Road Back to the Ring

 

 

Sylvester Stallone is 60, and he’s been climbing into boxing rings for 30 years, ever since the original Rocky (1976) won three Oscars, including Best Picture. Rocky earned more than $117 million and instantly made Stallone a wealthy and famous man. His next three Rocky movies earned an average of $110 million, but by Rocky V (1990) Stallone’s fans had lost their enthusiasm. That film earned a mere $41 million, and most people assumed that a stake had been driven into the heart of Rocky franchise and, not coincidentally, of Stallone’s career. But Stallone, who describes Rocky Balboa as a man who “goes against common sense” and has “more will than skill,” refused to let Rocky die and has resurrected his alter ego for one last fight.

“I wanted to show that I had balls at 60,” he says. “So they couldn’t write me off.” So for Rocky Balboa, both starring and directed by Stallone himself, he re-envisioned the character as an aged warrior who “wins his peace of mind, who deals with the frustrations of his youth as an old man, without screaming, the only way he knows how – through his body. Rocky has always been a guy who’s about giving and receiving pain, purging old pain with new.” If that sounds like Stallone himself, well, that’s no surprise. As Talia Shire, who played Rocky’s wife, Adrian, in the previous Rocky movies – but whose character has died by the new movie – has said, “Sylvester was always putting issues from his own life in his movies.”

Stallone is aware that his latest Rocky might be met with cynicism and derision. Even before the movie’s release, David Letterman has imagined some Rocky Balboa dialogue along the lines of “Yo, Adrian, got my Lipitor?” The Miami Herald claimed that the film was irrefutable proof “that mankind has officially run out of ideas.” When he told his wife, Jennifer Flavin, that he was planning another Rocky, Stallone reports, she said, “Why do you want to expose yourself to humiliation?” “I know I’m not what I used to be,” he replied, “but I’d rather do something I badly love, than feel bad because I didn’t do something I love.”

Stallone hasn’t starred in a hit movie for 10 long years, during which he busied himself with trivial interests, all of which had to do with his body, which was always more his currency than his acting.

He wrote a fitness book, came out with a line of vitamin and dietary supplements called Instone and hosted The Contender (2005), a boxing-based reality series. He published three issues of Sly, a lifestyle magazine for men between the ages of 35 and 55, ventures that were a sad comedown for an actor whose five Rocky and three Rambo movies, all written or co-written by Stallone, grossed almost $2 billion worldwide and made him, at $25 million a picture, the highest paid actor of his day.

Stallone and I were driving down a hill to his gym when two women in an SUV gawked at him. This is one of his problems as an actor. He can’t hide from himself. Even at 60 no matter what character he plays, the audience sees only Stallone the star or, more accurately, Stallone as Rocky. Stallone says that he has made his peace with the burden of his recognition, but he still thinks it’s part of the reason why, for so long, he didn’t have a career in movies. His problem is that he still looks like the Stallone of the Rocky years, with his black hair and distinctively droopy features that look less wrinkled than they do like melted wax.

Stallone describes his father, Frank – who, in his 80s, recently married a woman 45 years his junior – as “a frustrated singer,” and his mother, Jackie, as “a bon vivant.” Both spent more time pursuing their own dreams than worrying about their son’s. His mother ridiculed his attempts at being an athlete, and his father was especially hard on him, telling his son that his brain was ‘dormant’. When he tried to teach Stallone how to drive in a nail with a single hammer stroke while the boy took three, he berated him. His son snapped at him, “I’m not going to hammer nails like you, get it?”

When Stallone was born, the forceps nicked a facial nerve and paralysed the left side of his face, caused his left eyelid to droop and eventually slurred his speech. Tormented by his peers, he withdrew and spent his time daydreaming of superheroes. When a skinny, 11-year-old Stallone saw his first Steve Reeves movie, he had an epiphany and began lifting weights to sculpt his body. But no matter how muscled his body became, it was only a veneer that hid a psyche filled with inadequacies. “Once you’ve been born an underdog,” he says, “you always identify with that character.” It’s been a long time, though, since Stallone was an underdog. Determined to prove his versatility as an actor, Stallone followed Rocky with projects such as F.I.S.T. (1978), Paradise Alley (1978), Rhinestone (1984), Oscar (1991) and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992), films that required dramatic or comedic talents he didn’t have. When one of them failed, he would reflexively churn out another Rocky or Rambo sequel, which was what his fans and Hollywood moneymen expected from him. But the truth was that Stallone’s limited range found its fulfillment in Rocky, in Rambo and nowhere else, except in one other role that, in a sense, was the real highlight of his career. Stallone is working out with his trainer, Gunnar Peterson, in the Compound. Stallone works out maniacally hard, super-setting from one machine to another without rest, his face contorted in Rocky pain as he heaves heavy weights over his head. His body is massively muscled, which, he says while he works out, “definitely hurt me in movies… Exercise is my salvation, my discipline. The best roles come and go.” Interestingly however, the best role he ever played was the only one in which his body wasn’t chiseled. Gaining 40 pounds to play Freddy Heflin, a simpleminded suburban sheriff bossed around by a gang of corrupt New York police officers in Cop Land (1997), Stallone perfectly captured Freddy’s hunched-over, shambling movements and his innocent psyche.

