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Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday May 29, 2008

Tim Elliott

Hugh Jackman for breakfast, Nicole Kidman for lunch and Kate Bosworth for dinner

- it's all a game for Sydney's home-grown paparazzi, writes Tim Elliott.

The first thing I want to ask Jamie Fawcett is: what's it like being punched in the face by Russell Crowe's brother? But I never get to that question, because the second I meet him, in the Tropicana cafe in Darlinghurst, Fawcett starts talking. Physically unremarkable, with a slight paunch, thin gingery hair and milky blue eyes, the paparazzi photographer is nonetheless a world champion talker. He talks while he drives. He talks while he walks. He talks while he takes photos. As I soon discover, Fawcett can talk about anything, but mostly he talks about work.

"Some of the best material I've shot [in the last couple of years] was

of Orlando Bloom and Kate Bosworth," he says as we hop in his car, in preparation for the day's work. "They were sitting in Centennial Park, and the light was perfect - absolutely beautiful, right on sunset, and there they were, humping one another!" (In fact, the photos show the couple kissing.)

Fawcett sold the shots for $40,000 to New Weekly and Woman's Day, but readers didn't hear about the kerfuffle that occurred after he took the last frame. "I took one shot too many," Fawcett explains, "and that's when [Bloom] saw me. He hopped up and started chasing me across the park, and I ran, but as I was running I swapped the memory card in the camera and replaced it with an empty one." Fawcett then dumped the camera in a wheelie bin. "Orlando got the camera out of the bin, took out the card and left the camera on a bench. The card was all he wanted. So imagine the look on his face when he got home and discovered that it was empty!"

Due largely to his on-going battle with Nicole Kidman, who has said she feared for her life while being chased by Fawcett in 2005, the 46-year-old former private investigator is one of the better known of Sydney's paparazzi. (Kidman also accused Fawcett of planting a listening device outside her Darling Point home. He denies it, but in February, NSW Supreme Court judge Carolyn Simpson found it "probable" Fawcett had placed the device.) Most photos by the "paps'" - a growing band of freelance photographers who concentrate solely on shooting celebrities

- end up in the tabloid newspapers and glossy gossip mags, of which Australians are among the world's most avid consumers. Every year we buy 223 million magazines, more than half of which are classified as "women's weeklies". Judging from the covers of Woman's Day (sales: 465,000 a week), New Idea (388,000) and NW (170,000), we cannot get enough of Elle Macpherson's "new-look abs", Lara Bingle's "wedding woes" or Tina Arena's "baby joy".

"My grandma used to gossip about her neighbours," says Kim Wilson, editor of OK! Magazine, one of the market's newest entrants. "In our global village, we might not know who lives next door, but we know who won Dancing with the Stars. The people we all have in common are celebrities."

All this has, of course, been good news for the local paparazzi, whose rise over the past decade has paralleled that of Australian celebrities internationally. "Ten years ago it was a big deal to see an international star in Sydney," says veteran paparazzi Peter Carrette. "Now you have heaps of them here. That has made our work easier and more viable in some ways, but more difficult in others. Because when you have Hugh Jackman always down at the beach playing with his kids or Russell Crowe always out and about in his Rabbitohs cap, mate, you can't give those photos away. Picture editors just say: 'Boring! Seen that!' It's a strategy the smart stars use to make themselves a less valuable target."

Born in London, Carrette came to Sydney in the late 1960s to work

as a rock 'n' roll photographer on Everybody's, a Packer-owned magazine. Sacked a year later, he started working freelance, and now runs a photo agency called Icon Images, based in Bondi, with a dozen or so regular contributors all over Australia. "A decade ago there were only a half a dozen top-whack paps around, including me, but now there are about 30 or 40 of them. It means that you have to try to work outside the square, think of genuinely interesting stories, and get something the others don't have."

Getting that special "something" invariably starts with a tip-off. Today, for example, Jamie Fawcett has heard that Kate Bosworth (star of Blue Crush and Superman Returns), is in town, here for the wedding of her friend and former personal assistant, Jacqui Louez. "Bosworth is the jewel in the crown!" Fawcett pronounces, starting up his silver Jeep Cherokee. The plan is to get a few shots of the actor for the Sunday papers and also, if possible, find out where the wedding is.

