Molding Loyal Pamperers for the Newly Rich

By Blaine Harden

At butler boot camp, Lori Meyers, who wants to work for a very rich family in a Fifth Avenue apartment with a view of Central Park, was singled out from her classmates and scolded. "You are a little too slick for this profession, Missy," said Mary Louise Starkey, founder of the Starkey International Institute for Household Management, a school in Denver that markets itself as the Harvard of high-end household help. "The lady of the house will get rid of you in 10 minutes." A discerning household manager, which is the Starkey Institute's gender-neutral term for butler, would never, ever look more fetching than the lady of the house, especially if that lady is one of those young "trophy" wives, who tend toward insecurity and prickliness, Mrs. Starkey said. Ms. Meyers, a fit and attractive woman of 35, nodded compliantly. She conceded that she might have to retool her appearance to land the $60,000-to-$120,000-a-year salaries that household managers command in Manhattan. Having left her career as a chiropractor, Ms. Meyers is paying about $7,200 for an eight-week course in the elegant care and feeding of the rich.

These are lucrative and stressful times in the annals of household help in the United States. Never before have there been so many wealthy Americans with so many big houses that need tending. Yet many of these new rich need as much schooling in the art of living large as the students in butler school, according to Mrs. Starkey and many others in the service trade. The number of American households worth $10 million or more has quadrupled in the last decade, jumping to 275,000 from 65,000, said Edward N. Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University and an expert on wealth. The increase in the number of people who can afford a butler has no precedent in the country's history, except perhaps in the boom years of the 1920's, Dr. Wolff said. He estimated that up to a fifth of those worth at least $10 million -- about 55,000 households -- are in the New York region. There has likewise been an unparalleled swelling in the size of the American house. When the Census Bureau began measuring in 1984, only 7 percent of new houses were larger than 3,000 square feet (often considered the size threshold for household help). By the second quarter of this year, 17 percent of new houses were at least that big, and many were much, much bigger, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Its surveys show that the largest and most expensive of these houses are concentrated in the Northeast.

These numbers scream for good help. Mrs. Starkey's 10-year-old school, based in a Georgian mansion near the Colorado Capitol dome, now graduates about 60 certified household managers a year. She plans to expand next year with a second training mansion in the Washington, D.C., area. Carol Scudere, who owns Professional Domestics in Columbus, Ohio, said, "I wish I had more students and more applicants because I could place them all." She is the director of training at the four-year-old school, which competes with Mrs. Starkey's. In New York, Washington and Los Angeles, placement agencies that specialize in servants for the rich say that the demand for experienced household managers exceeds the supply.

Exactly how many household managers are working in the United States is not known. Until Mrs. Starkey's school opened in Denver, most either had been trained in the great homes of the very rich or had emigrated from England, where there are training schools and a long tradition of butlers learning their craft as underbutlers. After a long postwar slump for butlers in Europe (when the number of butlers in England shrank to the hundreds from more than 18,000), demand there appears to be rising. The International Guild of Professional Butlers plans to open a school in Amsterdam. "People don't want to deal with vendors, they don't want to cook, they don't want to hear about bickering and jealousy among the staff," said Keith Greenhouse, president of the Pavillion Agency in Manhattan."They want the butler to deal with it."

There is, however, a persistent and sometimes destabilizing undertow in this flood of big money, big houses and big demand for grade-A help. Many Americans new to wealth -- and three out of four households worth more than $10 million were minted in the past decade -- say they are uncertain about how to manage their servants, how to pay them and even how to talk to them. Their parents, in many cases, were not rich. They did not grow up with servants in the house. They sometimes are too chummy with the servants or too demanding, or both. Upstairs among the multimillionaires and downstairs among their better-trained servants, there can be grumbling, miscommunication and resentment. "We have learned not to include servants in family functions," said Mary Campbell, who grew up in a two-bedroom house and now lives in two large homes, in Boston and the Berkshires. Her husband is Lewis B. Campbell, chief executive of Textron Inc., which makes Cessna aircraft and Bell helicopters. "We have been burned through the years," added Mrs. Campbell, who three months ago hired a household manager trained at the Starkey Institute. "People took advantage of our niceness. They took advantage of friendship. They lied about their hours. They told other people about our business."

An experienced Manhattan butler says that working for the newly rich is almost always annoying. "Nouveau riches tell you the price of things," the butler said with a sniff. "I have worked for people who brag in front of their kids about how much their statuary art costs; then their kids brag to their friends. Americans also don't know how to draw the line about being too familiar." The butler, who was born in England, complained that many wealthy Americans do not even know basic table manners. "They don't know how to use silverware. People leave their knives and forks on table at all different angles instead of putting them together to show they are finished."

