Picture a paparazzi. A greasy, corpulent roué, fresh from a tabloid picture desk, reeking whisky and cynicism? But the man waiting to meet me at 11pm in a Florence hotel lobby is none of the above. Massimo Sestini, notorious paparazzo, scourge of celebrities, is instead slim, wiry, dressed in black with Florentine elegance, and playing with his Palm Pilot. “Ciao!” he says with the warmth he has consistently displayed over months of arranging this meeting, and we head to a restaurant for the most late-night interview I’ve ever undertaken.
“The last thing a paparazzi needs is publicity,” he says at the table, at the beginning of a two-hour outpouring, a week after he was prominently featured in the Sunday Times magazine, and a year after Italian newspapers figured out he was the Italian with second-highest profile in foreign newspapers. “But I know what’s it like to need to get something from people. So I want to help you out.”
But paparazzi have only ever been selectively shy, ever since they were immortalised in Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita, where the Vespa-riding photographer Paparazzo was modelled on Tazio Secchiaroli, possibly the most notorious paparazzo of all. Though there are other candidates: Californian Phil Ramey, the most ferocious celebrity stalker in Hollywood. English Jason Fraser, who “gets a buzz from hanging out of helicopters” and who otherwise fearsome tabloid editors are anxious to keep happy. Self-titled “King of Paparazzi” Rino Barillari, whose measures his job satisfaction with 183 hospital visits, several knifings, five shootings and 78 destroyed cameras. And Massimo Sestini, 38, the man who has a picture in his office of the Dalai Lama waving to him from a helicopter, who has penetrated European brothels with a hidden camera, and who has “done his time in trees.” He wants to move onto the serious stuff, he says during our interview. “If you offered me the chance to photograph [Italian business magnate] Gianni Agnelli, I would drop everything.”
For the past twenty years, though, he has dropped everything – and hired planes, trains and automobiles – to pursue the world’s trash and tiaras with very long lenses. While James Bond’s latest villain had turned from Cold War tyrant to Murdoch-esque media mogul, today’s James Bonds are the persistent ranks of the world’s paparazzi, armed with surveillance equipment, helicopters and thousands of sources. “They are more like secret service agents than photographers,” sniffed one Italian photographer. “You spend your summers in beach resorts and your winters in mountains,” says Sestini. “You have to be able to do everything to keep up – ski, swim, scuba-dive. Everything.”
That explains his thinness: Days of lugging around equipment, living in trees and hiding overnight in churches takes its toll on body fat. Though he didn’t go to the lengths of Londoner Robert Jones (who recently hid for three days in the organ of Madonna’s Scottish church, with two binliners for body waste), Sestini did once spend a night hidden behind a confessional in Florence’s Brancacci Chapel, before dressing up as a workman, duping a kindly priest, and getting the world’s first photos of uncovered genitals in the famous Masaccio frescoes.
The second thing I notice about him is the gash on his forehead, which I hope came from some run-in with thuggish bodyguards (actually he walked into a shop shutter while looking through his digital camera). And the third is the size of his car boot, where he keeps 60kg worth of equipment, including lenses as long as your arm, the brains of his DVD/CD/GSM computer (complete with dashboard TV and navigator, and steering wheel remote control) and the pin-hole camera that got him some of his famous scoops. “I’m not even going to tell you how much it all costs.”
But he’s not reticent – in fact, positively gushing - and I get the feeling he’s had a lot of practice (later, I read his tales almost word for word in the Sunday Times). Here goes the Caroline of Monaco Story: “It was the funeral of her husband [who died in a speedboat accident]. I was freelance – no money, no backup. The funeral was top-secret – invited guests only. It was crawling with security. The paparazzi were massed outside the cathedral and I decided there was no point standing there to get the same picture everyone else got. So I put on a raincoat, hid a KGB ordnance camera behind my tie and attached myself to some guests. Everyone had numbered, seated invitations, so I couldn’t sit down. The security guards noticed me and I was trying to figure out how to escape, when I heard “Massimo!”. It was a relative of King Vittorio Emmanuele – I’d taken pictures at his children’s weddings. He said “can I introduce you to Vittorio Emmanuele?” and I was so terrified, I threw my arms around the ex-King of Italy. The guards backed off, and I sat down with the royal family. Caroline went up to the coffin and burst into tears, and I got a picture. It earned me £30,000.”
