Howard Stern
In Cannes with his autobiographical film Private Parts, the shock jock plays the pussycat with Nick Roddick
The guy in the cream linen suit, silk shirt and deep tan just wants to take care of business. "You have finished with the girls, OK? They can go now?" The girls have done their bit for the cameras. One of them has the guy in the cream linen suit's suit jacket draped round her shoulders. It's pissing with rain and she's wearing a pair of mini-shorts with two words on them, 'Private' on one leg and 'Parts' on the other.
Apart from that, all that any of them is wearing is a ton of make-up, a skimpy, tie-round-the-back halter that would hardly do to clean a pair of sunglasses, and some dangly ear-rings.
The halter is a fairly recent addition. For the photo call that just ended, it was nipple-nipple-Howard Stern-nipple-nipple-nipple-nipple. It must have been hard to frame, because Howard is six-foot-six, while the girls are big in other ways.
"It was a little odd," Stern says later. "You feel a little self-conscious, but that's what I came here to do. The photographers saw a guy with a bunch of naked women and they started taking pictures."
If Stern felt self-conscious, he hid it well. "These are really nice girls," he told the crowd. "I've known them all my life. These girls are like sisters to me."
By the time the guy with the cream linen suit has got his girls back, Stern is pressing ahead, mobbed by American cable-TV cameramen and smiling young men with logo-bearing microphones asking him how it feels to be in Cannes.
I miss the question, but Stern's answer has the word 'penis' in it.
"Ooh!" squeals a producer. "You can't say that."
"I just said it," says Stern, "it's just that you can't run it. Did you know," he says, turning back unabashed towards the camera, "that Frank Gifford's private parts are football-shaped?"
Stern has just been handed several pages of faxed American tabloids carrying a story about how Gifford, the 65-year-old former New York Giants football star, husband of squeaky-clean TV talk-show host Kathy Lee and champion of down-home family values, has been caught playing an away game with the aforementioned football-shaped equipment.
"It's killing me that I'm not in the United States right now," Stern continues, his mind ranging over the possibilities of the Gifford story. "You know what's really weird about this? Only in America: all these old guys with beautiful young wives, and it's the old guys who are cheating around!"
Probably North America's best-known radio personality, with his show playing in 40 markets (I know this because he drops it into the conversation early on, plus the information that more markets are about to be added), Stern is in Cannes to promote his movie, the mainly autobiographical Private Parts, which Rysher is screening here.
It opened in the US in early April, pushing The Empire Strikes Back off the top spot, and has so far grossed nearly $41 million. Now Stern is taking on Europe, having previously come no closer than a fight in a London pub and a screaming match with a British radio journalist in New York.
"We were separated by a glass en-closure, and she started climbing over the glass, clawing at me and ready to punch me," he recalls. Stern's free-ranging, free-associating radio style - he calls it "verbal diarrhoea" - has not endeared him to the politically correct.
But the Howard Stern of Private Parts is quite a sweet guy, and the Howard Stern who appeared on the US chat-show circuit to promote the movie was a positive pussycat. So which one is real?
"I've always been basically a nice person," says Stern, "and that was the point of the movie: I was trying to say that
I'm not some rabid dog who's going around completely insane.
"I believe that my radio audience have always thought I was a nice person," he insists. "I don't believe I would have survived 20 years of radio if the audience thought I was a scumbag. But I have to tell you something: I go into a trance when I do the radio show. I'm trapped inside my head and I'm very lost when I do it.
"In fact, my wife came into the studio one time when I was working and she said, 'I've known you all these years and, when you're on the air, you're like a different person. Your eyes roll into the back of your head.' It's true: I take no prisoners."
In the end, though, reckons Stern, "the question is not whether I'm a nice guy: it's whether the movie is funny. Audiences want to pay their money and laugh, and that's all that matters with me. If I can get audiences to go, they'll have a great time. I actually think this is a story that will interest Europeans more than Americans, because American audiences are familiar with a lot of the material. Whereas here, they'll walk in and go, 'Oh man, look at this guy!'"
For a radio personality, Stern is certainly worth a look, with his beyond-shoulder-length hair and permanent dark glasses - a disguise about whose origins he is quite open.
"I've got a skinny head, a big nose and a thin neck and I thought maybe this will distract people," he says, adding: "I need prescription glasses, because I'm actually as blind as a bat, and I always look better in dark glasses than I do in those clear frames.
"I've got weird theories on my face," he continues. "I figure my nose looks smaller with the dark glasses. Everyone tells me I'm crazy but, if you put the hair like this" - he pulls it in front if his face, like Slash in Guns 'n Roses - "and you've got the glasses, then you're in good shape."
