Insurance of the rich and famous

Angela Mount, a former wine taster in Britain, insured her sense of taste, which included her taste buds and nose, for roughly $19.8 million at current exchange rates, says Thomas. The annual premium: more than $39,000.

Those gams. A 20-something leg model (who estimated she had five to seven more years in her career), insured her valuable gams for $989,000 -- a realistic estimate of what she could expect to earn during that time, says Thomas. Her annual insurance bill: about $3,500.

And when supermodel Heidi Klum signed a deal to promote Epilady, Thomas says the product's manufacturer, Braun, took out its own million-dollar policy on those famous legs "to protect her contract."

That ankle. Remember Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's 1998 race to break Roger Maris' home run record? What you may not have known is that there was a special policy on Mark McGwire's ankle, according to Thomas.

Apparently, the St. Louis Cardinals had insurance on McGwire, but the underwriter wouldn't include the would-be home run king's ankle, which was giving him trouble at the time. So Thomas says Lloyd's stepped in with a policy to cover only that specific body part.

But writing a policy for just an ankle is a lot more complicated than you might imagine, he says. To draft it, they had to set out, in detail, which tendons and ligaments were included in the definition of "ankle."

And McGwire is not the first or last baseball player to require special treatment in the insurance arena. Thomas says one team wanted to insure a player for the amount of his multiyear, $200 million-plus contract, but the team's owner was unable to find that coverage "at the price he wanted to pay."

So a number of insurers, including Lloyd's, joined forces to cover the risk together, up to $120 million-plus, Thomas says. The annual bill? More than 2% of the sum of the insured, he says. Translation: more than $2.4 million annually.

A princess and a judge. A South African soap maker insured Princess Diana for two months back in the early 1990s, Thomas says. The most extraordinary element of the policy was that the princess probably never knew anything about it.

The soap manufacturer put 400,000 rand (about $51,000 U.S.) into an eight-week ad campaign that used a Diana look-alike. But if anything happened to the real Diana, the company worried it would have to pull its ads and would lose its investment, he says.

So it took out a policy on the princess that started at $53,000 and declined every week, to match the money it still had in the ad campaign.

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A similar policy was issued for a judge in a high-dollar civil trial in the mid-1980s by one of the parties in the suit, Thomas says. Both sides had spent millions presenting testimony, and it was feared that the money would be lost if anything happened to the judge during the course of the proceedings.

A contract. When a big-name talent signed on for an extended Las Vegas schedule, part of the agreement was that the entertainer would accrue ownership in the performance venue. It was guaranteed whether the entertainer could perform or not, Thomas says. And the resulting contract was worth more than $75 million, he adds.

So Lloyd's was called on to cover the majority of the contract. The shows did go on, Thomas says, and "the contract has run its course."

This story was reported by Dana Dratch for Bankrate.com.

Updated Sept. 15, 2009

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