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You can only imagine the kind of wild demands a live-in servant might face from their ultra-wealthy employers.

Well, one servant is sharing a few jaw-dropping tales of the bizarre requests she received and the ways she managed to fulfil them, as well as how she batted away the more morally questionable or humiliating demands.

Former Manhattan nanny to multi-millionaires, Stephanie Kiser, has spilt some behind-the-stroller secrets of caring for the richest children in the Big Apple in 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.

The new tell-all book divulges the kids’ designer wardrobes, being made to chase after their golf carts, grumpy celebrities on the school run, and an odd request about inducing lactation.

The 32-year-old nanny previously 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 aged two to five.

Apparently, 80-year-old De Niro, a father of seven, was at his most audacious when he picked up his second youngest daughter, Helen Grace, whom he shares with his 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 NY Post.

Meanwhile, Barrymore “was by far the best” when coming to fetch 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.”

And then, Martin preferred to keep 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.

Stephanie’s memoir, out August 6, spills all from her foray into nanny-hood, which lasted from 2014 to 2022, with the highest salary she ever received being something like $110,000 per year in cash, sans medical benefits. That’s R2 million.

“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.

She said the price tags on some of the clothing and extracurricular activities for the kids are just mind-blowing, like the $425 (R8,000) Oscar de la Renta dress for four-year-old Ruby or 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.

Stephanie once did a nannying trial for a New York billionaire who invited her to spend a weekend looking after his 18-month-old in the Hamptons. In a shocking turn, he made her run behind the golf cart transporting him and his son on their way to the 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.

With a staff of 50 – including a chef, sous chef, servers and butler all present during every meal at his home – the unnamed billionaire wouldn’t have thought twice about making a servant run after him like that.

“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?”

Among the most shocking requests Stephanie got was that of a mega-rich mother who wanted the young nanny to take drugs in order to induce lactation, per DMARGE.

“The mom didn’t want to pump at work, but also only wanted her child to drink breast milk,” Stephanie says:

“She was looking for a nanny comfortable with induced lactation, hoping to find ‘help’ willing to try hormone-mimicking drugs or herbal medication.”

Despite leaving her asking whether such a thing ‘was even legal‘, Kiser has received plenty of other requests that are jaw-dropping. While being interviewed for another job, Stephanie was asked if she would be comfortable running errands in a Porsche because that’s the only kind of car they had available. “Needless to say, the answer was ‘yes,’” she said.

Working for another family, she had to report every minor detail of the child’s day to the mother.

“Once he’s settled in bed, you and I meet to discuss his day. You should be taking notes throughout it so you can keep me up to speed on his moods, any issues, and concerns. It’s all about communication,” the mother said.

One family even offered a “sort of ‘survivor’s prize’ if you will” the mother said – a $90,000 (R1,6 million) salary plus a bonus if she could last two years – as their 17-year-old son had a penchant for scaring off all his caregivers in record times. Despite the ludicrous paycheck, Stephanie turned the job down, seeing the red flags clearly and early.

Her worst job? Hand-washing the poopy linen underwear of her five-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.”

But it was running after the billionaire and his baby that was the cherry on top for Stephanie, writing “I am 60 seconds into running after a fat billionaire and his baby when I decide that today is the last day I will ever see these people…”

She now lives in Astoria and works as a senior executive assistant at an ad-tech company. Good riddance.

[source:dmarge&nypost]