Nanny Confidential: Phillipa Christian on working for the world’s rich and famous

AN elite nanny from Melbourne who has worked for the world’s rich and famous tells of the film sets, megayachts, exclusive parties and paparazzi in her new book. | Read an extract

Shane Warne And Elizabeth Hurley Sighting - October 27, 2011

Melburnian Philippa Christian, 27, has spent most of this year living in the Bahamas and Beverly Hills.

In any one month, she’s been on a film set, sailed on a megayacht, hobnobbed at a Hollywood party, shopped in a centre exclusively open to her family or been forced to flee the paparazzi.

Christian is neither an actor nor a millionaire, but to the rich and famous families who have hired her over the past 15 years as a nanny she is priceless.

Growing up in Brighton and babysitting from the age of 11, her first full-time employer was Shane Warne and her dedication to the job soon saw her in hot demand.

She has worked for talk-show hosts, reality TV stars, Victoria Secret’s supermodels, professional sportsmen, musicians, singers, movie producers and multinational company executives.

Christian has been offered a lot of money over the years to spill the beans on her employers.

“When Shane was with Elizabeth (Hurley) I was offered $280,000 to take a photograph of them together,” she tells the Herald Sun.

“We’d just been on holiday together and I had photos of her with no make-up on — I could have gone to town. But I would never do that.

“I don’t even say, no. I don’t even reply.”

She says requests for photos of bosses without make-up is common, along with inside knowledge related to any scandal.

“Some nannies have gone off and done that and they never get employed again,” she says.

“They are not trustworthy and they are not in the job for the children. You’ve always got to think of the children first.”

But Christian was still tempted to give others some insight into her $500,000-a-year career.

She’s not name-dropping, but has disguised the scandals, diva demands and bizarre upbringings of her young charges in her debut novel, Nanny Confidential.

It has been ghost written by freelance writer and former Gracia editor Amy Molloy.

“Everyone who has read it said that it has made them laugh, it has made them cry; every emotion she (Amy) has touched on,” Christian says.

The novel includes stories of domestic arguments, dodgy business deals, unwanted pregnancies and plastic surgery horrors.

Christian says these scandals are hardest on the children.

“They go to school and get told certain things, and you’ve got to deal with that,” she says.

“Or you will have a child who can’t sleep because they are constantly being chased by paparazzi and having nightmares.”

She says it can be a headache making sure the kids wear the right clothing in public, especially if the parents own a clothing line.

And though she has a wardrobe that’s worth a large fortune — because many celebrity mothers want her to blend in so they can pretend they are supermums who don’t require help — she is still a “T-shirt and jeans kind of girl”.

“I like to be comfortable. I like to play with kids, I like to run around and chase them and play hide and seek. I’m not someone who likes to get dressed up and not feel comfortable enough to do my job properly,” she says.

Christian’s dedication to her young charges has seen children become more attached to her than their parents.

“Sometimes you’ll hand the baby over to the mum and the baby will start crying and put their arms out because they want to go back to you,” she says.

“Or kids will say, ‘Can Pip be our mummy and you just be our babysitter?”

Then there’s the feeling of being under constant surveillance.

“Some people are horrible to work for, and I told my Mum, the only place I can cry and let it all out is when I am in the shower, because it’s the only place they can’t see me,” she says.

She’s put her own love life on hold because every contract stipulates that she cannot be in a relationship.

“All my friends have gone through that stage of going out a lot, drinking and kissing all these guys. I’ve never actually been drunk, I’ve never smoked, I’ve never seen an illegal drug.

“This job has kept me as clean as anything.”

She hopes one day to marry and have six children.

“My grandma wrote a book and had six kids and I wanted to be just like her,” Christian says.

“She promised she would be the first person to read this book, but unfortunately she passed away a couple of months ago, so I have dedicated the book to my Gran.”

Christian says her job teaches you what is important in life.

“A lot of people love the idea of fame and having more money than you know what to do with, but it actually brings a lot more problems than you would ever imagine.”

Nanny Confidential, by Philippa Christian, published by Allen & Unwin, rrp $24.99, on sale December 17, 2014.

Read on from our exclusive extract

As I sprinted down Rodeo Drive, racing to get to a beautician’s appointment, with a child bouncing in a Bugaboo pushchair and a Louis Vuitton handbag slung over my shoulder, I kept a watchful eye out for paparazzi.

Those guys are never far behind me. Neither is my personal bodyguard, who I could hear huffing, puffing and muttering, ‘Why couldn’t she just bring the damn chauffeur like a normal person?’

The problem is, having a chauffeur-driven Mercedes at your beck and call isn’t considered ‘normal’ where I come from.