The obvious questions start rumbling, involving the words ‘intrusion’ and ‘grief’ and ‘exploitation.’ But we’re only on the first course, so I leave them for now, while he tucks into chicken, and into the tale of “a lovely Di in paradise,” as the Sun headlined his most famous paparazzi moment.
It was five years ago, and Diana and Charles initiated the paparazzi hunt by borrowing billionaire John Latsis’ 400 foot yacht Alexander. “Hunt” is not an exaggeration: Latsis loathes journalists, and part of the attraction of the Alexander (because one yacht is pretty much like the next after a while), is its ability to outspeed the paparazzi powerboats and yachts which they hire every summer to trail around the Mediterranean for three months. The Med Hunt is the unspoken sporting fixture of the international society set calendar, as much so as Camilla’s Gloucestershire Beaufort hunt, only this time Camilla’s being hounded. Last year, it was William and the three debutantes accompanying on him on the Alexander, the potential First Kiss (or First Kiss in Print) having most tabloid and gossip editors fainting with pleasured anticipation.
In 1995, Diana and Charles were still married, but staying in separate suites on the yacht. Or so it was rumoured, because the hundreds of paparazzi buzzing round the Bay of Naples, floating on oceans of cash from picture desks, couldn’t actually manage to find them. Even Sestini failed, but back in Florence he had, lightbulb-like, a burst of inspiration. “I imagined where I would go if I was very rich and wanted privacy, so I called a friend in Sardinia to look for a big blue yacht with a helicopter pad. He found it near Olba, and I grabbed a ferry and went out in a high-speed dinghy. The sea was really choppy, so I jumped on to a tourists’ boat that was passing, and at that moment, Diana came out on deck. In a bikini! This was the first time she’d ever been seen in one! When I phoned the tabloids, they didn’t believe I’d found her.” He earned £65,000, a cover of the Sun, and an instant international reputation as the man who got Diana in a two-piece. From then on, he was the paparazzo to turn to for sneak photographs or, as Italians say more poetically and accurately, “foto rubate” (stolen photos). Not bad for 1/500th of a second of work.
Should you be befuddled at just how a piece of swimwear can be considered a milestone in popular photography, think back to Rome, 1958, and a small, thin man on a Vespa. There was a strike on in Hollywood, and the stars were coming instead to the Holy City’s Cinecitta studio. With the intelligence and imagination of celebrities worldwide, they all conveniently hung out on the same street, in the same clubs, exactly where ‘photojournalists’ like Tazio Secchiaroli could stick Rolleiflexes in their face and escape on the Lambrettas driven by their assistants.
The combination of stars and scooters demolished the old tradition of glossy, posed, boring studio photographs, but it was to get better. One night, Secchiaroli pissed off the ex-King Farouk of Egypt, and the Vespa mob discovered papers would pay 3000 lire for a normal “foto rubata”, but 200,000 for a foto rubata with a furious celebrity thrown in. [Secchiaroli took to wearing a football helmet around Marlon Brando]. And so the rules of engagement were laid down, then engraved in celluloid by Fellini in La Dolce Vita. Quite how he came to choose Paparazzo as the name of his photographer is a mystery: Some think it came from a the name of a hotelkeeper in a 1909 travel book. Or from the Latin term for a large and annoying mosquito. Or from the name of a particularly tenacious rock mollusc found only in southern Italy.
Whatever. It has anyway become a badge that – unbelievably – most paparazzi wear with pride. Though Jason Fraser may sniff that he is a “specialist photographer” (his speciality being taking telephotos of Camilla on a Mauritius beach), the Italian paparazzi have no shame in their name. Rino Barillari has “King of Paparazzi”, complete with coronet, engraved on his business card. Sestini says it’s neither positive nor pejorative. “It’s just a description.” Not according to the outraged celebs – Pavarotti, Tom Cruise - who howled after Diana’s death in the Pont d’Alma, and who equate the word “paparazzo” with “vulture” or “scum”. Catherine Deneuve calls her pursuers “dogs of war,” then admits that at the hairdressers, she will always pick up Hello! before the Economist.
