‘I didn’t sell out. I bought in.’
‘You owe me the favour.’
‘I owed you lunch,’ she said, springing for the door. ‘And I just paid for it.’
In a town like Hollywood friendship doesn’t go nearly as far as betrayal. After sunset I settled into a parking spot across the street from her production office. I had a sack of burgers and coffee, the radio and a wide-mouth pee jar to keep me company. I knew how to wait. Boredom meant nothing to me. It wasn’t like I had anything more important to do. The coffee kept me awake until three in the morning, when Cass and two burly men lugged boxes of equipment out to a van and sped onto the empty streets. Meat Wagon emblazoned the sides and back of the van in red. It wasn’t difficult to follow. At Sunset Boulevard, the van turned east. When a police cruiser blasted by at a speed to blow off my doors I swung around the van and gave chase through Bel Air and into Beverly Hills. That time of night, we were all going to the same place.
9
The cruiser swerved into the driveway of a top-ten icon of the Southern California good life, a pink and palm-treed hotel where movie stars and European royalty mingled with the merely wealthy. In deference to the sleep of the rich, the cop extinguished his bubble-gum lights at the top of the drive and joined a line of parked emergency vehicles missing only a fire truck. I followed the cruiser until a flash of green uniform in my headlights braced out his hands to stop me. I started to sweat because I was poor and driving a beat-up old car, even if it was a Cadillac. The uniform would take one look at me and know I wasn’t the type of person who stayed in that kind of hotel. I hit the button that made the window roll down and, before he could get a word out, said I had missed the last flight out of San Diego and had to drive up, sorry if I had to wake somebody to check in.
‘Do you have a reservation?’
I told him somebody at Warner Brothers Records made it for me but I wasn’t sure what name it was under. You get all kinds in Los Angeles; people who look ragged enough to be living in their cars can be rock stars worth millions. He glanced around inside the Caddy interior then handed me a parking stub. ‘Welcome to Beverly Hills. Please leave your keys in the car.’
The headlights from the van dusted my shoulders in white light as I got out of the car carrying my duffel bag. That I was too poor to buy a professional camera case proved my good fortune because even if he was just a parking valet I think his job was to keep out the media. He and two other green-jackets converged upon Cass’s van before the lights dimmed and from the sound of their voices I don’t think they offered valet parking. Hotel security looked to be a bigger obstacle than the cops. I counted six green-jackets standing in the lobby and not one of them carried a tray of canapés. It was a hell of a lobby, all soft peaches, greens and natural burl wood done up Art Deco. They could have roped it off and charged an entrance fee. To the rich it probably wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
The green-jacket at the front desk couldn’t find my reservation and we went back and forth about whether some mistake had been made until he got around to telling me he had rooms available, even a few in the budget category of $300 a night. I snapped Cass’s platinum card onto the counter. After lunch it had somehow slipped into my pocket. I hadn’t meant to take it but after I’d picked it up from the table I’d forgotten to give it back and considering how our lunch ended I wasn’t going to return it personally. Technically, I was committing credit card fraud but in the unlikely event she reported it stolen it wouldn’t show up on the system yet. Cheque kiting, credit card fraud and other fiscal scams had been the third most common profession among the sisters at the Institute, behind prostitution and drug dealing. Sure, my teachers had all been nailed by the law but I’d learned a lot about what someone could get away with nine times out of ten. I asked for a high floor at the back of the hotel, where I figured I could see the cause of the commotion, then followed a sleepy bellman who held my bag between two gloved fingers at some distance from his body. I asked him why all the cops.
‘Big rock group down in the Presidential Bungalow. Made a little too much noise earlier this evening.’
‘What’s the name of the group?’
He said he heard it was somebody called Death Row, then opened the door to my room and showed me how to work the drapes and lights as if I couldn’t figure it out myself. I knew Death Row’s music because an ex-boyfriend once drove me crazy listening to it. They had a hit a half-dozen years back named ‘Faceful of Cherry Pie’ and then one just out titled ‘Taste the Juice’. Both were big with the head-banger crowd. I tipped the bellman my last five bucks even though he made a lot more money than I did. He pocketed the bill without a word, like it was on the low end of acceptable.
