Sylvester Stallone: On the Sly

"I've had my share of scorching by the flames of love," he observes. "Even though you know, going in. 'This is most likely a tainted affair.' There is still a part of one's romantic nature--if one has a romantic nature and is not supremely cynical, which I never want to be--that makes you fall for it. Each time, though, you become a little bit wiser. With love, you're bound to get hurt, but, in the end, intelligence and a good sense of self-preservation will prevail. With me, there hasn't been any irreparable damage. The only damage is that you've lost some precious time, and the public feeds into the 'Dumb Syndrome' people have about me. You know, the lore that goes that I'm this monosyllabic, rather mesomorphic individual. That stuff just stems from people who are die-hard detractors, who go out of their way to say hurtful things, critics like Rex Reed writing, 'Sylvester Stallone's career is more mysterious than crib death.' People read this stuff about [my love life] and it's like, 'Oh, he did a dumb thing again.' But, as you know, love makes you do incredibly inane things. You're not a rational person when you're in love. It's a temporary form of insanity, but that's the beauty of it."

Even by Hollywood standards, Stallone's love affairs seem to flare up and burn out in short order. "In show business, we live in a high-pressure, high-paced, all-accelerated world," he asserts, "where in six months, you're in a different part of the world, with different people, different everything. Relationships come and go at a much more alarming rate than would be normal in a job situation where you deal with the same people for 25 years. Besides, I don't like to be in an embattled state. I've never understood the idea that you have to work at being in love. The last thing I want to work at is love. Love should be on autopilot. Work at love? What's that mean? 'You wear a blonde wig tonight, I'll change my clothes and play a character?' Subterfuge. I evacuate when we begin to live a lie."

Fine. But isn't dating models and wanna-be actresses asking for it? "Models are like kissing magazine pages," he concurs. "Why go with models or actresses? Because, in [my] world, that's who you deal with 99 percent of the time. Models are wonderful, but I feel bad for them because I feel a lot of them have been wounded. They've been deprived of a normal life. Their priorities are distorted very early and when modeling begins to fade, they are left in limbo, like Rambo. They've been used for a certain purpose, then discarded. You can't expect to be able to say to someone who has been on the road, on a runway, pampered, under ultimate scrutiny, then dumped, 'OK, now get a job at JC Penney's or in a fast-food chain,' What do they do? Where do they go?" To Sly's house, maybe?

Anyway, while we're talking dolls and their brief burst of physical glory, what's with Stallone and plastic surgery? What about the rumor that the studio forced him to cut an entire plastic surgery subplot he had written into the script of Rocky III to help "explain" the drastic change in his appearance since the last Rocky? "I haven't had any cosmetic surgery," Stallone insists. "The problem was I had lost so much weight that I looked dramatically different from Rocky II. We thought, 'Maybe he gets so vain that he has scar tissue removed.' I wore rubber pieces, appliances, in three different places in the first Rocky. I took them off, that's all. The only thing I ever had done is, see, my mouth leans on one side because I had a forceps accident at birth. There is a cut here because these muscles had to be pulled up. But they go, 'You had a face lift, and I say, 'What? I ran out of money and couldn't do the other side? Or they gave me a half-price deal?' I think you should never have cosmetic surgery. If you have a face that has become your blueprint for the world and you change that, you are no longer that person. You are now a mask. If you wanted to fool with your look a little bit, but not change the essence-- whatever gives you tranquility and doesn't hurt anyone else, do it.

"Are you going to ask me about the penis rumor?" Stallone asks. Of course I am. In his struggling days, Stallone bared himself fore and aft in Score, an off-Broadway play, and in a stag reel, Party at Kitty and Studs, released in 1970 and released as The Italian Stallion. But that was before... well, let him tell it. "Oh, yeah, I've heard in every corner of the world that I had to have a pump inserted, that, if I wanted to get an erection, all I do is flap my arm or something. Can you see me walking around like this all day, flapping like a penguin? I finally tracked this thing down to a newspaper in Canada, The Canadian Weird Enquirer or something, that printed this story, "Stallone's body so ravaged by disease and steroids that he's impotent and had to have this implant,' with a picture of this implant. I called the editor and said, 'Tell you what I'm going to do. We're gonna have an x-ray done and you'll see there's nothing in there except some viscera and you're gonna be out of business,' He goes. 'We had a doctor from New Jersey...' who went on record, but I checked it out and the guy's a veterinarian. I sued them to the point where they couldn't pay any legal bills and they were shut down."

Speaking of tabloids, Stallone and Angie Everhart certainly kept them humming for a while. So have his co-star Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith, I mention to Stallone. Has Stallone given Banderas any advice to help him deal with the tabloid uproar over his home-wrecking affair? "I said, 'Don't fight back, because tomorrow, next week, there'll be another scandal and yours will just go away."'

So, has he taken his own advice by not fighting the torrent of press about him and Everhart? And what was going on between them, anyway? Stallone tells me that the announcement of their engagement was "very, very premature, to start off with. I went, 'Oh, my God, how do we reverse this?' Rather than say, 'Stop the presses,' and have everyone truly embarrassed, I went, 'OK, let's ride it out.' I knew that having the announcement out there, if a breakup were to occur, would make it take on a more serious tone than if it were just a minor dalliance. I'm not opposed to long-term relationships. I keep all those avenues open. The promise, great expectations, that's terrific. When I'm in love, I'm energetic, feverish, vociferous and helium-like. I feel very, very light. I tend to hover."

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