Winner and Still Champion

By J.D. Reed

Rocky III is a box-office knockout and a homecoming for "Sly" Stallone

An actor is an athlete of the heart.

--Antonin Artaud

Heavyweight Challenger Gerry Cooney quotes its lines with fervor. Olympic Figure Skater David Santee trained to its triumphant sound-track music. Its plot is adapted by feature writers and by coaches for locker-room pep talks. At V.F.W. halls, in cocktail lounges, and surgical scrub rooms, Americans on any occasion of victory or defeat, no matter how evanescent, are liable to exclaim, "It's just like Rocky!" The story of the virtuous and vulnerable heavyweight, Rocky Balboa, the Philadelphia club fighter who "went the distance" (Rocky, 1976) and battled to the championship (Rocky II, 1979), has become a red, white and blue touchstone of fable, energizing a spark of recognition that few film heroes--and fewer fighters--have ever done.

Rocky is a meat-and-potatoes exemplar of the American dream, a working stiffs contender who battles for his dignity against odds that seem overwhelming. Rocky III, premiering just two weeks ahead of the Cooney-Holmes championship match, extends a fresh set of sweat-stained victories to Rocky's loyal fans.

Their loyalty is bankable. The first two installments of the Rocky saga garnered an astonishing $400 million in worldwide distribution, against their modest combined production cost of $9.1 million. Rocky III grossed a near record $16 million in its first four days. Only one film, Superman II, has ever opened better, and that was because it was shown in 458 more theaters. Playing in 939 houses across the U.S., III has set a new Hollywood record by averaging $17,056 a theater in that period. Movie moguls still scratch their beards, wondering how the Italian Stallion managed to connect with such a haymaker. To Rocky's creator, that secret punch is easy to explain: he put satin trunks on his autobiography.

Sylvester Enzio Stallone, 35, "Sly" to his friends, stood at the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art two weeks ago, surrounded by co-stars and dignitaries, facing the Instamatic strobe pops of several hundred noisy admirers. "This is just like a scene from the movie," he pronounced, in a voice that echoed Marlon Brando's punchy Terry Malloy from On the Waterfront. Rocky did roadwork on the museum steps in the first picture. In III he unveils a statue of himself on the same spot, his gift to the city. Now Stallone was preparing to do the same in reality.

In his vanilla suit and matching boots, he moved with the assurance of an athlete whose daily regimen includes whole-grain bread, no sugar, a two-hour workout and 45 daily vitamins. At 5 ft. 10 in. and 165 Ibs., Stallone appears slighter in person than he does on the screen. But on the slender legs of a runner resides the torso of Charles Atlas. His face is healthily gaunt: rosy but hollow cheeks guard the languid brown eyes. When the yellow cloth fell from the 8 1/2-ft, $70,000 movie-prop bronze statue, Stallone gazed upon his features on the face of a fiction. That confrontation has taken place before. Rocky has made the star wealthy ($25 million from the first two installments), a leading man the equal of an Eastwood or a Reynolds, and a budding Hollywood business force. But his image as the boxer has kept Stallone's career in a clinch. His other roles, the labor leader in F.I.S.T. or the neighborhood loafer in Paradise Alley, attracted disappointing revenues and mixed reviews. After a moment, he turned to his fans, raising his fists and becoming Rocky for an instant, as if he were slipping into another skin. "You can break that statue into a million pieces, and you'd find a piece of it in every Philadelphian," he cried. "It belongs to you."

Rocky III is a kind of report to the fans on Stallone's recent life. The film's dramatic motor is the struggle from the softness of success back to the mental toughness of a champ. If Stallone is a man of steel, he is scarcely a man of irony, and he handles Rocky III as he has handled all of his writing and directing efforts, with heart-in-the-right-place primitivism. That is not necessarily a defect in movies that depend for effectiveness on walloping blows to the audience's emotional solar plexus. Stallone is unabashedly faithful to his character and his friends. The old gang is reassembled. Talia Shire is freshly steadfast and inspirational as Rocky's wife Adrian, Burgess Meredith is back as the wizened trainer Mickey and Burt Young as the earthy brother-in-law Paulie. Carl Weathers reprises his wily Apollo Creed. It is all durable and somehow innocent. There are no crooked managers, no manipulating promoters, no mobsters in this boxing crowd.

