Bottled water - 15 August 1997

I don’t know when the phrase "status symbol" came into daily usage – the flaunting of an object, some possession, to show that while all men might be created equal, you’re a little more equal than most.

I suppose it’s an impulse that has always needed satisfying in human beings. In medieval times – for that matter, in modern times in some countries I could name – to own a private army was the thing. Heraldry was an early and very impressive form of being unusually posh and it’s an urge that has persisted, nay flourished, in our time. Witness the ads in newspapers and magazines everywhere to have your family tree traced, no matter what your name: Demont, Morency, Smith, Jones, Cook.

I once knew a man in Chicago, a very affable, nice man, who yet couldn’t quite forgive his parents for having been so humble. He was one of those rare poor boys who realised the American myth: work hard and you’ll get to be a multi-millionaire. He did. He left school as soon as legally possible in order to peddle books from door to door. He didn’t read them, but he liked to be around them. In time, he was running a bookstore, then a small publishing house; and by his 40s was on his way to becoming the president, the chief executive officer, of a giant publisher of world renown. Now began his campaign to be somebody.

The old rich of Chicago, which means money gone through, say, three generations, they built spacious houses out in the country about an hour’s carriage ride from the heat and bustle, the majesty and squalor of the city. This was the custom everywhere in the eastern and middle western cities. Until the automobile came in, nobody built a country retreat much more than 10, say 15, miles out of town.

Well this man was, by the standard of the old Chicago families, new money; and, as everywhere on earth, he was patronised by old money. So he built himself a fine, rambling ranch house on the top of the Hollywood Hills – in Hollywood, California, that is – for by the time he was truly rich, the jet airplane was coming in and slipping off 2,000 miles to your country shack at weekends was impressive even to old Chicagoans.

He set the house up with the standard Hollywood requirements, a housekeeper, cook, gardener and the pool. A pool was compulsory for anybody building a house of any pretension in Hollywood. The really grand thing was to have a grand pool and never use it.

Well this man wasn’t a bit solemn about having his status symbols, but he had to have them all the same; and by the time I knew him well and stayed with him out there – being in San Francisco now, I suppose I ought to say down there – he had more or less satisfied his itch for conspicuous wealth.

One day we were sitting by the pool – I felt about pools much as he did – and we got talking about families, names of people we’d known, the countries, places they or their grandparents had emigrated from. It suddenly struck me, and I mentioned it more or less facetiously, that his surname was the same as that of the Earl Marshal of England. He raised an eyebrow and chuckled and no more was said.

Next time I stayed with him, over his bed and on a wall of the dining room and over his desk in his study was hung in each place a small wooden shield bearing, beautifully inscribed and gilded, the crest of the house. The house, I blush to say, of the Earl Marshal of England.

Well to have attained (and you might say with an almost plausible claim) the crest of the president of the college of arms itself, surely nobody could go higher than that in pursuit of a status symbol? No wonder he relaxed after that.

Unfortunately, he had very little time to enjoy it. He died shortly thereafter of a heart attack. Up there with the scent of the pepper trees and the eucalyptus, high up in the Hollywood mountains, one poor boy who hankered after the American Dream and made it nobly.

This instinct to flaunt, even in the quietest way, a status symbol is nothing to sniff at. We all have it, a car, a watch, a bookbinding, a personal licence plate; and not least the people who scorn such things by advertising their lack of them: inverted snobs who keep their cars deliberately unwashed, who make a point of apologising for the general untidiness of the living room when you stop by – the kind of man who used to come to a party that required a dinner jacket and apologised to his host with a chuckle and a, “Well, frankly, I don’t own one.”

Teenagers are perhaps the most gullible slaves of status, and vast fortunes have been made by corporations who discovered that the great teenager lust is for elaborate and expensive, cool, cool shoes.

My first shocked awareness of this came from the novelist Tom Wolfe when he wrote the enthralling novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. And the detail that stays with me, with extraordinary vividness, is that of the poor Harlem boy, a street urchin, who for the first time in his life was called on to testify in a court of law, in the case of the motor accident, and wore for the first time with enormous pride his new shoes, his new fancy Reeboks that cost as much as his mother’s monthly rent.

I’m afraid there will never be an end to wanting (as we used to say in Lancashire) to "come it over" the neighbours. And just recently we’ve had a couple of interesting twists on one of the wettest, most pretentious, status habits of all: bottled drinking water.

I think Hollywood picked it up aeons ago, but it spread to what we used to call upper middle-class people about, I’d say, 20 years ago. In most cities here, except a half-dozen I could name which carry too much chlorine in their tap water, the water is as pure as you could wish. But a week ago, a private environmental group issued a report which rang a fire bell throughout the midwest and caused hilarity and mirth among the makers of bottled water.

The group said that the tap water in 245 small towns, almost all in the midwest in what we call the Corn Belt, the Maize Belt, the water has traces of a pesticide which – quote – “In high doses has been linked to cancer”. They don’t say how high the dose or whether the cancer goes into humans or mice.

Anyway the headline, "Pesticides Said To Pose Risks In 245 Towns" was enough to cue great rejoicing, not only among the usual bottlers but among half a dozen big cities that have started bottling what one wag called “L’eau de tap” – in other words, their own city tap water.

A cheerful cynic noticed what’s been true for a quarter of a century; that if you bottle water from anywhere but home, give it a lyrical name like Fountain Dew or Crystal Springs, there is already a population of diners out there, Americans, ready to pay as much for it as for a glass of wine

A spokesman for the bottled water trade thought these cities were being comical, “They’re setting themselves up to compete against their own tap water.” He didn’t add for publication, “Which is exactly as good, in fact the same...”

I ought to make clear the extent of the peril that this private group is warning us about. The suspect pesticide, the chemical is atrazine, and it’s normally sprayed on corn, maize to kill weeds in minute doses. The federal government says the limit you can use for safety is three parts per billion. The atrazine standard the group used was almost twenty times less than that – namely 0.15 – which I should guess wouldn’t kill a flea on a mouse. No wonder some government regulators call this study “greatly exaggerated”. But the bottled water boys cry, “Hallelujah!”

The story to end all bottled water nonsense is a true one and it goes as follows. Some time ago the publication that 60-odd years ago started the consumer movement in this country put out in its monthly issue, a 50-page analysis of drinking water in America; mainly, of course, of all the famous and less famous bottled waters. The conclusion was enlightening. Far and away the purest water available in America, by every test, came from the Groton Reservoir up the Hudson. It was, it is New York City tap water.

A distant second was a well-known bottled water of domestic manufacture, and then came all the other famous American and then the continental brands – one of the most famous of which was almost at the bottom of the list because the company still used a tiny bit too much arsenic. Arsenic in very small doses is a temporary preservative; whereas, as you know, arsenic in large doses is a permanent preservative.

Well a rich Californian with a nice sense of humour got hold of this consumer report, and next time he came to New York, he made the necessary arrangements and financed the whole deal, which was to have New York City tap water bottled under a tasteful label he himself had designed, engraved Groton Springs.

Back home in Los Angeles, he gave an elegant dinner party in his smashing modern mansion and he served the water – “I want you to try this” – to some smashing, chic guests. They were entranced. They’d never tasted anything like it.

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