It was an embarrassing week. I had to go to the drugstore to get $10 worth of Clearasil Maximum Strength Vanishing Cream. (This job is very stressful.)
And I had to go to the bookstore to get $139.76 worth of Leonardo DiCaprio books and magazines.As I cradled my teetering Leo pile, trying to prevent a landslide off the counter, the young cashier looked at me with pity.
"I like him, too," she said reassuringly.
I glared back at her. I wasn't regressing to adolescence. I was simply trying to decipher a mystery. Having seen three Leonardo biographies - and four "Titanic" books - dominating The New York Times paperback best-seller list for weeks, I was curious about this international craze.
From Gable to Sinatra to Elvis to the Beatles, never has the object of girlish affection been so, well, girlish. Even David Cassidy seems like a sulky brute compared with Leo. And certainly Kate Winslet looks as if she could deck him.
Teenage girls all over the world are squealing. The ones I know say the 23-year-old actor has "kissable lips" and seems "artistic."
Even some adult women understand the Leo phenom. Amy Pascal, president of Columbia Pictures, compares Leo to James Dean. "He's incredibly sexy because he's so beautiful and so troubled and he seems like he has a wild streak."
Try as I might, even in a tense week when I'm covered with Oxy emergency spot lotion, I don't get it.
Females finally develop some real power in the marketplace. Hollywood is now eager to make romantic movies that will appeal to women and the teenage girls who turned "Titanic" into the biggest movie in history. And what do we use it for?
A young man who has a way to go before he could even be called callow. He doesn't seem very bright. As my friend Tammy says: "He couldn't have found another piece of driftwood to hang on to? It was a huge ship. There was a lot of debris."
He seems unripe, as if he needs more time on the tree. "I feel like I should pay a baby sitter after I've seen him in a movie," Tammy complains.
Yet we have driven his asking price up to $20 million a picture. He's bigger than Barbie - and prettier. The volume of Leo minutiae, the endless discourses on how he "mastered his craft," are staggering.
In one of the best-selling bios, "Leonardo DiCaprio: Modern-Day Romeo," we learn that Leo was so precocious he picked his name before he was even born by kicking his mother, Irmelin, as she looked at a painting by Leonardo da Vinci in an Italian museum. We learn that he likes to chew "chewing-tobacco" bubble gum and drink Fruitopia. His habit is twisting his hair, his best birthday was his 16th, and his biggest wish is - surprise! - to save the environment and live in peace.
In "Leonardo DiCaprio: A Biography," a quiz for the Leorati asks brain-twisters such as: "What is Leonardo's stepbrother's name?" and "Was Romeo a Montague or a Capulet?"
The Gold Collectors Series magazine looks back on Leo's "notable" TV appearances, such as "Romper Room" and "Lassie." In Teen Magazine, I discover that the "leading love god" won't leave home without his Game Boy and had a bad first kiss.
Nope. Still don't get it.
I turn to Seventeen. I discover that Leo has many dimensions and the phone numbers of many supermodels.
Moving on to YM, I resisted the stories on "15 Ways to Make Him Want You Bad" and "4 Big, Bad Blemish Lies," and perused "15 Things That Rock Leo's World."
YM hired a numerologist to analyze Leo's facial features. Hooded eyelids: He's a supremely passionate real-life Romeo. I'm just going to close my non-hooded eyelids and wait for the Leo storm to pass.