Ah, gossip. “It is merely one of those half-alive things that crowd out real life,” wrote E.M. Forster eight decades ago. Nothing wrong with that, says Bice Biagi, the charming and civilised editor of one of Italy’s more cantankerous scandal mags, Novella 2000. “We all want to know that the dentist’s wife on the third floor is sleeping with the concierge. It would be stupid to deny it.” The public’s voracious consumption of curiosity – the Sun sells more than all the broadsheets put together - is the reason most paparazzi give when asked to defend their profession. “We just take pictures. The responsibility is on people who look,” says Sestini.
And the outraged celebrities are standing on shaky ground, too, in this battle where the lines are fuzzily drawn. “When people are trying to get known,” Sestini says, “they make friends with paparazzi. They’ll call you and say ‘I’ll be at the airport with my lover tomorrow at 4.’ If you asked them to kiss the President, they’d do it. When they get famous, you never hear from them again.” “Scandalised?” laughs Bice Biagi. “I get businessmen ringing me up when they know I’ve bought a photo of them, asking me to put them on the cover. When I do publish them, they never care what we’ve written, just what they look like in the photos.”
Since Diana’s death in the Pont d’Alma – caused by paparazzi or a drugged and drunk driver, according to your viewpoint – UK tabloid editors have nobly stayed away from paparazzi photos, though the continental mass of Eurotrash gossip mags (Voici, Evatremila, Novella 2000, Semana, etc) have had no such scruples. “I got a picture of Tony Blair in his swimming pool,” says Sestini, still sounding slightly surprised, “and the English papers wouldn’t touch it.” Which is financially disastrous for any paparazzo: Though the British tabloids lay much noisier claims to being serious newspapers than the Eurotrash press, they pay much more for sneak shots. “Foreign photographers are surprised at how low the market rate is here,” says Biagi. “But we only read 5 million papers a day, and that hasn’t increased since the 1950’s.” Blame transport, not tradition. “In the UK, more people travel to work on public transport. They have time to read a daily paper, and a tabloid is easy to read. Italians always use a car – it’s a bit difficult to read a paper when you’re on a motorway, even the way Italians drive.”
So when the tabloids’ self-imposed restraint began to melt last summer – as soon as Prince William turned 18 – the ranks of rock molluscs with motordrives breathed a sigh of relief. But then the government adopted the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, just in time for Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas to use it to sue Hello! magazine for sneaking a sneak photographer into their tacky New York wedding, for the high-minded reason that they’d already sold the rights to OK! for £1 million.
Because – though you may not have noticed it was missing – the Human Rights Act now provides Britons with the means to protect their privacy. Until now, this was a quaint continental practice to be regarded with faint mockery, sort of like civil rights and freedom of information. For now, it’s just made two avaricious stars richer. But it could in future lead to greater things, like the transformation of the nation’s magazine design departments. In France, where privacy laws are stringently enforced, the bare naked ladies on gossip magazine’s covers are regularly dissected with a half-page black and white legal apology to whoever has sued for their “right to their image” this week.
“It’s hilarious,” says Bice Biagi. “Half the cover every week! And they keep on doing it!” So much so that French intellectuels now snigger that Voici, VSD and other gossip mags wouldn’t be recognisable without it. No such scruples in Italy though, where – as was the case in Britain until the Zeta-Jones Human Rights Law – editors claim to be bound by self-imposed ethical limits. Hospital beds are out, says Biagi, “unless it’s a positive piece of news, like a woman giving birth.” Private residences are out too. “Everyone has the right to hang out in their own garden without having a photographer take pictures of them, even if they’re cheating on their husband.” For those unlucky enough to be unwilling celebrities, this amounts to house arrest: Shops, churches, restaurants are all public places (though a German court recently agreed that Princess Caroline’s privacy had been invaded because she had chosen to dine away from the window.)
Most paparazzi still sigh with reverence at the exploits of Adriano Bartolini (Signor Bartolini, with delicious hypocrisy, prefers to guard his privacy and won’t talk to “the press”). It’s 1980, in Castelgandolfo near Rome. A rumour is circulating that the Pope is building a swimming pool in his summer residence. Bartolini and fellow paparazzo Luciano Parente hire a helicopter and reconnoitre, noting some concrete foundations, as well as the position of each tree, bush and wall. A year later, the pool is ready and the paparazzi are back. They climb the outside wall and lay low for two weeks, sustained by a local girl who throws them food. They rig a Nikon F2 up to a bush and link it to a videocamera, keeping an eye on what the camera sees. After ten days, the Pope comes out, strips to his trunks and the paparazzi get a legendary photo.