Fawcett starts working the phone, calling his contacts - journalists, shop assistants, concierges, restaurateurs, limo drivers - anyone who might have seen Bosworth out and about. "This job is all about building relationships," he says.

"I keep a running tab at the cafes and restaurants along Darlo Road, because that's where a lot of celebs hang out."

Building relationships takes patience, though. "That's also what this job is all about: patience. And persistence."

Tip-offs or no tip-offs though, Fawcett has a good idea of where to look for Bosworth. Years of relentless "papping" have turned his brain into a giant celebrity teledex filled with the haunts and habits of the rich and famous: Kylie Minogue's favourite car? Audi. Nicole Kidman's preferred hairdresser? Renya Xydis. Kate Bosworth's favourite Sydney vegetarian restaurant? Kawa in Surry Hills.

Of course, his job is made easier by the fact that, in Sydney at least, there is only a handful of restaurants and bars where celebrities reliably gather, like wildebeest round waterholes (see Hunting Grounds, page 48).

"It also helps that I grew up in the eastern suburbs," says Fawcett, who went to school at Scots College, in Bellevue Hill. Today he lives with his wife, Anne, a veterinarian and journalist, in a renovated semi in Stanmore, where they share a flamboyant wardrobe ("we love dressing up"), and own a pair of mice called Bryan Brown and Barry White.

We swing down Liverpool Street, past Bills in Darlinghurst, and - bingo! - Fawcett spots someone. "Hugh Jackman!" he says. Fawcett pulls into the laneway opposite the cafe and starts shooting through the rear window.

"I'll never drive past a photo, even though Hugh Jackman doesn't really sell by himself, but he might be waiting for someone else - Naomi Watts, maybe."

It feels a little strange, taking photos of someone without them knowing. But Fawcett is unmoved. "If the worst thing that is going to happen to you is having someone like me take a photo of you coming out a restaurant, then get over it."

Jackman's companion turns up and, unfortunately, it's not Watts. "Looks like some guy from Wolverine," Fawcett says, disappointed. "Oh well. The photo's probably only worth $400, so I'm not going to waste too much time on it."

We take off again, this time up to Crown Street, Surry Hills. Bosworth might be having a late breakfast at Kawa, so we do a drive-by. She is probably with her minder, Fawcett informs me. "So look for a black man and a small white woman."

Fawcett calls another photographer with whom he has a "strategic alliance" (paps often work together to get big shots, the proceeds of which they then split). They discuss the possible whereabouts of the Louez wedding - using electoral rolls, Fawcett has found the addresses of two women named Jacqueline Louez, one in Bondi and one in Mosman. "Just go and hang out the front of the houses and see what comes up," Fawcett tells his colleague.

Meanwhile, we head to Double Bay, via Splash Car Wash in Darlinghurst, "to see if someone famous is having their car cleaned". (They aren't.) Down at Double Bay it's a different story: we're cruising down Cross Street when Fawcett spots Jessica Rowe and former newsreader Anne Fulwood (or at least someone who looks like Fulwood), sitting outside Simmone Logue. He stops the car in the middle of the street and starts shooting through the passenger-side window.

Fawcett wants the women to look at the camera, but they're not playing ball. "Ladies! Ladies...!" he says. But when they still don't respond, he toots his car horn, prompting the women to look around and smile, shaking their heads good naturedly, as if reproaching a naughty toddler. Fawcett claims to be able to make $50,000 in a good day. The most valuable shots he ever took were of Kylie Minogue and Olivier Martinez, in 2005, skipping stones at French Island, near Melbourne.

"I had no idea, but that night she announced she had breast cancer," Fawcett says. "The value of the shots went through the roof. I ended up selling them worldwide for $250,000." Did Kylie get upset? "Nah - she loved the photos."

