[Deathwatch] Felice Quinto, photographer, 80

[Notification of departing celebrities]

*'King of the paparazzi' Felice Quinto, 80*

By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 7, 2010

In "La Dolce Vita," his 1960 film about jaded sophisticates at play, 
Italian director Federico Fellini <http://www.federicofellini.com/> 
portrayed a week in the life of a tabloid reporter in Rome. The 
reporter, played by Marcello Mastroianni, visits nightclubs and parties, 
has sexual encounters, drinks too much and contemplates his spiritual 
emptiness as the line between glamour and desperation is blurred.

Mastroianni's partner in pursuit of pleasure and tabloid headlines is a 
sharp-elbowed, flash-in-the-face photographer named Paparazzo. The term 
"paparazzi" is derived from his character.

The photographer who may have been the model for Paparazzo was one of 
Fellini's friends in Rome, Felice Quinto, who died of pneumonia Jan. 17 
in Rockville at age 80.

Mr. Quinto strolled with his camera among the cafes of the Via Veneto, 
waiting for opportunities to capture celebrities and royals acting like 
mere mortals. He hid in bushes, assumed false identities and raced 
around Rome on his motorcycle to get the pictures that fed gossip-hungry 
publications around the world. He was always well dressed, and press 
accounts sometimes called him the "king of the paparazzi."

"I was the first to begin in Rome before Fellini was doing his movie," 
Mr. Quinto told the Dallas Morning News in 1985. "We were five to begin 
with, five press photographers -- but freelancing. By the time Fellini 
came out with the movie, it was already about four years that I had been 
doing photography."

According to his wife, Fellini asked Mr. Quinto to play a photographer 
in "La Dolce Vita," but he declined because being a paparazzo on the 
streets of Rome was far more lucrative. In the end, Mr. Quinto had a 
brief appearance in the film as a bystander.

Fiction and reality collided for Mr. Quinto one night in 1960 when he 
snapped a photo of actress Anita Ekberg 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKN1T3K1idg> -- featured in "La Dolce 
Vita" as a starlet stalked by paparazzi -- smooching a married movie 
producer at a cafe in Rome. When Mr. Quinto staked out Ekberg's house at 
5 a.m., the Swedish bombshell emerged in stocking feet and a black 
cocktail dress, armed with a bow and arrow.

One arrow struck a photographer's car and a second nicked Mr. Quinto's 
hand.

"She just let it go and goodbye, Charlie," he recalled in a 1997 
interview with ABC News.

The enraged actress wasn't finished. She attacked Mr. Quinto with her 
fists and a well-placed knee to the groin.

"And so, from one word to another," he later put it, "she just grab me 
by my coat, wow, with the right knee, get me where the sun doesn't shine."

The episode would seem to have come from the fevered imagination of, 
well, a tabloid reporter if it hadn't been caught on film by one of Mr. 
Quinto's fellow paparazzi.

Mr. Quinto was never ashamed of how he earned his living.

"Jack Nicholson wants me to pay $10 to see him in a movie," he told 
Newsday in 1997. "If I pass him with his pants down taking a leak 
against a tree, you want me to keep walking? Give me a break."

Felice Quinto was born April 11, 1929, in Milan. He trained to be an 
auto mechanic, but his father owned a camera store, and Mr. Quinto had 
taken pictures as a hobby since childhood. A newspaperman who saw him 
taking pictures of beggars suggested that he became a photojournalist.

He moved to Rome, drove an Alfa Romeo sports car, hung out with Fellini 
and generally led "la dolce vita" -- the sweet life.

"I don't come from no special school of photography. I don't come from 
no school of journalism," Mr. Quinto said in 1985. "The only school was 
just the necessity to eat and the love of the work. I think I'm one of 
the few people in the world that is satisfied with what he does."

In 1958, he met an American schoolteacher, Geraldine Del Giorno, at an 
art gallery in Venice. They were married in 1963, the same year Mr. 
Quinto moved to the United States to work for the Associated Press.

One of his first assignments was the funeral of John F. Kennedy. He 
photographed civil rights marches in the South led by the Rev. Martin 
Luther King Jr. and won an award for a picture of white police officers 
beating a black man.

But Mr. Quinto was always best known for his images of celebrities. In 
the 1970s, he became the court photographer of New York's Studio 54 
<http://nymag.com/news/features/31276/> and for a time was Elizabeth 
Taylor's personal photographer.

For more than 20 years, Mr. Quinto's wife, who taught English at 
Gaithersburg High School, commuted to New York on weekends to see her 
husband. When he retired in 1993, he settled into her townhouse in 
Montgomery Village and lived quietly, tending his basil and pepper 
plants and cooking Italian meals. Few of his neighbors knew anything of 
his earlier life among the glitterati.

In 1997, Mr. Quinto published a book of his Studio 54 photography, but 
by then he had put his cameras away for good.

"He never took pictures recreationally," his wife said last week. "When 
we went to Europe, he never took his camera."

He remained proud of his photographs, some of which have been shown in 
museums, and he had few regrets about the celebrity culture he had 
helped create.

"People are human," Mr. Quinto said in 1997. "They want to see these 
pictures and there is too much money to be made."

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