I might look like the stereotypical Hollywood yummy mummy, with my blonde hair swishing in the breeze and my diamond watch glittering in the sunlight, but appearances can be deceptive.

In fact, the child isn’t mine, the handbag was a freebie and it’s the three-year-old girl in the stroller who is booked in for a facial and a pedicure.

I’m just there to act as her chaperon.

My name is Lindsay Starwood and I’m an elite VIP nanny. Although nobody knows my name, they certainly know the names of my employers.

I’ve cared for the children of the richest parents on the planet, from presidents to movie stars, oil barons, hotel heirs and supermodels.

I’ve worked for so many celebrities that gossip magazines are like my version of Facebook — that’s the way I keep up to date with the lives of my past and present celebrity bosses. My CV reads like the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In a sense I am rich and famous by proxy, because being linked to a famous family opens every door in the city. I can get a table at any restaurant, as long as I’m with the children. I’ve flown on private jets and lived in a mansion the size of two football pitches. And that’s really only the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve seen wealth that I could never have dreamt of back when I was growing up in a small country town in Australia, but my job isn’t quite the Mary Poppins fantasy that you’d imagine. It’s a labour of love and a test of endurance.

These parents’ expectations are high, and thankyous are hard to come by. I’m often asked if the children I care for are spoiled, but they’re really just following the examples set by their elders. Let’s just say I’ve never come across a baby who was born a diva — it’s a case of nurture over nature. I once knew a mother who named her daughter ‘Your Highness’. How was she supposed to grow up to be well-adjusted with that on her birth certificate?

As a VIP nanny you see and hear it all, from domestic arguments to dodgy business deals, unwanted pregnancies and the aftermath of plastic surgery.

Oh, but the handcuffs are golden! I’m only twenty-seven years old and earn up to $500,000 a year, without paying any living expenses.

I live in the lap of luxury, holiday at the best hotels in the world and have a wardrobe that’s worth a large fortune.

On top of my generous pay packet, I have been ‘tipped’ with expensive jewellery, vouchers for plastic surgeries, a convertible BMW and even a prize-winning pony that I could keep in the family’s stables.

So how did a small-town girl from rural Australia find herself caring for the tots of Tinseltown? I’m not a wannabe actress who came to Hollywood chasing stardom and then had to find a backup plan when it all fell through, if that’s what you’re thinking. It sounds like a cliche but I just genuinely love children, and they seem to love me too.

Take the three-year-old currently bouncing around in my stroller. Lavender Appleby is one of the six daughters of movie director Cameron Appleby and his soap star wife, Alysha. Sorry, that’s ‘Sir Cameron Appleby the third’ to you and me.

I’ve only been working for the Appleby family for a fortnight since leaving my previous role and yet, last night as I tucked Koko in to bed, she wrapped her arms around my neck and whispered, ‘Lindsay, will you be my mommy, and mommy can be my nanny?’

Either she’d already grown attached to me in the past two weeks — it does happen — or the mature little girl had done the maths and realised that if her mum were her nanny, rather than a celebrity and socialite, then she’d be more likely to spend quality time with her children.

That morning on my way out the door Alysha had given me one instruction: ‘Don’t let the children nap during the day, nanny.

When I get home from work I need them to be too tired to ask me to play with them.’ Truly unbelievable but, depressingly, not unusual.

That’s why doing my job, and doing it well, is so important. A nanny is one of the few constants in the lives of richie-rich children, and it’s rewarding to see the difference I can make to their wellbeing.

I’ve always been drawn to babies, ever since I was given a bag of flour with stick-on eyes as part of a school project and was charged with the task of keeping it ‘alive’ for a week.

I was so frustrated by the other students’ apathetic attitudes towards their bags of flour that I ended up setting up a corner of the classroom as my ‘nursery’ for looking after everyone else’s ‘babies’.

Unfortunately, as an only child, the number of real babies in my vicinity was limited. I was born in a country town called Hamilton in southeast Australia, which only has a population of just over 8000 people.

We knew absolutely everyone in our town, and there were only three girls in my year at school.

That’s why, when I was fourteen years old, my parents decided to move to Melbourne to give me a better education.

When I was growing up they ran the local convenience store, which sold everything from groceries to camping equipment.

It also had a coffee shop in the back, and they were the first to offer computers with internet back in the days when computers were still mystical.

They might have been from a small town, but they were always thinking ahead, and they weren’t shy of hard work. I remember my dad getting up at the crack of dawn to help our neighbours milk their cows before working an eight-hour shift at the cafe.

I also remember thinking it was unfair that, for all the hours he was working, we couldn’t afford to turn the hot water on more than one day a week.

