Baby Face

Success hinged on Joelle Carreon’s mood. And at the moment, the 15-month-old girl had a runny nose, cookie crumbs caked around her mouth and a scowl as fierce as a Santa Ana wind.

Suddenly, with a slap of her chubby little hand, Joelle hurled her bowl of ravioli on the floor of the Studio City home. And an already-anxious crew of photographers, art directors, advertising staff, stylists and assorted minions spun into a frenzy.

For the task at hand--a Gerber’s baby food photo shoot--the crew needed a happy baby. A hungry baby.

Good thing Jimmy Wagner was there.

Wagner turned to Joelle and looked into her big brown eyes.

“Bah!” he said, startling her. “Bah! Bah!”

After a few sniffs, the tears stopped and, curious, Joelle stared back, enthralled with the bubbles Wagner was blowing. The baby threw her head back and squealed with delight. Then she picked up some ravioli and merrily munched away.

“She’s eating,” the cameraman said, snap-snapping photos with the urgency of a photojournalist at a packed news conference.

Once again, Wagner had saved the day. Hollywood has all kinds of “wranglers”--

specialists who handle everything from lions to llamas. Wagner, 48, is known as a baby wrangler.

Like a cowpoke herding horses, Wagner steers babies, toddlers and preschoolers into acting roles in movies, television and commercials. When a script calls for childhood contentment, he coaxes tots to smile and laugh by making goofy faces or bouncing a bright blue ball. When a shoot needs sleeping babies, Wagner soothes with his mesmerizing drone.

And when babies throw tantrums, exasperated producers and directors rely on Wagner to return order to the set.

“Jimmy is the one to go to,” said Meredith Fine, director of the youth division for Coast to Coast Talent Group near Hollywood. “Nothing is worse on a set than a baby who won’t stop crying. Sometimes, Jimmy is the only one who can get a baby to stop.”

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It might mean getting spaghetti flung in his face, being hit, sneezed on and soiled, or eating Gerber’s pureed peas and banana custard, hoping a baby will imitate him.

His bag of tricks includes blowing bubbles, shaking rattles and squeaking a brown plastic head. Those who have worked with him say his “magic” goes beyond play.

“Kids get swept up in his energy,” said Mary Bean, senior art director at Bromley Communications, a leading Latino ad agency based in San Antonio that worked on the Gerber’s baby food shoot. “It’s kind of like having Jerry Lewis on the set.”

Dwight Hovey, an on-set teacher and child welfare worker who has watched Wagner wrangle young children for the past six years, attributes the baby wrangler’s success to an ability to understand baby gurgles and facial expressions as if it were a separate language.

“I think it’s because there is a repressed clown inside of Wagner,” Hovey said. “My first impression was that he was a little bit wacko. Then I realized that he can genuinely talk with babies, and they respond.”

Wagner half-jokingly called his methods crazy.

“I have a secret confidential talk with the babies,” he said, speaking in the low voice he uses with children. “I tell them what to do and how to get it done.”

While talking to babies, Wagner also locks his eyes with theirs, staring so intently “into the inner depths of understanding, cutting time and space, baby-hood and adulthood, reaching their souls. It’s magic.”

He chuckled. “Maybe I’m crazy,” said Wagner, who has a master’s degree in child development and experience working in his native Chicago as a therapist specializing in autistic and emotionally disturbed children. “I don’t know what it is, but they do what I tell them.”

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Few adults can connect with young children, say those in the entertainment industry, so few baby wranglers exist. And not everyone has Wagner’s natural touch.

“One lady dresses like an elf,” said Hovey, the on-set teacher. At another shoot, he said, the crew brought in a frantic New Yorker who “upset the baby and made everyone uptight.”

Uptight also describes some parents. Wagner’s duties include calming nervous--sometimes hysterical--parents who hover, bite their nails and cry. One mother of a baby who refused to act on cue started fretting: “You hate my baby.”

“I would never hate a baby,” said Wagner, who is childless himself. “I love babies.”

Wagner usually helps in the casting. Not only is he looking for outgoing babies, but also parents who are not uncomfortable with a stranger “wrangling” their children.

“Sometimes the baby is perfect, but the parent isn’t,” he said, explaining that hovering parents distract the child. “We can’t use that baby.”

Hollywood producers and directors often view baby wranglers as a luxury rather than a necessity, Wagner and others say. Instead of spending the extra money for the services of a wrangler, producers sometimes just fire a crying baby and hire a different one.

Wagner declined to discuss his earnings, but he said he lives “very well” in Studio City, estimating that he works about nine months out of the year as a baby wrangler. He supplements his income working in props and as a character actor.

Although the baby jobs come sporadically, Wagner stays busy, dividing his time among advertising campaigns, television and dramatic features. Among other gigs, he has wrangled babies on commercials for Mattel, Mazda, Quaker Oats, Fisher-Price and Pampers.

His television work includes the sitcom “Friends.” In film, he saved scenes in “Baby Geniuses,” “George of the Jungle” and “Baby Boom.”

He credits “Baby Boom” with launching his career, by chance. It was the late 1980s, and Wagner worked as a prop assistant on a scene in which Diane Keaton walks into a large dance hall carrying a 13-month-old girl.

But the strangers and stimulation--including 300 extras and hundreds of twinkling lights lining the dance hall--frightened the baby. She started crying and screaming, sending the cast and crew into a panic.

“Everyone went berserk,” Wagner recalled. “The adults started screaming and pulling their hair and no one knew what to do.”

Not knowing what to do, directors, stylists and producers swarmed the baby, trying to calm her, but instead sending her into an even louder hysterical fit. Even her parents couldn’t help.

Wagner dug into his drawer of props, pulled out a bubble kit and pushed through the crowd. He looked into the baby’s eyes and startled her with a “Boo!” a tactic aimed at diverting the baby’s fear.

She stopped crying. Wagner started blowing bubbles, lulling her into a calm.

*

Wagner dabbed the baby’s eyes and shouted instructions to director Charles Shyer: “If you want to shoot, do it now.”

He did. Keaton carried a blissful baby while, beyond the range of the camera lens, Wagner blew hypnotizing bubbles.

After the shoot, Shyer fired Wagner as prop assistant. “I told him, ‘You’ve got a new job,”’ the director remembered. “From now on you direct babies.”

“It was an opportunity of a lifetime,” Wagner said.

“Ever since, I’ve been playing with babies.”