—Kara, Pittsburgh
The B!tch Replies: The most likely reason has to do with rumors involving nuclear disaster, and no, I'm not making this up, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
You'd think the answer would be obvious. Evian—naive spelled backwards—is reserved only for people willing to pay premium prices for water that tastes like Gerard Depardieu's scalp.
But the true reason may be more complex than that.
According to top celebrity caterer David Mintz in Toronto, stars are simply turning toward other brands, specifically, Fiji, or the Norwegian water known as Voss. Both brands are ubiquitous in show business these days. So, maybe stars think the easiest way to get either Fiji or Voss—aside from specifically requesting Fiji or Voss—is to ban Evian.
Both Ashlee Simpson and her ex, the delightfully spiky Ryan Cabrera, cannot stand Evian in their dressing rooms, according to news reports.
Ditto with Clay Aiken and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose contract rider reportedly states, "no Evian or other local spring water." (The band instead prefers water culled from a still glacier.)
Other alleged Evian haters include John Kerry and K-Fed.
But the most fascinating anti-Evian theory comes from top on-set caterer Tom Morales, whose TomKats Inc. provides food to about 25 movie sets a year. Morales also has worked thousands of music concerts. (Currently, TomKats is catering on the sets of HBO's Big Love and The Sopranos and ABC's Six Degrees.)
According to Morales, the no-Evian clause is a holdover from years ago, when a rumor started circulating that the radiation cloud from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster blew straight from Ukraine to Evian's water source in France.
"That's the only reason I've ever been given for not serving Evian," says Morales, who has fed everybody from Nicole Kidman to Gwyneth Paltrow. "I guarantee that's what it is."
(Paltrow, of course, never orders bottled water of any kind. Why do that when you can get ice water from your own veins whenever you want?)
A spokeswoman for Evian denies that any Chernobyl radiation has touched the company's water.
"I've been with the brand for two years, and I've never heard a word about that," the flack told me. The thing about Depardieu's scalp, however, can be neither confirmed nor denied.
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