Ron Galella poses with the football helmet he once wore as mock protection against angry celebs, after Marlon Brando punched him. (MARIE-JOELLE PARENT/QMI Agency)

NEW YORK — Fifty years ago, Federico Fellini introduced the world to the word “paparazzi”.

Ron Galella was the first “photo bandit” in the United States. Without him, there would be no TMZ. It was he who started the trend of secretly shooting his subjects.

Galella opened the doors of his New Jersey home to me recently, a home with a basement filled with three million pictures of celebrities. A real gold mine.

Jackie Onassis took him to court twice. Marlon Brando knocked out his teeth and he was beaten up by Richard Burton’s bodyguards. Elvis’ people punctured his car tires and he was twice banned from Studio 54. It should come as no surprise that Newsweek nicknamed him the “paparazzi extraordinaire”, while Vanity Fair called him the “Godfather of U.S. paparazzi culture”.

Galella was the first to photograph stars away from the red carpet and out of their comfort zones. Instead, he waited for the tipsy stars to exit places such as Studio 54.

“The exclusive, the unrehearsed, the off guard, that’s what I was looking for,” says Galella.

The wall of his home’s huge atrium is covered in black and white photos.

Lennon, Elvis, Taylor, Kennedy, Warhol, Newman and Jagger are all there. A real celebrity museum.

“A great photograph shows the famous doing something unfamous,” Warhol once said.

Galella and Warhol, in fact, got along well.

“We had a lot of things in common, we had the disease to not want to miss anything, we would go out every night,” says Galella. “He called me his favourite photographer in his book. I think he wanted to be like me but he was too shy and he was an insider. I have always been an outsider.”

The choice spot for a photo over the fireplace is reserved for his best-known shot.

“I call it Windblown Jackie,” says the photographer of the picture in which Jackie Onassis is seen, wind blowing through her hair, crossing Madison Avenue with an enigmatic smile. “It’s my Mona Lisa smile.”

It has been reported that Galella made as much as $1 million for the photo, though he begs to differ.

“No, I don’t think I made that much,” he says.

The shot was taken by Galella while he was in a taxi.

“That’s probably why she smiled, she didn’t know it was me,” says Galella, who had a strange relationship with Onassis, his muse. “It’s a complicated story. She was my favourite subject. She made me the paparazzo I am because she didn’t pose.

Despite her reactions, Galella believes Onassis liked being photographed.

“She was the biggest hypocrite, she seemed to love being chased,” he says.

“She kept a scrapbook of pictures of her.”

Galella did everything he could to photograph Onassis. He hid behind coat racks in restaurants and even in the bushes of Central Park when he wanted to surprise her while she was biking with her children.

“Smash his camera,” she is said to have told her bodyguard on one occasion.

That line is now the title of a new documentary on Galella that recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

But despite the complicated history between the two, Onassis is not the only star with whom Galella had problems.

“Sinatra used to call me 'the wop’, ” says Gallela, who also fought with Marlon Brando.

One June night in 1973, Brando, tired of being followed, hit Gallela in the face.

“He made a sign for me to come to him and asked me Œwhat else do you want?’,” says Galella. “I said (I wanted) a picture without glasses and that’s when the punch came. I lost five teeth.”

The case was settled out of court and Galella pocketed $40,000.

“My paparazzi germs infected his hand, he had to go to the hospital,” says the paparazzo.

When Galella saw Brando again a year later at an event, he showed up wearing a football helmet. The photo was seen around the world and stars pretending to hit the photographer became a recurring gag.

Galella became a photographer with the American Air Force during the Korean War. He then studied photojournalism in Los Angeles before moving to New York, with his Roloflex camera, in 1958.

“I was forced to do this paparazzi thing because of poverty,” he says.

These days in Hollywood, anyone with a camera can be a paparazzo. The death of Princess Diana 13 years ago didn’t do much to help their reputation, either.

“It was easier in my time,” says Galella. “I had the freedom to move around.

There were less photographers, publicists and bodyguards. “Today it’s a sad scene and it’s dangerous.”

At 79, the man who once spent a weekend in a rat-infested factory to get a shot of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton on their yacht no longer has the drive he once did. But while his aging knees don’t allow him to run along red carpets, he still always has his camera around his neck.

In the basement of his home, four employees take care of the archives. There are hundreds of boxes marked with the names of celebrities stacked to the roof. One room is dedicated to Newman, Sinatra, Travolta and Minelli alone.

At night, Galella still enjoys developing his work in a dark room and is now focusing on book publishing. He looks through his archives and reminisces about the good ol’ days.

“These were the golden years,” he says. “The best pictures are already in my files. Glamour is gone.”

For Galella, the hunt is over.