From the corner of the balcony I could see something was going on at one of the twenty or so private bungalows hidden among the palm trees four floors below. With my elbows braced on the railing I maxed the zoom lens. The bungalow’s interior lights burned brightly and beneath a canopy of trees outdoor lights illuminated what looked like a back patio. Paramedics and police hustled up and down the bungalow’s front steps. At ASA 400 the film was fast enough to make an exposure but at that distance and angle the image wouldn’t sell for a dime.
From the balcony I marked out where I could stand to watch the one green-jacket I needed to evade and when he wandered a little too far from his post I slipped down the path that led behind the bungalow with the lights. The hotel grounds were immaculately swept so I didn’t worry about stepping on dry leaves when I veered off the path and crept through the hibiscus to a lone oak tree by the back fence. After two failed jumps at the lowest limb I found a knothole to boost me up and I clawed from there to a branch that hung over the fence.
The tableau that appeared before me was too unexpected to understand at first glimpse. Somebody had hooked a photoflood to a bougainvillea branch, spilling a harsh glare across the paving stones. The balding dome of a crouched man glinted in the light as he crept hands and knees to lift something with tweezers and drop it into a zip-lock baggie. Two plainclothes cops in light leather jackets stood backlit in the rear doorway, drinking coffee out of paper cups. A photo tech with a 35mm camera and a good-sized zoom lens walked carefully around a hot tub, taking photos of four long-haired, multiple-tattooed men and two young women who sprawled naked along the rim like they had been flash frozen in the middle of having a really good time. Through the picture window to the right of the rear door two women, wrapped in towels, talked to a potbellied man who recorded their answers in a notebook. An extension cord ran from the corner of that window to a small amplifier near the hot tub, then a different cord stretched from the amplifier to a guitar strapped around the neck of one of the rockers. Sure, it’s easy to figure out what happened now but at the time I couldn’t figure if they’d sexed themselves to death, been victims of a mass overdose or some deadly cocktail of the two, even if I did realize I had six dead bodies in front of my lens and four of them could be considered famous.
The photoflood provided more than enough illumination to shoot. After I fired off the first half-dozen frames, one of the cops in the doorway looked sharply in my direction and stepped around the technician working on his hands and knees. I waited until the fence obscured his line of sight and dropped ten feet into a dead run. The squawk of a walkie-talkie on the path ahead warned me to slip behind a palm tree just before one of the green-jackets sprinted past. I didn’t see anyone else on the way back to my room except a half-deaf septuagenarian jogger coming out of the elevator for his five a.m. run.
‘Early bird gets the worm!’ he shouted.
‘Already got mine!’ I shouted back.
10
Just before dawn I rang the back-door buzzer to a one-man photo agency run out of a media services building in Santa Monica, wired from a cup of coffee to go and the proof sheet I’d collected from an all-night developer in Hollywood. The guy who answered the door had the vampire glow of someone who dropped into his casket at dawn. I
n contrast to his black beard and matching turtleneck the whiteness of his skin nearly blinded. Frank told me the guy’s name was Lester and he was looking for new talent. I told him I’d taken some photographs of a famous rock group I’d seen at a hotel in Beverly Hills.
‘What group?’
‘Death Row.’
I could tell from his non-reaction that he hadn’t heard what happened. Few people had. The only other photographer on the scene worked for the Beverly Hills Police Department and as far as I knew he wasn’t selling. ‘Can’t move it,’ Lester said. ‘A group like that, the only action is the heavy metal mags. They don’t buy a lot of candids and when they do they pay some of the lowest rates in the business.’
‘These might be a little different.’
‘Any babes? A good-looking babe hanging around the neck of a rocker, I might be able to do something with that.’
‘Sure, babes are part of it. Nudity too.’
