Hogg says she is to newborns what Robert Redford’s character was to horses in the three-hankie movie “The Horse Whisperer.” She says she can “read” a fretful baby and figure out what it needs. Ballantine Books believed in her and paid her a whopping $750,000 for a two-book deal. The first, “Secrets of the Baby Whisperer,” has become a best seller, and her 29-city author tour aims to make her name as familiar as Dr. Spock. Hogg’s premise is simple but enticing for REM-deprived parents: you can have a new baby and still get your beauty sleep. “I think that by taking the proper steps, babies don’t have to be disruptive,” says Hogg. “You should be able to lead a normal life.”
She counts a host of L.A. power moms among her clients, including Jodie Foster and Jamie Lee Curtis. Twentieth Century Fox Television president Dana Walden says Hogg moved in for six weeks after Walden’s daughter was born. “With Tracy’s help, our daughter now sleeps 11 hours a night. Some people we know who have babies–smart people who run studios–are still racing into their babies’ rooms when they wake up in the middle of the night.” But that peaceful slumber doesn’t come cheap. Hogg charges $500 for a two-hour phone consultation and $1,000 a day to stay at your house.
You can’t afford to spend what could be a year of college tuition on a baby nurse? You can buy the book for $22. It’s filled with quickie questionnaires, cute acronyms and your basic over-the-back-fence wisdom. It advises new moms to put Baby on a schedule and to figure out if Junior is bawling from hunger or simply fatigue. But some of her advice is downright kooky. If your child cries when you put him down for a nap in his crib, pick him up, soothe him and put him down again. Repeat this until he settles–up to 120 times, if necessary.
“All that picking up and putting down, it seems a little wearying for the parents,” points out Dr. George Cohen, editor of the American Academy of Pediatrics book “Guide to Your Child’s Sleep.” “It doesn’t sound very practical.”
A registered nurse in England, Hogg left her two daughters, then 8 and 11, with her mother and moved to L.A. in 1992. Unable to use her nursing license here, she began taking care of babies. She had, as they say in the movie industry, “great word of mouth,” and soon Hogg opened her own baby-equipment store in Encino, Calif. Her book and her Web site claim that she got a master’s degree in hypnotherapy from the University of California, Irvine. But a university spokeswoman says they have no record of her. Earlier, according to her book and Web site, Hogg was “assigned” to the “Great Orman Street Children’s Hospital,” an apparent reference to London’s famed Great Ormond Street Hospital, where she, in fact, attended a three-weekend-long training course. And a “stint with the World Health Organization in India” turns out to refer to a two-week trip she took there in 1989.
A Ballantine publicist says the company is standing behind its author. When pressed, Hogg herself grows vague, then teary, then dismisses questions about her credentials with a brisk, nannylike “Never mind.” Says Hogg, “I know that I’ve helped a lot of people along the way. And nothing can take away from that.” For now, the success of her book has the phones in her store ringing off the hook, and she’s already working on her next volume, “Secrets of the Baby Whisperer for Toddlers.” She knows those babies she’s been “reading” are bound to grow up.
