By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 8, 1998; Page C01

For Peter Clipsham, creator of the Unofficial Chelsea Clinton Fan Club Web site, everything was ducky in 1996. There was intense interest in the president's daughter, who was mulling over colleges and appearing in public more often. At his home in Ottawa, Clipsham was constantly fielding new stories and photos of Clinton. "There were scoops and sightings," he recalls. Some 10,000 people joined the fan club, which had no dues. People wrote essays about her. The site was really clicking.

Then, in the spring of 1997, the phone rang.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police asked Clipsham to come down to the station. The 20-year-old college student was told that the U.S. Secret Service had complained to the FBI about the Chelsea Clinton site. The FBI, in turn, had called the Mounted Police. Clipsham was surprised by their interest in his Web creation. "I don't think there was anything shocking on it," he says.

Clipsham says the police offered him two options: (1) take down the site and walk away, or (2) answer a few questions. Clipsham chose Door No. 2.

What exactly, the police wanted to know, did Clipsham intend to accomplish with the site? Clipsham said he was intrigued by Clinton and that it was an innocent fan's site. They asked him for a list of club members. Clipsham refused.

And that was pretty much that. The club faded away as Clipsham, a student at Brock University, had less and less time to keep up with Clinton. The police, he says, had nothing to do with the site's dismantling. "I don't think I was frightened," he says. "I hadn't done anything wrong.

Neither the Mounted Police nor the FBI would discuss the incident. Secret Service spokesman Jim Mackin would only say that his organization "can't confirm or deny who we may or may not have had contact with on a specific investigation."

Mackin says the Secret Service would only become involved in a case if someone makes a threatening comment or statement, or if they undertook "an unusual direction of interest toward someone we protect.

"We would not," Mackin adds, "make contact with individual organizations or Web sites indiscriminately."

Says a respectful and resigned Clipsham, "It is the president's daughter."

"Since Chelsea is a figure of our internet savvy generation," writes staff writer Ellen Steuer in the online Mousy Magazine, "the World Wide Web seems an appropriate medium for Chelsea fan sites and other wackiness."

It does. But for some reason, the Internet shies away from Chelsea. Nando.net, originally an online offspring of the Raleigh News and Observer, wouldn't print the name of Clinton's boyfriend in the spring. "Reporting on Chelsea Clinton's private life is a treacherous path that, once taken, offers only wrong turns and bad choices for news organizations who take it," writes Nando.net's executive editor Seth Effron. "For now, Nando.net sees no reason to follow that badly charted course."

Other folks seem to have followed Nando.net's lead. Online fan clubs have folded. Personal home-page paeans have come and gone.

Chelsea Clinton is one of the last taboos of American journalism. In a profession where the president's private life is fair game, the mainstream press has pretty much obeyed the wishes of the president and first lady and has stayed away from Chelsea.

Arguably, as a rising sophomore at Stanford University and a frequent companion to her parents on official occasions, Chelsea is increasingly newsworthy. But so far there have been no extravagant magazine profiles or photo spreads.

You'd think then that the woolly, wide-open World Wide Web would be the place where admirers could post fan messages at sites dedicated to the first daughter, or where people could learn more about her increasingly complicated life.

After all, other children of the famous bejewel the Internet. Charles and Diana's son, Prince William, for instance, is the subject of dozens of adoring sites. Lisa Marie Presley has a Web ring -- several connected sites -- devoted to her.

A search for Web pages dedicated to Chelsea Clinton yields measly offerings. There are some scattered stories in online newspapers and magazines. The closest thing to a fan page belongs to a resident of GeoCities, an online community with scads of members. Info:Chelsea/Victoria/Clinton contains some telltale tidbits and a few moments of lucidity. Here's a sample: "In the seeming blink of an eye, Chelsea went from the youngster who sadly released her pet turtle into an Arkansas river before heading to Washington to the proud young woman who raised some eyebrows as she wore a miniskirt for the march down Pennsylvania Avenue for her father's second inauguration."

There are a couple of joke pages. One is called Chelsea Clinton's Top 10 White House Complaints (No. 8: Childproof locks still on some doors from Dan Quayle's days; and No. 5: It's a $300,000 toilet seat and it still is never down). Another is the Top 16 Chelsea Clinton Pet Peeves About College (No. 13: "No room in dorm for all those boxes of missing Whitewater documents"; and No. 8: "Every boy who hits on you winds up on a 'peacekeeping force' in Bosnia within 48 hours").

And there's the husk of a site called The Definitive Chelsea Clinton Page, produced by Christopher Short. Short, 19, who works in a photo lab in Crawfordsville, Ind., developed his site in April 1997. In the beginning, it was linked to three other sites.

Rather suddenly, Short says, the sites -- including the Unofficial Chelsea Clinton Fan Club -- vanished and his links were rendered useless. Short gave it up a month ago.

Here's the entirety of Short's page now: "The definitive chelsea clinton page, like all its predecessors, is gone. when all the others folded, they took with them all the information i had on chelsea. lamentably, this left me with nothing but an amalgamation of lame links -- 'definitive' in name only. so, i've pulled the plug. someone who knows something about chelsea, PLEASE carry the torch -- i can't."