Higher Help

Higher Help – The butler is back, but what are the new rules for a modern-day master and servant? – Hannah Rand

Vogue Australia – March 2005

I consider myself a low-maintenance type but have recently enlisted a small army of hired assistants to help me sort through life’s laundry. That’s laundry as a metaphor. I have a cleaner who does actually deal with my unwashed clothes, but I also have a gardener who keeps my humble patch of turf trimmed. I employ an accountant to sort my taxes and a facialist to make up for my less-than-diligent home-beauty regimen. There’s a naturopath to smooth out life’s potholes, a masseur to iron out the knots in my back and a hairstylist and colourist to tame my mane.

This is frugal by some standards. Donna Karan has a personal chef on hand to help her stay trim without going hungry. Gwyneth Paltrow was so dependent on her acupuncturist (he’s also her Ashtanga yoga teacher and Indian medicine guru) that she moved house across London to be near him. No self-respecting celebrity leaves home without a personal assistant in tow to meet their demands and manage their lifestyles. And it seems they are getting harder to dispense with.

The Beckham’s personal butler John Giles-Larkin resigned in December because he reportedly couldn’t cope with Victoria’s demands. He was quickly replaced in time for Christmas when Britain’s second royal family hired another butler, at the cost of GBP1,000 (around $2,500) a day, to organize the rest of the staff to put lunch on the table.

The personal service industry is having a renaissance after several decades of lying in state. Far from the make-do, do-it-yourself mentality of our parents’ generation, we’d rather get others to do it than us.

Staff who traditionally ‘lived-in’ are now the assistants and cleaners who ‘live-out’. We’ve moved on from the days of ‘upstairs, downstairs’, when personal staff were meant to be seen and not heard, when fires were miraculously lit and boots were left outside doors, shiny and clean each morning. In those dark ages personal staff worked for a pittance in return for food and lodging and, if they made it to the lofty position of butler or housekeeper, a rise in status. Thankfully the master-servant dynamic, dramatically illustrated by the 18th century Duke of Portland, who insisted his staff turned their faces away from his family when they met in the long corridors of his stately pile, has undergone a seismic shift.

‘There has been a massive leap in attitude,’ agrees Pamela Spruce of Australian Butler Services, which provides butlers and valets to Australia’s elite. ‘The butler of yesteryear was paid very little money and was there out of a sense of duty. Today the relationship is strictly professional and the butler is a service provider or estate manager rather than (a member of) the household staff.’

Whilst few of us indulge in a butler, most of us use the personal service industry without a second’s thought. But how comfortable do we really feel about employing these lifestyle assistants? The old way is hopelessly outdated, but in its wake is something of a vacuum. The rule book is still being written when it comes to how to manage these new relationships.

It’s sod’s law, of course, that you run into your therapist at the most inappropriate time (I’m sure there are those, for example, who bump into their sex therapists while on a first date with a new flame) but it can work the other way, too. One of Spruce’s butlers encountered his employer at last year’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. ‘We expect our butlers to represent their employers 24/7 but sometimes they have to let down their hair’, she says. ‘This butler’s employer tapped him on the shoulder as he was dancing the early hours away in a nightclub. Even though the employer approached him, and not the other way around, the butler said hello, and then left. Discretion is our number-one priority’. The Remains of the Day meets Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The Duke of Portland would turn in his impeccably tended grave.’