“You're looking for Mary Poppins, Rose, and she doesn't exist. I'll find someone.” And in no time he'd settled on Sandy. “She's not much to look at,” he said. “But the princess loves her and she makes us both laugh.”

When Sandy had started the job, she'd been a little overawed to be working in the household of the famous Bobby Manning, but she'd quickly learned to relax around all of them, and she proved to be a terrific nanny—smart, warm, and nurturing. Rose felt secure leaving her precious daughter in Sandy's capable hands. Not that Carrie was alone with Sandy very much; Bobby kept his baby daughter with him most of the time. Once a week he and Sandy and the baby had lunch with Lu at Lindy's or the Edison Hotel Coffee Shop.

“We've got a club going,” Bobby told Rose. “The princess is our Head High Honcho, Lu and I are the Lowly Peons, and Sandy is the Head Peon. We call ourselves the Gang of Four. If you'd like to come along it'll be the Gang of Five. We've got room.”

But somehow Rose always seemed to be busy working with Father Xavier when the Gang of Four met. The truth was, she wasn't sure she wanted to watch her mother and Bobby—the two Broadway giants—work their magic on her baby daughter. Carrie already had way too much show business in her life as far as Rose was concerned.

Yet things with Bobby were so much better than they had been—it was almost like a miracle. He decided he wanted to stay home more in the evenings, so they cut back on the frantic social life Rose had grown to dislike. Now she and Carrie had him all to themselves several nights a week. When Carrie was a year old, Rose realized that it had been that long since there had been a Girl. So even when Bobby gave her a diamond pendant to commemorate Carrie's first birthday, Rose didn't say anything. She felt guilty about the waste of money, but she didn't want to do anything to derail their new life.

IT USUALLY TOOK Bobby a year and a half to write a musical. For the first six months he'd “cook.” That was his word for the many false starts he had to go through to get himself on the right track. Scenes would be considered, sketched out, and discarded; songs would be started and abandoned. “I'm clearing away the underbrush,” he'd say. Rose thought she'd be screaming in frustration if she had to try and fail so many times, but Bobby would cheerfully throw away pages that represented weeks of effort, and say, “You don't know what'll work until you find out what doesn't.”