COLUMN ONE : The Life of a Celebrity Stalker : With fascination over the rich and famous at an obsessive pitch, <i> paparazzi </i> stop at nothing for ‘the shot’ and a giant fee. Like the rest of them, Alan Zanger dreams of nailing ‘the fat man.’

The actor’s son and the photographer stand face to face for an uneasy moment outside an elevator at the Van Nuys Courthouse. The actor’s son is charged with beating his wife. The photographer is working for a tabloid with a fondness for shots of celebrity children in trouble.

The actor’s son advances toward the photographer and the photographer, Nikon F-4 in hand, nervously retreats. The tense standoff lasts a moment, then the actor’s son breaks the mood. He winks and says, “Go easy on me,” as the photographer snaps a volley of shots, strobe blazing, filling the courthouse hallway with a nimbus of light.

Life usually is not this easy for Alan Zanger, a notorious member of Los Angeles’ paparazzi. He has been beaten with a baseball bat, run off the road, fined thousands of dollars for trespassing, thrown in jail and shoved and sworn at countless times.

This is the price Zanger must pay to earn a living in Los Angeles, paparazzi capital of the world. An old paparazzi adage is: “Fish where the fish are.” Because more celebrities live in Los Angeles--center of the movie and recording industries--this is where the paparazzi gather.

At one time in Los Angeles, the paparazzi consisted of a few movie magazine photographers milling about in front of restaurants such as Chasen’s or Perino’s. But the fascination with celebrity has evolved into an international obsession, and there is an increasingly lucrative worldwide market for exclusive pictures of stars. Tabloid photographers can command a six-figure fee for a single celebrity photograph, and a few paparazzi live almost as well as the celebrities they pursue.

Because the stakes are much higher today, the once-polite minuet between reluctant star and persistent photographer has evolved into angry confrontations, lawsuits and restraining orders. Every day on the back streets of Los Angeles there are minor dramas played out between the paparazzi and wary stars.

There are lengthy stakeouts. There are dramatic car chases on windy canyon roads. There is even airborne surveillance with paparazzi in helicopters coordinating the pursuit with ground crews in four-wheel drive vehicles.

On a recent weekday morning, Zanger is sitting in a rental Chevy, facing east on Sunset Boulevard. Sipping coffee from a thermos, occasionally checking the streets with a small pair of binoculars, he is determined to get his shot. This is more than just another assignment to Zanger; it has become a personal quest, a matter of photographic vengeance.

Five days earlier, a tabloid newspaper hired him to get a shot of actress Jackee, star of the television show “Royal Family,” with her boyfriend. On the first day of the stakeout outside the boyfriend’s Westside apartment, Zanger was spotted in the back of his truck taking pictures. The boyfriend grabbed a baseball bat, broke every window in Zanger’s truck and took a few whacks at Zanger. Worst of all, he broke the camera and destroyed the film.

The man was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, but Zanger was not satisfied. He did not have his shot. And a shot of the boyfriend is critical now because the focus of the story has changed from Jackee and the new boyfriend, to the boyfriend and his attack on Zanger.

“Even Sean Penn, at his worst, never did anything like this,” Zanger says, scanning the road leading up the Hollywood Hills.

The boyfriend is not at his apartment this morning, so Zanger figures he’s staying with Jackee. After two hours on stakeout, Zanger spots Jackee driving down the hill from her house, buying a newspaper from a rack and returning home.

“Damn,” Zanger says, nervously cracking his knuckles. “I need a picture of that boyfriend.”

Zanger, who is being paid $250 a day plus expenses, is accustomed to lengthy stakeouts. But now he is particularly edgy. The tabloid’s deadline is today at 5 p.m.

Zanger staked out actor Michael J. Fox’s house for more than three weeks after his wife, actress Tracy Pollan, had a baby. He knew where they shopped, where they went to the gym, what restaurants they favored. Fox went out every day; his wife went out every day; they went out together every day. But Zanger never saw the kid.

