“Not since Leo, circa Titanic, has a young actor been so aggressively beloved by 13-year-old girls worldwide,” writes Evgenia Peretz in her Vanity Fair profile of Robert Pattinson (Twilight’s Hot Gleaming, December 2009). Peretz is right—and I would know. I was one of those teenage girls who got caught up in the “Leo-mania” fan frenzy in the late 90s. The first copy of Vanity Fair I ever bought was the January 1998 issue with Leo on the cover. I hung Tiger Beat and Teen Bop posters of Leo on my bedroom walls. And after I saw Titanic in the movie theater six times, one of my friends and I even created a Leo Web site, at a time when you could only access the Internet via a dial-up modem.
by Jessica Flint (www.vanityfair.com)