He was taken to court by Jackie Onassis, punched by Marlon Brando and admonished by Greta Garbo. Yet Ron Galella, the most notorious paparazzo of the 20th century, is no longer reviled as an intrusive pest who invented celebrity doorstepping.

Instead he is hailed as a pioneering artist whose street portraits of American icons fetch thousands of dollars in galleries in New York, Paris and Amsterdam. The photographer, who started wearing a crash helmet after Brando knocked out five of his teeth, has become an icon himself.

“All that running around and waiting in the cold finally paid off,” Galella said last week as he prepared to launch No Pictures, a book featuring some of his finest photographs of celebrities trying to hide from the camera.

Galella, 77, lives in style in a New Jersey mansion surrounded by some of his most famous works. One 5ft frame holds a picture called Windblown Jackie, regarded by many as one of the most striking photographs taken of the widow of President John F Kennedy.

His boldness and persistence made him rich, but Galella confessed he sometimes wonders what he helped to start when he surveys the paparazzi culture today.

“It’s sad and it’s sick,” he said. “I didn’t think it would turn out this way and I’m glad I’m not a part of it.”

Galella’s career has taken several turns since he bought his first Rolleiflex camera after joining the US air force during the Korean war. Moving to New York, he found his greatest muse by accident. “I saw Jackie at a party at the Wildenstein gallery in May 1967,” he recalled.

“There were so many people it was impossible to get a good shot, so I followed her home to 1040 Fifth Avenue. That was how I learnt that when you know where they live and you stake them out, that’s how you get the best shots.”

He struck up a romance with an Onassis maid and paid doormen to tip him off whenever she left her building. Yet the picture that paid for much of the marble in his New Jersey mansion was taken almost by accident.

Galella never tires of telling how he was returning from a model shoot in Central Park when he spotted Onassis down the street. He and his model jumped into a cab and followed her. “I shot a couple of pics out of the back window and she didn’t notice,” he said. “But at the corner the taxi honked his horn and she turned towards me.”

His picture caught Onassis with the wind blowing across her face, a Mona Lisa-like smile on her lips. She looked both beautiful and achingly vulnerable and Galella’s fortune was made. “When she saw it was me, she asked, ‘Are you pleased?’ ” said Galella. “I said, ‘Yes’.”

He was less pleased when Onassis’s bodyguard later had him arrested for harassment, eventually leading to a 26-day trial which he lost.

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