Side show

HOW POOR IS HE? HE'S SO POOR . . .: The faux millionaire that Fox is putting forth in Joe Millionaire, its perversion of the perverse Bachelor, chose to blow through a toll plaza in Irvine, Calif., rather than pay the toll, which would have totaled at the most $2.50.

Evan Marriott, 28, pleaded guilty to toll evasion for his September trip, according to the Court TV Web site thesmokinggun.com, and he paid a fine of $104, which is quite a bigger chunk of his $19,000-a-year construction worker salary than $2.50. (Depending on where he got onto the highway, the toll could have been 50 cents.)

On Joe Millionaire, which debuts on Fox on Monday, Marriott is passed off as the recent inheritor of $50-million, and 20 gold diggers are taken to a French mansion for a Bachelor-like contest for his affections. Fox claims the women didn't know Marriott's real financial status until he made his final selection.

NO, HE REALLY IS POOR. WELL, MIDDLE CLASS: After news of Joe Millionaire surfaced last month, predictable buzz began that Marriott really is a millionaire and that Fox is the one pulling one over on TV viewers.

So an intrepid reporter in Marriott's hometown, Virginia Beach, Va., tracked down his parents, who still live there, and checked out the surroundings.

The conclusion of the Virginian-Pilot: Though Marriott wasn't exactly raised in "humble surroundings" with "limited financial security," as Fox tells it, his family wasn't in the Trump stratum, either.

His father, Robert H. "Hank" Marriott III, is vice president of Norfolk's Old Dominion Trust Co. His mother, Charlotte, manages a linens boutique. They live a "modest" house in a "comfortable" Virginia Beach neighborhood.

Hank tells the Virginian-Pilot that they're a long way from being millionaires, and so is Evan, as far as he knows.

"There's nothing fancy about us," he says.

CHEERS: Ted Koppel's Maryland neighbors may not like him much for taking them to court over the size of their homes, but his Nightline staff loves him. And he loves his staff. To commemorate a year in which they lived to chuckle at ABC's attempt to kill the show by acquiring David Letterman, Koppel gave as a holiday gift to staff members bottles of wine with a custom label that read "Nightline Survivor 2002 Private Reserve."

A card went with it, according to Broadcasting & Cable magazine, and it read, "With thanks to another Nightline survivor."

GET THAT MAN A BEACH MOVIE: Method-actor-to-the-extreme Daniel Day-Lewis grudgingly admits to USA Today that he "maybe" took unavailable-in-the-19th-century antibiotics during the filming of Gangs of New York because "I got very sick at one time."

Gangs co-star John C. Reilly tells the newspaper that the reason Day-Lewis got sick was that he refused to wear a warmer coat while in character as Bill the Butcher. Day-Lewis' rationalization was that a warmer coat would not have been available 100-plus years ago.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright