Men (6 page)

Though I truly hate it when people say about movies “That wouldn't really happen,” as though they're supposed to slavishly emulate reality (they're not), I can't help wanting to ask:
do
con men read self-help books about compulsive behavior and brilliantly distill buried psychological truths about their authors? How
does
Mike so adeptly predict Margaret's every move in advance, down to the minute, which he'd have to for the setup to work? Obviously if you think about any of this too much, it crumbles into fairy dust.

The better question isn't whether it's realistic, but whether it's convincing. If the whole narrative contraption hinges on male omniscience, a lot of mystification is clearly required, and the audience has to be willing to be seduced by the pretense—as willing as Margaret was to be duped by Mike. But I'm game. It's wonderfully easy to be lulled into Mamet's either/or universe, even when you
know
that the world he pays tribute to, the one dictated by the desires of men, is already an anachronism; that his planetary system is lit by a dying sun.

But if this movie still deals men the winning hand … well, so has history, for most of existence. Now,
that
was a long con. Mamet parlays the foul emotional truth about life under the ancien régime into an elegantly seductive storyline. Who is the enigmatic and seductive Mike? A stand-in for the way those historical residues are still lodged in women's (and everyone's) psyches: for the fantasy about the man who knows you better and more deeply than you know yourself. I love/hate this film because it knows me so well, fissures and all. It seduces me all over again every time I watch it.

 

The Trespasser

It's worth choosing the right muse if you're in the market for one—having the right muse can make all the difference. Though it's not entirely clear if
choice
is precisely what takes place. Impulse? Instinct? Probably the whole business isn't rational to begin with—who knows what recesses of the psyche are engaged. Still, when someone else's muse propels him to riches and fame, it makes you wonder if maybe you yourself failed at the muse-choosing thing somewhere along the way. Yet being overly aspirational regarding muses can also prompt social rebuke, as when a not-especially-lovely man fastens on one of the most elegant women in the world to serve in this capacity. Some will find it ambiguous as to whether this is classical or creepy, especially in cases when the two aren't exactly social equals. And when the man in question isn't exactly an artist.

“A curious, grunting sound”: this was the noise emitted by celebrity stalker–photographer Ron Galella whenever he consummated a shot of—or more precisely
at
—the object of his longstanding obsession, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as she testified during one of their numerous courtroom encounters. You can imagine her delicately wrinkling her nose while saying it. It can't have been pleasant being trailed everywhere she went by this hairy lug thrusting his equipment in her face. Everything you need to know about Galella is that
he
was the one who instigated the lawsuit rather than Jackie: not content to merely hound her, he also sued her for $1.3 million, claiming that Secret Service agents (assigned to protect the Kennedy kids) were preventing him from doing his job. Which, as he construed it, involved trailing the former First Lady whenever she left her Fifth Avenue apartment and squeezing off shot after shot while crooning her name. When Jackie countersued, claiming that he was terrorizing her, he at least got to be in the same room with her, on the same footing, which had to be gratifying. What did it matter that he ended up saddled with a restraining order since, true to form, he gleefully violated it, arranging for himself to be photographed while doing so. Posterity beckoned, Ron had the film. He eventually got the judge to knock the restriction down from fifty yards to twenty-five feet on appeal, then violated that too. “You stay away from me or I'll see you in court again,” Jackie hissed, and he made sure she did. So there they were together for one more round, practically side by side—the publicity gods were smiling down on Ron once again.

If you get the idea that Galella was a little driven in his pursuit of Jackie, this wouldn't be wrong. But obsession is the mother of invention, and Galella was nothing if not inventive in his quest to capture Jackie on film. He dated her maid to get the lowdown on her household habits; he bribed her doormen to find out when she was leaving her apartment, then tailed her all over town in taxicabs. He disguised himself in wigs and fake mustaches, showed up at funerals and the theater, and leaped out from behind coat racks at fancy restaurants to capture her startled-doe expression. He even managed to track her down at her children's Christmas pageants. Once, on an outing in Central Park with the kids, she finally lost it—finding Galella hovering around yet again she bolted, dashing into the foliage like a startled fawn. There went Ron galloping after her, snapping away at her elegant retreating form like a great white hunter chasing wild prey.

When asked why he was so obsessed with Jackie, as he increasingly was—he was getting pretty well known for his antics and, of course, the lawsuits—he'd say that he saw himself as performing a public service. A mumbling Bronx-born gum-chewer and, let's face it, not the world's most eloquent guy, he became positively heartfelt when speaking of Jackie: dogging her wherever she went was just what he was put here on earth to do. Not that he didn't enjoy the notoriety, and getting to be a bit of a celebrity himself. The Jackie fixation rescued Galella from being just another putz with a camera: ironically, it's what made people start to take him seriously. For those who see neurosis as the origin of creativity—and it's a fairly common cultural conception—what better artistic bona fides than a public idée fixe? It implied that he had a rich inner life, which is what we require from our artists; it notched him upward in the cultural pecking order. The
National Enquirer
days were behind him—not that he ever refused to sell his work to anyone, but these days his photos are at the Museum of Modern Art and he's featured in collections around the world. These are more impressive venues than guys in his line of work—though he wears the label “paparazzo” proudly—generally aspire to.

But Jackie wasn't the only recalcitrant subject. His quarry ranged from Greta Garbo (hiding her face behind a handkerchief) to Mick Jagger (giving the finger to the camera) to Sean Penn (punching out Galella's paparazzo nephew). Galella especially liked getting pix of the most reclusive stars—Hepburn, Brando—staking them out for hours, days if he had to. He was the most dedicated of pests: he once got exclusive photos of Taylor and Burton by camping out in a rat-infested attic for an entire weekend with a quayside view of a yacht across the street they were scheduled to board days later. They all
tried
hiding from him, without success—Hepburn, crouched behind an umbrella, scuttled away like a sandcrab, others pulled their coats over their heads like criminals on a perp walk, but images of hounded stars are salable too. Yes, many found Galella to be a king-sized pain over the years, not that it troubled him.

Maybe it's this supreme lack of shame that gives his photos such a compelling immediacy. “Look over here! Look over here!” he'd beseech, using a nickname or anything to draw the victim's attention, and often capturing something unstudied in these familiar faces, wresting something “real” from a world of over-managed surfaces. His most famous shot, of a windswept Jackie, glancing back at the camera with a half-smile, has an undeniable aura—it's hard to take your eyes off her. Galella calls it his “Mona Lisa,” though he readily admits that Jackie only smiled because he disguised his voice, and she didn't realize he was the one hailing her.

The term “paparazzo” derives from the name of one of the swarming photographers in Fellini's
La Dolce Vita
, though it's also supposedly a play on the Italian word for the annoying buzzing of a mosquito. One thing you can say about Galella is that he never shirked the physical hazards of being an annoyance. Marlon Brando knocked out five of his teeth when Galella wouldn't stop photographing him; Galella sued (he called his lawyer before he called a doctor), settling for 40K—the amount it cost him to reconstruct his jaw, minus a third for the lawyer fees. Which didn't prevent him from once again lying in wait for Brando following a benefit at the Waldorf-Astoria, though this time he wore a customized football helmet emblazoned with his name. Mindful of his own increasing legend, he made sure to have himself photographed trailing the reclusive stone-faced star through the lobby.

Having reached his eighties, Galella has been racking up the tributes lately, with shows booked well into 2015, proving that annoyances who stick around long enough eventually become cultural darlings. No doubt he deserves some credit too as a forerunner of today's 24/7 celebrity harassment—yes, he should get a mention in the history books for that wonderful feat. But let's talk about this salvage process that hoists professional vulgarians who sprout a few gray hairs into respectability, rebranding them as benign and lovable figures. You see it happening all over the place these days: another renowned aggressor-against-proprieties, the scatological countercultural cartoonist R. Crumb, has been the subject of countless museum retrospectives and tributes too. Why can't thorns-in-sides just keep on being thorns-in-sides—do they have to get adoration for it too? It's disheartening to watch the former cultural nuisance join in his own rehabilitation, so moved by all the love that he forgets to thumb his nose at the niceties he used to abhor. He begins speaking of his artistic process, his childhood, his personal demons, and fitting his story into the over-familiar templates and sanctimonies his career was once devoted to smashing.

It was the same thing with professional thorn-in-the-side Larry Flynt, rehabilitated by Milos Forman's biopic. In fact, Galella too has been the subject of a loving film treatment by an award-winning director, the 2010 documentary
Smash His Camera
, by Oscar winner Leon Gast (
When We Were Kings
). It's an enjoyable film, but the clanking of the cultural elevation machinery is a little deafening. It premiered at the Museum of Modern Art fittingly, given the artistic burnish Gast confers on Galella, opening with him in the darkroom swishing his prints around in developing fluid like a latter-day Stieglitz. Galella happily plays along, throwing himself into the role of an aging paparazzo-auteur, leading the film crew to the sites of his most famous Jackie shots and letting them trail him to a photo shoot, though he doesn't actually do that kind of thing anymore. You can see why. This one's a stage-managed red carpet event featuring Brad and Angelina—press passes required—and Ron can barely get a clear shot of them through the thicket of other paparazzi, his soulless spawn, with their press credentials and digital cameras.

The film feigns evenhandedness about its subject—diehard elitist and former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving is trotted out to denounce Galella as an “obscene bottom-feeding so-called journalist”; others brand him everything from a parasite to a sociopath. On the “Is it art?” front, Gast gathers a collection of photographers and photo editors to sit around a table and squabble about Galella's artistic legacy: does his work have something going for it beyond his famous subjects, or is he just a second-rater who'll be forgotten fifty years from now?

It's Jackie who's brought in to settle the question—if she was his muse, then Ron is an artist. Or maybe she was more than muse? “It was a relationship conducted through the camera, but it was nevertheless a personal relationship,” contends a former
Life
magazine editor. Galella “captured something that was very elusive about Jackie,” gushes gossip columnist Liz Smith. “He loved her,” lyricizes magazine editor Bonnie Fuller. “And he loved her children.” Both Jackie and Ron benefited from “this push-me-pull-me thing,” Smith adds. “In the end, she was posing for him—she must have had a little feeling for Ron.”

Here things take a turn toward the sentimental and plummet into sheer mythology, though it's a myth Ron's apparently come to believe in himself. He too speaks about Jackie as though they were entwined in something deep together. When the film attempts to probe Ron's innermost feelings about her, he's happy to help. Why did he have this obsession with Jackie? he's asked. He says earnestly that he's tried to analyze it: It was because he had no girlfriend at the time. He wasn't tied down or married, so “she was my girlfriend in a way.” (Those bouts of self-analysis don't seem to have been too taxing.)

The film is more successful at sounding his inner life when it proceeds less directly. After Onassis brought Galella back to court for repeatedly violating the restraining order and he was threatened with six years in prison if he didn't desist from photographing her for the rest of her life, it seemed he might be forced to finally abandon the fixation. But no one ever abandons a true fixation; we just find creative work-arounds. When Ron first spoke on the phone to his future wife, Betty, a photo editor, her voice reminded him of Jackie's, he recalls: soft and sort of whispery, a laughing sort of voice. They arranged to get together, and he proposed marriage within the first five minutes of meeting her. She said yes. They went to the nearest motel to consummate the deal (he says), and have been happily married ever since. Betty also handles the business end of things.

Their mansion in Montville, New Jersey, makes the Sopranos' place look modest, its indoor acreage a monument to the world's insatiability for celebrity images. The warehouse-sized basement is devoted to the massive Galella archive—aisle upon aisle of floor-to-ceiling industrial shelving holding literally millions of Ron's photos, with a staff to monitor the illnesses and deaths of celebrities, making sure to have prints on hand whenever one shuffles off the mortal coil, or seems about to. The grounds of the place are lavish too, replete with Italian gardens, columns, burbling fountains and windmills—and an array of spray-painted silk flowers and polyurethaned topiary, lovingly planted by Ron himself. (“It's an utter and absolute humiliation,” says Betty, whose parents were florists.) Ron is also strangely obsessed with rabbits and keeps them as pets. “They're cleaner than cats,” he explains. “They don't smell. And when you pick up their poop it's like raisins.” Gass provides a cute montage of Ron rolling around in bed with a few of his cuddly friends. Rabbit memorabilia is strewn throughout the mansion, and out back there's a private cemetery for pet rabbits past, replete with a sculpture garden of bunny statuary—including the famous Bugs—some as big as full-grown men.