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By Root 463 0

I chased him step-by-step for almost a block, holding the bottle like a cudgel. I’d almost caught him when he jumped onto a streetcar and escaped. If I’d caught him, I might have killed him with that champagne bottle. Later that night some of his friends, a gang of toughs, started banging on my door at about 2:30 A.M. I got a butcher knife in the kitchen and prepared for a bloody battle, but the woman I was with said she was afraid I was going to kill someone and started wrestling with me for it. She was the strongest woman I ever knew, and held on to my wrist with both hands. Finally I came to my senses and thought, This is crazy. I’m not going to go around killing people with a butcher knife. I called the U.S. Embassy and demanded to speak to the ambassador.

The night-duty officer said, “He’s asleep.”

I said, “Wake him up or he’s going to read about himself in the morning.” I was really furious.

When the ambassador came on the line, I said, “I demand that I get some kind of protection from the Italian government. I’ve been intimidated and assaulted, my family has been harassed and I want some action.”

The next morning a couple of carabinieri were posted outside my door. When I opened the door, a flashbulb went off in a sneak attack by one of the paparazzi, but a policeman put a hand the size of a ham over the lens and took him away. At the police station they opened his camera, pulled out the film, and said, “We don’t see anything wrong with this,” and returned the spoiled, exposed film to him. No more paparazzi bothered me during that visit to Rome, but I nearly choked another photographer at the airport after he started taking pictures of my children.

Now I don’t care, but in those years I was constantly in combat with the paparazzi. Once I hit a photographer, who was waiting outside a club in Hollywood with his face pressed against his camera, and knocked him out; when he came to, he looked around and saw the pieces of his camera on the sidewalk beside him. I felt sorry for what I’d done, bent over and collected the pieces for him. “Sorry,” I said, and he said, “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Looks to me like your camera just exploded.”

On my way to a restaurant in Chinatown in New York with Dick Cavett, I told one paparazzo who had been following us around most of the day, “Look, I’m here with a friend and you’ve been taking a lot of pictures all day long. I’d really appreciate it if you’d let us have a quiet dinner and leave us alone.”

“Well,” he answered, “if you’ll take off your dark glasses and let me take a good picture, I’ll think about it.”

Faster than I imagined possible, I planted my feet, swung and broke his jaw. When he fell, I flexed my foot to kick him, when I suddenly thought, Marlon, stop this. Don’t do it.

The next morning my hand was as big as a catcher’s mitt. Figuring I’d broken it, I went to a doctor who X-rayed it, then said, “It’s not broken.”

“Well, thank God for that. Thanks a lot, Doc, I’ll keep it bandaged and soak it in something.”

“No,” he said, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to go to the hospital. See those little red lines running up your wrist? That’s blood poisoning. If you don’t take care of it, you could lose your arm.”

The photographer’s teeth had cut the sheath of a tendon, and the doctor told me there were more dangerous bacteria in the mouth of a human than in almost any other animal except a monkey. This didn’t surprise me; I had assumed that the mouth of a paparazzo was a cesspool of bacteria. I spent several days in the hospital on my back with my arm soaking in hot compresses, but made sure that no one heard I’d put myself in the hospital by hitting a paparazzo.

Before finding one who could help me, I was a patient of five different psychiatrists. Based on my experience, most psychiatrists are people who feel comfortable trying to control other people because they can’t handle themselves. Their experiences have overwhelmed them and they believe they will be able to cope only if they are in a controlling position over others. I’ve known a lot of