Sylvester Stallone was on the links when he found out his mother, the eccentric Jackie Stallone, had died.
“I was playing golf and someone called me, ‘Your mother’s dead,’” Stallone told me.
He didn’t go to the funeral.
“No… Now you have the scoop,” he said with a chuckle.
It’s a surprising admission from one of Hollywood’s most famous men, but Stallone’s relationship with his flamboyant mother – a famous astrologer known for extreme plastic surgery who died in September 2020 at the age of 98 – was anything but conventional.
As Stallone, 80, recalled, Jackie would tell him, “The only reason you’re here is because the hanger wasn’t working.” »
In his brilliant new memoir, “The Steps,” the actor recounts how, when he offered his mother a ticket to the 1977 Oscars — where “Rocky,” the film he wrote and starred in, would win best picture — she refused to come because he wouldn’t give her a plus for her hairdresser.
And when Stallone looks back on his life, he is clear-eyed.
“Some people just shouldn’t have kids,” he said. “And I think she knew it… She was very, very immature and she wanted to be a star… She tried to be this palmist, this astrologer, this croupologist (Jackie pretended to read fortunes on the butt), she was a trapeze artist, she played the piano, but she never reached out to her grandchildren or her children.
But it was this lack of love that ultimately fueled Stallone, as he said: “It’s the ones with all the problems who usually end up being the most creative.” »
Eventually he said: “It got to the point where she just wouldn’t talk to me anymore. So she died in isolation.“
His father, Frank Sr., was equally impassive. “My father waited until his deathbed to give advice about love,” Stallone said. “You are 96 years old, you are dying. And it is now that you understand everything?”
Only now, at age 80, does Stallone realize how grief, ignored for decades, can finally burst forth.
“You delete, and you delete, and you keep trying to ignore it, and then it comes out as an adult,” he said of the emotional “Vesuvius” that erupted “a few years ago.”
It almost cost him his marriage when Jennifer Flavin, 58, mother of his daughters Sophia, 30, Sistine, 28, and Scarlet, 24, filed for divorce in August 2022.
The couple reconciled weeks later after discussing their problems at home. “Thank God,” Stallone told me.
He dedicated the book to Flavin, writing: “Your love was a beautiful miracle! »
Looking back, Stallone sees the crisis as part of something much larger.
“Finally, all the grief, everything came out, and it was horrible,” he revealed.
Some of this grief was unimaginable. In 2012, Stallone’s eldest son, Sage, whom he shared with his first wife, Sasha Czack, died suddenly. At just 36 years old, he had a heart attack caused by coronary artery disease.
Stallone still remembers exactly where he was when he heard the news.
He was in his office writing a screenplay when his mother’s third husband, Dr. Stephen Levine, called to tell him of Sage’s death.
“He said, ‘I’m calling to say he’s gone,'” Stallone recalled, shaking his head. (He had never met Levine before, and he never made it clear why he called to tell him the heartbreaking news.)
“It was so simple and emotionless. ‘Sorry, I’m gone. See you later. Bye.’ That was all. Not like: Can I help you? Nothing. And it was devastating.
In 1996, at age 20, Sage told People that her relationship with her father had been strained before they reconciled.
He confessed that starring alongside his father as Rocky Balboa Jr. in 1990’s “Rocky V” was both painful and cathartic.
“When I was screaming (in the movie), ‘You never spent time with me! You never spent time with my mother!’ it was true. I looked at my dad’s face and I really said that,” Sage said. “I put out a lot of stuff. We burst into tears several times. After the film, everything changed. We would do anything for each other.”
“I had high hopes for him,” Stallone told me of his firstborn. “He was going to do something really wonderful because he found his own niche, which wasn’t acting, which I thank God…but I didn’t know he was sick.”
Sorrow is always near. “When you see a picture, it’s hard,” Stallone said. “Really hard.”
His youngest son, Seargeoh, 47, is autistic and lives with Sasha. “She never gave up on him,” he said. “So he has constant companionship and they live in Los Angeles.”
Stallone, who currently lives on the East Coast, admitted that he doesn’t see his son much “because I don’t go to California very often.”
In “The Steps” — named for the 72 stone steps he climbed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in “Rocky” — Stallone takes us through a childhood that began in a small, frigid Hell’s Kitchen apartment and was dominated by his parents’ abusive marriage.
When he was 2, they sent him to a boarding school for traveling salesmen in Queens and visited him only once a month. He stayed there until he was 6 years old.
Damage to a facial nerve when he was born left him with his now-famous crooked mouth and permanent insults, and the children at each new school were not kind.
By age 16, he had attended 12 schools in Philadelphia and was sent to Devereux, an institution for troubled teens in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.
At 17, he was sent to the Snake Pit, the school’s grim disciplinary block – “basically a mental hospital doing double duty as a solitary confinement ward”, he reveals for the first time in the book.
Some young men sat in their own excrement, while others bore lobotomy scars.
There, Stallone was assaulted by a huge naked inmate nicknamed Jay Bird, who “clawed my penis like he wanted to rip it off.”
“I screamed for help as loud as I could, while he was digging his nails into my crotch, tearing it, trying to rip my pants off,” he said.
For the star, diving back into those early memories was “pretty traumatic.”
“I think we bury a lot of memories to survive,” he told me. “It becomes scar tissue, then covered in dust, and then you blow the dust away and you go, ‘Oh my God, that was sad.’
“As an adult, you wonder, ‘Why was it so hard to be loved?’ Why was it so hard to make friends?”
“It’s emotional. I literally welled up several times.”
And the memories that hurt the most? “It always came down to the parents,” he admitted. “There are no good memories.”
In the early 1970s, Stallone returned to New York. He was so broke that he subsisted on raw eggs and spoonfuls of cottage cheese that he kept on his windowsill because he didn’t have a refrigerator.
He auditioned, wrote screenplays, and worked in a delicatessen and as a movie theater usher.
“Even though I had no opportunity or encouragement, I never thought about plan B,” he said. “Even though it was scary because there was no plan B. I would have been helpless.”
Instead, Stallone turned his pain into his most famous creation, Rocky Balboa, the Philadelphia club fighter who was a million-to-one winner of the heavyweight championship.
THE…
Gn entert
