Molly Shattuck left the hubby, kids and credit cards in Roland Park to spend a week waiting tables and ringing up groceries in a poor Pennsylvania coal mining town. For the new reality TV show Secret Millionaire, the wife of Constellation Energy Group CEO Mayo Shattuck lived incognito and on minimum wage as she looked for someone who could best use a bit of her wealth.
She mopped floors and stocked shelves. Took out the supermarket trash. Went hungry. And eventually gave away at least $100,000 of her own money to someone she barely knew.
No sweat, said Shattuck, a philanthropist who gives away money all the time, an ex-waitress who started in a relative's restaurant at 13, a mom who has household staff but still is a mom.
"I know people think I lead this, quote, unquote, glamorous life, but I'm wiping up dirty bums every day," Shattuck said. "I'm wiping up spills. I'm still doing the normal things you do as a mom and a wife."
That said, Shattuck did face a daunting challenge: Not looking like a million bucks.
Shattuck was told to dress down for the show, which debuts Dec. 3 on Fox. The former Ravens cheerleader still looked too good.
Try wearing a T-shirt from Target, they told her.
She was.
They gave her a T-shirt from Wal-Mart.
Still too good.
They bought her T-shirts that were really big so she looked, well, not really big, but several sizes bigger. Like, maybe a 4. She also messed up her hair.
(Not that Shattuck really let herself go. Deprived of her gym, she ran and kept to her usual push-up routine - 220 of them, every other day.)
"She's a beautiful, beautiful woman," said executive producer Greg Goldman. "She uglified herself up. She really made herself into a mess."
And so, a woman whose husband earned about $14 million last year managed to pass herself off in Shenandoah, Pa., as someone very much in need of a job.
She told people she was from western Pennsylvania, which she was, originally, and that she was trying to make a new start.
And those cameras trailing her?
For a documentary on starting over, she told them.
Shattuck did the filming back in the spring, but Fox just went public.
Her high-profile noblesse oblige comes as Constellation has just escaped bankruptcy, its shareholders have lost their shirts and its customers are still steamed about huge rate hikes. Isn't the timing a little awkward?
