PHOTO FINISH

Post-Diana, reports William Cash,

the paparazzi have fallen on hard times

Klosters THE last time I was in Klosters, back in January 1992, when I was sent out by the Daily Express to report on a skiing accident involving the Duke of Kent's daughter and a German, I probably contravened almost every section of the new Code of Practice ratified by the British Press Complaints Commission, in particular section 9, titled `Hospitals', which states: 'Journalists or photographers making enquiries at hospi- tals or similar institutions must identify themselves to a responsible executive and obtain permission before entering non- public areas.'

Quite why a broken royal leg was so newsworthy, I forget, but I do know that getting the first exclusive pictures of Princes William and Harry's 11-year-old royal cousin lying in bed with her leg sus- pended from the hospital ceiling was of much importance to the Express, who spared no expense in sending out their seasoned royal snapper, Steve Wood, to accompany me.

En route to Heathrow, I picked Wood up in a taxi from his imposing three- or four-storey Georgian terraced house in Kensington. It was probably worth at least half a million and was decorated like the pictures from a Colefax & Fowler cata- logue. If you'd been walking past as Wood loaded his designer skis into the cab, with his pretty wife and children waving good- bye outside the front door, the last profes- sion you would have imagined he belonged to was tabloid snapping.

Ditto as we sat back sipping champagne in our British Airways Club seats to Zurich — I remember Wood talked a lot about which public schools he had been visiting as a prospective parent. On arrival, we hired a four-wheel-drive Jeep and sped off towards Davos hospital. Passing our- selves off as members of the royal skiing party, we roamed unchallenged around the wards, camera discreetly hidden, until we were directed by a helpful nurse to the young Kent's private room, where she lay asleep, surrounded by get-well cards and fluffy teddy bears.

In today's post-Diana tabloid world, any such photo would not be worth the paper it was developed on. The once super- wealthy breed of 'stalkerazzi' — many of whom would regularly earn between $300,000 and $500,000, considerably more than most Fleet Street editors — have now fallen on painfully hard times. A quick call around paparazzi working in LA revealed stories of a well-known former British royal paparazzo reduced to working as a hair stylist's photographer, and a for- mer White House staff photographer- turned-paparazzo now working as a 'nude stylist' for a hard-core porn magazine.

`As far as buying paparazzi-type pictures, we've totally stopped,' Stuart Higgins, edi- tor of the Sun, told me. 'It's an area that has just dried up in the last six months. I don't think the public are ready to see newspapers using those pictures, and I think we would suffer if we did.' The Sun's quest for respectability may have gone too far; late on New Year's Eve I walked into the Scotch Bar at the Verinna Hotel to find that the Sun's two reporters were the only men in Klosters decked out in black tie.

With the tabloid photo market having crashed on Fleet Street, formerly the best payer, photo prices around the world have dropped by up to 75 per cent. A photo worth £20,000 two years ago is worth less than £5,000 now. As a result, many paparazzi are having to change their lifestyles radically, if not their jobs alto- gether. As Piers Morgan, editor of the Mir- ror, who always used to keep a hidden camera in his pocket when at a party for the Sun's showbiz column, told me, 'The worst paparazzi, the hounding types who stalked Diana, are getting out of the busi- ness and the agencies are concentrating on less aggressive stuff.'

The royal skiing trip to Klosters has been closely watched as a test of post-Diana paparazzo behaviour. Despite two French photographers being 'named' at Klosters for disobeying the royal request to be left alone, the ban seems to be working. I was in Klosters for a week — on holiday this time, I should add — and didn't see any paparazzi skulking around at the bottom of the Gotchna ski lift in the afternoon, wait- ing for the royal party to finish the day's skiing. Back in 1992, packs of 'Nikon guer- rillas' were practically hanging off the lifts. Apart from the official photo-opportunity, when 50 or so photographers dutifully clicked away, the royals have been left alone.

Were, say, a photo to exist of Prince William snagging a wannabe 'It' girl in the Casa nightclub — the local snog market where a bottle of Absolut costs over £100, where public schoolboys throw up on the dancefloor, and where ex-army officers and bankers fight to buy a 20 franc Sea Breeze cocktail for Tara Palmer-Tomkin- son — such a photo (worth possibly hun- dreds of thousands before the Princess of Wales's death) would be almost worthless, at least in Britain.

In Aspen, meanwhile, where the death of Michael Kennedy on the slopes has pushed the royals off the front page, the paparazzi ratpack are also enduring a humiliating change of fortune. Take my British paparazzo friend Kip Rano, expelled from his London comprehensive at the age of 14, whom I used to be mildly surprised to see having dinner at the exclu- sive Caribou Club, the Annabel's of Aspen. He used to boast that his daily expenses for his annual New Year's Aspen trip were around $900 a day, with a $450 suite at the Ritz-Carlton. This year he is staying for free at someone's house, admit- ting that the days of the $5,000 trip are over.

