Jean is pretty much hard to describe -- but I'll try. She may well be a hardnosed businesswoman, but anyone who would let it end there simply does not see the private side of her. It's true that they called her Crabapple, among other things, behind her back. It's true that she built her business single-handedly and turned it into enough of a success to warrant opening a branch office and hiring a staff to run it. In fact, the first time we see her in her role as boss she's having a shoe thrown at her front door by a woman she just fired. Speaking of being fired, she's jealous of Daisy and causes her to be fired. To her credit, she never intended that Daisy be removed from the rolls; she only wanted her to be removed from her own living room. The moment she heard that Daisy was fired, she orders Sally Curtis to re-hire her.
But she's also a person who is unwilling in her private life to stand up for what she believes. When she hires Gwen Flack to work in her home it becomes clear that Jean is also a tender woman. She knows that Gwen isn't working out, but she doesn't put on her "big boss" hat and dismiss her because she doesn't want to hurt Gwen's feelings. She knows that because of Penny's constant "poorjeaning" their relationship is riddled with strains, but she doesn't want to confront her for fear of hurting her feelings. At home Jean is almost completely spontaneous and almost always instead of being as direct as she might be at the office, she opts to take the easy way out. She might be imitating a telephone or saying that Lionel is a psychiatrist or pretending she has a vision problem or trying to order room service in the privacy of the hotel bathroom -- no matter. Rather than provide a simple explanation that would close the chapter, she gets deeper and deeper into a situation. When she doesn't know exactly what to do she looks like a deer caught in the headlights and the first thing she thinks to do is lie. And it doesn't seem to bother her when she drags Lionel into it either. She's just fortunate in the sense that he always seems to go along, rather than end the charade on the spot.
What I find particularly funny about Jean is the lengths to which she goes to avoid telling the truth. Her lies are not well thought out. Usually it takes Lionel to point this out to her. She makes up the whole story about Sandy's wanting to see Harry , not really bothering to think that he might mention to Sandy that he's there because she invited him to be there. She tells Penny and Stephen that Lionel was a psychiatrist. She never imagined that Stephen might actually want to be treated by him. She tells Lionel that she ordered room service, but it never occurred to her that when no food was delivered to the room Lionel might doubt the truth of her story. She's good enough to develop the rough outlines of a lie, but she fails miserably in the execution. It's not easy for her to say she's wrong. She won't tell Lionel the vacuum isn't broken. She won't admit that the office can run well without her. She doesn't want to say she needs the help of a psychiatrist.
She's easily flustered. Although her wedding day started out reasonably well, she was such a wreck as the time grew near that she developed problems with her jaw. She was so distracted by Sally Curtis' perfection that she covered Sally's resume with pickle juice at their first meeting and nearly fell over and broke her neck at a latter meeting in Sally's office.
I don't want to make her out to be a slapstick kind of a woman -- even though she's been known to bark like a dog to frighten away intruders and she's once been caught doing a rather poor imitation of a telephone. She's certainly got a warm and tender side to her -- witness the way she took in Sandy and treated her as a member of the family. She was clearly heartbroken when it appeared as though Sandy might leave. She immediately warmed up to Rocky and within hours of meeting him responded as though she were already part of the family. She saw the injustice in the Alan/Dorcas "new money" crowd at Hampshire and when she had to she was able to manage that confrontation without resorting to any lies. She lost an important client rather than let Lionel go to the book cover shoot alone. And she arranged that afternoon tea for the residents of the Home for the Elderly.