On the 23rd day, he finally spotted Pollan with her baby on the way to the gym. He parked in a lot next door, waited until they got out of the car, and then, crawling on his belly, used a telephoto lens to shoot the picture through a hole in a wooden fence.

“I nailed her,” he says, throwing his head back and cackling.

While paparazzi take pride in this type of exclusive picture, other photographers are concerned about the rise of “in your face photography,” said Wayne Kelly, chairman of the photojournalism department at Cal State Long Beach.

“Things have really deteriorated . . . . These photographers definitely go too far now,” Kelly said. “This constant hounding is an invasion of privacy. But the public has to accept some responsibility for this--they’re the ones who create a market for these kinds of pictures.”

When Kelly was shooting free-lance photographs for Hollywood fan magazines in the 1950s, the sessions were cooperative efforts, set up by agents and supervised by the studios. Even the handful of photographers who gathered outside the Hollywood restaurants, he said, usually kept a respectful distance.

Today, the paparazzi are so invasive that celebrities have had to take them to court. For years, tabloid photographer Ron Gallela relentlessly stalked Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, until she finally obtained a restraining order keeping him at least 25 feet from her.

But as long as paparazzi only pursue and do not criminally harass, they cannot be prohibited from shooting celebrities in public places. Paparazzi run into legal problems when they trespass. The most dramatic example of a trespassing paparazzo was during Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding, when a man with a video camera attached to his helmet parachuted uninvited about 10 feet from the seated guests and was immediately arrested.

The public’s obsession with celebrity revelations is at a peak today, with the proliferation of tabloid newspapers, celebrity-oriented talk shows and tabloid television shows. Some paparazzi, such as the parachuting wedding crasher, now lug super-8 video cameras on assignment, along with their Nikons, and sell the footage to shows such as “Hard Copy” and “A Current Affair.”

This insatiable interest in the lives of stars has emboldened the paparazzi. Instead of seeking the candid photograph, paparazzi now want the clandestine shot. They want a photograph that shows frailty, weakness or just simply reveals that the star, beneath the layer of bodyguards, publicity agents and entertainment lawyers, is--like the tabloid reader--human.

One European photographer recently earned about $400,000 in worldwide sales for a series of shots of Princess Caroline of Monaco because the photographs contained all the key tabloid elements. There was romance--she was spotted with a new boyfriend. There was tragedy--this was her first romantic interest since the death of her husband a year earlier. There was controversy--should she be dating yet? And there was that always intoxicating tabloid melange of royalty, celebrity and sex.

At noon, Zanger spots Jackee driving down from the hills, heading west on Sunset. Zanger is facing east but another photographer, Leslie Knowles, is facing west. Knowles, who was added to the stakeout because the tabloid made the story a high priority after the attack, tails Jackee. He is hoping that she will lead him to the boyfriend.

Zanger calls Knowles from his cellular phone and says he is going to stay behind because he is concerned that Jackee is acting as a decoy. While Zanger scans the hillside streets, he reminisces about some of his biggest photographs.

He shot Zsa Zsa Gabor after her face lift by tailing her as she left the hospital and jumping out of his car at a stoplight. He caught Julia Roberts leaving her boyfriend’s house early in the morning. Zanger hid in the bushes and shot Tom Arnold outside his house after he and Roseanne Barr broke up. A year later, he shot the two of them at the Beverly Hills Hotel the day after their wedding. He photographed Cher four separate times while she was on a ski vacation in Aspen.

He shot Barr and Ryan O’Neal after sudden weight gains. He takes a sip of coffee and says, somewhat sheepishly, that he is one of the few tabloid photographers who never got a shot of an overweight Elizabeth Taylor. While he ponders the mystery of why tabloids like “fat and ugly shots,” his reverie is broken by a phone call from Knowles.

“I tailed her to Westwood!” Knowles shouts breathlessly. “The boyfriend is here.”

Zanger gets directions from Knowles, peels out across the street and speeds toward Westwood.

Zanger, a small, wiry man who approaches each celebrity assignment with a humorless, single-minded intensity, has an unusual background for a paparazzo. He is a former United Press International photographer who was laid off in the late 1980s and could not find work. He began free-lancing for the tabloids to pay the bills and discovered that he enjoyed the thrill of the chase, the cloak-and-dagger stakeouts.