In Britain, an increase in the number of paparazzi has led to a crash in the market price of photos, with a full-page shot of Keira Knightley or Kate Middleton fetching as little as $420. A similar phenomenon is occurring here: "Too many photographers, too many photos," says Peter Carrette, who was one of a group of photographers who famously fired water pistols at Heath Ledger in 2006. But competition between magazines still has the potential to push the price of exclusive shots to stratospheric levels. "I'm pleased to say I hold the current Australian sales record," Ben McDonald,

a Sydney pap, tells me. "They were a set of pics of Shane Warne holidaying with Simone in Fiji in January last year, and I sold them to New Idea for more than $250,000."

Recently McDonald has been working in alliance with Fawcett to get shots of Nicole Kidman. "I'm really after a shot of her at the beach, because she would probably be wearing something form-fitting, which might reveal her baby bump.

I mean, she's five months' pregnant, and everyone wants to know why she isn't showing more."

Even so, pictures of Kidman, bump or no bump, would only be worth $5,000 to $10,000, "because there's been a bit of her around lately". The real pay day would come with the baby's birth. So, what would a photo of that be worth? "If it was of her and the baby and Keith and it was exclusive and sold around the world..." McDonald pauses: "$1 million."

Back on the road, Fawcett receives a phone call telling him that Mandy Moore, a teen-pop idol perhaps best known for dating tennis player Andy Roddick, will be going shopping on Oxford Street, Paddington. "Mandy Moore!" he exclaims. "F--k her! She's boring! She has dinner at 6.30pm and she's in bed by eight. Boring, boring, boring." Moore, says Fawcett, is on the "pure tour", which makes her "not

worth a pinch of shit. No one cares about celebrities when they're well behaved. They want to see them going through the same stuff that we all do. Drunk. Partying. Going to rehab."

Nevertheless, Fawcett insists he has standards. He doesn't do funerals, for instance

("You make enough money out of people when they're alive"), and once caught a well-known Australian actor emerging from a brothel late at night, but didn't shoot him - "That would be wrong." In 2005, he was asked to track down Graham Kennedy in his dying days, but he declined. "He did not want to be a public figure any more," says Fawcett. Fatal illnesses and brothels aside, the photographer considers most stars, and particularly Nicole Kidman, it seems, as fair game. As part of a defamation case brought by Fawcett against The Sun-Herald in 2005, the photographer denied he had chased Kidman in a high-speed car chase. He spent $700,000 on the case, which he lost, and has just had $800,000 of costs awarded against him. Most recently, he enraged Hollywood starlet Mischa Barton by gatecrashing her Hamilton Island holiday. And yet he remains unapologetic.

After an hour of waiting outside a shop called Peep Toe in Oxford Street, the boredom gets too much, and Fawcett resumes the search for Bosworth. It occurs to him the wedding might actually be today. "People make the mistake of assuming weddings are always on Saturday - I've done that before." Spotting wedding guests arriving at the St Francis of Assisi chapel

on Oxford Street, and punting that it might just be Louez's party, Fawcett pulls up beside them.

"Who's getting married then?" he asks, bristling with bonhomie.

"Carol and Steve!" one of the guests replies.

"Give them my best!" Fawcett yells and drives off. "Well, it could've been them; stranger things have happened."

Ten minutes later, we're walking down Oxford Street, peering into clothes stores as Fawcett talks animatedly into a walkie-talkie (which collaborating paps sometimes use as a free alternative to mobile phones.) "It's sport!" Fawcett says. "Not many people will admit that, but that's what it is. Getting the shot that no one else has got. That's still really exciting.

I still love opening the paper and seeing my photos and a great story. I also enjoy the chase, although I have to be careful with that word nowadays."

Later that night, I get a call from Fawcett. "We found her!" he says of Kate Bosworth. "She was in Bondi, having dinner." What about the shots? "Oh, they're OK. Most celebs, they're only worth something for a split second. Don't ask me why, 'cos I really don't know... All I know is that this is her split second." He laughs, then goes silent for a moment. "Now, we just have to find that f--king wedding..."

Hunting grounds

Where the paparazzi lie in wait

Hugo's Kings Cross, Scanlan & Theodore Paddington, Bills Darlinghurst, Icebergs Bondi, Simmone Logue Double Bay, Hemmesphere CBD, the Finger Wharf Woolloomooloo, Park Hyatt The Rocks, Campbell Parade Bondi, Ocean Road Palm Beach

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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