Nanny knows best... about how to steal your husband
THE revelation that a pop star and a pop star have divorced ostensibly because he allegedly had a three-year affair with the nanny hardly breaks the internet.
We merely add the name Gavin Rossdale, ex-husband of singer Gwen Stefani, to the Hall of Shame that seemingly already has Jude Law, Ethan Hawke, Ben Affleck, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robin Williams and many others in gold letters on the ‘dishonour roll’ for helping themselves to the help.
Indeed, l’affaire RossdaleStefani contains so many movie cliches it could have been scripted by committee.
The nanny in question – an Australian blonde twentysomething called Mindy Mann – penetrated the family home in theory as trusted carer for the couple’s young children, but in practice it seems her target was the husband (The Hand That Rocks The Cradle).
She also started copying bosspopstar Gwen’s look and hair (Single White Female) right down to khaki flying suits, hairbands and geeky glasses.
The affair was supposedly discovered because the couple’s sexts and nude pix synced to a shared iCloud (Apple’s hilarious slogan: ‘Bring harmony to your family’s digital life’), which reminds us that no new movie is complete without smartphones in a leading role.
IT’S SAID that their liaison was duly rumbled by another one of the household’s nannies with an iPad, and it was splitsville. The point is, Mary Poppins it is not. But we wise women of Britain know in our waters that if you ship another woman into the marital home, especially a younger, willing and smiley service-woman who is not cross with her other half on a point of principle at all times, you have a potential cuckoo in the nest. It’s an accident waiting to happen. One father I know warned his wife: ‘Don’t hire any Swedish au pair girls because I’ll…’ You fill in the rest.
In the olden days, a nanny was more like Mrs Patmore in Downton. She wore a starched Norland-style uniform in brown or blue, she had a mono-bosom, took only half a day off a week, and would never eat, let alone sleep, with the family.
And the first rule of the nursery was that she answered to the lady of the house and the husband – who should know better than to s*** the staff – was out of bounds.
In The Sound Of Music, Maria was only permitted to become Baroness Von Trapp because Georg was a widower. Ditto in the forthcoming new musical about a nanny – Eva Rice’s Harriet, based on the Jilly Cooper romance – Miss Poole can mate with stormy writer Cory Erskine because his ghastly American movie-star wife has bolted and left him solo with the children.
Now, of course, nannies and au pairs are family ‘friends’. There is no green baize door and these crucial boundaries are blurred. This is fatal.
MEN wander round in their boxers, nannies in their thongs. Everyone calls each other dude, and it’s hard to tell who’s the nanny as they all look the same and do the same stuff. Mindy and Rossdale went hiking together (he was photographed patting her bum).
This hot mess in hearth and home doesn’t mean to say that fault doesn’t lie with ‘Dork and Mindy’, as we must think of them from now on.
It was Dork who apparently fouled the family nest.
It was Mindy who seemingly invaded the sacred space between man and wife.
But ‘ No Doubt’ Gwen, I regret to say, story-boarded their downfall.