The Steps

1: Back in the Kitchen

Overview

A young man arrives in a vast city with no shelter, no contacts, and no clear path. He has to build an acting life from nothing. Ambition and effort aren't the problem. The real question is whether he can handle that much isolation long enough to find a way in.

Ten hours on a plane and two hours on a bus ended at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Heat and noise hit at once. He had no bed and no one to call in a city of millions. The street signs read Forty-Second and Eighth; his first apartment had been on Forty-Sixth and Ninth.

Hell's Kitchen

He was born July 6, 1946, to a mother who had denied the pregnancy until labor began on a bus. According to the book, forceps in a difficult delivery crushed a nerve, partially paralyzing the left side of his face. He was left with a crooked mouth and a permanent slur.

The apartment was a cold water flat at about fifteen dollars a month, with no hot water. Water was boiled for sponge baths, and plywood over the tub became the kitchen table. His father packed steel wool and a bent tomato can lid into the rat holes.

His father was a barber who wanted to sing but had crippling stage fright, so he trained in women's hair. His mother, a cigarette girl at Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe, later told friends she had been the club's star. She had forgotten to divorce her first husband, Tommy, a truck driver from New Jersey, and the discovery brought broken furniture and shouting.

Jackson Heights

He was sent across the river to a boardinghouse run by Mama Hanson, where six bedrooms filled with traveling salesmen, airline stewardesses and drifters. He was the only child there; his parents visited about once a month for an hour.

Back at Port Authority

In the late forties and early fifties, Hell's Kitchen was often murderous, and children learned to walk in the street rather than the sidewalk to avoid being pulled into an alley. He came back to Port Authority for the air-conditioning and a bench, and slept with his arm around his backpack.

Key Takeaways

• Poverty here means physical problems you solve one by one.
• In Hell's Kitchen, danger changed the rules of ordinary caution. A child was safer in the roadway than on the sidewalk.
• His parents each preferred a convenient version of events. One hid a secret first marriage, the other claimed a stardom her friends never witnessed. Both taught him to invent the story of who he was.
• Sent across the river to a boardinghouse of salesmen, stewardesses and drifters, he learned that his parents raised him from far away.
• The adult return to Port Authority, sleeping with an arm hooked around a backpack, shows the city that formed him offering no bed and nobody to call.

2: Home Unsweet Home

Overview

He landed in New York with $80, no map, and no one to call. Sleeping at Port Authority was impossible: muggers, pickpockets, police banging on benches, and crowds at dawn all moving with a purpose he didn't have. On August 18, 1969, a headline reported exhausted rock fans leaving Woodstock. He had no idea what was happening in America. He had spent three of the last five years in Europe, two of them at the American College of Switzerland. He checked Bowery flophouses, but they were full or crawling with rats. So he spent two nights in the alley behind the Terminal Bar, across from Port Authority.

The Sutton Hotel

Nothing downtown worked out, which turned out to be lucky. The action was in the Forties and Fifties around Broadway. The Sutton Hotel on East 56th Street, between First and Second, put him right at the edge of it. Residents urinated in the elevator, defecated in hallways, and used drugs in stairwells. A manager with a cigar and a gun under the counter took $21.80 a week, held mail, and charged a quarter for calls. The room was about seven and a half by eight and a half feet, smaller than the minimum jail-cell size the Bureau of Prisons recommends today, with a bathroom shared by ten transients. It was nirvana: a nook, a home base.

The Yellow Pages

A tattered Yellow Pages opened up show business. He knew he needed an agent. Under Talent, the agents and managers section held about a hundred names. He wrote down the first five and set a plan:

• Visit three or four agents or managers each day.
• Work through the hundred names over three or four weeks.
• Start tomorrow, when his clothes were dry.

Key Takeaways

• In a strange city, what matters most about shelter is whether you can stay. A weekly rate and a locked door beat filth, shared plumbing, and a manager with a gun under the counter.
• You can land in a country during a moment everyone else will remember and still survive. A headline about a festival you've never heard of shows how far you are from the culture, not what your chances are.
• To break into a closed field, start by admitting what you don't have. Without an agent, talent sits idle, and a directory of agents is the first real resource a newcomer has.
• A plan built from quotas, daily counts, and a start date turns an impossible industry into a short list you can work through on foot.

3: Male Pattern Badness

Overview

Sylvester Stallone couldn't get an acting job until someone in charge agreed to look at him. But nobody in charge would look at him until he already had acting jobs. So the door that finally opened wasn't one he would have chosen.

