Sylvester Stallone, the voice of experience-if not reason-in Hollywood, explains how to survive models, tabloids, career slumps and your own mother.
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The warnings begin almost as soon as I land in Seattle and motor to the location site of Sylvester Stallone's new movie, Assassins, "Whatever you do, don't whistle around Sly," a production source tells me. Whistling is not a standard trick in my interview bag, but, I ask, for the record, why not? "His father used to whistle, just before he'd beat the living shit out of him," explains the Stallone confidante. I get it; no whistling. Another party proffers this tip: "Try not to mention his hair or check out his hairline." Why, exactly? "He's got plenty of hair, but he's freaking because he thinks he's losing it." Roger Wilco, no checking out his thatch. Yet another person confides. "You know Sage, his kid? The two of them were screaming at each other outside his trailer the other day, so, right now, that's kind of a sore subject." Got it. Oh, and one more thing: "You're pretty tall and he can be sensitive about that. You might want to try slouching a little."
Just goes to show you. I figured that if I were going to be warned off any topic, it would be Sly's recent broken engagement to this year's model, Angie Everhart. Or the outrageous salary he's due to collect on future projects despite flaccid box-office for The Specialist and the outright nonperformance of Judge Dredd. Or the rumors about his having had more plastic surgery than Cher. Or to his alleged use of steroids and the weird things they'd done to his sex organs.
When I show up on the set, no-body knows exactly where Stallone is at. "Try the golf course," a crew member cracks. While people go looking for the missing star, I content myself with sitting beside Richard Donner as he directs co-star Antonio Banderas, who plays a young contract killer out to unseat the aging master of the trade played by Stallone. The director of Maverick and several Lethal Weapons studies the monitor playing back shots of Banderas, lit like a god, loading up a cannon-size gun. "Jesus, imagine looking like that just for one hour of your life?" Donner says wistfully. "He's Mel Gibson with an accent." After several strong run-throughs, during which the director encourages Banderas to turn up the smolder, it's a letter-perfect take.
"Jesus, Steve, aren't you bored?" Donner asks, reading me dead to rights. Stallone remains among the missing, so the director makes his cast and crew available to talk behind Sly's back. "He's the proverbial day at the beach come to life," says Donner. "As far as his acting, he's amazing me. Here's his chance to do something different in his life, and believe me, he's grabbing it." Co-star Julianne Moore, miles away from Vanya on 42nd Street or Nine Months, says, "It's excruciating to watch him sometimes, because he'll do something in a scene, then go, 'No, no, no! He'll want to do it again because he doesn't like the timbre of his voice or the way he was holding himself. He's very hard on himself." Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond says Stallone "has certain bad points in his face and he knows it. He knows exactly where the lights should be. In fact, he knows everything about moviemaking." Enthuses Banderas, "We were working together on a scene in a car for nine days. When things are that tight, there can be problems. With him, nothing. Probably everything I've seen him in except for the first Rocky is based on muscle. But here, he's introverted, full of pain, and he's very believable. I tell him, 'You're doing great' and he is."
Stallone has been found. Just before I make my way to his trailer, which is situated for maximum comfort close to the water, someone gives me a last bit of advice: "Sly thinks Antonio's great--I mean, who doesn't like Antonio?--but, like the relationship of the two guys in the movie, this time Sly's really working on his chops because Antonio's a young, gorgeous actor who could run off with the movie."
Stallone greets me in his Arctic-cooled trailer, bronzed and rippled despite pushing 50, garbed in a black Planet Hollywood T-shirt, gym shorts and tennies. The trailer is actually smaller than those I've seen lesser stars in. He looks up, shark-eyed, from whatever it is he's watching on a video monitor, and offers me a seat and an iced drink. When he parks himself across from me on the sofa. I find myself facing the TV screen in back of him. On it plays a continuous loop of dailies featuring Banderas running, shooting, strolling like a cat. The nonstop display of young, tan, New Movie Star spools away as I talk with Older Movie Star.
