Stallone’s memoir ‘The Steps’ is now available for purchase wherever books are sold

NEED TO KNOW

• Sylvester Stallone shared an anecdote about his incarceration at the Manhattan House of Detention in New York City in his new memoir ‘The Steps’
• Stallone wrote that in the early 1970s, he was held in the detention center for over a week after he was arrested during an altercation at a deli he worked at
• The Rocky icon wrote that his experience in jail gave him a “wake-up call” to “keep my nose clean”

Sylvester Stallone wrote of a harrowing experience he had after he was arrested in the early 1970s in his newly released memoir The Steps.

Stallone, 80, detailed the odd jobs he worked in New York City while he developed his craft as an actor in The Steps. In the memoir, Stallone wrote that when he worked at a N.Y.C. deli during that time period, he found himself in trouble with the law after he was asked to tell a man from a trash company that the deli would be using a new vendor moving forward.

The Rocky icon wrote that the man then threatened him, “closed the distance and gave me a big-time shove against the counter. ‘You’re gettin’ a f—in’ beatin,’ punk!’ ” A young Stallone picked up a tenderizing hammer and a “razor-sharp fish knife,” as he wrote, but both men were apprehended by police before the incident grew more violent.

Stallone wrote that he was arrested “for threatening an ‘unarmed’ man with not one, but two deadly weapons,” while the other man was ultimately freed. Stallone was booked in the Manhattan House of Detention, which he wrote was nicknamed “the Tombs,” in lower Manhattan.

“It was filthy. It was violent, overcrowded. It was a true house of horrors. It was also very familiar,” he wrote, noting that he had “spent a week in a place a lot like this, except worse because there were no cops, laws or judges there” during his teenage years. Stallone wrote that when he was processed, he tried to argue he acted in self-defense and that a police officer grabbed him by the neck when he “started mouthing off.”

The actor wrote that he was held in a cell with “at least 15 men framed into a space probably designed for six” for a week and a half before a judge released him. He added that he quit working at the deli following his release.

“It was a wake-up call,” he wrote in the memoir. “The thought of having no freedom ever again was an incentive to keep my nose clean, forever.”

Stallone made his screen debut in a 1969 movie titled The Square Root and found occasional work as an actor through the early 1970s before he launched himself to fame at age 30 with Rocky, which released in theaters in 1976.

In The Steps, Stallone shares anecdotes from many of his adventures in and out of Hollywood before he found fame.

Outside of the actor’s new memoir, Stallone’s early years in the film industry and the making of Rocky are covered in the upcoming film I Play Rocky, which sees Anthony Ippolito portray the actor. However, Stallone’s experience in jail is not depicted in the movie.

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The Steps is now available for purchase wherever books are sold. I Play Rocky is in theaters Nov. 6.

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