Living in such straightened times meant that Leonardo grew to love any opportunity to get out of Los Angeles and he spent all his holidays with his mother’s parents in Germany: Grandpa Wilhelm – Leo’s middle name – and his wife Helene, or ‘Oma’ as he affectionately called her. They had moved back to Germany in the early 1980s after growing weary of the American way of life.
Back in Germany, his grandfather’s strong work ethic – contrasting somewhat with the hippy ways of his father – ensured at least that Leonardo could enjoy the sort of holidays that the economic reality of his parents’ economic situation would otherwise have denied him. Helene remembers her grandson’s visits to Dusseldorf as happy times. ‘From the age of about eight, Leonardo spent all his vacations with us here in Germany,’ she said. ‘He even got his first taste for the sea when his grandfather and I took him on a cruise. We went all over – to the Bahamas and Canada. We also took him skiing in Austria. He was a very happy child, always ready for fun – and food.
‘He loved German dishes. A favourite was pig’s trotters with sauerkraut. But his real loves are homemade potato pancakes and German cold cuts and rolls.’
Despite his many visits, Leonardo never really got to grips with the German language. ‘The best he could manage was a few sentences,’ Helene adds.
Then, from out of the blue, something happened that would change young Leonardo’s life forever.
His brother Adam had been sent to audition for a cornflakes advert (his parents hoped it might earn a little spending money). That one advert led to a series – 20 in all – and Adam soon found himself at 12-years-old with a cheque for $50,000.
Leo was amazed. How could so much money be earned from doing what looked like so little?
From that moment on, his mind was made up – he was going to escape his dirt-poor background and become an actor, just like his big brother.
Leonardo’s first foray into showbiz had ended in disaster when he was kicked off Romper Room but for a while it looked as if that early experience might be a high-water mark in the television career of the young wannabe. After his bold pronouncement that he wanted to be an actor, 11-year-old Leo set about finding the right agent but this proved more difficult than he imagined.
His description of that first meeting with an agent is particularly painful: ‘I remember them lining us up like cattle. There were eight boys. A woman comes up and says, “OK, no, no, yes, yes, no, no, no, yes. Thank you.”’
The young Leonardo was a ‘no’ and the ordeal left him distraught – ‘I thought that that was my one chance into the business and that the community was now against me.’
For the next three years he tried again to find adequate representation – with the same level of success. Leonardo couldn’t understand it. By that age he’d earned himself a reputation among his school friends for being a bit of a performer. His impression of serial killer Charles Manson was a particular hit, although he ended up in a heap of trouble after he painted a swastika onto his forehead for one such pastiche of the crazed hippie, whose insane gang butchered actress Sharon Tate and other innocents in a mock protest.
In elementary school, he earned respect from classmates with a killer Michael Jackson impression. ‘The next thing I was like the most popular kid in school,’ he recalls. ‘The coolest kid there walked up and gave me a Street Beats tape and goes, “Hey, this is for you.”’
It was only a temporary reprieve, however. By the end of term, after an argument over the most beautiful girl in school, the cool kids threw Leo in a garbage can. In a bid to act tough, he began stealing gum from his local convenience store but stopped because he ‘believed in karma.’
One of the few teachers who spotted his talent for performing was Helen Stringos-Arias, who was so impressed by the precocious 13-year-old that she put him forward for a state drama scholarship.
‘Leo always wanted to be an actor,’ she said. ‘On school trips, he would get up at the front of the bus and entertain us with impersonations of his classmates and teachers. But I never saw him growing up into a sex symbol – he would come to school with his hair unbrushed, in jeans and a sweatshirt.’
During this time he also came close to winning a break-dancing competition in Germany but dancing was never going to take precedence over his dream. His body popping did earn him his nickname ‘The Noodle’, however, thanks to the moves he pulled and that has stuck to this day.
It’s hard to imagine now but when Leo was 14, he was short and scrawny. And, although he acted tough, he was prone to being picked on by bigger kids. His most humiliating moment of school life, he revealed, was when he got badly roughed up for refusing to return a thug kid’s basketball. ‘I woke up about ten minutes later,’ he recalled. ‘I had about 30 kids all around me, throwing spitballs and kicking me. I tried to run away but they’d tied my shoelaces together, so I took one step and fell flat on my face. I had to hop away while they were still kicking me.’
During this time, the young Leo didn’t have much luck with girls either. His first crush was in the eighth grade on a girl called Cecilia Garcia, or ‘Cessi’, as Leo remembers her. He recounts a poignant tale of unrequited love.
‘I went out with this girl named Cessi, this beautiful little Spanish girl. We had this beautiful relationship over the phone all summer – she was away. We were so close, so bonded, we’d tell each other everything. Then she came home, and we went out to the movies for the first time, and – oh, God! – I wanted it to be so perfect. So I put on my light blue turtleneck, which I thought was cool at the time (it was a turtleneck I bought from Kmart or something).
‘When I saw Cessi I was petrified and I couldn’t even look her in the eye or speak to her. We saw When Harry Met Sally… and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t look at her or anything. But the movie took me away. For two hours I was at peace because she was watching the movie and I didn’t have this responsibility on me to be Superboy. And then afterward, I remember eating French dip sandwiches. She was really shy. Finally she said, “Do you have a problem with me eating this sandwich?” I said, “No, no, not at all.” But I was really acting weird. And that was our last date. I was in love with her for a year after that, but I couldn’t go near her because I was so mortified.’
When he eventually got round to experiencing his first kiss with a girl, it was an equally excruciating moment. Describing it as the ‘the most disgusting thing in my life’, he said: ‘The girl injected about a pound of saliva into my mouth – I had to walk off and spit it out.’
Leo’s yearbook shows why the girls might have rejected him. Long before the dazzling blue eyes and angelic blond hair captivated females the world over, he was an awkward-looking, young-for-his-age teenager. Fittingly, perhaps, his fellow classmates voted him ‘most bizarre male freshman’.
One classmate recalled: ‘He wasn’t the type to sweep anyone off their feet. He was a skinny kid and quite wild and funny. Cecilia was very mature for her age – while Leo was playing basketball and joking around, she was interested in politics. No one could have known that Leonardo was going to become one of the most lusted-after men in the world.’
However, Leo certainly lived up to his jokey image in his second year in high school. Then