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Sylvester Stallone was out on the links when he found out his mother, the eccentric Jackie Stallone, had died.
“I was playing golf and someone called, ‘Your mother’s dead,’” Stallone told me.
He didn’t go to the funeral.
“No. .. Now you’re getting the scoop,” he said with a small chuckle.
It is a startling admission from one of the most famous men in Hollywood, but then Stallone’s relationship with his flamboyant mom — a celebrity astrologer known for her extreme plastic surgery who died in September 2020 at age 98 — was anything but conventional.
As Stallone, 80, has recalled, Jackie would tell him, “The only reason you’re here is because the hanger didn’t work.”
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 movie he both wrote and starred in, would win Best Picture — she refused to come because he wouldn’t give her a plus one for her hairdresser.
And as Stallone looks back on his life, he is clear-eyed about it.
“Some people just shouldn’t have children,” he said. “And I think she knew that … She was very, very immature and she wanted to be a star … She tried to be this palmist, this astrologist, this rumpologist [Jackie claimed to read fortunes from buttocks], she was a trapeze artist, she played piano, but she never reached out for her grandchildren or her children.”
But it’s this lack of love that ultimately fueled Stallone, as he said, “It’s the ones that have all the issues that usually end up being the most creative.”
Eventually, he said, “It got to the point where she just didn’t want to talk to me. So she died in isolation.“
His father, Frank Sr., was similarly unemotional. “My father waited till his deathbed to give advice on love,” Stallone said. “You’re 96, you’re dying. And now is when you figure it all out?”
It is only now, at 80, that Stallone realizes how grief, ignored for decades, can finally erupt.
“You suppress, and you suppress, 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 nearly cost him his marriage when Jennifer Flavin, 58, the mother of his daughters Sophia, 30, Sistine, 28, and Scarlet, 24, filed for divorce in August 2022.
The couple reconciled weeks later after talking through their issues at home. “Thank God,” Stallone told me.
He dedicated the book to Flavin, writing, “Your love has been a beautiful miracle!”
Looking back, Stallone sees the crisis as part of something much larger.
“Finally all the grief, everything just came out, and it was horrible,” he revealed.
Some of that 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’d had a heart attack caused by coronary artery disease.
Stallone can still recall precisely where he was when he got the news.
He was in his office writing a screenplay when his mother’s third husband, Dr. Stephen Levine, called to tell him Sage had died.
“He goes, ‘I’m calling to say he’s gone,’” Stallone recalled, shaking his head. (He hadn’t met Levine before, and he’s never been clear on why he called with the heartbreaking news.)
“It was just so cut and dry and unemotional. ‘Sorry, gone. See you later. Bye.’ That was it. Not like, Can I help you? Nothing. And that was devastating.”
In 1996, at age 20, Sage told People that his relationship with his dad had been strained before they eventually reconciled.
He confessed that playing opposite his dad as Rocky Balboa Jr. in 1990’s “Rocky V” had been painful as well as cathartic.
“When I was screaming [in the movie] ‘You never spent time with me! You never spent time with my mother!’ that was true. I was looking into my father’s face and really saying that,” Sage said. “I got a lot of things out. We broke into tears a few times. After the film, everything changed. We’d do anything for each other.”
“I had great 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 about performing, which I thank God … but I had no idea that he was ill.”
The grief is ever close. “When you see a photo, it’s rough,” Stallone said. “Real rough.”
His younger son, Seargeoh, 47, has autism and lives with Sasha. “She’s never abandoned him,” he said. “So he has constant companionship, and they live in LA.”
Stallone, who is currently based on the East Coast, admitted he doesn’t see his son a lot “because I don’t go to California very often.”
In “The Steps” — named for the 72 stone steps he ran up at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in “Rocky” — Stallone takes us through a childhood that began in a freezing, tiny Hell’s Kitchen apartment and was dominated by his parents’ violent marriage.
When he was 2, they shipped him off to a boarding house for traveling salesmen in Queens and would visit just once a month. He stayed until he was 6.
Damage to a facial nerve during his birth left him with his now-famous crooked mouth and permanent slur, and the kids at each new school were not kind.
By 16, he’d gone through 12 schools in Philadelphia and was sent to Devereux, an institution for troubled teens in Berwyn, Pa.
At 17, he was sent to the Snake Pit, the school’s bleak punishment block — “basically a mental hospital doing double duty as a solitary confinement detention hall,” he reveals for the first time in the book.
Some young men sat in their own feces, while others bore lobotomy scars.
There, Stallone was assaulted by a huge, naked inmate nicknamed Jay Bird, who “clawed at my penis like he wanted to rip it off.
“I yelled for help as loud as I could, as he dug his nails into my crotch, ripping at it, trying to tear off my pants,” he recounts.
For the star, delving back through such early recollections was “kind of traumatic.”
“I think we bury a lot of memories for survival,” he told me. “It becomes scar tissue, then covered over by the dust, and then you blow the dust out, and you go, ‘Oh God, that was sad.’
“As an adult you go, ‘Why was it so difficult to be loved? Why was it so difficult to make friends?’
“It’s emotional. I literally welled up a lot of times.”
And the memories that hurt most? “It always got down to parents,” he admitted. “There are no good memories.”
In the early 1970s, Stallone made his way back to New York. He was so broke, he subsisted on raw eggs and spoonfuls of cottage cheese he kept on his windowsill because he had no fridge.
He auditioned, wrote scripts and worked in a deli and as a movie theater usher.
“Even though I had zero opportunities and zero encouragement, I never thought about plan B,” he said. “Even though it was frightening because there was no plan B. I would’ve been destitute.”
Instead, Stallone turned his pain into his most famous creation, Rocky Balboa, the Philadelphia club fighter handed a million-to-one shot at the heavyweight championship.
The then-unknown actor wrote the screenplay while his own career was going nowhere and famously refused to sell it unless he was allowed to play the lead.
The gamble transformed him into a star. “I don’t know if that’s arrogance or what, but I think you need a little of that,” he said.
But stardom ultimately took a “terrible toll.” While making “Rocky III,” his obsession with his physique became so extreme that he developed bulimia and got down to 2.6% body fat, he told the New York Times. He also admits to steroid use and, over the years, has undergone nine back operations, two shoulder operations and three neck fusions.
For Stallone, the book is also about time. “It’s my currency,” he told me. “I’m at the end of my life.”
Asked about future plans, he said, “I plan on just really condensing it, cramming it together and jamming and doing as much as possible.”
With his hit Paramount show, “Tulsa King,” he said, “I told [producer] Taylor Sheridan, ‘I’m going to write this in a way that it’s just me.’ … It’s become this really bespoke kind of performance where it’s tailored to just allow me to be me, which I’ve never done in my whole life, ever.
“You don’t have to be a tough guy. You just show up and let the words carry you away.”
And after a lifetime spent proving people wrong, Stallone insisted, “I have nothing to prove. I have no more tricks in the bag. You’ve seen the magician.”