Sylvester Stallone came to New York with no photos and no résumé. The first two agents wouldn't let him past their secretaries. At a third agency, he handed over a fifty-cent photo-booth strip with four poses:

• facing forward
• looking left
• looking right
• leaning in with an intimidating stare that stretched his nose

The secretary told him only professional shots would do. He refused to smile for cameras because his crooked mouth made a smile look like a snarl. He thought the strip put him in business. It was worthless.

The Name He Left Behind

The last agent on his list worked out of a West Side walk-up with no secretary, a thick German accent, tiny spectacles, and a desk piled with dog-eared scripts. He asked Stallone who he was. Stallone said Mike. He was born Tyrone Gardenzio Stallone, named by his mother after Tyrone Power. His father changed the birth certificate to Sylvester, the Americanized form of his grandfather Silvestro, the traditional name for a firstborn Italian son. Schoolmates called him Sylvester the Cat, mocking his slurred speech with the cartoon's lisp and its sidekick's catchphrase. Fights led to detention, suspension, and expulsion. He became Mike to avoid conflict.

Apartment 3D

The agent offered him a ten o'clock Brooklyn audition, met him on the subway platform, led him to a dark brick walk-up, and left him at apartment 3D. The director, Ed, was barely five foot seven, thin, curly-haired, bearded, and energetic, wearing a red silk robe with birds. Ed offered sake and wine, asked what made Stallone special, and had him recite Biff's confession about stealing a suit in Kansas City and going to jail. Stallone heard hangers rattling in a closet and pulled out a half-naked man. Ed screamed. Stallone left, suspecting his drink had been laced. He was proud he hadn't done something that could have changed his life.

Key Takeaways

• The first thing standing between you and an acting career isn't talent. It's that the people who run the industry won't even let you audition.
• Stallone started going by Mike as a kid to avoid getting beaten up. That name stuck with him for years and kept people from knowing who he really was.
• Stallone's fifty-cent photo strip got him nowhere because it wasn't a professional headshot. But his bigger problem was that he wouldn't smile for photos at all, and no agent could fix that for him.
• An audition in a private apartment with alcohol and a half-dressed man is a sexual proposition. Walking away from it is refusing to be coerced, not missing your big break.

4: Lions in Cages

Overview

How does someone keep chasing a calling when every gatekeeper says his looks and voice rule him out, and he's too broke to do anything but take any job that will have him? He never lost the desire. The real question was whether he could keep going long enough to prove them wrong.

Cleaning Cages at the Central Park Zoo

He had sixty dollars left. Rent was $43.60, the subway cost twenty cents, and food ran a dollar or two a day. The math forced him to find work. A sign for the Central Park Zoo led to a job cleaning lion cages, starting right away. The ammonia stench made his eyes water. The lions watched him through the bars and sniffed at him. He felt sorry for them, great animals locked up for no crime. He was grateful his own cage was one he had chosen, and he held the key. Shifts ran from 5:30 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon and left him reeking. He quit after one boiling night.

Advice That Cuts

Agents rejected his look: a slur, drooping eyes, and a deep voice. One told him he would never make it as a lead, suggested tough-guy roles, and said acting was brutal. Pep talks, a habit since he was ten, helped him keep going. A year and a half earlier, he auditioned for Juilliard with a monologue he wrote himself about self-improvement and adversity. John Houseman, the school's founding director, stopped him early and thanked him. There was more to the piece, but Houseman didn't need to hear it. He took away one lesson: people resent difference when they measure it against a standard.

The Fire Someone Else Lights

After Death of a Salesman at the American College, director Dr. David Swanson, who had directed avant-garde shows off-Broadway, told him he had ability and should think about acting. Those words gave him direction and reminded him he wasn't crazy for knocking on agents' doors. He believed that if you want something badly enough, you can take the hits and keep going. Swanson had stoked that fire.

A Headshot and a Night Job

He paid $25 up front to a photographer on Avenue A who looked like Rasputin and posed him as a cowboy holding a used cigarette butt. Walking home, he took a Help Wanted shift at the Dover Delicatessen on Fifty-Seventh Street, 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., which left his days free for agents. With photos on the way and work covering rent, things looked bright.

Key Takeaways

• When people judge you against a standard that was never built for you, that's just what being different feels like. Blame the standard, not yourself.
• When someone qualified to judge tells you that you're good, that's what turns a private belief into a real direction.
• A cage you choose for yourself is not the same as one someone else locks you in. The key matters more than the bars.
• Paying for a headshot in advance and working a night shift to keep his days free weren't detours from his ambition. They were the groundwork that made it possible.