If you're going to Jeet's pool party, leave your camera in the car

Today, the Page Six Team - the journalistic equivalent of Seals Team Six - has another scoop.

The nub of it: Guests to Derek Jeter's massive Tampa home - big as a hospital - are not allowed to bring cameras inside. No shots of the caged dancers. No pictures of the reanimated zombie heads in fish bowls. No photographs of the stuffed Billy Martin cadaver, fighting the robot Tommy Lasorda.

What we're glimpsing here is not Jeter's life, but the bizarre universe that he must inhabit. For starters, this report is probably a half-truth. My guess is that some NY Post source went to a party, and there were celebrities there, and nobody wanted their pictures while getting diddled on the trampoline.

But then again, there is the unique paranoia factor that surrounds all things Jeter. A NY sportswriter once told me that if I saw Jeter on the street, and marveled with excitement, I would be met with the eyes of a doll. The iciness of the stare - coupled with the false smile - would knock me back six feet, like a force field from Sue Storm. That's how Jeter is. It's not his fault. That's the only way he can be.

At this stage of life, Jeter is still supposed to embody the Yankee ways and virtues, the captainhood lifestyle, which is harder and harder to define. He can go through women like packs of cigarettes. Nobody cares. But he can't be photographed in a compromising way. The biggest damage to his image in history was the shot last winter of his beer belly - the Derek Eater headline. So it's Sunset Boulevard, Yankee style.

Sometimes I wonder if it was the extra money Seattle offered that convinced Robbie Cano it was time to go. Maybe he looked into the world of an aging Yankee icon and wondered if that's what he wants. I don't blame Jeter for confiscating cell phones at the door. Soon enough, he'll be back in the fishbowl, next to all those reanimated zombie heads.