European media hold vigil on Beverly Hills street for 'French Elvis'

Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- European journalists who have been camped outside a hospital for nearly a week explain to passersby they are there to report on the French Elvis.

Johnny Hallyday is hardly known by Americans -- even in the celebrity enclave of Beverly Hills, California, where he is being treated for a serious infection.

"He's doing well," said Benoit Clair, a reporter the French LCI news channel. "He is out of the artificial coma. He seems to feel better today."

Hallyday, 66, recently flew to Los Angeles -- where he owns a home -- after surgery on a disc in France. He was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center last week for treatment of an infection possibly connected to the surgery.

The news that Hallyday was seriously ill prompted assignment editors at Europe's RTL radio network to send reporter Xavier Yvon across the Atlantic last week.

Yvon's last visit to Los Angeles was in June, when he rushed from Paris, France, to cover the death of Michael Jackson.

"He is like a mix between Elvis and Michael Jackson for the French people," Yvon said. He compared Hallyday to the Eiffel Tower.

Vanessa Costanzo, a reporter for Belgium's RTL-TVI channel, said Hallyday "is like, for some people in France, a god."

In Belgium, the home of Hallyday's father, he has no privacy, she said.

"I don't even think he could walk down the street in Brussels," Costanzo said. "He would be stopped all the time."

In Los Angeles, where paparazzi stalk even minor celebrities, Hallyday "is living kind of anonymously here," she said.

Only a few U.S. journalists have visited the street corner across from the hospital where news media tents were erected and satellite trucks have parked.

U.S. patient privacy laws have also protected Hallyday, to the frustration of the Europeans.

"We don't have real information," Costanzo said. "What we know is what relatives want to tell us. The [public relations representatives] of the hospital don't want to talk."

She said she hopes for a news conference Wednesday from Hallyday's producer, who was set to arrive at the hospital Tuesday evening.

Baptiste Muckensturn, a TV reporter for France's Canal Plus, has spent much of the past four days standing in front of a camera at the corner of Beverly and San Vicente boulevards.

"I know very well the road, but I don't [know] very well the inside of the hospital, because we can't go inside the hospital," Muckensturn said. His camera position is across the street from Hallyday's hospital window.

"We only know that Johnny Hallyday is on the eighth floor, where the curtain is black," he said, pointing upward.

"It's not very easy to work like this," he said. "We're working like paparazzi, and we are journalists. So it's not the same thing."

A French doctor who visited Hallyday at Cedars-Sinai did emerge to give the Europeans one quote.

"The good news is that Johnny Hallyday will come back on scene someday, and he will sing," Muckensturn said.