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