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"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.
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. |
"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."
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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A recent graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Justin Clark has written for L.A. Weekly, Psychology Today, Black Book, Architecture, Fuse, and The Fader, among other publications. He is currently researching a history of the American child prodigy, and writing a mystery novel set in Los Angeles.
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©2006 Justin Clark and Nerve.com |
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