To iron out wrinkles in wealthy households, Mrs. Starkey preaches professional management and personal boundaries. Her students are taught to trim their nose hairs, wax their eyebrows, use a yardstick to space plates at the dinner table and always call their employers by their surnames and use the proper courtesy titles. Mrs. Starkey also drills her clients. During home inspections, she advises prospective employers to tell their household managers many details about their personal lives, from how they like their coffee in the morning, to favorite television shows, to which child is related to which ex-spouse. Mrs. Starkey repeatedly alerts clients to the insidious dangers of familiarity. "You have chosen the profession of service," Mrs. Starkey told Ms. Meyers and seven other aspiring household managers at the Starkey Institute. "You are about to be propelled into a world many of us never see, a world of plenty, of power and of indulgence. Remember, you are going to be paid as a professional."

The morning course in "boundaries" at the Starkey Institute raised these sticky questions: What if the lady of the house asks the household manager for help in adhering to a strict low-fat diet? And what if the household manager, while working in her employer's bedroom, finds an empty container of double-chocolate ice cream? "Throw it in the trash and keep it to yourself," said Jenny Hookey, a former household manager for Gov. John M. Engler of Michigan and an instructor at the school. "You are not supposed to be your employer's conscience." Mrs. Hookey rose from her chair in a basement classroom of the mansion-cum-school and wrote these initials on the blackboard: YBYJ. "You bet your job if you cross a boundary," Mrs. Hookey said, explaining what is perhaps the most dismal fact of life in the service trade. Servants have almost no job security. If an employer does not like your look, your attitude or your work, you are out, no matter how well trained or highly paid you may be. In a class on "personal style," taught by Mrs. Starkey, students were asked to describe the character of the wealthy people for whom they hope to work. The class volunteered these words: selfish, intelligent, aggressive, rushed, motivated, stuck-up, philanthropic and judgmental. Why would you want to work for people like that? Mrs. Starkey asked her class.

The answer, gleaned from separate interviews with all eight students in the class, seems to be as follows: Those who aspire to the butler trade are middle-aged people in post-marriage, post-child-bearing phases of their lives. Ms. Meyers was the exception, and she has been advised to compensate for her relative youth. A beautician who consults for the Starkey Institute told her: Trim the blond, highlighted hair. Lose the showy earrings. Lay off the dark red lip-liner. Most of the students said they enjoyed taking care of expensive things. Many have worked for restaurants or in catering, luxury sales or property management. They are intrigued by the idea of working for a very rich family with many houses and jetting around the world. One student, Chief Petty Officer Samuel Sutton, 39, has worked for several generals and admirals in Washington as a chef and a senior household manager, and he is hoping to go to work soon in the White House. He said he went to the Starkey Institute to polish his skills and prepare for 2003, when he will leave the Navy and look for a household manager job that will double his military pay of about $40,000.

A more typical student was Ingrid Lawrence, 56, who is divorced with no children. In "personal image awareness" class, Ms. Lawrence, a tall German-born woman with ramrod posture and an expensive but understated wardrobe, was judged to have a near perfect look for service: tasteful, elegant and simple. "I am kind of fussy," said Ms. Lawrence, who recently quit her job at Neiman Marcus in San Diego, where she sold china, crystal and silver. "I love housework. I love to be surrounded by beautiful things. It will give me pleasure to take care of these beautiful things in a private house." Ms. Lawrence explained that in her own house in San Diego, she used only fresh linen napkins, never paper. She kept her linens damp in plastic bags in her refrigerator, she said, so that she could iron them as needed, obtaining the crispest and most wrinkle-free napkins possible. In ironing class at the Starkey Institute, when a teacher mentioned the linen-in-the-refrigerator trick, Ms. Lawrence smiled knowingly.

At the end of a grueling 12-hour day at the Starkey mansion, all the students gathered in the basement over dinner to watch "The Remains of the Day," the 1993 film in which Anthony Hopkins plays an emotionally remote English butler. The butler, Stevens, resolutely refuses throughout the film to judge the character of his employer, Lord Darlington, even as he makes a national fool of himself by appeasing the Nazis in the days before World War II. Near the end of the film, the butler is asked how he could endure working for such a despicable man. "I was his butler," Stevens replies. "I was there to serve him, not to agree or disagree."

Although the students laughed during parts of the film, especially when servants ironed The Times of London, it struck most of them as profoundly sad. The next day in class, however, Mrs. Starkey said that Stevens had had it exactly right. "If you start judging your employers," she said, "your days are numbered."