Zanger has earned as much as “a hefty five-figure fee” for his exclusive photograph of Taylor, suffering from pneumonia and being transported on a gurney by ambulance from one hospital to another. He dismisses the paparazzi who gather at celebrity events or at trendy restaurants as merely “event photographers.” He considers himself a stakeout expert, a specialist whom the tabloids call to shoot only the most elusive stars.

“Who gives a damn about shots of these people when they’re made up--everybody already knows what they look like then,” he says. “People want to see what they look like when they’re uncovered, when they’re most vulnerable.”

Although many of the people Zanger pursues consider him a sleaze of the first order, Zanger says he does not dwell on the morality of his job. Instead, he takes a somewhat amoral approach to his work. He is indifferent to whether his shots are an invasion of privacy or a cause of anguish to the people he pursues.

Whether his assignment is Cher in Aspen or the Riverside man who barbecued his neighbor’s dog, ate it and put the head on a stake, Zanger approaches the story in the same dispassionate way. Getting the shot, he says, is his only concern.

Celebrities recently have been combatting the paparazzi in a variety of ways. Taylor ensured that she would profit from her wedding photographs, not the tabloid photographers, who hovered over the ceremony in more than a dozen helicopters. She sealed off Michael Jackson’s estate, hired a well-known photographer and sold the wedding pictures herself, donating the money to AIDS research.

The paparazzi are driven by supply and demand--published photographs of a star drive down the price of future shots. So when former “Starsky and Hutch” star Paul Michael Glaser and his wife, Elizabeth, suspected that a tabloid was going to feature their family’s battle with AIDS, they went public with the story and posed for pictures to thwart the paparazzi.

There are so many photos of Taylor circulating today that “you couldn’t give away a picture of Liz now,” Zanger says But all the paparazzi want a picture of the actor they call “the fat man”--reclusive Marlon Brando.

“It’s like the flavor of the month,” said Beth Filler, deputy photo editor for People magazine, who buys celebrity shots from paparazzi. “Luke Perry pictures are popular because his television show (“Beverly Hills 90210”) is hot. Michael Jackson pictures aren’t because people aren’t talking about him. But if he suddenly got married and had a kid, the paparazzi would all be after him again.”

Zanger screeches to a halt near a parking lot in Westwood and calls his partner, who is staking out the area. Knowles says he got a few shots of the boyfriend before he entered the building with Jackee. But the pictures were taken with a zoom lens from a few hundred feet away. He does not know how they will turn out.

The two photographers watch the parking lot for a few hours, hoping for a better shot of the boyfriend, but he never appears. They decide that they have to take a chance with the long distance shots. It is only a few hours until deadline.

They drop the film off at a one-hour photo lab in Santa Monica and walk down the street for a quick lunch. During lunch they agree that the story and pictures are more interesting now that the boyfriend attacked Zanger.

“You’ve got innocent, sweet-voiced Jackee with a raging, lunatic, nut-case boyfriend,” Knowles said. “That’s a pretty good flow for the story.”

But Zanger still is outraged that the boyfriend had the audacity to attack him. He is used to being the hunter, not the prey.

The tabloids have every right to relentlessly pursue the stars and their families and friends, Zanger and Knowles say. That is the price of celebrity. They both discuss, with a tinge of bitterness, the beautiful homes the stars own, the expensive cars they drive, the exotic vacations they take, the exorbitant salaries they earn.

Finally, Knowles drums a forefinger on the table and shouts: “The public owns them, man! We own them!”

After lunch, they wait at the counter of the photo lab for the pictures. Zanger chews a fingernail. Knowles paces in front of the counter. The pictures finally arrive and Zanger rips open the packet.

He quickly leafs through the photographs, and removes three from the stack. He studies the pictures and hands them to Knowles.

“We got the guy,” Knowles says. “We got him good.”

“Yeah,” Zanger says, smiling. “We nailed him.”