After his workout, Stallone and I get back into his Mercedes and head up the hill to his villa. The inside of his home is decorated in a style best described as Renaissance Baroque. Classical statues. Huge wall paintings of gods and goddesses. Heavy, antique wooden furniture and lots of reds and burgundy velvets. He shows me a photograph of himself standing high above Lincoln Financial Field prior to a Philadelphia Eagles game in 2003. The stadium is packed with more than 68,000 fans, all screaming “Rocky!” amid a crescendo of fireworks. Stallone grins and shakes his head. “I can’t blend in anywhere,” he says. He says that he gets up at 5:45 a.m., does some stretching and then rouses his 10-, 8- and 4-year-old daughters for their ‘extracurricular activities’ – five minutes of billiards, Spanish, television, piano, golf and soccer “to give them focus before they go to school.” Obsessed with time, it’s running out, he says, so he crams as much into a day, painting, writing, lifting weights, acting when he can while working on new projects. He once said that his desire to cram so much into his life was “a sickness, an obsession... always driving, driving...”

After leaving college, Stallone went to New York and began to make the rounds of casting offices. “With my slurring voice and droopy eyelid,” he says, “I was told at each stop, ‘Maybe you ought to rethink if you have something else you want to do.’ So I took a test and found out that I was suited to be an assistant electrician. Not even an electrician! Not even full voltage!” The actor laughs, and then turns serious. “You can either buckle under and wallow in your misery,” he says, “or look for another avenue into the business. So I began to write scripts.” Ever methodical, Stallone got a job as an usher at a little-attended movie theater so he could study films, obscure Indian films that he’d watch 40 times before trying to rewrite the dialogue.

He got his first break when a friend asked him to be his sounding board when he read for a part in the movie The Lords of Flatbush (1974). “I got the part and he didn’t,” Stallone says. “He wouldn’t talk to me for two years.” A little encouragement for a few of his scripts and 86 hours is all it took him to write Rocky. Producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff offered to buy his script, planning to hire Ryan O’Neal to play Rocky. A mere $106 to his name, he still refused to sell, even when the producers offered him $360,000. “I wanted one chance to sink or swim,” he says. “I knew there’d never be a part like that for me again. I was raw, but so was Rocky. If someone else received accolades for Rocky, I would have jumped off a bridge. I would have sold out, and Rocky’s not about selling out. Finally the producers gave in, signing Stallone to play Rocky for $320 a week and 10 percent of the profits. Rocky made film history. “I hit a grand slam the first time up,” Stallone says. “Where do I go now?” Where he went after Rocky became the story of his career. He signed contracts that were more and more lucrative, on the condition that he would repeat Rocky’s success and, later, Rambo’s; and although the critics were relatively gentle with Stallone’s Rocky, they were vicious with his Rambo. Stallone was accused of promulgating a right-wing, warmongering agenda in telling the story of John Rambo, a crazed Vietnam vet who destroys everyone and everything in his path. In reality, Stallone insists, he’s essentially apolitical. “Rambo (1985) met with a lot of opposition compared to, say, Platoon (1986),” he says. “But it’s always been a male fantasy to fight a war you have control over. Is that liberal or conservative?”

Stallone’s friendly rival Schwarzenegger drew similar accusations, but in retrospect Stallone says that his action-movie colleague had a better sense of what lay ahead. He always saw action movies as a means to an end, specifically to a political career that has taken him to the governorship of California. “Arnold understands that in L.A. you can’t be dogmatic,” Stallone says. “He knows, if you don’t bend, you break.”

“I should have just gradually evolved as an actor over the years, like Clint Eastwood,” Stallone says. “But Rocky took away my opportunity to build to a peak.” “Clint was smart,” “He never went too far from his tightlipped character and delivered the kind of performance people could rely on. I went to extremes. I couldn’t break my persona.” Eastwood wasn’t tempted by big money early in his career because he wasn’t offered it. Stallone was. During those years when he himself was getting the most money, Stallone says, he developed “a sense of false superiority... an aura of invincibility. I thought I could make anything work. I pontificated on every subject – capital punishment – I didn’t know anything about. I was full of anger, too, for being taken for granted. I was antagonistic to the press. I thought I was a victim, the butt end of a joke. “People said, ‘He made his bed and sold his soul to the devil, and now he has to pay,”’ Stallone says. “I really don’t have any defence.” He shakes his head and looks pained. But, like all pain, it has subsided with time and age. Stallone is not so angst-driven these days. He’s made his peace with his frustrations and, instead of picking at the scab of all those dramatic roles he never played, he has accepted the ones he did play.

“I was lucky to deliver someone, Rocky, who endured,” the actor says. “When you’re young, you know, you don’t want to be stereotyped. Now I say it’s who I am. When I die, I know I’ll be remembered as this left-handed boxer, Rocky Balboa.” It doesn’t even matter, he says, whether Rocky Balboa is a hit or not. “People will always say that’s all I can do as an actor. So I’ll retire. I’d like to direct movies now. Arnold told me that it was silly for men our age to put on makeup and shoot bad guys. That’s not me anymore. “It’s almost a relief, you know, to retire.”