Sylvester Stallone is celebrating the first volume of his memoirs.
The book is called “The Steps,” released today and already number 7 on amazon. It’s all about his life up to the time he made “Rocky” in 1975.
Stallone’s pals threw him quite a book party tonight at a swanky mew private club called Coco’s at Colette on the 37th floor of what we used to call the GM Building. Back in my very much younger days you could go into the showroom on the ground floor and try sitting in the new Chevy’s and Oldsmobiles. Years later, FAO Schwarz took over the opposite corner. For a while Donald Trump had had his name emblazoned on the facade in gold.
So this is a far cry from the Oliver Twist like childhood Stallone describes in “The Steps.” He lived with his family on Ninth Avenue in a Hell’s Kitchen cold water flat. As a baby he slept in a drawer in a dresser, no crib.
Stallone writes: “As the name suggests, it had no hot water, which made washing dishes almost impossible. Getting into the bathtub, especially in the winter, was brutal, so it was not done too often. My mother would boil water on the gas stove to mix with the freezing bath water and give me a quick sponge bath. When it wasn’t being used for its intended purpose, which was most of the time, we laid a piece of plywood on top of the small tub.”
He recalls, “One time, I asked my father for a cat. He said if I wanted a pet I could play with the pink baby mice that
snuck through the steel wool and got stuck on the flypaper under the sink.”
So now Stallone, 80, Oscar winner for “Rocky” 50 years ago, international movie star, recent ex Trump Hollywood ambassador, is being interviewed by Fox News’s Bret Baier at Colette in a club where monthly dues are $5,000 after a $7,000 initiation fee. He’s come a ;ong way.
In the crowd at Colette was Stallone’s wife, Jennifer, their three beautiful daughters and some of the richest people from what’s known as “the Palm Beach Crowd.” They include New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, billionaire John Paulson, CBS’s Gayle King, former Trump cabinet member Wilbur Ross, NY Jets owner Woody Johnson, famed designer Tommy Hilfiger, Hudson News owner Jimmy Cohen, and not me. (Thanks, to my spy.)
I’m told there was a huge, sumptuous cake depicting the famous scene of Rocky running up the steps at the Philadelphia Art Museum. (I’m hopeful someone took a picture.)
Stallone — who will come to New York to shoot his “Tulsa King” TV series soon — is overwhelmed. Not only by the book, but by the movie “I Play Rocky,” which Peter Farrelly directed about the hardships the actor-writer-producer went through getting “Rocky” made. There’s already serious talk about awards, and big box office.
As for the movie, Stallone told guests he really liked it. He said, however, that the kid who plays him, Anthony Ippolito, was “too arty.”
Stallone, as ever, keeping it real.
