Harry’s Bar, Rome, on Via Veneto –
Where the king of paparazzi waits,
White bandage on his cheek, like a raw scar
Of honour – is heaving, full of Dolce
Vita‘s cream, in Rino’s memory –
Illustrious as some vague delirious fantasy
Of his gilded past… – He’s snapped back to the
Present, as out walks Gerard Depardieu
With his companion, Magda Vavrusova:
Sad scenes of sordid violence ensue –
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Recalling Rino in his pomp, maybe,
Scourge of glitterati outside all the bars;
But now, he says, the street is like a cemetery
Thronged only with the lonely ghosts of stars.
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Photo by Ziogiucas via Italian wiki
How we miss the glamour and romance of days when paparazzi roamed free, capturing images which have become iconic, timeless!
In those days, open sexuality was still seen as a normal part of a normal person’s image.
Elegance, class and good taste weren’t seen as being in conflict with sexiness.
People laugh about the hippies these days but I miss the people who drove the sexual revolution and the freedoms they tried to bring to us all.
Rino, as a paparazzo, played a role (perhaps small) in those days, helping to publicise the stars’ sexuality in the media, making it available to everyone. A more open sexuality became increasingly acceptable, aspirational.
Camilla
O sexuality is a queerly fluid, selfish, giving thing, sluttish, pure and thoughtless
It is, and more.
Rino brought its stylish outward surface to the fore.
There is, all the same, a conspicuously sordid side to Rino’s paparazzi pillagings—not necessarily coming from Rino himself, more from the stars’ entitled milieu, the frustrations and arrogance of wealth, of being players in the public eye.
Witness Rino’s beating at the hands of a drunk Peter O’Toole and (in separate incidents) Vitussa Vita (with her handbag), and Sonia Romanoff (with her ice cream cone)—the last two of which admittedly look staged, but still.
For all the surface glamour of the epoch, that sordid side endures, in vicious counterpoint, characteristic of the era (and Rino’s business model) as a whole.
If anyone was I n at the birth of performative coverage, Rino was!
He does seem to have had a distinctly performative aspect in his own interactions with the stars
However, whatever you may think about that, he is himself an icon now