The Philadelphia Museum of Art contains a 14th-century Buddhist temple, a one-acre sculpture garden and works by Picasso, Renoir and Van Gogh. Its most famous attraction, however, is a flight of stone steps that draws several million tourists every year. These are the so-called “Rocky Steps”, immortalised by Sylvester Stallone in his 1976 movie about an underdog boxer who needs to build up his strength. The climb is a lung-busting challenge, but if unremarkable Rocky can sprint all the way to the top, he gives hope and encouragement to everyone down below.
It’s not just the fans who relate to Rocky Balboa. So too does Stallone, whose entertaining rags-to-riches memoir paints the creator and his creation as all but indivisible, each an extension of the other. Stallone was flat broke and beaten down when he wrote his film about “the forgotten man”, the blue-collar schlub with a good heart and firm chin. Everyone knows that Rocky is being set up as a fall guy. He can’t possibly defeat Apollo Creed, the dazzling, charismatic, undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. Except that Rocky doesn’t care, he only wants to be seen, and in scripting an unlikely redemptive arc for his hero, Stallone wound up transforming his own fortunes as well.
The Steps talks us through how he did it – or how he likes to tell people he did it – and how we might go about doing something similar in our own lives. Believe in yourself, he advises. Roll with the punches. Never throw in the towel. His memoir reads like a breakneck self-help manual in which the author is variously cast as guide, guru and crash-test dummy. Stallone – a keen student of narrative structure – knows that failure packs more dramatic punch than success, and shrewdly wraps up his account just as his film storms the Oscars. The man loses every round but the last, which is of course all that matters.
The messaging can be cheesy and several of the stories feel fishy, but he spins a good yarn, plonking himself centre stage. He’s the raw, gauche outsider in Midnight Cowboy-era New York, earning a crust as an usher and cleaning cages at the zoo. He’s a striving Martin Eden in mid-70s California, trying and failing to get his scripts off the ground. Stallone writes in an authoritative conversational style, as though he’s leaning in close and draping his arm around your shoulder. He says, “I don’t know if you know anything about dogs,” and, “You might be asking, why doesn’t he go to a laundromat,” and, “If you’ve never been in a lion’s cage, let me tell you, it is very pungent,” and the effect is charming, companionable and ever so slightly oppressive.
There is no side to Rocky – what you see is what you get. His creator, by contrast, feels more guarded and controlled. He presents himself as a sweet innocent – monastic and almost sexless – but there is an anger to his memories that burns on every page. He hates the snobs who write him off and the suits who feed him a diet of scraps. Francis Ford Coppola makes him wait several hours to audition; Richard Gere drips chicken grease on his trousers. Most of all he hates his mum and dad, who never wanted him to begin with and have left him with a desperate, mechanistic hunger to succeed. “If they’d been sweet and loving, like parents you see in a TV show, would I even be here?” he asks. They broke him and made him: it’s a complicated relationship.
In a fair and just world, Stallone might have sold his labour-of-love screenplay about the life of Edgar Allan Poe. But now he’s down to his last $80 and his first child’s on the way and so he writes the first draft of Rocky in three days flat, pouring out a decade’s worth of humiliations and frustrations. Producers offer him a fortune to hand over the script, but he sticks to his guns and insists on playing the lead. The suits are in uproar; his agent’s having kittens. Except that our hero is proved right, his brinkmanship paying dividends. Rocky – a rousing old-school melodrama with a little 70s grit in its gloves – is cobbled together for a measly $900,000. It goes on to earn $225m.
How true is this laundry list of hard knocks and life lessons? True enough. Stallone’s early struggles are well documented and largely verified. As for his origin tale about the making of Rocky, some see it as a foundational myth, heavily salted and spun. “The press feeds on the underdog story,” Gabe Sumner, United Artists’ former marketing boss, said back in 2006. Stallone’s claim that he faced down the studio, Sumner added, was “horseshit”, part of a “tremendous marketing campaign” in the run-up to the Oscars.
The Steps asks us to accept the author as a real-world Rocky, the lowly everyman who hauled his way to the summit. That’s not a lie; it’s a life story to be proud of. But he is also Apollo Creed, the wily showboater and self-promoter, who knows that a David and Goliath story is good for business and that the best American heroes are self-directed, self-made and still a little rough around the edges.
