Looking For Leonardo

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Leo, Leo, Leo--I'm so sick of that Leo DiCaprio. Bad enough he's on the cover of every teen magazine on the planet. Now he's invaded my home page--and my home. Ever since Titanic set sail, "DiCaprio" has been the most searched-for word on Pathfinder, Time Inc.'s website, relegating the Coke and Pepsi of the search-word business--"sex" and "Bill Gates"--to also-rans. Leo searches are especially frenzied from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Schoolgirls coming home, I figure, as the sweet spot of the time zone rolls west.

All this looking for Leo would be O.K. if I could escape him at Casa Quittner. But I can't. My daughters walk around with their noses buried in Leo biographies. They slather their walls with his glossies, making their bedrooms look like preteen minimum-security prison cells. Worse, they know he's out there on the Web somewhere, everywhere, and they force me at whine-point to find him. Which explains why I was online the other night, a daughter on each knee, trying to avoid the king of Leo sites, www.dicaprio.com "Rumor has it," Zoe read aloud, "that Playgirl is attempting to print unauthorized nude photos of Leo in their July issue. Click here if you'd like to sign a digital letter of protest."

"Yeah!" said Ella, 7. "Let's do it!"

"Elllllllllla," said Zoe, with the practiced, world-weary exasperation of the slightly older sister. "'Protest' means you're against it."

"Oh. Forget that."

Ah, but somehow I couldn't forget it. The whole Leo thing is just too big, too disturbing. I called Darrell Gaskins, proprietor of the site--which describes itself as the "Completely Unofficial" DiCaprio home page--hoping that he had become as Leo logy as I have. Not a chance.

A computer consultant living in Atlanta, Gaskins, 21, paid $50 for the domain name dicaprio.com in 1996 after renting What's Eating Gilbert Grape on video and becoming a die-hard fan. The home page was just a hobby, a way to learn how to build a website. Then, on the day Titanic came out, the $20,000 computer that served www.dicaprio.com sank like the great ship itself. "I had to reboot it every half hour," Gaskins recalls. Finally he relocated to more heavy-duty digs donated by a for-profit site that sells Leo-related merchandise.

Nearly 3 million people have visited Gaskins' home page--as many as 30,000 a day. It takes him an hour just to wade through the 150 e-mail messages he gets each day from kids hoping for contact with the screen idol. (Note to the Leo-struck: Gaskins has never communicated with the star or his handlers.) I would find all this very draining, but Gaskins does it for free. Is he a sucker? "I had someone appraise my site," he says. "The domain name itself is worth more than $75,000." Hmmm, maybe not.

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