Leonardo DiCaprio - The Biography. Douglas Wight
on a cruise ship with Irmelin’s parents.
By the time he was returned to his parents, George had already moved out but the solution was as unconventional as their lifestyle had been up until that point. So that they could raise their son together, George and Irmelin each moved into twin craftsman’s cottages with a shared garden in the downbeat LA suburb of Echo Park. Before too long, George had met and moved in a new girlfriend called Peggy Farrar and her son Adam, who was three years older than Leo.
Peggy had recently divorced from her husband – and Adam’s father – Michael Farrar, who’d managed a dairy farm in northern California. She’d met George in San Francisco, where he’d been on a business trip and she was performing with a theatre company. While Peggy was arguably saddled with the same commitments as Irmelin (though six years younger), George nevertheless must have felt his options were better with this new woman. However, so as not to deprive Leonardo of a constant father figure in his life, the compromise was to continue living next-door. Somehow, the two families managed to co-exist in relative harmony.
The only early disagreement they had to overcome was settling on a sum of maintenance for George to pay towards the upkeep of his son. Both George and Irmelin were struggling to make ends meet and she felt strongly that her estranged husband should face up to his responsibilities. When his initial offer was deemed unacceptable, Irmelin had to take her husband to court to force him to pay just $20 a week for little Leo’s upkeep – all George could afford.
Life was tough for a struggling single mother. Even things that most moms would today take for granted – such as finding a suitable day care nursery, while Irmelin juggled her legal job – turned out to be a trial, particularly when her young son proved to be a handful. The infant Leo wasn’t shy about making himself heard and therefore his mother found it difficult to find a nursery that would take him. On one occasion she drove to an outer district of Los Angeles to visit his new pre-school.
Leonardo remembers starting to cry, wailing, ‘Am I going to stay all the way out here all day? I wanna stay home!’ In the end Irmelin had little option but to solve the problem by becoming a childminder herself, taking in local kids from the neighbourhood.
Getting his own way was something Leonardo was quickly getting used to and an early episode gave him a flavour of what it could be like to be an entertainer. He recalls: ‘I was taken to a performance festival when I was two. I had my red jumpsuit on and my tackiest shirt. My father suggested, “Hey, go up on stage.”
‘I remember looking out at a sea of expectant faces. After a moment or two, I began to dance – tappity, tappity, tappity… the crowd loved it. And I thought, “That’s me getting that attention, me!” There was no stopping me and my dad had to pull me off the stage.’
He was to have less success with his television debut, which came two years later on the educational favourite Romper Room. The show, effectively a televised nursery session, saw several sugared-up kids bounce around with a mumsy presenter and a guy dressed as a bumblebee. It seemed an impossible gig to mess up but Leonardo’s dream debut was cut short when he became too boisterous.
‘It was my favourite show at the time,’ he later admitted. ‘I used to sing the songs at home. So I went on Romper Room and I got completely excited. They had a little circle and they were all singing and dancing, and stuff like that. I was too excited to be on camera. I was running up and slapping the cameras, trying to pull my mom onstage. So they kicked me off.’
Such an experience might have crushed a less-confident toddler but Leonardo said: ‘I got to see myself on television. I went completely neurotic, it was beautiful.’
Although George remained close by, it fell to Irmelin to effectively raise the boy on her own. But the area they lived in – Hollywood Boulevard – was not dubbed ‘Syringe Alley’ for nothing. The earliest memories for most children revolve around playgrounds and parks, but for the young Leonardo those images are forever slightly tarnished.
He recalled: ‘We were in the poorhouse. I would walk to the playground and see a guy open up his trench coat with a thousand syringes. It was a bit of a shock. I lived in the ghettos of Hollywood, right near the old Hollywood billiards. It was the most disgusting place to be.
‘My mom, who thought Hollywood was the place where all the great stuff was going on, took great care of me but I was able to see all sorts of stuff at an early age. It was pretty terrifying – I saw people have sex in the alleys.’
With prostitutes and junkies as neighbours, it was impossible for Irmelin to shield her son from the raw life that raged around them. When he was just five, he witnessed two men having sex outside a friend’s balcony. This was an image that would have a profound effect on him, especially when it came to tackling homosexual roles later in life.
While his mother was doing her best to limit Leonardo’s exposure to more adult experiences, George was doing exactly the opposite. He continued to hang out with the likes of Charles Bukowski, Robert Crumb and The Velvet Underground. He also made an acquaintance of drugs guru Timothy Leary, then only recently released from prison on drug charges. Leary had been an early advocate of LSD and at one stage was labelled ‘the most dangerous man in America’ by then President Richard Nixon and facing 95 years in jail for a series of drug convictions. Despite his notoriety, he was feted by hippies and the art community, inspiring John Lennon to write ‘Come Together’, so it was perhaps unsurprising that George would soon be taking little Leo to meet him. Years later, in 1994, it was said Leary even officiated at a marriage ceremony for George and Peggy, but given the suggestion that Leo’s parents never legally divorced, this may have only been a spiritual blessing.
Unwilling to modify his hippy tendencies, George would take Leo to new-age parades, the two of them dressed in their underwear, covered in mud and carrying sticks.
Although Leonardo was used to the alternative lifestyle from an early age, one experience when he was six was something he felt was a step too far.
‘We were sitting in a car,’ he recalled. ‘Dad suddenly announced, “The first time I had sex, I was your age. You should try it.” But I wasn’t interested. I told Dad, “Shut up, Dad, I don’t want to try it. I’m gonna do all my homework instead.”’
George later explained himself by saying: ‘Leonardo was never excluded from conversations about sex or drugs. He’s still on a quest to find out how many things he can do in life and not do them straight.’
It might seem the unlikely ingredients for a successful life but Leo’s parents found an educational blend from the anti-establishment scene and the mainstream. By this time, young Leo was attending Corinne A. Seeds Elementary School, an innovative teaching establishment at UCLA, but Irmelin was committed to getting her son the best education and two years later she enrolled the budding star into the specialised magnet school called the Center for Enriched Studies.
The school attracted kids from all over Los Angeles and boasted one of the top performance records in California.
‘She drove 45 minutes there every day and back,’ Leo recalled. ‘So she spent every day, every weekday of her life, three hours a day, to make sure that I didn’t go to just any normal school.’
Cocksure and confident the youngster may have been, but those attributes often made things worse in the rough neighbourhood he grew up in. He might have been attending one of the area’s top schools but he was still the victim of beatings by thugs on the estate.
‘I was small, and I was a smart-ass – that’s a deadly combination,’ said Leonardo, who by this time was developing his own style, which in the mid-1980s was a punky haircut teamed with leather gloves and silver trousers. He was developing into quite the cute little boy.
His stepbrother Adam shared Leo’s contempt for the neighbourhood and its inhabitants. ‘East Hollywood was the most disgusting place to live in,’ he said. ‘We called it Scumsville.’
Adam and Leonardo got into several scrapes together. And DiCaprio needed his older stepbrother to come to his aid during one particularly gruesome