The Long, Long Tail
Riding along with a paparazzo, in pursuit of Jake and Penelope.
by Justin Clark
December 12, 2006
Angelenos spend a lot of time in their cars, but Jose, a thirty-nine-year-old former helicopter-parts salesman from Brazil, has more to complain about than most. He has spent almost all of the past three days in the rented white Jeep Cherokee in which he is now parked a hundred yards from the entrance to Los Angeles' celebrity-infested sushi restaurant, Matsuhisa. He has not changed his clothes in three days, nor has he slept more than four of the past twenty-four hours, having spent the previous night parked on a block of expensive homes in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, relieving himself into a bottle and enduring periodic harassment from suspicious neighbors and the police. Fortunately, Jose is well-paid, if not always well-liked by those he hunts. He is a paparazzo.
He's slunk low in the driver's seat, concealed like a zoologist in a nature blind, just out of sight of the valets waiting on the cold sidewalk outside. He chatters away in Portugese on his cell phone. All I recognize are the two names he mentions almost continually: "Penélope" and "Jake."
As soon as he gets off the phone, Jose looks at me cautiously. He's a blonde beach-bum-looking type, wearing a sweatshirt and shorts, despite the November chill. We've only met a few minutes earlier, and he studies me as if I might be a spy from a rival agency, here to spoil his scoop.
"You know who is in the restaurant?" he asks.
I nod, having already deduced that Jose's quarry, actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Penélope Cruz, are his targets. A few days ago, someone tipped off Jose's agency, X17, that the two have been dating. If so, the story could be particularly juicy: Cruz was previously linked with one of Gyllenhaal's best friends, Matthew McConaughey. Or, if you are a member of Jose's profession, simply Matthew.
"You can't tell no one," Jose tells me, but then smiles and lets me in on a secret. "I have a source inside."
No sooner does Jose tell me this than the "source" appears, a dark-haired woman he introduces as Sabrina.
"It's too difficult," Sabrina says breathlessly, jamming herself into the front seat amid Jose's gear. She opens her black leather bag, which has a hole cut from it just large enough to accommodate the lens of the video camera she pulls out. As she and Jose review the footage on the camera's playback screen, she explains the problem: the stars are seated hidden behind a wall in Matsuhisa, and that the restaurant is too dark to pull off a decent shot anyway.
"They know there are paps all around," says Sabrina. "But they're going to come out soon."
As Jose readies his camera and leaves the car to hide behind a wall closer to the restaurant entrance, I feel myself succumbing to the desire to see Penélope Cruz in person — something I can honestly say I've never experienced before. Neither has Sabrina, who claims Penélope is "fucking another A-lister to keep her career alive." Still, if the shot is worth a bundle, why doesn't Sabrina follow Jose to get her own photo?
"I'm the spotter," she explains, meaning that she doesn't specialize in taking pictures. Instead she drives around all day, and uses what she says is a photographic memory to recognize celebrities. "I know every face from the A-listers to the Z-listers. It helps that I'm a TV freak."
"Where do you look for them?" I ask. "The Chateau Marmont?"
"No, I just run my own errands. I see them in places like Target," she tells me. I think she's kidding, but she isn't. "Eva Longoria is a Target freak. So is Avril Lavigne."
"What did you do before this?"
"I was Madonna's nanny."
For someone who spends her days in close proximity to the famous, Sabrina seems surprisingly star struck. She is "in love" with Prison Break star Wentworth Miller and Al Pacino; not so much Keanu Reeves, who she claims doesn't know how to pump his own gas. When I ask Sabrina how she knows that, she tells me about the time his motorcycle ran out of gas, and she pulled over to give him a ride. He didn't recognize her until she introduced herself. He begged her not to photograph him, swearing he would give her the chance the next time he saw her.
"Did he?" I ask.
"He didn't even recognize me," she says.
Jose comes rushing back to the car.
"Did you get it?" asks Sabrina.
Jose shakes his head.
"They're leaving," he announces, and Sabrina has barely enough time to jump out of the front seat before Jose guns the engine and whips a U-turn across La Cienega. I buckle my seatbelt as we pursue Penélope's Range Rover north. She's obviously aware that we are in pursuit, and barely stops at the red light ahead of us.
