Legendary paparazzo Ron Galella has died at 91. Revisit emilynussbaum's 2008 feature on how Galella gave birth to the idea of modern celebrity
The notorious paparazzo and his wife, Betty, live in a neoclassical megamansion in rural New Jersey. There’s a white marble fountain out front; columns frame the front door. It’s no surprise that an HBO scout once showed up, interested in renting the place as Tony Soprano’s home.
As we settle into the kitchen, with its massive white island, Galella’s wife, Betty, walks in, her arms wide in welcome. We’d spoken earlier, when I had to reschedule because of a child-care problem. “Oh, I totally understand,” she’d told me on the phone. “We have two children ourselves.” Really, I said, I didn’t realize she and Ron had any kids. “They’re both dead,” she replied. As I fumbled alarmed condolences, she merrily explained, in her warm southern lilt, that they were rabbits .
His first big sell was a simple picture of a little girl, a bit of photojournalism—he’d tried to capture actress June Lockhart’s daughter at her preschool, but couldn’t get permission, so he shot a different child instead, earning $62. “But once I found celebrity journalism, I plied my know-how,” Galella says with satisfaction. “For a take of Elizabeth Taylor or the Lennon Sisters, you could get $1,000 from these magazines. Photoplay. Modern Screen. Silver Screen.
Betty herself came from a family of Kentucky blue bloods; she is a member of the DAR. And in those days, Galella was regarded as a bug, a parasite: The word paparazzo is derived from an Italian word for mosquito. But from Galella’s perspective, he was always misunderstood. His art was a corrective to the artifice of the star system. It was a kind of forced Turing test of celebrity, determining whether the star is human.
Ron and Betty began to spend entire days on stakeout together. This was long before cell phones and the mobs on the red carpet, and Galella prided himself on his cleverness in breaking into velvet-rope environments. He wore wigs, glasses, hats; he faked credentials. Once he cut a hole in a hedge to get a shot of Doris Day sunbathing.
I ask Galella about the Miley Cyrus photos, the ones showing her half-naked. “Well, I think it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous in the fact that it promotes sex.”Galella chuckles. “It promotes sexual promiscuity in the young. The sexual drive is enough to promote chaos in people’s lives. People mature too fast—by nature. These girls, they get knocked up, and usually the man is forced to get a job that he don’t like. He don’t have a career.
A high-school Italian teacher, Mrs. Costanza, once told Galella that you are “somebody or nobody.” Deep down, everybody wants to be famous, he believes; to be famous is a “good thing,” to be photographed a compliment. So if stars say they are angry about being photographed, they are acting. If they ignore Galella as he shoots, they’re consenting. If they smile for one photo, and then disallow the next, they’re hypocrites. In fact, stardom itself is hypocrisy.
And of course, Galella himself is now something of a celebrity, which he enjoys. Some of the photos in the book rely on this peculiar dynamic: The star recognizes Galella, then performs the “no photos” stance as an homage. He even has a stalker, a woman who sent him intimate e-mails that Betty resented as invasions of their partnership.
In his first book, Jacqueline, published in 1974, a year after losing the court case, he writes about how he misses shooting her. “They were thrilling times. I remember wandering through Central Park on fall afternoons and all of a sudden finding her, like a diamond in the grass.” Galella shot Jackie bicycling in Central Park; at Bobby Kennedy’s funeral; picnicking alone with her children in Peapack, New Jersey.
“She was really angry, her Adam’s apple popping.” His face is dark, remembering. “I never released that picture. It was a negative thing that I don’t like to see. I like to see the positive—like Windblown Jackie. The cabdriver blew his horn, and she turned, and I got the picture!” When we leave the restaurant, Galella sets up shop on the corner of Bank and Jane and begins to snap away, gathering shots of the restaurant itself, with its clump of nobodies eating in the front garden. “There’s a market for these,” he says. No one stops him, no one even looks up.
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