In fact, Rano says he is about to 'retire', in his mid-thirties, after the National Enquirer informed him that they would only pay him an insulting $36 per diem expenses. Like many others, he bemoans that Diana's death has merely provided an excellent excuse for tabloid editors to get their pictures on the cheap. `I've been strangled,' said Rano, who used to earn over $300,000 in a good year. The final insult was when the Sun recently sent him a cheque for £29 for a photo they used without his permission of the rock star Prince having a tete-a-tete lunch with Kim Basinger in a restaurant. He was orig- inally paid $90,000 for it. 'When I called up and said how much I wanted for it they just laughed,' he sniffed. 'So there's a paper removed from my list of clients.'

`The new tabloid photo editor philoso- phy', he added, 'is to live away from your target in a cheap motel and try and creep around and get a picture of them in a pub- lic place. The way I operate is to live with them, in the same style. If someone isn't willing to pay the bills to stay at the Ritz- Carlton, I'm going to lose interest.'

In the past, on his trips to Aspen, Rano would dismantle his state-of-the- art computerised transmitter that he keeps in a safe at his house in LA and install it in his Ritz-Carlton suite. Had he snapped Michael Kennedy skiing in the near-dark, he could have sent the picture around the world in the time it would take to help himself to a drink from his hotel mini-bar. He used to drive his Jeep to Colorado from LA, fitted with a spe- cial rack for transporting his coffin-like telephoto lens cases. His trophy lens the size of a baby elephant's trunk — is custom-built from a telescope. `I'm not taking the equipment this year,' he told me, before leaving for Aspen. 'The money has vanished. The prices have just dropped. Everybody is complaining. Every photographer I talk to seems to be in financial trouble.'

The Canadian Louie Defilippis, the man behind the exclusive photos of Madonna's daughter's baptism, the man who exposed Walk-to-work day

the rubbery cellulite on Goldie Hawn's bot- tom, has announced to friends that he is going to hang up his camera and try to become a rock singer himself. 'I've had to change my style since Diana's death,' he told me from Miami, where he was shoot- ing the wedding of Anthony Quinn. 'I don't shoot on properties any more. I don't phys- ically intrude.' He gave an example of his new 'style', a recent News of the World shot he took of the actress-model Farah Fawcett looking 'really old'. 'It was a public event, so I went in real close with the lenses. Get- ting her to look really wrinkled and hag- gard became the story,' he told me.

The rules of the tabloid photo hunt have radically changed, not unlike when big game hunting was banned in Africa, and professional hunters had to adapt in order to survive. The most crucial change is that photo editors, certainly those in Britain, want to know how and where the picture was obtained. Some paparazzi, to their deep resentment, are even being required to sign a contract stating such information.

Tabloid editors, of course, are a cunning bunch, and if a set of 'really fabulous' — as editors like to exclaim — pictures come along, a way can usually be found to get them into print. A good example of this was when ,the Sun was offered a set of prints of the actor Keanu Reeves swigging from a whisky bottle like a down-and-out in an LA alleyway. The Sun got round the question of consent by calling up his publicist, saying, `We've got these pictures of your client drunk,' and asking what he was doing. 'It turned out his publicist said he was "rehearsing" for a part,' said Stuart Higgins. `I have no idea if that was true, but it gave us the option of publishing the pictures.'

The closest the stalkerazzo profession has to a Day of the Jackal-style hit-man is the legendary Phil Ramey, based in LA. My favourite Ramey moment was when Vanity Fair crooned that the marriage of Anjelica Huston and the sculptor Robert Graham in LA 'was so private that not one paparazzo showed up'. In fact, the gate- crasher Ramey — he hired a tux — sat through the entire wedding ceremony on a front-row seat chatting away to Mick Jag- ger. He sold his roll of film for over $100,000. Again, in the post-Diana world, at least in Britain, the pictures wouldn't be worth the development fee.

A few years ago, when Ramey was earn- ing at least $1 million a year and was described as 'the most dreaded paparazzo in Hollywood', I interviewed him in the Santa Monica airport hangar where he was on standby to jump into his rented heli- copter to snap Liz Taylor as she was about to be carted into hospital on a stretcher. `To be good', he said, 'you have to get in and burn the celebrities right at their restaurant table.'

Ramey refused to return my calls on the subject of how he was doing post-Diana. All I know is that there was no Ramey party this Christmas.