"They're taking separate cars to throw us off," Jose says, explaining that a third photographer is following Jake's black Mercedes.
We hang a right on Wilshire, and I find myself pressed against the door, reaching for something to hold onto. All the sudden we're on a street I don't recognize, despite having lived in Los Angeles my whole life. We swerve into the left lane, back into the right, back into the left. The partygoers cruising this upscale neighborhood gawk as we fly past, but we're still not making any headway. Apparently Penélope picked up some driving lessons on the set of Vanilla Sky, I think. As adrenaline blinds my senses, I feel a primal fixation on the luxury automobile three cars ahead.
She weaves through traffic, stopping hard at the next light, then darting between pedestrians as she drives into the Grove, an upscale outdoor mall built in the grotesque effigy of a small New England town square. Suddenly we are all stuck in traffic, and Jose could practically hop out of his car and sprint up to the Range Rover if he wanted.
But a police car is waiting ahead, which means Jose has to be careful. While he's never been arrested, he has been handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police car. For Jose, a non-citizen, his is an especially dangerous business. A felony conviction could get him deported, and California now has the toughest paparazzi laws in the nation. Last year, a Los Angeles paparazzo was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon after crashing into Lindsay Lohan's car. The charges were subsequently dropped, and many paparazzi blame Lohan for the crash. But if there's anyone the public hates worse than an obnoxious celebrity, it's the person who takes their pictures.
At the moment, Jose couldn't care less what people think, but suddenly there's another problem. Penélope's lane has cleared up, and she zooms up into the parking structure while Jose is still stuck in traffic. When we finally get to the entrance, Jose doesn't know whether she's used the garage's valet entrance or the regular one. He gets on his phone and tells Rafael, one of his colleagues en route, to search the valet portion of the garage. Jose sighs, as we drive slowly around the parking level, peeling our eyes for Penélope's license plate.
"I think they played a trick," he says. "Maybe they drove in and drove out."
Jose decides to go to Penélope's house and see if her car is there. He slams the Jeep into reverse and executes the fastest three-point turn I've ever seen, before we plunge down the exit ramp. He grabs a fistful of bills from his wallet to hand the parking attendant, too fixated on the pursuit to worry about exact change. We're waved past free of charge, however, and Jose starts racing back out of the Grove, but Penélope isn't anywhere in the outbound traffic. Apparently, he's overestimated her cunning: she's still in the parking structure, somewhere. We flip yet another U-turn and re-enter the garage.
"Keep your eyes peeled," he tells me, reciting the last three digits of her license plate. I ask him how many license plates he has memorized. He tells me I don't want to know.
Success. After a careful tour of the parking garage, Jose sees her car parked and empty, and decides they've gone to a movie at the Grove after all. He decides to go looking for Jake's Mercedes, and eventually we find it. But it's unlikely that he'll get the shot he needs of the two of them together in the garage, and with the police around it's too risky to try to shoot them on private property. He decides to go to back to square one.
An hour later, we wait in Jose's car, a hundred yards up the street from Penélope's house, high up enough to catch a glimpse of Hollywood's yellow lights scattered below us. It's midnight, hours to kill before the rich and famous weave their Jaguars home. Jose has already given me a tour of Penélope's neighborhood, pointing out Christina Aguilera's house and Paris Hilton's. "One night I was waiting outside and I saw Paris' legs sticking up in the air while [boyfriend] Stavros Niarchos was eating her pussy," Jose tells me.
And yet one of Jose's revelations is that Paris Hilton is probably the least promiscuous celebrity he knew — unlike her boyfriend, who Jose says fucks everyone, including former Hilton handmaiden Lindsay Lohan.
Sometimes the celebrity territorial pissing is literal. Jose recalls the night he photographed a puddle of urine Paris left behind on the sidewalk outside a popular Hollywood nightclub. As her friends entered the club ahead of her, Paris hung back with her bodyguards, using them as a curtain as she squatted on the sidewalk. As soon as she continued to the club, Jose found the evidence the heiress had marked her territory. "If only I'd been thinking, I would have sold it on eBay," he says. But as someone who regularly relieves himself into a bottle, he adds, he sympathizes.
