CELEB PICTURES TO DEPEND ON
AN embarrassing photograph of Larry King's garbage has been pulled from an art exhibit because it shows a box of Depends adult diapers among the detritus.
The diapers in the 70-year-old CNN talkmeister's trash set tongues wagging Tuesday night at four-star eatery Le Bernardin, where French photographers Pascal Rostain and Bruno Mouron previewed their exhibit "Star Trash" for which they shot the rubbish collected from the curbs of King, Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks, Cindy Crawford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Madonna, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Melanie Griffith and other boldfaced names.
Rostain, who removed the King photo from his show yesterday, told PAGE SIX that the inclusion of the Depends box image was not an attempt to embarrass the bespectacled broadcaster. He said, "We didn't know that this product was for old people - we thought it was for babies.
"We were not trying to make a scandal. [At the party] some people were laughing. We said, 'Oh, [bleep]. And so now the picture will not be in the show."
Rostain and Mouron, who have been rummaging through celebrity refuse for the past 15 years, say they purposefully leave out any garbage of a sexual or medical nature, and even decided against exhibiting a photograph of Ronald Reagan's garbage because of his death last week.
They instead immortalize such illuminating bits of debris as Crawford's Lear jet bills, Mel Gibson's dog-eared copy of "Interview with the Vampire" and Pam Anderson's empty wine coolers.
The full exhibition will be on display at the Star Trash Store at 28 Wooster St. through July 16. Photos of the trash of Travolta and Madonna will be displayed at Le Bernardin.
"Garbage is the best portrait of a person," Mouron says. "It's really a [blue]print to the American way of life. I'm sure these pieces will be very interesting in the next 50 years."
The five-times married King, who likes to boast that he had two young sons with his much-younger wife, Shawn, "without Viagra," had no comment on the photo, a CNN spokeswoman said.