Before Sylvester Stallone became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, he had just $60 to his name — with $43.60 already set aside for rent. But even as he struggled to make ends meet in New York City, the future “Rocky” icon refused to give up on his dream.
In his new memoir, “The Steps,” Stallone recounts the years before fame, including his arrival in New York City in 1969, determined to become an actor despite poverty, rejection and uncertainty.
The 80-year-old told Fox News Digital that even in his darkest moments, he held on to the belief that his life would eventually change for the better.
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“I think it comes from naïveté and the folly of youth, that you still have this sense of, ‘I can do it, I can break the mold,'” Stallone said. “I hadn’t been beaten enough by life yet to say it’s over because, as an actor, if you haven’t made it by 30, I’d say 99% you’re never going to make it. I wasn’t aware of that, so I kept going.”
“In New York, when I was really down and out, I didn’t focus on, ‘God, you’re going to be destitute,'” Stallone said. “There was this certain optimism that if you put every effort forward, if you denied yourself every moment of pleasure of going to the movies, dating a girl — if you abandoned all that and dedicate yourself, I believe that you’ll know 100% whether you actually have a chance to be this character you always wished you could be.”
Stallone never stopped believing he would one day make it as an actor.
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After leaving the American College in Switzerland without graduating and dropping out of the University of Miami just a few credits shy of a drama degree, Stallone returned to New York City with little to his name. He rented a room so cramped that he later compared it to the minimum size recommended for a federal jail cell. He shared a bathroom with 10 other people.
Stallone also found work as an usher at a movie theater, earning just $34 a week. He said the job became an education in filmmaking. Night after night, he studied the movies he watched, keeping his dream alive.
Stallone said he would shower with his clothes on to save money on laundry. If he were lucky enough to find a bar of soap that didn’t have a “strange hair” stuck to it, he would use it to lather up “my shirt, pants, underwear, socks — and myself.”
“I could never afford to go to a laundromat,” Stallone said. “My wife thinks this is so gross, ‘Why would you take a shower with your clothes on?’ I said, ‘It made sense to me at the time, rather than going down to the laundromat. But this was a tenement home. It was so bad. But you do what you could to survive.'”
To stave off hunger, Stallone would eat spoonfuls of cottage cheese, then down three or four raw eggs. In the book, he recalled later treating himself to chicken breast and apple juice.
“It’s the only thing that made sense numerically, financially,” he said. “Of course, it’s all wrong. It’s terrible. I’m surprised I didn’t get salmonella, really. It’s really quite remarkable. But these two things at a certain time of year, because in the summer, the cottage cheese would rot, and the eggs would spoil.
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“But if you brought it from around October, it would sit on your windowsill until March. So that became my refrigerator. And at the time, I just thought it was so convenient. No dishes. You drink the egg, so you don’t have to wash anything. You didn’t need a fork. And the cottage cheese, it’s a spoon, and you throw the cup away.”
Stallone wrote in the book, “I wouldn’t recommend this diet to anyone. But if you’re young and poor, it will suffice, which is why I used eating raw eggs in ‘Rocky’ to give some insight into Rocky’s ways of approaching his life.”
Stallone had a dollar or two a day for food. He needed a job, and fast.
One of Stallone’s earliest gigs was cleaning the lion cages at Central Park Zoo. The smell was bad enough — but it wasn’t what frightened him.
“I also feared for my life,” he wrote. “The lions were always close by, always watching. They looked through me. They were behind a set of bars, but that didn’t stop the great sad creatures from wedging their huge snouts between the bars to sniff me out. The way they inhaled and exhaled made an eerie moaning sound, like they already knew what I was going to taste like.”
During that period, Stallone faced repeated rejection from agents, including one who criticized his deep voice and asymmetrical mouth — two traits that would later become signatures of his screen persona.
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Walking home one day, he spotted a “Help Wanted” sign at Dover Delicatessen and took the 6 p.m.-to-2 a.m. shift. While he was able to save enough money for a coat to brave the city’s bitter winter, it’s one gig he doesn’t miss.
“Every customer gets cranky over this and that, ‘Hey, there’s not enough coleslaw here. This sandwich should weigh an ounce and a half more,'” Stallone said with a laugh. “You’d be shocked. I learned to be a really good fish cutter, like for lox on bagels. I still would hear, ‘I can’t see through the salmon.’ They wanted the cut so thin that you could actually see light. Oh man. And you’re cutting your fingers off, too.”
“And then the characters that come in at two in the morning, the outrageous drunks and gangsters, unbelievable,” Stallone continued. “You’d be shocked who walks into a place at two in the morning and wants a sandwich. So that’s colorful. And of course, I ended up in jail, but that’s only because of the stupid deli.”
“I thought I was living OK, a decent life,” he said. “But by today’s standards, you were on the cusp of oblivion.”
After an altercation at the deli, Stallone found himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, still wearing his apron and name tag. He was sent to “The Tombs,” New York’s notoriously violent detention facility — or, as Stallone put it, “the place of nightmares.” He was put into a 20-foot-by-20-foot holding cell with at least 25 other men. One man was already pounding another’s head into a small hole that prisoners used as a toilet.
A criminal court judge eventually released Stallone.
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“I took the apron, balled it up and tossed it in the trash on the way out the door,” he wrote.
Today, Stallone has zero regrets.
“If you don’t sacrifice completely and fail, you’ll suffer for the rest of your life going, ‘Why didn’t I try harder? Why didn’t I use whatever God-given talent I had to be the absolute best?'” Stallone said. “If you fail, you can say, ‘I tried.’ People can never point a finger in your face and say, ‘You didn’t try hard enough.’ But my biggest fear was that I would leave something on the table.”
Looking back, Stallone said those difficult years taught him a lesson that still resonates in “Rocky” decades later.
“‘Rocky’ still points out that if you’re willing to completely sacrifice good times, pleasure and escapism for the goal, it’s really possible,” he said. “There is no halfway point.”