‘Might be worth a hundred bucks then.’ He invited me into an office so cluttered with telecommunications and photographic gear that the only free floor-space was a narrow aisle down the centre of the room. Black-and-white photographs of various celebrities papered the walls, from Elizabeth Taylor on the arm of one of her many husbands to Sean Penn looking like he was about to smash the photographer’s lens. Freshly printed eight-by-tens hung pinned to a cork board over his desk. Most depicted the back of a famous head, a bodyguard’s hand stretched toward the lens or a third-rate celeb vamping shamelessly for the camera. ‘The catch of the night,’ he explained. ‘Some nights you get lobster, other nights you get flounder.’
When I set the proof sheet under the lamp on the light table Lester’s eyes darted straight to it. From the back pocket of his black jeans he drew a bronchial inhaler and without taking his eyes from the proof sheet plugged it between his lips and gave himself two quick blasts. After scanning the basic content he bent over the light table with a magnifying loop to examine specific images. He stood no higher than my chin when he straightened and to stand that tall he needed the boost of black combat boots.
‘Incredible,’ he pronounced. ‘Were you a guest of the hotel?’
‘No.’
‘How did you know to be there?’
‘Had a hunch.’
‘None of my business, you’re right.’ He took a white grease pencil from the light table and circled several of the images. ‘You ever work through an agency before?’
‘Never.’
‘I’m gonna tell you the way it works and it works only one way and the only way to avoid a later misunderstanding is to listen clearly now. Understand?’ Before I could respond he flew into the next sentence like he’d spiked his bronchial inhaler with amphetamines. ‘When you take a picture you think can be sold to any media you bring it to me. Not to anybody else. I don’t care if it’s going in the Rotarian Club Newsletter, it goes through me. If the image has no immediate news value it goes into the stock file to be used when a publication needs it as filler.’ His eyes took on a funny gleam as he paced the length of the aisle and back and back again, twirling a yellow No. 2 pencil between his fingers like the baton of a drum major. ‘If the photographs are very hot – and the ones you’ve brought are scalding – I’ll go to the trouble and expense of calling editors and art directors to pitch them. I bear all expenses involved in this and in return I take 40 per cent. I do not take less. When the publication makes out the cheque, they do so to my agency. I then write a cheque to you for 60 per cent of the amount. If someone cuts a cheque with your name on it, we send it back and tell them to issue a new one. That keeps the record books straight and the tax man happy. Are we agreed?’
‘Something you should know first.’ I’d been rejected so many times I braced myself for it. ‘A week ago I was released from prison. Right now I’m on parole.’
The pencil jammed between his fingers and skidded to the floor. ‘What did you do?’
‘Shot somebody.’
‘Good.’
‘Good?’
‘Weak sisters never last in the business. You mind if I call you Shooter?’
‘No.’
‘It’ll be our joke. Shooter. Get it?’ He cocked his thumb back and flexed his forefinger. ‘Bang!’
The Death Row photographs ran in most major newspapers in the US and even some papers in Europe and Australia. I made enough on the rights not to worry about money for a couple of months and a reputation for being in the right place at the right time. I didn’t think about the tragedy that had resulted in my good fortune. They were already dead when I got there. I just helped to advertise the wake.
The advance on my first cheque as a paparazza bought me a lease on a studio apartment a half-block from the beach, two floors up a four-storey building populated by drug dealers, petty burglars and a few romantics like myself who thought living by the boardwalk in Venice Beach would be inspirational. My needs were simple. Fruit crates scavenged from the dumpster of a local market doubled as bookshelves and bureau. At a discount store I bought a small futon, one glass, one mug, one set of silverware, one plate and one bowl. I didn’t expect company.