Paris is an easy target, rarely rude to the paparazzi — unlike, I learn to my disappointment, Sean Penn. The last time Jose encountered Sean in a Malibu parking lot, he was warned to stay away — by his fellow photographers. "They told me, 'That guy is a motherfucker. He'll punch you the first chance he gets.'" But even Penn is an easy mark, compared to the rare animal Jose is hunting now: the Jakelope.
As in a James Bond movie, the silhouette of a black-clad bodyguard paces up and down Penélope's floodlit driveway, outside the open garage. The bodyguard's name is Craig, and he harassed Jose during last night's vigil. Tonight, Jose has somehow managed to befriend him, despite their cross-purposes. He doesn't want to bother Penélope, he's told Craig; he only wants to do his job like everyone else, and go home.
That approach actually works more often than you'd expect, he tells me. At some point, the paparazzo's determination may simply wear out the celebrities he hunts. Or vice-versa: all he wants is to go home and go to sleep. I ask Jose why he moved to L.A. five years ago.
"Because coming to L.A. was like a dream," he tells me. He'd never been interested in celebrities, he explains; as a passionate surfer, he'd dreamed of Southern California's beaches. At first, when a Brazilian paparazzo friend of his invited to teach him the ropes, Jose wasn't interested.
"I was so straight and narrow," Jose says, telling me he was on anxiety medication at the time, and the thought of pursuing someone in traffic or hiding in the bushes was unthinkable. He'd only recently learned to drive, an essential skill for any paparazzo. Gradually, though, he came to hate his aviation-sales job enough to give his friend's offer a second thought. One day Jose and his friend went to a newsstand to pick up a tabloid carrying the friend's photos. Unaware how lucrative the profession was, Jose asked his friend how much money he made. When he heard the answer, his jaw dropped.
"That did it," Jose recalls.
Paparazzi are secretive about how much they earn because rates vary so wildly. Jose spends much of his time snapping celebrities at pre-arranged photo-ops. A standard red carpet shot could be worth only a few hundred dollars initially, though the right shot could provide steady income from royalties.
The business has gotten tougher recently, says Jose. For some reason, he's seen dozens of novices entering the business in the past year, driving down the market and inspiring increasingly competitive tactics that have led to the stricter paparazzi laws. Some of Jose's competitors don't even use cameras. Jose fumes when I mention celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, recently sued by X17 and several other agencies for using their photos without permission.
"He makes more money than the people who take the photos," Jose says, which is plenty. Jose earns close to $10,000 during a good month, of which his agency keeps a significant share. His more experienced colleagues bring in $30,000, much of it from royalties.
The real money comes from exclusives and candid shots like the one he is pursuing today: a photo revealing an undisclosed romance, a hushed-up pregnancy, a public argument, or a nip-slip. Last year, a shot of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's tryst in Africa went for a cool half million. Jose's most lucrative shot was a photo he took of Stavros Niarchos pounding on Paris Hilton's door in the middle of the night, begging her to take him back. Jose won't say how much he was paid, but his smile does it for him.
Surprisingly, though, it isn't all about the money for Jose. When he started taking pictures, he says, he discovered a confidence in himself he'd never imagined he had. He began to feel at home in Los Angeles, and stopped missing his family so much. He now makes good money, enough to let him retire in just a few more years, and travels regularly to exotic resorts, sharing the adventures of the famous without experiencing the same nuisances — paparazzi like himself, for example.
Like scores of his colleagues and rivals slinking around the freeways and private drives of L.A., Jose is still hunting the coveted, elusive Jakelope — so far, the alleged couple have managed to evade being photographed in any incriminating mileau. By the time Jose drops me off it's near dawn; we'd spent six hours together in alternating extremes of adrenaline-fueled pursuit and mind-numbing tedium. While I was eager to collapse into bed, Jose had only another quick nap to look forward to before it would be time to pick up where he left off: chasing down the celebrity couple for the shot that could bring him months worth of rent. The dreams that come true in Tinseltown can turn out to be mostly hard work. When I asked Jose where he liked to surf, he answered, "I've lived here five years," he laughs, "and I've only gone surfing three times." n°
©2006 Justin Clark and hooksexup.com