Let Them Drink Seltzer

By NANCY GIBBS

For those who believed in the verities of the '80s -- that greed is good, that one can never be too rich or too thin, and that abstinence and exercise will lead to eternal life -- the new decade spells trying times. Mike Tyson's crown has toppled, and the Trumps have split. Oat bran is no panacea; Drexel is bankrupt. "I suspect," says editor E. Graydon Carter, 40, co-founder of Spy magazine, "that when they find red suspenders cause back problems, that will be the final nail in the yuppie coffin."

For the faithful who spent their days selling bonds and their nights at the juice bar, the holy water was Perrier, a drink with the flavor of old rocks and the price of cheap perfume. Shielded from the light in its distinctive green bowling-pin bottles, Perrier was the drink of choice of a whole generation that was equally suspicious of whisky and Pepsi. But those who are busy toasting the beginning of a new decade may have to return to Scotch or soda -- at least for a while.

Last week Perrier announced that it was recalling its product worldwide, having already reclaimed 72 million bottles from stores and restaurants in North America. Reason: traces of benzene, a known carcinogen, had been found in the water, first in the U.S., then at the very plant where the water is bottled in Vergeze, France. Yuppies shuddered, bartenders flinched, lime futures tumbled and normally well-hydrated joggers faced desiccation rather than switch to Schweppes. To the true believers, those who used it to spray their camellias or rinse their lingerie or boil fusilli or water their Scotch, there could be no substitute for Perrier.

For Paris-based Source Perrier, which did $119 million in U.S. sales in 1988, protecting the sanctity of its product is crucial. How, after all, does % a company persuade a population that the presence of a few bubbles transforms the most common substance on earth into a fashion statement? With its reverent ads and fitness-cult following, Perrier won a unique niche in the psyche and vocabulary of the '80s. "People ask for Perrier when they want mineral water," says Dan Rose, a bartender at an uptown Manhattan restaurant, "the same way they ask for Kleenex when they want a tissue. Perrier has come to mean mineral water." Riding the decade's fitness fad, sales jumped 190% in seven years.

Then one day last month, county water testers in North Carolina, who use Perrier's purity in their labs to gauge local water quality, found that the French product was contaminated with excessive levels of benzene, a solvent used, among other things, to make Styrofoam. The Food and Drug Administration ordered random tests and found similar benzene levels in 13 bottles. FDA officials noted that there was not much danger. Drinking two small bottles of contaminated Perrier a day, they estimated, would increase one's lifetime risk of cancer by only one in a million.

Nonetheless, Perrier rushed to assure customers that the source was still pure. "The decision to recall was made by the company itself," said FDA spokesman Chris Lecos. "We didn't request it." Pressed for an explanation by French reporters, Perrier officials at first speculated that the chemical came from an overly fastidious workman who used a solution containing benzene to clean grease from some bottling machinery. If indeed only one bottling line was affected, production could resume quickly, and the bottles would be back on store shelves within weeks.

But the explanation did not ring quite true, partly because bottling plants, fearing just such contamination, do not usually use toxic chemicals to clean their equipment. Days later, Perrier officials abandoned the careless-worker hypothesis and disclosed that, in fact, all bottling lines had been contaminated. The new explanation: the real fault lay in saturated filters, which someone had failed to replace. It turns out that Perrier straight from the source contains traces of benzene, which occurs naturally in the gases that give Perrier its fizz, and that filters are routinely used to extract the chemical. "I think it is fairly clear that they rearranged the truth," says Anne Mougenot, an analyst with Didier Philippe brokerage in Paris. "At first they grabbed for anything, and now they have this theory of saturated filters."

Since other mineral-water brands from nearby springs have also been found to be contaminated, some speculate that a drought in the region may have raised the level of natural contaminants in the water. This would tend to clog the filters more quickly. "Of course they cannot say this," notes Mougenot, "because it would be close to saying that the source is really polluted."

The French do not seem to be losing much sleep over the slipup; in fact, the little green bottles were readily available in Paris cafes last week, and could be back in the U.S. by next month. This will surely relieve those who quailed at the prospect of entering the Decency Decade without it. But for others, it may not make much difference one way or the other. Much of the heartland never quite embraced the idea of paying more for a glass of water than for a bottle of beer, and in Los Angeles Perrier is already passe. "Evian is hotter than Perrier," says Roland Fasel, the food-and-beverage manager of the swank Bel-Air Hotel. "It even sells for breakfast." In New York City apostates are already appearing. "I'm going to order plain old Brooklyn seltzer," says entertainment lawyer Jonathan Horn. "If I'm going to drink benzene, by God, it's gonna be good old American benzene."

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris and Janice M. Horowitz/New York