When a young backpacker paid a clairvoyant 100 pesetas to look into his future, Madame Pilar’s predictions came thick and fast. ‘Fortune by 1976. Drama, not singing. Avoid comedy,’ she told the university drop out, who was in the Spanish Pyrenees, trying to ‘find himself.’ The traveller was Sylvester Stallone who, now 80, puts huge stock in her uncanny predictions in his new autobiography, The Steps, released today, which follows his life up until winning a best film Oscar for Rocky in 1977.
The Creed, First Blood and Rambo legend was just 23 in 1969 when he met Madame Pilar. Himself nominated for best actor Oscars three times, he says in his book: “I had just turned 23. On a dirt road leading to the sea, deep in the Pyrenees mountains, I saw a sign. It was for a fortune teller. A hundred pesetas and I could have my future foretold.
“A few months earlier, I’d dropped out of the University of Miami a few credits short of graduating, and now, like so many from my generation, I was backpacking through Europe trying to ‘find myself.’ If there was one person in all of Spain who could use some guidance about what the future held, it was me. She [Madame Pilar] said I had a double lifeline. I was going to live two different kinds of lives. Then she began making predictions.”
While the reading was uncannily accurate, when Stallone moved from Philadelphia, where he’d grown up, to New York in 1969, with just $80 (£60) to his name, sleeping in a bus terminal, before shovelling lion dung in Central Park Zoo and then working in a deli, to afford a grim room, it felt like a pipe dream. Stallone writes: “After a couple of months, I could slice salmon and sturgeon so thin you could almost read through it.”
Recalling his lonely existence, staying in freezing digs, he continues: “It was incredibly cold most nights and the radiator worked when it felt like it, so I slept in my clothes and my battle-tested sheepskin coat. I didn’t go anywhere for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I bought a chicken breast and apple juice and had them by myself in the middle of my bed. My only company were my buddies, the pigeons, who always gathered on the fire escape and pecked the window begging for a piece of chicken.”
Finding work at the Baronet and Coronet Theater, he seized the chance to practice his acting skills, writing: “I would give a speech at the beginning of a screening.
“You could smoke in theatres at that time, and I liked to make something out of the moment. I’d blurt out something like ‘smoking, chewing, spitting, and other unsanitary phenomena, on the right! Health fanatics, on the left!’ I’d get a few laughs. Most patrons were polite, though some were not. There’d often be a wiseguy who had to make a comment, usually followed by a derogatory name that sent me right back to my childhood. They would mock my announcement, or my speech, or my ill–fitting tuxedo and sagging bowtie.”
Some customers were also dangerous. Stallone recalls: “Late one night… I had a guy come in and walk right past me. I asked him for his ticket. He smirked. He was a big man with a flat top, a dirty trench coat and an unnerving grin on his face. ‘You can’t come in without a ticket,’ I said.
“He stopped, turned, opened his trench coat, and exposed a huge, chipped, wooden-handled butcher’s knife tucked into his belt, sheathed in frayed newspaper. He grinned, never breaking eye contact. It didn’t take a genius to know what was coming next. I waved him in, pointing to an empty seat.”
By day, Stallone pounded the streets seeking an agent – often visiting four in a day, He writes: “People were telling me, not behind my back but right to my face, that I was basically a misfit, that I was never going to make it.”
Persistence paid off and, in 1974, he landed his breakthrough role in Death Race 2000. But, just three days in, the producer asked him to film a “completely unnecessary nude scene”. Stallone recalls: “I’d done gratuitous nudity when I was starting out and I wasn’t about to go through that again. I felt I’d paid my dues.
“I didn’t want to feel like I was going backward, so I refused. I was a little shocked that I wasn’t fired right there.” Initially screamed at to “do it” by the director, he stuck to his guns and eventually won. He writes: “Instead, I did the scene in a towel.”
Married three times – another Madame Pilar prediction that came true – while Stallone has been with third wife Jennifer Flavin since 1997 – for his first wedding, to Sasha Czack, he was too poor to buy a suit.
He writes: “We were barely surviving, so she made her dress out of an old linen curtain from the rental house. 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.”
It was also while Stallone – who was married to Brigitte Nielsen from 1985 to 1987 – was a struggling actor in 1975 that he wrote the screenplay for Rocky, the movie that made him, in just three and a half days.
He hoped that, as well as finding him fame, it might win some respect from his parents – hairdresser, businessman and author Frank and astrologer, dancer and women’s wrestling promoter, Jackie.
Stallone, who recently spoke about his father’s violence, also writes movingly about his loveless childhood. He recalls: “When I was young, I always wanted to be hugged by my parents. Just once. “There was no love. All I wanted, more than money, was to feel my mother’s hands holding my face and saying, ‘I love you, my son,’ or my father’s arm around my shoulder pulling me close.
“Doing Rocky was the only thing I could think of that might make this miracle happen . . . maybe.”
Rocky was the highest grossing film of 1976 and made over $225 million(£168 million) globally on a $1million (£755,0000) budget. It received 10 Oscar nominations, winning three, including Best Picture. Sadly, Stallone’s parents didn’t attend the ceremony – fulfilling another of Madame Pilar’s predictions.
But when Jack Nicholson announced Rocky had won the Best Picture gong, life changed forever for the one-time ‘misfit.’ Stallone writes: “A year earlier, I was completely destitute, at the end of my rope, when this humble character appeared in my thoughts and threw me a lifeline.
“Now, with five little words out of Jack’s mouth – ‘and the winner is Rock,’ – he didn’t just save my life, he changed all the cast’s lives forever. Through Rocky, we all learned that the goal is not to be the champion of the world, but to simply be the champion of your own life. The goal isn’t to always ‘win,’ it’s to go the distance, to prove you can endure what life throws at you. It’s to just not quit when things get hard.”
*The Steps by Sylvester Stallone is available now in Hardback, eBook and Audiobook (Seven Dials, £25.00)
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: mirror.co.uk
