What does it mean when a celebrity gets a part of their body insured for millions?
—Kate, Draper, Utah
The B!tch Replies: Surely you're responding to reports that Tom Jones has insured his chest hair for 6.8 million quid, luv. That rumor surfaced earlier this month.
The Las Vegas staple has denied it, but that's entirely not the point. Plenty of other celebrities have insured various body parts, securing very large, very real payouts if their legs or faces or hands or badonkadonks suddenly go away, or, at least, fail to function on an A-list level.
According to media reports, Lloyd's of London has covered Bruce Springsteen's voice for $6 million, Claudia Schiffer's face for $5 million and Heidi Klum's gams for a single day while she shot a commercial. The reported policy value: $52 million.
(As for the famous ballyhoo about Jennifer Lopez insuring her nether half-moon, Lloyd's has dismissed that chestnut as false.)
For help with this question, I bothered Harry Ennevor, president of E.G. Bowman insurance brokerage, based in Manhattan. As soon as I got him on the blower, he generously offered to insure my incredibly lucrative hands, but seeing as how they're priceless, we were forced to move on to your actual question.
Insurance companies work together with the potential client to decide how much a body part is worth, he says.
"Before they write the insurance policy, they go through the person's history," says Ennevor, who says he helped arrange insurance for Dan Rather's face several years ago. "If you're a writer wanting to insure your hands, we might go into your educational history—have you written any books, for example—to see how much the hands might be worth to your income."
To trigger a payout, something really bad has to happen to that insured body part. In the United States, the body part usually has to be completely severed, or gouged, or what have you, Ennevor says. In Europe, policies tend to pay out once someone merely loses the use of said body part. (Hence the popularity of overseas-based outfits like Lloyd's.)
All this said, know this: Insuring a body party is largely a vanity move, experts tell me. Veteran publicist Howard Bragman and Dave Evans, senior veep of the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, both make a good point: Disability insurance already helps to cover potential losses of income. And it's a lot more common.
"Usually," Evans says, "insuring a body part falls under one of three categories: PR, vanity or preference."
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