BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS?

By MARGARET CARLSON

There was a high price on the head of Diana, Princess of Wales--dead or alive, as it tragically turns out. The amount being paid for any picture of the princess getting to know her first serious beau since her divorce had increased dramatically. Princess Di was used to being the most photographed woman in the world, but her linking up with Dodi al Fayed had thrown the scavengers of celebrity into a heightened state of alert. When she took her two sons to vacation with Al Fayed's family at his St. Tropez villa in July, paparazzi followed by land, sea and air; "the kiss" in the sparkling Mediterranean waters was on the front pages of tabloids on three continents.

By the time of the couple's dinner at Paris' Ritz Hotel, the rules of engagement sometimes observed between the photo hounds and the princess had gone completely by the board, as the street value of a grainy shot of Diana with Al Fayed reached six figures. The stalking had become so bad that two weeks ago Diana disclosed that the idea of leaving Britain and its paparazzi had crossed her mind. "Any sane person would have left long ago," she told the French newspaper Le Monde. "But I cannot. I have my sons."

Now her sons don't have her, and part of the blame has to be placed squarely on the lunacy of publications paying exorbitant amounts for whatever the paparazzi can get by whatever means. The photographers in hot pursuit of the couple into a tunnel under the Seine were quickly arrested, but none of the publications that buy their pictures have so far been taken into custody. If the publications don't buy, the photographers won't shoot. Steve Coz, editor of the National Enquirer, says he swore off overly aggressive photographers a year ago when he saw the scrum that formed around certain celebrities. "We told the paparazzi we didn't want stalking pictures," he says.

Although Princess Di used publicity for her causes, she often appealed to the press to give her and her family space to live. On a skiing trip with her two sons last year, she left a restaurant on the slopes to go along a row of photographers and ask them to give her sons some breathing room. All but one did, and he made a fortune for his exclusive pictures.

There are no royalty in America, and yet the run-ins between celebrities and those who would take pictures of them are growing increasingly ugly. The Kennedy encounters are among the worst. Surely one reason Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis was the privacy that his immense wealth could offer her. In her later years, she finally got a court order against one of her most persistent stalkers. Her son John has a permanent blockade outside his apartment so that photographers have to stay a humane distance away as he and his wife, herself a constant target, come and go.

If you're not a Kennedy but just in the movies, you are also fair game--although the stars tend to fight back. George Clooney urged a boycott of Paramount Pictures TV shows because of their use of video paparazzi footage of him and his girlfriend. Alec Baldwin scuffled with a photographer who confronted his wife Kim Basinger and their newborn daughter as they came home from the hospital. Robert De Niro, Will Smith and Woody Harrelson have all fought with the shooters.

But if readers hadn't wanted to stand in the supermarket check-out lines and devour Di in her pink-flowered swimsuit in the Mediterranean with Dodi in shades and shorts on his father's yacht, would there have been a phalanx of photographers in a high-speed chase to capture yet another glimpse of the couple? There's an audience for celebrity pap, and when the mainstream press doesn't pander to it directly, it does so indirectly by tabloid laundering: writing about how crazy it is that the tabloids spend so much time covering a royal romance, and then running pictures of the tabs' pictures to say how invasive they are. And the mainstream press is just a step behind the tabloids when it come to exploiting the private lives of any public person for newsstand gain. Ironically, like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Princess Di may have chosen Al Fayed for the cocoon of protection he could offer. His father owned the hotel they dined at, the yacht they sailed on, the villa at which they vacationed, the jet on which they flew there, a department store to shop in. And yet the very act of taking up with him raised her news value dramatically. The paparazzi were willing to do anything to capture her.

If there is any doubt that the world of photography has gone insane, moments after Princess Di had been pronounced dead, the dilemma facing some British publishers was what to do about the pictures taken that fateful night. The National Enquirer's Coz says he will not purchase any such photos, in an effort "to send a message." Someone may well publish a picture from the tunnel, and to keep blood off its hands, the public must avert its eyes. We can blame the press only if we stop watching.

--Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York