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 talked too
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 up on Dre-
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 surreal to find
yourself suddenly in communication with her, like
meeting a former babysitter years later, each of you
older, wiser, and a little wider, the dynamics of your
relationship subtly changed. At 62, Drescher is both a
whole new woman—a cancer survivor with a foundation to
advocate for early detection, prevention, and policy; a marijuana
evangelist; and a fiery political opinionator with a snappy anti-
capitalist bent—and exactly the one you feel you know. Her text
messages are spangled with kiss-print emoji. She loves an
espresso martini, the height of ’90s elegance.
Back home on the Upper West Side after a stop at a Columbus
Avenue bodega for $186 worth of fresh flowers, which she
arranges and distributes across a number of vases, Drescher has
quick-changed into a terrycloth robe and UGGs, a diamond ten-
nis bracelet on her wrist, while her ever-present assistant, Jor-
dan, lights a fire in the living-room hearth. Drescher’s company
is called Uh-Oh Productions, and emails from Jordan, 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.”
“The Nanny 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
to Broadway. Dan Levy, a producer and writer for the ABC show
The Goldbergs, created a “Fran Drescher type” mother figure in
his new NBC sitcom, Indebted, which premiered last month; he
told every development executive that he’d pictured Fran Dre-
scher in the part and then, bowing to Occam’s razor, cast Fran
Drescher.Indebted gives Drescher her first starring network role
in years, and one, she says with relief, that her elderly parents in
Florida and their friends can find in the newspaper TV listings.
She is even working on a cabaret act that will take her to Café
Carlyle in New 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.