The actor recalls the ‘Happy Days’ star helping him and his first wife find an affordable motel after they first came to Los Angeles
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NEED TO KNOW
- Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler became friends while filming The Lords of Flatbush with Perry King
- Winkler helped Stallone and Sasha Czack find an affordable motel after their cross-country move
- Stallone recounts his early Hollywood struggles in The Steps: A Memoir, out now
Sylvester Stallone may have had a rough start in Hollywood, but he had a friend waiting in the wings.
Long before he became one of the biggest action stars in the world, Stallone, 80, was a struggling actor trying to make it in Los Angeles. Along the way, he found an unlikely friend in Henry Winkler, who would ultimately offer a helping hand when Stallone needed it most.
In his new book, The Steps: A Memoir, Stallone recalls the two first crossing paths while working on The Lords of Flatbush, after Winkler, 80, joined the cast alongside the Rocky actor and Perry King. Stallone says he and Winkler hit it off right away, despite their very different backgrounds.
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“We were an odd couple. He was an intellectual Jewish kid from the Upper West Side who graduated from the Yale School of Drama-the real deal. I had to learn everything the hard way,” Stallone writes. “We were anomalies in each other’s lives. To see us together was like watching a zebra hang out with a buffalo. Still, we clicked, because Henry is a genuinely wonderful human being.”
Winkler soon got a glimpse of just how difficult Stallone’s circumstances were. When he visited Stallone’s shabby apartment, he saw the struggling actor’s modest surroundings — and the stack of screenplays Stallone hoped would eventually change his life.
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Years later, Stallone would find himself in an even more precarious position when he and his wife, Sasha Czack, made the cross-country trip to California. They didn’t have a place to live, Stallone barely knew the city, and after arriving in Los Angeles, they had just one person to call: The Fonz.
By then, Winkler had moved to California and become a star thanks to Happy Days. Stallone pulled up near Hollywood and Vine, taking in the famous sights before realizing he had no idea where to go next.
“The only choice I had was to call my friend, Henry Winkler, who I hadn’t talked to for more than a year,” he writes. “Like a god-send, he showed up a little while later and was nice enough to direct us to a motel that we could afford for maybe two nights.”
Stallone writes that Winkler also shared stories about his own struggles establishing himself in Hollywood, giving the actor a much-needed boost of confidence.
By the time Stallone and Sasha left the motel, they were still living on a shoestring budget.
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“We had barely $500 left of the $830 we departed New York with,” Stallone remembers.
Winkler pointed them toward the San Fernando Valley, where they eventually found a tiny rental in Encino for $300 a month, Stallone writes. It wasn’t glamorous — the house was barely 500 square feet, with no grass and no air-conditioning — but it gave Stallone a place to begin building the career he had dreamed about.
And he didn’t have to wait long for that dream to become reality.
When Stallone first arrived at Hollywood and Vine, he had no idea that the nearby Walk of Fame would one day bear his name.
“That I would have a star there less than ten years later, and only a few blocks away, still boggles my mind,” he writes.
The Steps: A Memoir is out now.
Read the full article here
