The 5 biggest revelations from Sylvester Stallone’s memoir

Many people told Sylvester Stallone he’d never make it as an actor. In his new memoir, The Steps, the 80-year-old movie star recounts the litany of rejections, setbacks and just plain insults he faced on the road to becoming one of the biggest celebrities of the 1980s.

As has become Hollywood legend, Stallone eventually figured out that if he wanted to see his face blown up to the size of a movie poster, he’d have to create the part himself.

After writing the script for his breakthrough movie Rocky, he famously turned down multiple huge financial offers to give up the script so that another actor could play the titular boxer from Philadelphia. That story will get its own big-screen treatment later this year in Peter Farrelly’s aptly named biopic I Play Rocky.

Stallone sets down his own memories of the struggle to get Rocky made in The Steps, with the book finishing when (spoiler alert) the scrappy underdog of a movie gets its very own Hollywood ending and is named Best Picture at the Oscars in 1977.

But what really makes the book fascinating is Stallone’s recounting of the long, arduous road he took to get to the place where he even conceived of writing a script like Rocky. It’s a warts-and-all account of risking it all for what seems like an impossible dream. Here are five key moments Stallone shares with readers:

1. He cleaned lion cages at Central Park Zoo

In the years before Rocky, Stallone took every odd job he could find to make ends meet in New York City. After years of traveling in Europe, he had returned to his birthplace in 1969 to pursue his dream of writing and acting, but quickly found that he needed a day job to stay afloat. During a fruitless day of job hunting, he passed a sign for the Central Park Zoo and inquired at the front desk about a job. He landed the unglamorous gig right away.

“Fifteen minutes later, I was in a lion cage with a hose, a scoop, and a shovel,” Stallone recalls. “If you’ve never been in a lion’s cage after it’s evacuated, let me tell you: It is very pungent. In no time, my eyes began to water from the stench of the natural ammonia in a lion’s urine.”

Stallone cleaned lion cages every day from 5:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. for about three and a half weeks, he wrote. He quit largely due to the smell, which was preventing him from visiting acting agencies.

“I liked animals, but I didn’t like reeking as if I had the world’s greatest bladder problem when I walked home from work every afternoon.”

2. Stallone’s father nearly ruined the final day of shooting on ‘Rocky’

Stallone had a complicated relationship with his parents throughout his life, a dynamic underscored by their decision to send him to live in a boarding house for traveling salesmen when he was still a young child. Frank and Jackie divorced when Stallone was 11, and although they were initially unsupportive of his career, Stallone’s father did at least agree to help him make a short film about zombie cowboys in 1971 when he was struggling to get his name out there.

This leads to one of the book’s most memorable passages, when Frank is charged with ringing the bell to end the fight between Apollo Creed and Rocky on the film’s final day of shooting — the “last punch” moment, as Stallone calls it.

“I’d gone over it with my father ten times. I told him, when I drive Apollo into the ropes and start to pound away at him, and it actually seems like Rocky may pull this out and win the fight, the bell has to ring just in time to save Apollo,” he writes.

However, as Stallone drove Apollo actor Carl Weathers back, peppering him with punches, the bell remained silent. “It’s getting to be ludicrous. I can see Carl glaring at me as if to say, ‘What the hell’s going on?’” he recalls.

“I continue to throw half-hearted punches until finally, in a fit of frustration, I whip around and face my father. ‘Ring the damn bell. Ring it!’ He slams the hammer down and rises to his feet. ‘Don’t you goddamn yell at me!’ he shouts from his spot ringside.”

Stallone recalls squaring up to his father, who apparently had his fists balled up, ready to fight, before apologizing and letting it go. Moments later, Frank had disappeared from the set.

3. He threatened to knock Richard Gere’s teeth out

In 1973, Stallone got a significant break when he was cast alongside Robert De Niro and Richard Gere in a movie about 1950s greasers, The Lords of Flatbush. However, when asked to improvise with Gere, things took a turn for the worse.

Stallone recalls: “Gere grabbed my T-shirt and his fingernails dug into my skin. I told him to back off, but he did it again on the second take. He couldn’t have known, but Gere had begun to stir the emotional cauldron inside me.”

He continues: “I turned to [director] Stephen Verona and asked him, ‘Is it okay if I ad-lib here and react the way I would actually react if someone did that to me in real life?’”

When Verona asked what he’d do, Stallone replied: “Do? I’d knock his teeth out.”

The filmmaker replied simply: “Please don’t.”

After a subsequent incident involving Gere spilling chicken grease on Stallone’s leg, the pair got into another fight and Gere was sacked. De Niro separately left the production to work on a different film, with their two parts ultimately filled by Perry King and future Happy Days star Henry Winkler.

4. He was so broke he got married in a movie costume

Stallone’s impoverished financial situation is a running theme throughout the book. For many of the years he describes, he appears to subsist on a diet of raw eggs and cottage cheese. Things hadn’t improved much by the time he married his first wife, Sasha Czack, in 1974.

He had, however, been cast in a supporting role in the gangster movie Capone, so at least he had a suit he could use. Stallone recalls: “Sasha wanted to buy a wedding dress, but we couldn’t afford it. All our money went to rent, groceries, and repairs on the car. We were barely surviving, so she made her dress out of an old linen curtain from the rental house.

“For my part, I had zero dress clothes, so I borrowed my double-breasted 1920s gangster suit from the Capone wardrobe department — spats, shoes, and all. With my greased-back period haircut, I looked like I fell out of a time machine.”

5. His mother refused to join him at the Oscars

Even when his moment of greatest triumph arrives, Stallone’s parents still find a way to undermine him. After Rocky is unexpectedly nominated for ten Academy Awards, he learns his father has secretly sent the film’s producers his own script. Its title? Rocky II.

Meanwhile, Stallone invites Jackie to accompany him to the Oscars. She responds: “You know my hairdresser, Vivian? Can I bring her?” When Stallone says he only has one seat left, she replies: “Then I can’t go. I’ll watch it on TV.”

Sylvester Stallone’s The Steps is out now