Ron Galella, famous paparazzo and adversary of Jackie Onassis, dies at 91 in Montville

Ron Galella, a paparazzo famous for a windswept candid shot of Jackie Onassis-Kennedy, and a literal sparring partner to Richard Burton and Marlon Brando, died Saturday at his home in Montville at the age of 91.

His pictures have graced the walls of MoMA and the Tate in Londongand his book, "Disco Years," which documented the celebrity culture at New York City's Studio 54 was named the best photography book of 2006 by the New York Times.

But that was just one of 22 collections the prolific, if not indefatigable, celebrity photographer-cum-stalker published throughout his career, which he began as a dough-boy charged with taking photos in the Korean War.

"If I’m not invited into the pearly gates of heaven, I just might try sneaking in," Galella joked in his self-penned obituary.

The tenacious paparazzo followed in the footsteps of yellow tabloid journalists of Hollywood's golden age, and the artform's 1960s Italian namesake, honing a "hard-nosed" style that came in handy, figuratively speaking, on at least one occasion, as he told The Record/NorthJersey.com in 2007.

In 1973, the reclusive Marlon Brando came to New York for an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, and Galella got a tip from a limo driver where Brando's helicopter was scheduled to arrive.

After following Brando to Cavett's studio, and then picking up chase after the taping as the talk-show host and his guest retired to a Manhattan restaurant, both wearing dark glasses despite the late hour.

"After I took about nine or 10 shots ... [Brando] said, 'What else do you want that you don't already have?' " Galella remembered in 2007. "I said, 'Well, I'd like a picture without the glasses.' I'm looking at Cavett, and Brando, all of a sudden, socked me."

The blow left him with a broken jaw and a few less teeth than he'd had when he entered the restaurant, but granted him bonafides and a scar he would display proudly for the remainder of his career.

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During another incident in Mexico, he received a "serious beating" from Richard Burton's bodyguards and spent some time in jail as a result, according to his obit.

But his most famous picture, which he's referred to as his "Mona Lisa," is a photo of Jackie Onassis-Kennedy as she strolled down Manhattan's East 90th Street near Madison Avenue.

His obsession with his most famous subject began in 1969, when he snapped candid shots of the former first-lady riding bikes with John F. Kennedy Jr. in Central Park.

He continued to hound the family of Camelot, leading to a series of court battles that culminated in a 1975 ruling that barred him from coming within 25 feet of Onassis and within 30 feet of her children.

But before the injunction took effect, Galella snapped his now famous "Windblown Jackie."

In October 1971, he spotted Onassis leaving her Fifth Avenue co-op as he finished a photoshoot in Central Park.

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He grabbed a cab and set out following her along the tony thoroughfare, eventually catching up with her six blocks later.

When he rolled down his window to snap another picture, she turned as a gust of wind picked up, blowing a veil of brown hair across her magnetic face.

He later described the now-famous photo as "the smile in the beginning — in the eyes and the lips," he said, comparing it to Leonardo da Vinci's famous portrait.

But Galella hardly relented when it came to the family's matriarch, leading to a second court battle and a 1982 injunction that barred him from photographing Onassis, nor either of her children, which remained in effect with regards to Jackie's daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, until his death.

John Jr. made amends with Galella when the presidential heir launched "George" magazine in the mid-1990s and granted the unflagging photographer access during public events.

Galella was born in the Bronx on Jan. 10, 1931, and while Hollywood was nearly 3,000 miles away, the glitz of celebrity worship was a central theme in the first-generation Italian home.

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His mother, a Hoboken native and dressmaker, married his father, a cabinetmaker from Italy, in part because she thought he looked like then-heartthrob Charles Boyer and named Galella after actor Ronald Coleman, he wrote in his obituary.

Despite Hollywood's glamor, he never strayed far from the city of his birth. In 1994, he moved from Yonkers to Montville, New Jersey, where he would spend his remaining years with his wife, and onetime editor, Betty Lou Burke.

Although he rarely shied from self-stated laudations as a paparazzi pioneer, he later bemoaned what he saw as the encroaching vapidity of the artform and its subjects in recent decades.

"To me, if you catch celebrities being themselves, that means something. It's photojournalism," he said in 2007. "My approach was to catch them as they are. Not like today where they look into the camera and it becomes publicity pictures for the most part."

Galella once spent a week locked inside a verminous warehouse in London that overlooked the River Thames in hopes of capturing photos of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton as they boarded their yacht.

He paid the watchman $15 to lock him inside from Friday to Sunday with a bag of food, toilet paper and a sleeping bag.

It was the best vantage point, he determined, and it was all his. Not another photographer in sight, nor crowding his sightline.

It was a far cry from spending a couple hours in the parking lot of Beverly Hills' Spago, pushing your way through the scrum to get the same shot everyone else will soon be offering to TMZ.

Nicholas Katzban is a breaking news reporter for NorthJersey.com. To get breaking news directly to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.

Email: katzban@northjersey.com

Twitter: @nicholaskatzban

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Ron Galella: Famous paparazzo dies at 91 in Montville NJ