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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
My horror at Olen's piece was amplified by Tessy's blogged rebuttal, posted after the Times piece. Tessy, it turns out, is about to start a Ph.D. program concentrating on the late Victorian novel, which is pretty funny, since in her piece Olen had dismissed the nanny's interest in literature with casual "I used to read books too back when I was a self-indulgent single person" facility.
Tessy's response to Olen's assertions includes links to the entries that Olen describes in her story. The nanny's alleged "offbeat erotic fantasies involving Tucker Carlson" stem from a riff on how political frustration with conservative Carlson reminds Tessy of the sexual friction in a Jane Austen novel. Tessy says that what Olen called her "semi-promiscuous couplings" during her five-month nannying stint were hampered by the two and a half months she spent celibate. Her sleeping pills are over the counter from Target. Her crush on Jennifer Ehle is inspired by the actor's appealing turn as Elizabeth Bennett in A&E's adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice."
It's easy to imagine 7,000 New York mothers jockeying to get this woman on their own domestic payroll.
The nanny's response also tackles less funny problems with Olen's essay, such as Olen's expression of fear that Tessy might judge her boring married life. "This might be hard for Ms. Olen to understand, considering this article reveals that she lives in an insular world where everything is about HER, but I didn't judge her life," writes the nanny. "She employed me to care for her children. Her choices? Her compromises? Not my business." What Olen was trying to do, Tessy argues, was paint the young nanny as "anti-mother and anti-children." Tessy claims that she is neither, pointing readers to posts about her desire to one day be a mother herself.
For good measure, Tessy explains that while she is eager to set the record straight about her own promiscuity, she wants to be clear that she "will defend any woman's right to sleep with whomever, whenever she wants. Ms. Olen is shocked by a single woman who has and talks about sex ... One of the most disappointing things about this essay is the way it suggests that a woman who thinks about sex ... [is] not fit to care for children. Ridiculous."
Amen. But for other deeply twisted nanny news, we need look no further than the peculiar melodrama being played out across the pond by actor Jude Law, his nanny Daisy Wright, his onetime fiancée Sienna Miller and his ex-wife Sadie Frost.
It's all very tangled, but mercifully, everyone involved seems anxious to see it unfold on the pages of tabloids, so we've got lots of information to work with. Here's a condensed version: A couple of years ago, Law left Frost (reportedly suffering from postpartum depression after the birth of their third child) for the much younger Miller, a beanpole ingénue and his costar in the remake of "Alfie." Law and Miller (whose career has since blossomed along with her heir-of-Gwyneth reputation as designer clotheshorse) got engaged.
Then, while Law was filming a remake of "All the King's Men," 26-year-old nanny Wright brought his kids to see him on the set just after Miller had jetted off for an acting project of her own. Law was feeling lonely, so, within a day of Wright's arrival, he had sex with her. Unfortunately, one of his young children walked in on Daddy and Daisy in bed. (Apparently Law told him to go back to bed, then rolled over and had sex with Wright again.) The Law-Frost spawn squealed to his mother back in London; Frost promptly sacked Wright, who just as promptly sold her diary to the London papers.
Law soon confessed publicly; Miller's mother told reporters that Law is "so stupid." Not to be left out, Frost got on the horn with a British paper and offered to comfort Miller, the sylph she was jilted for. "I have all sorts of advice for her," said Frost. Mm-hmm. We bet she does.
Miller, the only lead in this saga not to have called a reporter yet, has been seen in London without her engagement ring.
But there are dismal side effects of this diverting summer sudser. Most alarming is that rather than considering the possibility that Law might be something of a cad, not to say a major-league asshole, the press, with help from the relevant players, has set about dismantling both Wright and Miller.
