It’s rarely as stylish as Fran Drescher makes out…
A former nanny to Manhattan multi-millionaires is spilling all about their kids’ designer wardrobes, being made to chase after their golf carts and grumpy celebrities on the school run in a new tell-all book.
Stephanie Kiser, 32, worked for three different families and regularly bumped into the likes of Drew Barrymore, Steve Martin and Robert De Niro at The Episcopal School on the Upper East Side, a private school for children 2 to 5.
80-year-old De Niro, a dad of seven, was the brashest while picking up his second youngest daughter, Helen Grace, whom he shares with ex Grace Hightower.
“He did not wait in the line. He waited across the street and his driver would get out of this massive SUV and open his door. And they would let him go in first and he would skip the line. Maybe he was just grumpy. You weren’t going to say hi to him,” she told The Post.
“His nannies were formal nannies, so they had uniforms. They wore pink polos with khaki shorts. So you knew that they were the sort of nanny that was not part of the family. They were just doing their job.”
Barrymore “was by far the best” when coming to get her daughters, Olive and Frankie.
“She was an angel … I just remember so clearly one day, walking in behind her to the school, and she was stopping to say hi and wave and hug every person that works there.”
Martin was more lowkey and kept to himself while waiting for his little one, Mary.
“Honestly, I think he thought he was a regular guy. He was very cute. He always had like a little satchel and a little hat. He was really quiet,” she said.
Kiser, a native of North Providence, RI, moved to East Harlem upon graduation from Emerson College to pursue film and TV writing.
Her new memoir, “Wanted: Toddler’s Personal Assistant: How Nannying for the 1% Taught Me about the Myths of Equality, Motherhood, and Upward Mobility in America” (Sourcebooks), out Aug. 6, spills all from her foray into nannyhood, which lasted from 2014 to 2022.
She worked for three multimillionaire Manhattan families, frequently clocking up 55 to 75 hours a week. The highest salary she ever received was $110,000 per year in cash, sans medical benefits.
“A young, sort of fit, educated nanny on the Upper East Side just gets paid in a whole different way than a career nanny from Nepal. It’s sort of ridiculous because they knew way more about kids than I did,” she said.
The first and last families she worked for both lived on the Upper East Side and had three children, ranging in ages from newborn to 6. She didn’t last long with the second family, who resided in Tribeca and had a 5-year-old son who still soiled his pants, and quit after five months.
She was shocked to see the price tags on items the children owned, like the $425 Oscar de la Renta dress 4-year-old Ruby, from her first family, wore to school.
“Ruby, probably in my two years I worked there, owned fifty $400 to $500 dresses, which, why? She didn’t fit in them very long,” she said.
Kiser was also taken aback by the cost of the children’s extracurricular activities, like the $500-an-hour Upper East Side reading class and the $13,000 day camp in the Hamptons, where Lin-Manuel Miranda’s son was a fellow camper.
Kiser also did a nannying trial for a New York billionaire, who invited her to spend a weekend watching his 18-month-old in the Hamptons — and made her run behind the golf cart he and his son were being transported en route to their docked yacht.
“‘The boat’s down there,’ he says to me. ‘You just follow the path to the water. Just run behind and meet us there,’” she writes.
The billionaire had a staff of 50 — including a chef, sous chef, servers and butler all present during every meal at his home.
“This person had an actual dry cleaning service in the basement,” she said. “Like there were housekeepers, their sole job was to do the washing and ironing. Five days a week. It was a family of three. How much laundry do you have?”
Kiser also divulged the worst job she was tasked with — hand-washing the soiled linen underwear of her 5-year-old charge “who s—ts his pants nearly every day, not accidentally, but spitefully,” she writes.
“It was like an out-of-body experience, I can picture myself with my nails, trying to scrape this poop out,” she said.
“It was really strange because we’re in a multi-million dollar apartment… Let’s just throw the underwear out.”
Kiser also revealed the outlandish requests her nanny friends received from their bosses.
“One nanny has to disinfect every toy that’s been touched, down to each individual building block,” she writes.
Another had to replace anything she had used.
“If she used diaper rash ointment, she would take another container and scoop it out and smooth it out so it looked full … [or] she was reprimanded.”
In the book, she also noted the glaring red flags she saw on job postings.
“‘Looking for a nanny who can fade into the background.’ [means] they want someone who essentially is absent of personality,” she said. “They want a servant; they don’t want anything more.”
Kiser also had to face the sad reality that being American-born and educated, she was treated differently than many of the other nannies, who hailed from the Caribbean, South America and Asia.
One mother in a building playroom Kiser frequented only ever spoke to her, ignoring the other nannies, who told her, “She talks to you because you are white.”
One of her closest nanny friends also once lamented about a father who would not allow her and another nanny at his barbecue to eat what the rest of them were having.
“We reach for the steaks, but Mr. Bruce yelled for us to stop. He brought out two tiny pieces of meat. He told us the big steaks are for everyone else,” the nanny told her.
Despite all the headaches, Kiser — who now lives in Astoria and works as a senior executive assistant at an ad-tech company — said it was hard to leave the children she nannied after growing to love them.
“Oh my God, I’ve had breakups that went smoother. For the last family, I was sick in bed for a couple days after leaving,” she said.
“But I still see them. Their moms send me updates all the time.”