Lester gave me my first formal assignment a couple days later, the premiere of what he called the Gone With the Wind of disaster flicks at the Mann Chinese Theater in Hollywood. I was anxious to do a good job for him, got there five hours early to stake out a spot. A half-dozen photographers already milled behind a roped-off area in front of the theatre’s red pagoda façade, each toting a camera that looked big enough to blow up a tank. Bus-loads of tourists measured their feet and hands against the concrete prints of dead movie stars and yelped with the pleasure in Swedish, Japanese, Portuguese, German and the flat accents of Kansas. When I approached the moulds for Bette Davis I too stopped, knelt and palmed her hand print, dumb as any tourist from anywhere and happy I was not yet so cynical that it didn’t thrill me. When I realized her modern counterparts would hate me for how I was about to make my living I moved on.
To the side of the entrance a young woman sat at a card table. Her tag identified her as the press coordinator. She checked my name from a list, handed me a blue tag that read Photo Press and pointed to the ropes. ‘The pen is over there. Wander around as much as you like, but after six don’t go past the barrier.’ She let the command hang in the air for a couple seconds before she added, ‘Please.’
I pinned the tag to my shirt. ‘The pen?’
She looked at me like I was brain damaged. ‘The area behind the ropes is the pen, where the other photographers are.’
I thanked her and walked away thinking, Great, I get out of one pen to start a profession that lands me in another one. I ducked beneath the ropes and set my duffel bag in the corner nearest the curb. A moment later a frizzy-haired photographer walked over and said the spot I stood on was reserved. He was somewhere in his forties, had that flashbulb-glazed look of someone who watches too much pornography. The photographs of famous celebrities hung from his camera strap like scalps. I figured that was why Gabe called him the scalp collector. I wanted to extend some courtesy to my new colleagues so I moved over a notch. I couldn’t stand there either, he said, that was somebody else’s spot. I asked him where I could stand. He pointed at the fan’s bleachers across the red carpet and laughed, raucous as a crow.
I aimed my camera at him and shot. That shut him up.
He said, ‘I’m serious. That spot’s reserved. You can’t work there.’
I could see right away there wasn’t all that much difference between pens. In prison I learned that you can’t take any shit, not ever, because if you do, they’ll just keep giving it to you for the rest of your time. I pulled the camera strap off my neck, zipped the camera in my duffel bag and set the bag at my feet. ‘Do you get any special pride out of being an asshole, or is it like a birth defect, something you can’t control?’ I said it loud enough for everybody to hear.
He flushed from his receding hairline down. ‘Look lady, there’s a pecking order here.’
‘And you’re the chief pecker?’
He was smart enough to see in my balled fists and flat stare a willingness to escalate the conflict. He called me a bitch but he was backpedalling when he said it. Nobody talked to me after that but I didn’t mind. Photographers trickled beneath the ropes in ones and twos until it was job enough holding my spot amid the pushing and shoving of the new arrivals jostling for an angle. Most of the photographers knew each other and gossiped back and forth about who got beat up lately. Bodyguards and actors beat on paparazzi all the time, they said. The way it sounded to me, they wanted to avoid getting beaten up by bodyguards but didn’t mind when hit by actors because they usually got a picture and big news story out of it. With bodyguards all they got was a broken rib.
When the lead limousine rolled in front of the theatre the photographers in the rear surged forward to wedge themselves into the front line against the ropes. An arm hooked around my waist to jerk me back and a bearded burly man in a bush hat and combat vest thrust forward to take my spot. I yelled at him but across the aisle three hundred fans were screaming themselves pink and my protest didn’t attract much attention. I unpinned the identity tag from my shirt. The point was about two inches long. I jammed it knuckle deep into the guy’s shorts. He let out a jumping howl, got tangled up in the rope and flopped on to the red carpet at the feet of an octogenarian actress strolling up the aisle. A security guard arm-locked him from behind and I thought that would be the end of it except the press coordinator darted over ready to hook me too.
‘The big baboon tripped,’ a voice behind me said.
Her eyes addled to a soft gaze and with a dizzy nodding smile she fled back to her corner. I glanced back to find my husband grinning down at me. It shouldn’t have surprised me that other women found him as irresistible as I thought him impossible. ‘No thanks needed,’ he said. ‘You’re short. He’s tall. It’s easier to shoot over you.’
Killing Paparazzi Page 5