This time Rocky, who whipped Creed to take the title in II, announces his retirement, feeling he can no longer give the sport his best shot. From the crowd on the museum steps jumps the Mohawk-coiffed, feather-bedecked Clubber Lang (played by Newcomer Mr. T, a.k.a. Lawrence Tero). The top contender harangues the champ with an intensity from somewhere beyond Muhammad Ali, demanding a title shot. Mickey, who has coached Rocky's career from the beginning, tells the fighter the awful truth: his title defenses have been against opponents he could easily whip. Lang, he suggests, would be too much to handle. "The worst thing that can happen to any fighter happened to you. You got civilized." The champion picks up the challenge, but when Mickey dies of a heart attack, Rocky loses the "eye of the tiger"--his term for hungry resolve--and the bout.

The retired Creed, of all people, replaces Mickey and tries to teach Rocky the new boxing method he must acquire to beat Lang--quick, stylish and black. Rocky is slow to pick it up and agonizes in self-pity. It remains for Adrian to deliver the ultimatum: go for it--the Rocky motto--or give up the rematch.

The final fight, the traditional climax of the Rocky epics, exceeds all earlier matches. Rocky gives and takes blows surrealistically enhanced by Dolby sound. Lang lashes back, growling and gnashing through his rubber mouthpiece. The experience is the nearest thing to being in a seat in Caesars Palace this Friday night that a moviegoer is likely to find. Indeed, the physical damage in the screen version surpasses that of many real bouts.

The screen mayhem, however, gains its authenticity from the heart. Stallone has built his stories on psychic lines that owe as much to myth as to realism. Says Shire, who is Francis Ford Coppola's sister: "Sylvester tapped the American spirit. I think a person who spent so long with his nose pressed against the window sees things in a most interesting way. Despite his success, he's extremely accessible. That's what's so ironic. Stallone is so famous now he has to stay isolated behind those gates to protect himself."

In Stallone's lavish, sprawling house behind a high brick wall and green canvas gates in Pacific Palisades, slightly to the left of Beverly Hills, film memorabilia vie for space with fine art in rooms accented with rich woods and polished brass. A mammoth Leroy Neiman portrait of Rocky hangs near a Rodin sculpture, a boxer's headguard inscribed "To Sly from Muhammad Ali" rests near Andy Warhol oils. Another treasured possession is a worn photo album that the star uses to document his "roaches to riches" story. Stallone, dressed in running shoes and warmup suit, puffing on a Dunhill briar pipe, leafs through the pictures of his pre-Rocky days, a ritual of memory: "There's me in a doorman's jacket I stole to keep warm. There's me with an earring--I actually delivered Perrier in that. Another with my torn-T shirt Stanley Kowalski look. Every six months I'd go to one of those picture machines to see how fast I was deteriorating."

His transformations began early. Stallone was born in a New York City charity ward. A forceps delivery severed a facial nerve, paralyzing one side of his lip, chin and tongue. Though he is a colorfully articulate speaker, Stallone must carefully pick his way through sentences. Says he: "I've got what you'd call a Mafioso voice, and I'm self-conscious about it." Father Frank, a Sicilian immigrant, moved the family to Silver Springs, Md., and opened a beauty shop. His mother Jacqueline, a former "Long Stem Rose" chorine in a Billy Rose revue, started her own business, a workout salon. The family exercise, however, was social climbing. It left a bitter taste. "My father wanted to be accepted into a certain class, so we played 'poor man's polo,' " says Stallone. "A good pony cost $15,000; ours cost $200. Sometimes they asked us not to play." After his parents' divorce, Stallone "did time" in a number of schools. Taunted by classmates for his looks ("I was a Mister Potato Head with all the pieces in the wrong place") and even more unusual name, he began lifting weights at 13.

He used his early memories when he began scriptwriting: "Remember the scene in Rocky where Adrian said, 'My father told me that I wasn't born with much of a body, so I should develop my brain,' and Rocky said that it was just the opposite with him? That was me. Muscle and physique were my calling cards."

After attending college in Switzerland and at the University of Miami, the actor was ready to take New York by storm. Casting Director Rhonda Young, then a talent agent, tried to get work for the hulking Stallone. "I sent him to Ivory Soap," she says. "They were looking for a greaser, but they sent him back. They said there was a limit to seediness." When he worked as an usher in a moviehouse, he fell in love with another usher, Sasha Czack. They got married, and the bride typed scripts that Stallone wrote in off-hours.

Together they went West, but Hollywood was not welcoming either. Irwin Winkler, who along with Robert Chartoff has produced all the Rocky films, remembers his first impression: "In comes this big lug who weighed 220 Ibs., didn't talk well and acted slightly punch-drunk. He said he had an idea for a boxing film. He wanted to star in it."

Against odds as great as Rocky ever faced, Stallone held out. United Artists insisted that the movie come in at $1 million, and the production became a Rocky story in itself. The result was a low-rent victory. The board of health even shut down the commissary. "We were so poor," Shire remembers, "we had stalls instead of trailers." Stallone's acting salary was $620 a week. "I would have done it for nothing," he says.