“Ah, the Pope,” says Sestini over dessert, with Catholic reverence. “He’s the one I want to get. Mountaineering, or walking. Doing something human.” Not much chance of that, given the increasingly corpse-like quality of His Holiness. But Massimo has other projects up his sleeve and behind his tie. “I don’t take pictures of celebrities doing their shopping any more, but I still use the techniques.” For the Italian news-weekly Panorama, he took his hidden camera into Europe’s highest-class brothels. Here comes the Hooker Story: $5000 to get in the door, 2 girls for an hour. He couldn’t have sex, not for any ethical reasons [despite his wife and young daughter], but because he couldn’t afford to get his equipment discovered. Nonetheless, one prostitute’s hand inadvertently caressed his camera. He leans over the table towards me. “I died on the spot. But she breathed into my ear, ‘next time, leave your gun at home.’”
It’s getting a little too 007 to be credible. But such exploits are what make photo editors say “Paparazzo? Talk to Sestini”. “There are less than 20 decent paparazzi in Italy,” sighs Bice Biagi, “and an infinite sea of bad ones.” She sees 8 reportages each from 15 agencies every morning. “They get so repetitive, sometimes I just can’t take it any more.” What distinguishes a good paparazzo, she says, is not hardware or technique. “Everyone has the same equipment these days. You can’t just stand there and go Clic! You need a good journalistic instinct.”
Which Massimo Sestini has in abundance. He has just told me that two of the photographers arrested after Diana’s crash were working for Sestini News Pictures, the agency he founded in Florence in 1988. And that they managed to smuggle out pictures of Diana dying – “lips still moving!” – but that he handed them over to the French police “because I didn’t want my photographers to end up in jail.” Continuing on the selfless theme, he recalls the days when Formula One drivers Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were killed within days of each other at San Marino. “A nurse called me from the hospital: He’d taken a roll of film of the corpses. He offered to sell them to me, and of course I said yes, who wouldn’t?” But dead racing drivers were too much even for a paparazzo. “I mean, you’ve got to be cynical in this business, but everything should be done upfront. So instead, I rang Panorama magazine and offered to sell them the opportunity to not buy the photos.” Eh? “I said, I’ll give you the opportunity to declare that Panorama has withheld these photos from public consumption as a public service. They told me OK, but I had to write the editorial.” The next week, Sestini got 60,000 letters from readers, congratulating him on his restraint and wishing more paparazzi were like him.
And how many other photos have you refused to publish in the public interest, Massimo?
Oh. Only those.
So go the puzzling contradictions of the gossip world, where a leading paparazzo like Sestini makes a fortune from tabloids, but loathes to read them (”I only like the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Times magazines”). Or where Bice Biagi would never buy a picture of “a woman in a cinema, say, whose skirt has ridden up and is showing her knickers. It’s just not going to interest the reader. It’s vulgar.” As vulgar as endless pages of topless starlets, and politicians, and middle-ranking businessmen, and Z-list TV presenters (because Italians have an even wider definition of celebrity than Channel 5), bending down on beaches, wearing only G-strings? But she doesn’t answer.
Sestini and me move onto a bar for chamomile tea. He tells me he enrolled at university to study political science, but dropped out to be a photographer on the local paper. He frowns. “You think less of me now, don’t you, because I didn’t go to university?” What, you mean as opposed to thinking less of you because you take pictures of grieving women with hidden cameras? No, Massimo, of course not.
On the way back to the hotel, he turns to me with a grin. “I’m going to tell you the most surprising thing of all.”
Let me guess. You’re actually shy?
“Shit! Am I that predictable?”
He decided at one point, he says, that shyness wasn’t going to affect his work. Quite how he got from this to being a professional gatecrasher is beyond me, but then so is the attraction of lying in cold Scottish grass for three days, as a paparazzo did recently in the hope of snapping Madonna.
But before I scorn mine host – and he is charming enough for me to feel guilty about it – perhaps I should recollect a recent survey by the Industrial Society: Gossip, it concluded, is essential in a healthy workplace, and by extension, in daily life. So Massimo Sestini, secret cameras and all, is performing a public service? He grins. “I don’t have any problems with what I do. The newspapers want pictures, and people always look at them. They always will.”
Published in Arena magazine