Whatever happened to Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Pussy Posse”?

If you weren’t around, or you were too young to experience the Titanic fever of the late 90s, let me fill you in.

From beach towels to baseball caps to lunch boxes – literally, everything had Leonardo DiCaprio’s face on it. At the time he was 23 and, thanks to the fame he acquired from the film, had cultivated two personas.

The one was the teenage ‘heartthrob’ who was thoughtful and serious in his interviews for Seventeen magazine.

The other was a regular at New York hotspots like Spy and the Bubble Lounge, and obsessed over by legions of screaming women – many of whom he happily bedded.

The latter was also the leader of a group of equally young friends who became known as the “Pussy Posse”.

It really was a different time.

Here’s The Telegraph:

Models were permanently attached to his arm, and his goals involved working with cinema’s greatest auteurs and bedding as many beautiful women as possible.

Swap out some ages and the names of nightclubs, and the image of DiCaprio ’98 isn’t much different from the DiCaprio of today. Save for a bit of a belly, the Oscar-winning star of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has more or less remained consistent in the years since – his latest girlfriend, the actress Camila Morrone, was just five months old when Titanic was released, bringing to mind the old adage, a spin on a classic line from Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, that while DiCaprio might age, his squeezes stay the same.

For a graph that perfectly sums up his dating habits over the years, go here.

Back to the posse:

Those that once surrounded him have more or less scattered. These men have historically included bonafide “names” like Tobey Maguire, along with eternal supporting-actors like Lukas Haas, Ethan Suplee and Kevin Connolly, vaguely recognisable actors like Jay R Ferguson, and starrier non-actors like filmmaker Harmony Korine and magician David Blaine.

There was the occasional woman, too, notably actress Sara Gilbert or the musician Jenny Lewis. Most, like DiCaprio, were former child actors, regulars on the same audition circuit whose individual fortunes had balanced out in the early 1990s, before DiCaprio outpaced them all with almost staggering ease.

Leo managed to keep this second party persona relatively under wraps until he was outed in an infamous bit of reportage by Nancy Jo Sales, published in 1998 by New York Magazine.

The image Sales creates is of a sleazy man-child awash in sex, power and money, whose entourage of arrogant, frat-boy party pals both enabled and exploited his worst instincts. Now actors comfortably ensconced under DiCaprio’s shadow, their respective fames had firmly stalled. “Some of them have completely lost their careers,” an unnamed actor tells Sales. “All they do now is hang out with Leo. If Leo wants to go to Paris, it’s let’s go to Paris. Las Vegas? No problem… The people closest to him have Leomania worse than anyone.”

The story is full of priceless anecdotes. DiCaprio doesn’t carry his own money, it claims, leaving his friends to foot the bill wherever they go. There was an incident in which they were seen throwing grapes at paparazzi, another in which they were seen throwing trash down onto the speeding cars below the Brooklyn Promenade, before being driven away by DiCaprio’s personal driver.

Leo denied all of this in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine.

Then there was the alleged feud between Leo and Tobey.

“There was a hierarchy in Hollywood at that time. And Leo stood right at the top of it,” writer and producer Dale Wheatley told Vanity Fair in 2016. “Everybody else fell into place, scrambling for second and third place. People vied for that position. And Tobey very blatantly talked about—not just taking that position—but becoming number one.”

It all sounds quite toxic.

Leo has settled down somewhat since his ‘Pussy Posse’ days, even if he still can’t bring himself to date someone within his age-group.

The rest of the Posse has also, for the most part, matured a bit.

That said, the group still crop up every now and then, with DiCaprio always in the top spot, while his friends bask in his glow.

[source:telegraph]