44 THE CUT | MARCH 2–15, 2020
What you first need to understand is that
I learned joie de vivre from The Nanny. Literally, as in the
phrase: It sneaked into the theme song to describe the stock-in-
trade of the flashy girl from Flushing, as the Nanny was, and as
Fran Drescher, its star and creator, was. Ann Hampton Callaway
wrote that song for her and did its jazzy performance, a step-
ping-stone on the way to writing hits for Barbra Streisand,
which, if you’re a Jewish girl from the boroughs, as Drescher is,
is a little like saying Callaway wrote for some little yeshiva Yentl
before ascending, pen in hand, to work for G-d Herself.
The joy of Fran! The Jewish girl onscreen who wasn’t a
meeskite but a bombshell, who turned what could have been a
career-killer—a face that could launch a thousand ships paired
with a voice that could sink them—and made it, through gale-
force charm, a selling point, a calling card. Thirty years’ worth
of journalists have struggled to describe her nasal whinny. I like
Los Angeles magazine’s version: the voice of “a Bloomies per-
fume spritzer in heat.” Teachers told her to lose it, and she tried.
But when she trained it out of herself, she lost her whole person-
ality and spoke at a snail’s pace. She remembers drawling her
way through an audition for a part in an epic television drama
and losing out to Jane Seymour. “They said to my
manager, ‘You know, she did fine, but she talkedtoo
slow, and it’s only an 18-hour miniseries,’ ” Drescher
says. “So that was kind of the end of that.”
If you are of the generation that grew uponDre-
scher—those of us who were impressionable,and
often latchkey, kids during her nannying days,from
1993 to 1999—it is more than a little surrealtofind
yourself suddenly in communication withher, like
meeting a former babysitter years later, eachofyou
older, wiser, and a little wider, the dynamicsofyour
relationship subtly changed. At 62, Drescheris botha
whole new woman—a cancer survivor witha foundationto
advocate for early detection, prevention, and policy;a marijuana
ev angelist; and a fiery political opinionator witha snappyanti-
capitalist bent—and exactly the one you feelyouknow. Hertext
messages are spangled with kiss-print emoji.Shelovesan
espresso martini, the height of ’90s elegance.
Back home on the Upper West Side after a stopat a Columbus
Avenue bodega for $186 worth of fresh flowers,whichshe
arranges and distributes across a number of vases,Drescherhas
quick-changed into a terrycloth robe and UGGs,a diamondten-
nis bracelet on her wrist, while her ever-presentassistant,Jor-
dan, lights a fire in the living-room hearth. Drescher’scompany
is called Uh-Oh Productions, and emailsfromJordan,dis-
patches from and about Fran, have been popping up on my
phone for days as simply “Uh-Oh.”
Drescher spends most of her time in Malibu, where she has a
house on the ocean and a regular table at Nobu. But she keeps an
apartment in New York in an Arts and Crafts–style building just
off the park, where she once shared a wall with Madonna. Here,
among rattan chairs and Asian antiques, most of which predate
her in the apartment—she bought it furnished from a decorator—
Drescher lives softly, a star in temporary residence. Framed photos
of her with potentates—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe
Biden—grace a side table. (She hasn’t yet chosen a 2020 candidate,
though fans who have been stoked by her anti-capitalist sallies may
be surprised to hear that, while she’s Bernie-curious, “I do like Amy,
and I do think that Joe has a lot of experience.”) In the kitchen is a
framed cover of New York Dog magazine featuring Drescher with
Esther, one of her late, beloved Pomeranians. Esther’s predecessor
Chester was a guest star on The Nanny.
The line between her lives onscreen and off can feel blurry.
When a phone call from her mother interrupts for a few
minutes—a periodontal appointment is discussed—I have to
remind myself that the person on the other end is Sylvia
Drescher, whom I have never seen, not Sylvia Fine, her Nanny
equivalent on the plastic-covered couch. Fran isn’t Fran Fine,
the door-to-door makeup saleswoman turned nanny to three
sad, spoiled, Anglo-American scamps and their blustery Brit-
ish father (“Mistuhhh Sheffield!”), but her characters tend to
be avatars of their creator. Most of them, she points out, are
called Fran. “I have the good fortune of being recognizable,” she
says. “For people to roll out the red carpet for me wherever I go
in the world, it’s such heaven. Sometimes people say, ‘I don’t
like Paris. They’re not nice to me.’ And it’s like, ‘Really? I’m like
Jerry Lewis there.’ ” She is Une Nounou d’Enfer—“A Nanny
From Hell,” as the show was titled in France—and La Tata, as
it was called in Italy. The Nanny has been syndicated and
adapted around the world, both dubbed in its origi-
nal version and recast in remakes. In more than 25
years, it has never not been showing somewhere.
The Fran Generation is now grown up, and its mem-
bers have carried Drescher with them. “I watched a lot
of TV as a kid, at night when my parents were working,”
says Broad City’s Ilana Glazer, one of Drescher’s spiri-
tual descendants. “Fran as the nanny was like my
nanny.” Glazer cast and directed her on an episode of
Broad City as her character’s aunt. “I have watched so
many hours, every episode of the show,” says Glazer.
“She makes up part of the structure of my brain.”
“TheNanny was very formative,” says Rachel Bloom, the
Emmy-winning composer, lyricist, and star of Crazy Ex-Girl-
friend,who is working with Drescher on a Nanny musical headed
toBroadway. Dan Levy, a producer and writer for the ABC show
TheGoldbergs, created a “Fran Drescher type” mother figure in
hisnewNBC sitcom, Indebted, which premiered last month; he
toldevery development executive that he’d pictured Fran Dre-
scherinthe part and then, bowing to Occam’s razor, cast Fran
Drescher.Indebted gives Drescher her first starring network role
inyears,and one, she says with relief, that her elderly parents in
Floridaand their friends can find in the newspaper TV listings.
Sheis even working on a cabaret act that will take her to Café
CarlyleinNew York, the first in its history, said Carlyle’s Jennifer
Cooke, that will not include singing.
It’s worth asking why, 21 years after the end of The Nanny,
we’re still in her thrall. It’s not just that those who are over-
whelmed by the chaos of the internet—which is to say, all of
us—see the feel-good sitcoms of the ’90s as sort of a cultural
balm, much of it accessible now, ironically enough, on the
internet. (The Nanny remains confoundingly hard to stream,
though it is a mark of digital glut that I discovered the first two
seasons are available on something called the Roku Channel,
which it turns out I have.) It’s also Drescher herself. The Nan-
ny’s rags-to-riches story—which is also her rags-to-riches
story—gave us a Borscht Belt Maria von Trapp with an exuber-
ance, even a vulgarity, that wasn’t an obstacle to overcome.MICHAEL KORS
COLLECTION dress,
at michaelkors.com;
BALENCIAGA shoes,
at 620 Madison Ave.;
CARTIER ring, at
cartier.com; DAVID
WEBB ring, at 942
Madison Ave.