I had a very sheltered childhood, in a sense. I wasn’t allowed to watch television for more than one hour a night, and I didn’t set foot in a cinema until we moved to Melbourne.

On the first weekend after we relocated to the city, my mum took me to see The Princess Diaries.

My dad decided to stay at home after checking the price of the tickets. I wasn’t allowed popcorn, but we brought Vegemite sandwiches from home.

I was the only person in the audience who stood up and cheered at the end of the movie, because I found it so spellbinding.

This was probably because my childhood entertainment up to that point had revolved around picking blackberries and skimming stones in the river.

How times have changed since then. I’ve been on countless movie sets, watched music videos being filmed and sat in green rooms next to my childhood idols.

The novelty soon wears off when you’re trying to keep a group of kids amused without getting under the feet of producers, directors and actors.

When I was younger my ignorance of popular culture probably worked in my favour. When I got a babysitting job, aged just twelve, I was vaguely aware that the parents I worked for were ‘somebodies’, but I wasn’t as starstruck as my school friends would have been.

My mother worked as a shop assistant in a clothing store and met Eliza Shawshank when she came in to buy a hat for the Melbourne horse races.

They’d got talking in the changing room and Mum had mentioned that she had a teenage daughter. The following Friday I was dispatched to a mansion on the other side of the city, left in charge of three children, and told I could help myself to anything in the fridge. I had my first taste of caviar that night, and spat it straight into the garbage.

I was naturally nosy and toured the house when the children were sleeping, piecing together clues about the family’s background.

The first giveaway was the recording studio in the basement, where the walls were decorated with gold and silver records. Above the children’s beds was a framed photograph of them with Michael Jackson. In another photo they were hugging Kylie Minogue.

On the mantelpiece in the living room was a pile of sparkling invitations to parties taking place across the world, including the Grammys and the MTV Europe Awards.

Eliza and Jason Shawshank certainly had an active social life and, for almost two years, I spent every Friday and Saturday night at their house.

I developed a bit of a girl-crush on Eliza, to be honest. I used to arrive half an hour early so that I could sit on her bed and watch her get ready. It amazed me that a woman came around to do her hair and make-up. She always lets her six-year-old daughter choose her earrings to go with her outfit.

I went to a strict Catholic school, which didn’t let students miss classes unless they presented a medical certificate. One day, I pulled a sickie so I could accompany the Shawshanks on a daytrip to Disney World in Florida over the weekend.

Unfortunately I didn’t realise that photographers followed them everywhere. That evening my teacher spotted me on the evening news boarding a private jet in Orlando, wearing a pair of Minnie Mouse ears. She wasn’t impressed when I came in on Monday, with a note from my mother that claimed I’d had a stomach bug.

I had been planning to go to university to study child psychology, but as my final school exams rolled around, Eliza made me an offer.

Would I be interested in moving in with the family and taking care of their children full time, as their nanny?

She then named a salary that, to an eighteen-year-old student, sounded like a fortune. A lot of my school friends were taking a gap year to travel around Europe. If I moved into the Shawshanks’ mansion it would be like a working holiday.

I’d heard my parents arguing about how they were going to be able to afford to send me to university and I didn’t want my dad to have to get a second job.

‘I’ll just do it for a year,’ I told my mum. ‘I can save enough money to get myself through university without needing to get into debt.’

Of course, it didn’t work out like that. A year became a career and my university place was deferred and then given away.

Shortly after my nineteenth birthday an email arrived from the manager of a Hollywood actor who was planning a trip to Australia.

He needed a nanny to take care of his four sons during their holiday and wondered if I’d fly to Sydney to stay with them on a yacht on the harbour.

I wasn’t really looking for extra work but I wondered if the universe was sending me a message. When they asked for my fee I quadrupled my rate, just to see what they’d say.

I told them my standard fee was $500, per child, per day, which meant I’d be paid $14,000 for a week’s work.

I fully expected them to look elsewhere, and couldn’t believe it when the agent emailed back. ‘My client is happy with that fee,’ it read. ‘They will also cover your living expenses, including accommodation, travel and food, and provide you with an appropriate wardrobe.’

At the end of the holiday they asked me to return with them to Los Angeles and work for them. They already had a nanny, who later sued for unfair dismissal, as she only found out she’d been replaced when I walked into her bedroom carrying my suitcase.

The Hollywood hiring process can be fast and fickle. I sometimes feel like I’m only just hanging on by my fingertips. But what other career would give you the perks of fame, without needing to actually be famous? I may work like a slave but I live like a queen.

Nanny Confidential, by Philippa Christian, published by Allen & Unwin, rrp $24.99, on sale December 17, 2014.

Originally published as Nanny Confidential: Phillipa Christian on working for the world’s rich and famous