The enormous success of Rocky--ten Oscar nominations and Best Picture of 1976 Award--was more than Stallone could handle. "I resented people confusing me with Rocky," he says now. "I wore white suits with flowers on the side. Rocky isn't very bright, so I went on talk shows to expound on things I knew nothing about. Rocky's decent, so I indulged in dime-store humor. I was a walking whoopee cushion."

He was also a wandering husband. Sly made the Manhattan disco scene and had a couple of well-publicized romances, with Joyce Ingalls, his Paradise Alley costar, and Actress-Singer Susan Anton. "Stallone is one of those eccentric, powerful and vulnerable males I've always adored," says Shire. "I think he was born sweet and spent most of his life repressing that. It's only recently, with Sasha's help, that he's decided to show it."

Sasha Stallone, 31, an accomplished photographer, waited calmly at home. "I figured it was the same old story--helping a man get to the top, and then he wants other things," she says. "But my negative feelings lasted only a little while." The actor's absence was short as well. Sons Sage Moonblood, 6, whose birth date his parents claim was astrologically planned (Stallone once wrote under the name Q. Moonblood), and Sergio, 3, helped bring him home.

Rocky III is the result of Stallone's crazy days. Originally, this last installment of what he has always thought of as a trilogy was to be set in the Roman Colosseum, with the big fight against a Russian. But autobiography took over. Says Stallone: "I wanted to reveal the flip side of the fame game. We're conditioned to cope with failure, but there are no platitudes for dealing with success. Seven years had passed since Rocky. Panic and fear set in. I used those emotions to get back to the person I was before all the glamour and notoriety. Rocky is a once-in-a-lifetime coming together of self and character." But now that they are together, Stallone realizes he may never leave his alter ego entirely behind. "I'm in a shell that will never incubate to the point of hatching, and I have finally accepted that fact," he says.

Like his hero, Stallone remains an athlete. He glories in his stringent conditioning. Since Rocky II he has lost 38 Ibs. under the direction of a nutritionist. "The idea was the reverse of body building. Instead of adding bulk and then sculpting down, I went to 157 and added on in increments of an ounce here, an ounce there." Stallone slimmed mainly on a daily diet of ten raw egg whites and a quarter slice of burnt toast--"so it would contain no water." The daily routine: two miles running, 18 rounds of sparring, two hours of weight lifting, a nap, another run and no dinner. The result: a 47-in. chest, a 29 1/2-in. waist. Stallone managed to achieve an incredibly low body-fat level of 4 1/2%. The average American male 15% to 20%. Says Stallone: "I was weak and dizzy all the time."

Convinced that it would be easier teach a boxer to act than an actor to Stallone auditioned the menacing Shavers, who had fought Ali and Ken Norton. "The man practically me to death," Stallone winces. "The instincts of the ring took over, and he trouble pulling his punches. He hit me the arm so hard that my elbow the wind out of me. I machoed it out the way into the men's room before threw up."

In filming III, what was needed was not literal fighting but its illusion--i.e., choreography. Says Al Silvani, who trained Rocky Graziano and actors in boxing roles from Paul Newman to Robert De Niro: "I taught Stallone how to box starting with II, but he did the choreography on his own. He'd say, O.K., Three left me.' " hooks The and I'll jab blow-by-blow you, dance then you script for jab the 9 1/2 minutes of the final bout of III covered 14 pages. Says Stallone: "The fight choreography is very precise. Miss a step and you're in for a detached retina." In the three Rocky films the pace of the last round has escalated dramatically. The fi nal round in Rocky contained 35 blows, had 75 and III an amazing 130--in the same amount of time.

Boxing was not the only aspect of Rocky III that accelerated. With each sequel, Stallone has faced the heightened doubts of the industry. Says he: "This time the haze of skepticism was so thick you could cut it with a knife." Skeptics will have another shot in October when his next film, tentatively titled First Blood, takes him outside the ring. This time Stallone is a veteran who won the Medal of Honor in Viet Nam and who finds himself considered almost an enemy of the state back home. "I play a man on the run from the cops and the National Guard," he ex plains. "I have dialogue just at the beginning and end. The rest of the time I speak with my body."

Tongue-tied Rocky is never far from Stallone. Rocky IV? "I've learned never to say never. I've got in too many difficulties when I let my mind rule my heart. I've learned to do what my emotions tell me. Rocky came out of nowhere like that. I just went with my feelings." Going for it is a habit Stallone may never break.

--By J.D. Reed.

Reported by Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles

With reporting by Elaine Dutka

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.