In college, I went through a Thomas Pynchon phase. I read everything of his I could get my hands on, and I tried to learn everything I could about him. Like Salinger and _why, he doesn't want you to do that. No photos, no interviews, etc. I tracked down stories he had written but banned from being reprinted (elusive photocopies that I still love), I read books written by his friends (?!), I wandered around the library in NYC where he wrote a lot of his first novel, I subscribed to a journal devoted solely to his writings (and struck up a friendship with the journal's editor), I even went so far as to phone his then publisher and try to get an interview (lying and claiming I wrote for a college paper).

Everything beyond "reading his books" was silly, and some of what I did was invasive (if not very inventively so). So what is my point? There's something powerfully magnetic about certain people - despite their telling us to stay away, and maybe even more so because they tell us to stay away. I'm not sure that I really disagree with what you're saying, but I think there's almost a degree of inevitability about people wanting to know more in such a case. It's how many of us are made.