Book details rise and fall of a newspaper legend

shocked disgust.

It’s a great image but it was created, not caught. Weegee not only planted the old wino there, he got her drunk first.

By the ’40s, New York’s gangsters seemed to be taking a breather — and with a war on, newspapers had less space for local news. Weegee was running out of subjects, clients and maybe patience with a job that had him chasing scoops for nearly 30 years.

He wanted something different, something easier.

The producer of the movie “The Naked City” had recently taken its title from one of Weegee’s books and sent him a check. The rumpled newsman figured there was more where that came from.

He swapped coasts and moved to Los Angeles, where he showed studios how to get special effects with a distorting lens of his own creation. He even played a few bit parts.

But he didn’t like the people or the food, and the expected riches never came. After a while, he moved back to New York.

By the ’50s the city was changing again, and so was Weegee. He had always told everyone he was a genius, but now he seemed to believe it. He made peculiar experimental films.

He became obsessed with darkroom tricks, turning out portraits of men with three eyes or nudes with four breasts.

The fellow who used to joke his ideal woman “had a healthy body and a sick mind” was becoming just another dirty old man.

He haunted camera clubs, where topless women posed for amateur photographers. He sold surreal shots of naked models to cheap men’s magazines.

Weegee even acted in a few “nudie cuties,” silly soft-core movies full of sunny nudist camps and sad burlesque comics. In “The Imp’probable Mr. Wee Gee,” he stars as a man in love with a mannequin.

Weegee’s real love life was not much more satisfying. Although he could be a charming storyteller, his apartments were usually filthy and his clothes looked like castoffs.

A cloud of cheap cigar smoke and pungent darkroom chemicals clung to him, and his idea of a night on the town was visiting a whorehouse before hitting a Bowery bar.

He married once, at age 48, but the couple split after a few years — though it appears he never bothered to get a divorce.

A long-term relationship with Wilma Wilcox, a photography buff, was lasting if not necessarily romantic. A social worker, she took a sympathetic interest in the nearly feral photographer, and eventually gave him a place to live in her house in Hell’s Kitchen.

After he died in 1968 at age 69 — he looked a decade older — Wilcox began sifting through the work he never bothered to catalog.

After her death, the collection was passed on to New York’s International Center of Photography.

More than 20,000 stills and negatives were haphazardly tossed in boxes, sharing space with equipment, letters, books and rubber stamps.

Among them were the man’s cherished possessions: Stacks of press badges and a beat-up fedora.