Stallone is the first actor I've ever interviewed whose mother I've inter-viewed first, I tell him that a few years back, his inimitable mom Jacqueline Stallone--Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling huckster, psychic, author, rhine-stone-and-turban-clad talk-show cutup--shook my hand, traced lines in my palms and launched into a stream-of-unconsciousness rap on everything from the size of my wangdoodle to my prowess in bed. "Oh. yeah, she's a love expert," Stallone says with droll sarcasm, adding, "Is that why she married a jockey once?"
Is it for real that, as papers recently reported, his mother is bankrupt, but won't ask her son for a hand-out? "My mother has nothing to worry about for the rest of her life," Stallone insists. "She is an unguided missile, truly an eccentric, and for some reason lots of eccentric people have this need to look as though they are bag people. They have this miserly thing going, where they like to cry poormouth." Stallone warms to the topic of his mom's weirdness. "We were talking the other day and she was all upset because some magazine gave out her age--like them, I didn't realize that she gave birth to me 35 years before she was born."
Given his well-publicized relationship woes, has Stallone ever felt that having such an astral Auntie Mame for a mother might have skewed his view toward women? I remember her telling me, for instance, how delighted she was when she realized that her son was reading porn, her reasoning being that at least he was reading. "Her eccentricity definitely has a hold on me," Stallone replies. "I've always liked mocking things. I like mocking myself. She will hurst anyone's bubble, not in a malicious sense, but just to get a rise. So will I. She has a true, free spirit."
So how did she let Stallone in on the facts of life? "From early on, I've always been extremely attracted to the opposite sex and was extremely aggressive in that way. When she figured that out, she sat me down and she didn't pull any punches. I was aghast at how graphic she got. She skipped right over the birds, the bees and the bears and went straight to. 'There's a woman, a man'like it was a heifer and a bull'and they slam ham.'" Given such guidance, how and when did he first go about slamming ham? "I was about 12," he recalls, "which, back then, was rather advanced. My friends didn't learn anything about anything until they were 14 to 16, forget about actually having sex, which came usually when you were like 17 or 18. Today, you've been married twice by then. My first time was with a beautiful person who I was completely immobilized by. Her name was Ingrid, a wonderful person because she had no personality at all. The kind of person that you'd put a mirror under her nose to see if she was breathing. She inherited all these lovely physical attributes with no mental stimulus whatsoever. Flypaper was more interesting to hang out with. Social graces and the ability to communicate weren't very high on my list back then."
He sighs so deeply at the memory that it's obvious something went awry with his dream girl. "She sent me crashing to earth," he says. "The day after she and I got together, she was off with Joey Bambatts, then kept on going to Eddie Mannuno, then to 'Zig' Bruno and worked her way through the whole school. I was just a key on her giant xylophone of love. And, you know what? Nothing's changed. Sure, the wardrobe changes and the locale, but the interaction is still the same. I don't care how much money you make or that you deal on a more intellectual, so-called 'spiritual' level as you grow up. The very same kind of romantic tragedies and maladies still occur."
With Stallone, of course, they seem to occur with alarming frequency, as any recap of his romantic tragedies and maladies makes clear. After many rumored affairs, and one very public one with Susan Anton, he divorced his wife of 10 years, Sasha, in 1985. The same year, he married Danish-born model-actress Brigitte Nielsen. Three years later, on the heels of Nielsen, and very spiked heels they were, too, came a daisy chain of serial steadies that included Alana Hamilton Stewart, Cornelia Guest, Vanna White, model Dena Goodmanson and actress Joanna Pacula. Then there was that long-term, on-again, off-again thing with model Jennifer Flavin, which was interrupted by a fling with '70s model Junice Dickinson. Her successor was model Angie Everhart, but when Stallone and Everhart broke off their engagement this past June, Flavin was back again. No wonder intimates familiar with Stallone's amatory attention span call his present love Flavin-of-the-Month.
"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."
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."
