Sylvester Stallone’s memoir The Steps: lion cages, a jail cell and the Rocky bell his father refused to ring

Sylvester Stallone was the most-searched entertainment name in Britain on Friday, with Google’s daily trends listing more than 10,000 UK searches for the actor as his memoir reached shops and a long New York Times Magazine interview, published under the headline “Sylvester Stallone Hid His Struggles for Decades. Now He’s Coming Clean”, circulated widely. The book, The Steps, covers the years before Rocky made him a star, and the detail in it explains the interest.

The Independent reported that the 80-year-old recounts a litany of rejections, setbacks and insults on the road to becoming one of the biggest celebrities of the 1980s, and that the book ends when Rocky is named Best Picture at the Oscars in 1977. Fox News, which interviewed Stallone about the book, said it is published by William Morrow and is out now.

Key facts about The Steps

Detail	What the book says
Author	Sylvester Stallone, 80, writing about the years before Rocky
Where it ends	Rocky winning Best Picture at the 1977 Oscars, per The Independent
Publisher	William Morrow, according to Fox News
Money on arrival in New York	$60, of which $43.60 was already set aside for rent, Fox News reported
Odd jobs	Lion-cage cleaner at Central Park Zoo, cinema usher at $34 a week, deli night shift
Related film	Peter Farrelly’s biopic I Play Rocky, due later this year, per The Independent

Three and a half weeks in a lion cage

The passage most outlets have seized on concerns Central Park Zoo. The Independent reported that Stallone, back in his birthplace of New York in 1969 after years travelling in Europe, saw a sign for the zoo during a fruitless day of job hunting and was hired on the spot. “Fifteen minutes later, I was in a lion cage with a hose, a scoop, and a shovel,” he writes. He cleaned the cages from 5.30am to 3.30pm for around three and a half weeks before quitting, largely because the smell was stopping him from visiting acting agencies.

Fox News quoted a darker line from the same chapter. “I also feared for my life,” Stallone writes. “The lions were always close by, always watching. They looked through me.” The animals, he adds, inhaled and exhaled through the bars “like they already knew what I was going to taste like”.

Raw eggs, cottage cheese and showering in his clothes

According to Fox News, Stallone arrived in the city with $60, rented a room so small he later compared it to the minimum size recommended for a federal jail cell, and shared a bathroom with 10 other people. He worked as a cinema usher for $34 a week, a job he described as an education in filmmaking, and told Fox News he would shower with his clothes on because he could never afford a laundromat.

His diet consisted of spoonfuls of cottage cheese followed by three or four raw eggs. “It’s the only thing that made sense numerically, financially,” he told Fox News. “Of course, it’s all wrong. It’s terrible. I’m surprised I didn’t get salmonella.” He wrote that he would not recommend the diet to anyone, but that it is why Rocky Balboa drinks raw eggs on screen: it was meant to “give some insight into Rocky’s ways of approaching his life”.

A night shift at Dover Delicatessen followed, Fox News reported, and so did an arrest after an altercation there. Stallone describes being handcuffed in a police car while still wearing his apron and name tag, and being taken to The Tombs, the New York detention facility he calls “the place of nightmares”, where he was put in a 20-foot-by-20-foot cell with at least 25 other men before a judge released him.

Richard Gere, a borrowed gangster suit and a mother who stayed home

The Independent picked out several more episodes. On the 1973 greaser film The Lords of Flatbush, Stallone writes that Richard Gere grabbed his T-shirt and dug his fingernails in during an improvisation, and that when the director Stephen Verona asked what he would do if he reacted as he would in real life, Stallone replied: “Do? I’d knock his teeth out.” Verona’s answer was “Please don’t.” After a second incident involving spilled chicken grease, Gere was sacked, and the parts eventually went to Perry King and Henry Winkler after Robert De Niro also left the production.

When Stallone married his first wife, Sasha Czack, in 1974, he was so broke that he borrowed his double-breasted 1920s gangster suit from the wardrobe department of Capone, spats and all, while she made her dress from an old linen curtain, according to The Independent. The paper also reported that, after Rocky received 10 Oscar nominations, Stallone discovered his father had secretly sent the producers a script of his own titled Rocky II, and that his mother declined her seat at the ceremony when told she could not bring her hairdresser.

The bell that would not ring

The book’s most memorable set piece, per The Independent, is the final day of shooting on Rocky, when Stallone’s father Frank was given the job of ringing the bell to end the fight with Apollo Creed. Stallone writes that he had gone over the cue ten times, yet as he drove Carl Weathers into the ropes the bell stayed silent. “Ring the damn bell. Ring it!” he recalls shouting, to which his father replied, “Don’t you goddamn yell at me!” The two squared up before Stallone apologised; moments later his father had left the set.

Stallone’s parents had sent him to live in a boarding house for travelling salesmen as a young child and divorced when he was 11, The Independent reported, though his father did help him make a short film about zombie cowboys in 1971.

Why he kept going

Asked by Fox News why he did not give up, Stallone credited “naïveté and the folly of youth”. “As an actor, if you haven’t made it by 30, I’d say 99% you’re never going to make it,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of that, so I kept going.” His advice to anyone struggling is blunt: “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.”

British readers will get a second telling of the same story before the year is out. The Independent noted that Stallone’s refusal to sell the Rocky script unless he could play the lead is the subject of Peter Farrelly’s biopic I Play Rocky, due later this year.

Frequently asked questions

What is Sylvester Stallone’s new memoir called?

The book is called The Steps. The Independent reported that it covers the years before Rocky and ends with the film winning Best Picture at the 1977 Oscars, and Fox News said it is published by William Morrow and is out now.

Why is Sylvester Stallone trending in the UK?

Google’s daily trends for the UK listed more than 10,000 searches for his name on Friday, driven by the memoir’s release and a New York Times Magazine interview headlined on his decision to speak openly about his struggles.

Did Stallone really clean lion cages?

Yes. According to The Independent, he cleaned lion cages at Central Park Zoo from 5.30am to 3.30pm for about three and a half weeks in 1969 before quitting because of the smell.

Is there a film about Stallone writing Rocky?

The Independent reported that Peter Farrelly’s biopic I Play Rocky, about Stallone turning down offers to sell the script so another actor could play the lead, is due later this year.