logo and orders me to find out where they’ve been shopping so she can copy them. In her eyes, making an unfashionable food choice is the equivalent of carrying last season’s ‘it’ bag.
She’s not the only mother who feels this way, which is why packing a kid’s lunchbox is such a minefield. If you send a child to school with ‘last season’s snack’ it will be the talk of the school gates. I’d recently been in trouble for giving Lavender her favourite chocolate bliss balls when everyone knows that trendy kids tuck into ‘raweo’ cookies (a raw, vegan version of an Oreo).
The hardest part of my job is when a parent asks me to put their child on a diet—especially when the kid in question isn’t even slightly overweight. Since I’d started working for Alysha and witnessed her warped relationship with food, I’d been dreading the day she’d give me that order. When she asked me to take over from the chef, she clearly saw it as an opportunity to target her oldest daughter. ‘I think Harlow could do with losing a few pounds, don’t you?’ she said. ‘I want her to set a good example for her little sisters.’
I should have said no, as Harlow is a perfectly healthy eight-year-old; however, Alysha didn’t give me a chance to answer.
‘I’m thinking of booking her in with my hypnotist to see if she can help,’ she continued. ‘In the meantime, can you cut out all fat from her diet? And sugar as well? And if that doesn’t work then try gluten too. And can you find out how Suri Cruise stays so skinny when she’s always eating so much candy?’
I dug my fingernails into the table. I’ve studied child nutrition and know all about the dangers of removing fat from their diet. This also seemed like an eating disorder waiting to happen. However, I’ve been in this situation before and knew that if I said no, Alysha would remove me from the equation and get someone else to do her bidding. There are far too many private doctors in Hollywood happy to prescribe weight loss pills to schoolgirls, just as there are plastic surgeons willing to give boob jobs to thirteen-year-olds.
I’d just have to come up with a way that I could trick Alysha into thinking I was following her orders, without putting Harlow’s health at risk or leaving the little girl with a complex and major body image issues.
When I was quiet, Alysha must have sensed my reluctance, but wrongly assumed that I just didn’t want the extra workload. ‘Oh, don’t worry, you won’t have to cook for long,’ she added. ‘I’ve just found an amazing chef from Chicago. Everything on his menu is cooked using wood or has an ingredient with wood in the name. His signature dish is salmon with wood-fired apples. Doesn’t that sound delicious? I’m having the kitchen redecorated next week with a $60,000 wood-fired oven from Brazil.’
She then pulled an inhaler from her pocket, took a drag and coughed. The smoke smelt of chocolate and almonds, as if Nutella had been vaporised. This was part of her ‘breatharian’ regime. The inhaler wasn’t for a medical condition—it was an appetite suppressant that was meant to satisfy sugar cravings.
The sickly sweet smoke had the opposite effect on me. After Alysha dismissed me, I went straight to my bedroom, reached into my knicker drawer and pulled out the family-size block of Cadbury Dairy Milk I keep there for emergencies, along with a big bag of fairy floss. The diet could start tomorrow. Today, I felt like rebelling.
•
Maybe it was the sugar high keeping me awake, but that night I couldn’t stop tossing and turning. Around 1 a.m. I gave up and decided to use the extra hours productively. I sat up in bed, pulled a notepad from my bedside table and wrote a list of ways I could follow Alysha’s orders without emotionally or physically scarring Harlow.
I already made sure the girls ate healthily and limited their fatty foods, although that can be hard to manage. The problem is, just as their mothers are gifted clothing and jewellery, celebrity children are given a free run of sweet stores and fast food outlets. Lavender even had a milkshake named after her by a global fast food chain, because they wanted product placement in Sir Cameron’s next movie.
There are certainly strategies that I’ve used in the past when a client has asked me to put their child on an extreme diet that I disagreed with. I make tiny changes like cutting their bread into thinner slices, diluting orange juice with water and swapping ham for turkey. At least this shows the parents that I’m trying to cut calories, but I’m not putting the child at risk. They might lose a little puppy fat but they won’t end up with an unhealthy relationship with food for the rest of their lives.