Did he drink? Drug? See shrinks? Order stuff he didn't need from QVC? "I took it out in art, painting 100 of the angriest. blackest. Rorschach test-like paintings that are like fingerprints of my soul," asserts Stallone, who owns a mighty art collection, and whose own surrealistic and impressionistic works sell very nicely, thank you. "Luckily, I had my painting and, also, exercise, which, for me, is like Zen movement and is like going to a psychiatrist. Exercise is truly a narcotic."
Stallone is too shrewd a careerist and businessman not to know that his career can hardly survive many more Judge Dredds, Still, having heard once that he nearly did Waterworld, I ask how he feels about that megabudget boondoggle. "I hate to see a movie go crashing down," he says, adding merrily, "unless it's up against one of mine. But don't the producers watch the dailies? If it's. 'OK. we're into this movie and it just hit $25 million and nothing is going right,' I say. 'stop everything.' Take a $10 million loss, but regroup or scrap it. Hollywood is a car with one gear that only goes forward, no reverse. Often, you fail upward in this business. A Waterworld creates concentric rings. Because of that, we're having to shoot my next movie, Daylight, in Rome to save money when we most likely would have done it in America."
Now. Stallone will get $17.5 million to star in that movie, which buys him a lot of time, but does he look to the careers of any past screen action stars for a compass for his future? To, say. Kirk Douglas, who's a best-selling author and occasional actor? To Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris, who flip-flop between ever-worse movies and TV? To Charlton Heston, who alternates acting with championing the right? "I'd love to get a cameo like Alec Baldwin did in Glengarry Glen Ross," he says, "just come in and nail it. For some odd reason, the audience identifies with me when I react physically, rather than a verbal one-on-one. At 55, no one is going to want to see me flying on a trapeze, though. I take offense to people writing off action films as some occupational hazard that actors occasionally must do so that they can be in something financially profitable, then do something 'serious.' Action films are a physical challenge and, because you don't have a great deal of dialogue, you have to become a partial mime to get things across. People dismiss them with a stroke of the pen, but, if there were no action films, there would be no Warner Bros., no Movieline magazine. Still, I can't be doing them forever. Acting is a great pleasure, but I just don't think, as I become more and more mature, it's going to be as vital to me. I find myself trying to regain a bit of that fire down below by writing screenplays. I'm taking out some scripts that I wrote 20 years ago. A lot of it's dated, but there is a naïveté and innocence that I've perhaps lost, but is still retained in the words, I'm gearing up to direct again, because I think that's where my strong suit lies. If Judge Dredd does well internationally, I wouldn't mind trying a sequel."
Rather than contemplate another Judge Dredd, Staying Alive or Rocky IV in my lifetime, I ask if he's serious about reported plans to turn Rocky into a Broadway musical, with music by Elton John. And who will be a young, singing Stallone? "I was just talking to Elton today and he's doing a musical for Disney first, but I'm holding him to his saying he was going to do this. Casting it, who knows? We've lost hardness, color, that take-the-bull-by-the horns kind of actor. About 10 years ago, John Milius told me, 'Here's how the movie business has changed. If I were casting the life of General Custer 20 years ago, we'd have 15 guys who could have done a wonderful job. Gary Cooper, Joel McCrea, Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, on and on. Today, De Niro? No, he's not right. Tom Cruise? Too young. Harrison Ford?' Today, your Leonardo DiCaprios, your Brad Pitts, they're not dogging it by any means, but it's just a different time, a different kind of actor from when I was coming up and I just don't know what's going to happen. In the next 20 years, is it gonna be totally ethereal, nonphysical actors? Because that seems to be the direction it's heading."
The direction this totally earthbound, physical actor is heading is to the set, where he'll be shooting through the evening and weekend. "Joel Silver runs this thing tight--a budgetary problem is addressed immediately," he says. "Days are cut, I'm working evenings." As he gets ready, I ask how he's looking at the future. "I feel as though I've been through three tours of duty in some battle-crazed foreign land and survived. I'm seeing this incredible new transition to a new kind of Hollywood, what with computer-generated images and new technologies that's like we're watching the electric bulb being made when I've been on candlepower all my life. I don't think I've ever been happier."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Molly Ringwald for the September Movieline.