Tight friends Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio had to fly across the country to learn this lesson: No good deed goes unpunished.
The dynamic Los Angeles duo thought they were doing the right thing during the week of Independence Day when they flew to Miami Beach, to host a breast-cancer fund-raiser.
When they got to the tropical paradise, however, they quickly noticed that things weren't going to be as smooth as the organizers promised.
For one thing, the duo got stuck with the bills.
And in the end, Titanic's DiCaprio disappeared without attending the event. Maguire became the only one of a long list of celebrities to appear - which left 2,000 stargazers at the event calling DiCaprio "De-Brat-io" for not showing and wondering: "Where are the celebs?"
"Leo and Tobey wanted to help out a charity," a source close to Spider-Man's Maguire reveals. "They should have known better when the organizers sent them plane tickets to the Bahamas, with a layover in Miami - where they had to sneak out of the plane like two thieves in the night."
When they first arrived, DiCaprio and Maguire, both 27, did what South Floridians do. They jet-skied, played basketball on the beach and chatted up models in late-night clubs.
But then things started happening. A limousine driver asked them for a credit card number to pay for nearly $3,000 in rides because no one else was planning to pay for it. And the impressive list of celebrities that organizer Tait Chatmon promised at the July 6 fund-raiser for the Friends of the Breast Program at UCLA got shorter by the minute.
Brittany Murphy, Matthew McConaughey, Heather Graham, Owen Wilson, Wesley Snipes, Patricia Arquette and Billy Zane were expected, as were singers Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue and Natalie Imbruglia. DiCaprio and Maguire ended up being the only ones present, with DiCaprio leaving six hours before the event for a mysterious "family emergency."
"It was a beautiful event," organizer Chatmon says coyly. "It's just that a sponsor fell through and we couldn't afford to bring many people in. Leo and Tobey even paid their own bills when they found out we were losing money. They were very generous with us."
Still, the young star of The Cider House Rules and his partner DiCaprio were taken advantage of, says one of Maguire's handlers.
"Someone in Miami made money from putting their names on a fundraiser's literature," the source fumes. "Tobey and Leo were fooled."