There was no way that I was cutting an entire food group from Harlow’s diet. Unfortunately her mother thinks dairy is the enemy and refuses to even keep butter in the fridge in case it ‘infects’ the lettuce leaves. I would need to convince Alysha that removing fat wasn’t a healthy—or fashionable—option. I spent the next hour surfing the internet, searching websites such as Vogue and Trend Hunter, for articles that talked about fats being trendy. I found a perfect article called ‘Fat is the New Black’ about how supermodels like Miranda Kerr are adding it to their diet. I planned to print it out and leave it conveniently on the kitchen counter for Alysha to find. She would be praising the virtues of avocado and almond butter by the time she got to the end of the page.
It was only 3 a.m. by this time, but I was still wide awake and the night nanny would be on call for another ninety minutes. So I decided to head to the health food store and stock up on supplies. In Los Angeles, health food stores are open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, just in case someone has a chia-seed emergency.
It might sound odd, but the thought of food shopping in the middle of the night, when the store would be deserted, seemed like the ultimate luxury. I can’t remember the last time I walked around a supermarket alone, without a baby in a trolley or a toddler hanging off my arm. Even when I’m not with the Appleby siblings my ‘nanny alert’ never really switches off. I can’t walk past a child in a pushchair without worrying about whether they’re in reaching distance of a choking hazard. If I hear a baby crying I want to swoop in and comfort them, even though they’re not my own.
So I was quietly excited as I pulled in to the store’s deserted car park. When I walked in the aisles were as quiet as a graveyard, apart from a plain-clothed security guard pretending to browse the nut section. After a decade surrounded by bodyguards I can spot them a mile off, usually from their slightly bored expressions. I said hello as I passed by, and the security guard looked suspicious. This could have been because I was wearing my pyjamas, which I hadn’t really managed to disguise by throwing a Burberry trench coat over them.
I would never normally set foot out of the house looking so dishevelled, especially when visiting this shop, which is a bit of a celebrity hotspot. I’ve seen the who’s-who of Hollywood in this health food store, from Pink to Justin Timberlake and the entire LA Galaxy football team. You never know who you might bump elbows with over the sweet potatoes, although I don’t tend to get starstruck. In this business, it’s not unusual to walk into the living room and find your idols sitting on the sofa watching themselves on TV.
So I’m not sure why I was so stunned to bump into Tommy Grant, the new golden boy of the golfing world. I’m not even a sports fan but I recognised him immediately. When not winning every trophy on the circuit, Tommy, and his supermodel girlfriend, Sophia Balmain, were being photographed at the hottest parties. He was also drop-dead gorgeous, with dark scruffy hair and a permanent five o’clock shadow. He always wore a pendant around his neck with the letter ‘S’. His mum Sharon was his number one fan and never missed a tournament.
Tommy and his girlfriend were such a beautiful couple that I’d heard a rumour Armani had already signed up their future children to model for their junior range, although that could be an exaggeration.
Sophia was a stunning brunette who used to be a ballerina. Whenever I saw her on TV she seemed to glide with grace and poise. I, on the other hand, smashed straight into Tommy with my trolley, scattering a box of quinoa across the floor.
‘I’m so, so sorry,’ I apologised, feeling my face grow red, as he staggered backwards. He was carrying a shopping basket and I automatically scanned the contents. It had a bottle of ginger beer, a packet of vegetable chips and a portion of vegan cheesecake for one.
It took a moment for the sports star to get his breath back, but when he spoke his voice was deeper than I’d imagined. ‘No need to apologise,’ he puffed. ‘It’s nice to see I’m not the only lunatic shopping in the middle of the night. I started to feel like that guy in I Am Legend.’
He scanned my face, looking puzzled. ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ he asked. ‘I feel like we’ve met before. Am I being extremely rude by not recognising you?’
This left me in a bit of a tricky situation, as our paths had crossed before, but I wasn’t really at liberty to tell him where. I had once worked for Tommy’s predecessor—the previous golden boy of the golfing world, who had made some unfortunate choices in his private life that had seen him fall from grace. Tommy used to visit our house every now and again, although we hadn’t ever spoken.
