Sylvester Stallone: On the Sly

To hear Stallone tell it now, he and Everhart did not hover all that long. "But, with Jennifer Flavin, see?" he says, referring to the woman who is back in his life. "This is a good spirit. This is a good soul. And she has proved herself time and again to be someone of impeccable credentials in every way. But you're dealing in a world here where everyone is a wanna-be performer, so you're really asking for it. I mean, it's not as though you're dating some-one who's a civil servant who has no intentions of climbing on your back, going, 'Oh, I won't use Stallone to get to be postmaster general.'"

Whew. Given all the pitfalls, it kind of helps one understand a bit why Hugh Grant might prefer a $60 hummer from a hooker in a BMW parked on a Hollywood side street. Stallone, who is after all currently shooting scenes with Julianne Moore, Grant's Nine Months co-star, has clearly given this matter some thought. "When you are going to superstardom," he says, "your brain is overloaded to the point where you just want to put it in neutral, not talk, not ask questions. Sometimes it's preferable to connect with someone who's just there. It's being naughty, getting out there, doing something dramatic, like something you might do in a movie. It's a theatrical event. It's so trite of the press to beleaguer this because [Grant] happens to be the one out of the billions that gets caught. This goes on every day. I mean, please, if Heidi Fleiss opened up her books, half the world here would be in there. Of all the criminal offenses in the world, prostitution is the most ludicrous. You might as well make eating with your hands an offense. If it weren't for prostitution in some form or another, you'd have an outpouring, perhaps even a complete landslide, of sexual offenses and violence being perpetrated across this country. Rape would be out of control. It would be on the front of Time: 'Tyrannosaurus Sex Loose in America.' I mean, please. How do you regulate sex?"

The question is: How does Stallone regulate his sex life? One hears that comely young working girls and models have been slipping in and out of Seattle with alarming frequency since the actor blew into town. "Oh, right, they're lining up now in the lobby, they're taking numbers to go to my room, like at the bakery." he says, rolling his eyes. "I wish I'd known that, because they sure don't make it up to my room. They must have gone to someone else's room. Up here? Never been one. Not one. If I'm lying. I'm dying, I only wish there were some sort of detection device to prove it right now. People give us too much credit. At a certain time. Nicholson, myself, at one time, Warren Beatty--we have these images of being like joy-boy fools who have to be entertained constantly by a bevy of beauties on a conveyor belt. We like to mingle, we are social creatures, but we are not orgy-bound every night. Believe me, the reality is far less exciting, but there's no way the papers are going to say that Stallone was at home eating French toast this weekend."

At this, Stallone takes a stroll around the trailer, laughing, saying, "Don't mind my flipping around here, but I suffer from a malady called 'attention span deficit' and I just have to move around." He grabs some water, laughs, and says. "You know. I was accused of the same thing as [Hugh Grant]. I'm watching TV and some girl comes on and says, 'Yes, I was with Sylvester Stallone.' First of all, the woman looked like my mother's mother and I mean, I have twenty-twenty vision. I am somewhat rational. Turned out to be a hoax and I was going to sue her, yet there was nothing I could do or say. I find out she has just gotten out of prison and this is how she is making some money. The people just buy into this stuff and then you have some terrible, insidious journalist who goes on these weekly gossip shows, and there's nothing you can do to defend yourself."

Except sue, as he has done. Or, as he did when Movieline published an interview in which producer Robert Evans dissed him royally, pen a gentlemanly letter of protest. Recalling Evans's remarks. Stallone says. "Robert Evans is a pathetic man. After that [incident], he wrote this letter and apologized profusely, then, a mere few months ago, he went behind my back and said something again, actually to Ms. Everhart, who worked with him in Jade, although, at this point, I suppose I should delete her name and say, 'An actress who worked with him." If I told you what Robert Evans did [back at the time Stallone was going to make The Cotton Club], there'd be no reason for this conversation with you to take place." For a moment, even the verbose Stallone looks tongue-tied. He's now dancing carefully with his words. "He brought out lewd pictures of this girl, taken 10 years earlier--I mean, really lewd-- showed them and said. "Don't you think that's funny?' I told him, 'Showing me pornography of a girl I'm dating is going to endear you to me?' That's when I washed my hands of him and pulled out of The Cotton Club. Because I was sickened. I was like. 'How dare this guy show me pictures of this girl in a compromising situation with him when she was 18 years old?' I realized he was demented, but he blames me, I guess, for having had to go out and get someone else to star in his movie."

The very mention of a guy like Evans, who has seen the heights and depths of the Hollywood experience, reminds one what a roller coaster Stallone's career has been. As he readily admits. "It was disaster when I tried taking my career on a whole different road, so disastrous that people were writing my obituaries in the Los Angeles Times" he says, referring to how only Cliffhanger and Demolition Man saved him from years of career bottom-fishing in such stuff as Rhinestone, Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot, Oscar and Over the Top. "I had started to hate the business, but then said, "It's not the business. It's me." My confidence weakened. I reached out desperately, thinking. 'Change your image,' only to work under disastrous circumstances with people who didn't have a clue about what I was or even what was funny. I knew that if it continued. I would have been embittered and relegated to monosyllabic heavies and negative roles. But, on the sets of these movies, I couldn't open my mouth because I had gotten a reputation for being very movie set dominant. I bit my lip and watched my career go down and down and down to the point where I had lost all hope."

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