The Steps: A Memoir

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A young man gets off the bus in New York in 1969 with a few dollars and a plan to become an actor. He sleeps on pizza boxes. He cleans lion cages at the Central Park Zoo for three weeks, until the smell follows him into casting offices and he quits. He sells his dog because he cannot feed it. Seven years later he has written a boxing script that every studio wants, and he refuses to sell it unless he plays the lead. The film is Rocky, the run up the museum steps in Philadelphia becomes one of the most copied images in movies, and the man who wrote it is standing at the Academy Awards. The Steps is the story of those seven years, and of what the climb cost.

Sylvester Stallone frames the book between that arrival in New York and the 1977 Oscars, with flashbacks to a childhood he has rarely talked about in this much detail. The forceps birth that paralyzed part of his face and gave him the slur. A father who hit him. A reform school where punishment meant hauling logs up a hill. The steps are his metaphor for all of it, every rejection and every time he got back up, and he leans on that metaphor hard.

The climb, told in scenes

The book works best when Stallone stops explaining and just tells you what happened. Some of the stories are already famous, but the details here are new. He marries Sasha Czack in 1974 in a borrowed gangster suit from the wardrobe department of Capone, spats included, while she makes her dress from an old curtain. On The Lords of Flatbush he and a young Richard Gere come to blows after Gere spills chicken grease on him, and Gere is fired. On the last day of shooting Rocky, his father is given one job, ringing the bell to end the fight, and does not ring it. Father and son nearly fight on the set.

The Rocky chapters are the heart of the book. Stallone goes through the dozens of drafts, the studio's doubts about an unknown lead, the casting fights he won, and the ending he rewrote when the studio wanted something more obviously uplifting. When the film earns ten Oscar nominations, his mother declines the invitation and says she would rather watch on television with her hairdresser. Kirkus Reviews called the result a lively memoir in which long-cherished dreams are the real star, and noted that readers may be surprised by how well written it is.

Where it stumbles

Not every critic was won over. Dean Van Nguyen in the Irish Times praised the clipped, unfussy prose and the smooth structure, and said the book captures the grimy depths of 1970s New York. But he found that Stallone struggles to turn his story into anything beyond another yarn about believing in yourself, and that his first wife Sasha never comes into focus even though she carried him through the lean years. That is a fair complaint. The motivational passages are the weakest part of the book, and the people around Stallone can feel like extras in his own underdog film.

If you already know the Netflix documentary Sly, some of this ground will be familiar. The memoir goes deeper into the New York years and the making of Rocky than the film did, and the later career gets much less space. Anyone hoping for a full account of the Rambo or Expendables years should know that this book is mostly about the climb, not the view from the top.

Why the audio is the version to get

Stallone reads the book himself, and that settles the question for most listeners. The voice is the story. The slur he describes in the opening chapters is the one you hear telling it, and the lines about humiliation and rejection land differently when they come from the man who lived them, now eighty and in no hurry. He is not a polished narrator. He is better than that, because he sounds like someone remembering rather than performing.

The William Morrow audio edition also carries new music written and performed by Bill Conti, the composer of the Rocky score. Stallone announced it himself and called it their first collaboration in fifty years. Hearing Conti again under a scene from the making of the film is a small thrill that the print edition cannot offer. At around nine hours this is a comfortable length, long enough to get the whole New York story and short enough that the self-help passages never outstay their welcome.

The writer behind the actor

Stallone has always written. He had a screenplay credit before Rocky, he wrote the novel Paradise Alley in the 1970s and later directed the film, and the fitness book Sly Moves came out in 2005. Rocky won Best Picture and earned him Oscar nominations for both acting and the screenplay, and the second one is the fact that matters here. This is a memoir by someone who understands structure, and it shows.

In the run-up to the book he gave a long interview to the New York Times about his early life, and the memoir arrived at number one on that paper's bestseller list in its first week. For anyone who has ever run up those steps in Philadelphia, or wanted to, this is the account from the man who put them there. The Audible free trial covers it.

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