He and Sophia had also attended a charity ball at Alysha’s mansion, although I’d only glimpsed them from across the room. However, I wasn’t really supposed to broadcast who I worked for, even though Tommy wasn’t exactly a reporter. I could have told him if I wanted to, but I found myself dodging the question.
‘I think I just have one of those faces,’ I stammered. ‘Although I recognise you from . . . you know . . . everywhere.’
I kicked myself for sounding like such a pathetic groupie but, thankfully, Tommy laughed. ‘Yep, I’m sure people are sick of looking at me,’ he said. ‘That’s why I prefer shopping in the dead of night. Oh, and I’m horrifically jetlagged. I just flew in from London.’
Now this was a topic that I could talk about. I like to think that I’m a bit of an expert on long-haul travel. ‘Oh, you should try an extract called Pycnogenol,’ I said excitedly. ‘It’s a type of tree bark that helps you reset your body clock. It’s my lifesaver! And when we’re travelling I give my children garlic oil to stop their ears hurting on take-off.’
At this, Tommy raised his eyebrows. ‘You look far too young to have children,’ he said. ‘But thanks for the tip. I’ll have to try it next time I’m travelling.’ Then, before I could correct his mistake, he looked towards the exit. ‘Anyway, it was nice to meet you,’ he said. ‘I’d better get my slice of cheesecake home to bed.’
As he walked away down the aisle I kicked myself for not correcting him. Now he thought I had kids. He’d probably assume I was married. I’m not sure why this bothered me so much, or what came over me next. I blame lack of sleep or the free samples of maca powder that I’d eaten at the entrance to the shop—the label had warned that it’s an aphrodisiac.
Instead of finishing my shopping, I dumped my trolley in the gluten-free section and followed Tommy around the supermarket like a stalker. I kept one aisle behind him so that he wouldn’t notice, peering through the shelves of dried fruit and muesli between us.
I watched as Tommy added a tin of soup to his basket and then choose a baguette from the bakery section. I watched him deliberate for five minutes over two types of chemical-free shampoo and then buy neither. I found myself imagining what his kitchen would look like and what he’d smell like in the shower.
At the freezer section I gave myself a good hard talking-to. ‘Lindsay Starwood, get it together. You are losing your marbles.’ I didn’t even realise I had said it out loud until Tommy turned around and stared at me.
‘Hello again,’ he said, sounding surprised. ‘Are you okay? You look sort of lost.’ I was suddenly very aware that I didn’t even have a shopping trolley anymore, as I’d left it behind four aisles ago.
‘Umm, yes,’ I stuttered. ‘I just realised that I left my wallet at home. I better run back and get it. It was nice to meet you . . . again!’
Then I raced out of the store before he could do something chivalrous like offering to pay for my shopping. Once I was safely back in my car I breathed a sigh of relief, until I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw what I looked like. Not only was I wearing pyjamas, but my fringe was clipped back with a pink, glittery Barbie comb that Lavender had stuck in my hair the previous night when we’d been playing hair salon.
Still, it could be worse. I’d once answered the front door to a delivery guy who I had a crush on wearing pull-up pants over my jeans, like I was Superman. I was toilet-training a little boy at the time and had been showing him how to put them on. The problem was I then forgot that I was wearing them. To make matters worse, they had a Mickey Mouse face printed on the crotch and Daffy Duck printed on the backside. (I’m amazed they fit me, but the little boy in question was the heir to a chocolate brand and a little . . . plus-sized.) I thought the delivery guy was checking out my bum as I walked away, until I looked in the mirror.
If I was Carrie Bradshaw maybe I could pull these looks off, but I don’t think Tommy would believe it was an ironic fashion statement.
Maybe tomorrow I’d put in a call to my former boss, a New York fashion designer, and ask her to tweet a photo of a Barbie hairclip. That’s all it took to start a fashion trend these days. Tommy’s girlfriend would probably want one by the end of the week. Then again, why did I care what he thought anyway?