In 1974, when I was 10, I was prayed over by Candi Stallone, Sylvester Stallone’s step-mother. Candi—real name Rose Marie—was babysitting me while my parents were out of town. This was the era of The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and other horror flicks depicting kids as demons, and I had nightmares. One night I woke up screaming and Candi took me into her arms and started praying. It worked.
How did Sly’s mother-in-law wind up my deliverance pastor in Potomac, Maryland? The answer is revealed in the new book by Mike Sielski, Going the Distance: Stallone, Philly, and the Story of Rocky. Stallone’s father Frank moved from New York to Maryland in the early-1950s. Frank ran a successful chain of beauty salons and cosmetology schools. The Stallones lived on Tanager Lane in Potomac, not far from the street where my family lived.
Potomac is a lovely, wealthy suburb—although my father was a journalist and we weren’t rich—and Going the Distance explodes the myth that Stallone was poor growing up. From the book:
The Stallone family—as it was constituted when Sylvester was born in Hell’s Kitchen on July 6, 1946—relocated from New York to Maryland to Philadelphia. Frank Sr. and Jackie didn’t move so often because they had to. They moved because they had the financial means to move. They moved because they could, and Sylvester himself has acknowledged that the perception that he pulled himself up by his bootstraps from a disadvantaged childhood—a perception that flavors the story of and myths around the making of Rocky—doesn’t reflect his reality. “It’s totally blown out of proportion,” he once said. “Everyone likes to think of a trashcan, struggling, battling youth, throwing away his brass knuckles, finding God, pulling his way out of the gutter. That’s not what happened. I left Hell’s Kitchen. We did live in poverty. Left when I was five. By the time I was seven… it was definitely a middle-class existence. It was all well and good. Psychologically, it wasn’t so good for me because I didn’t have a flowing rapport with my parents. But materially, I only wish everyone could have that.”
My mother sometimes told me that Sly was known as “the bad boy of Potomac.” Sly had a domineering father and got in a lot of trouble. “Maryland’s juvenile department considered me someone to keep under surveillance,” he once said. “I wasn’t such a happy kid. I was a bad person to grow up with. I was a nightmare.” Going the Distance goes down the list: “Public schools, Catholic schools, military schools: Sylvester would ricochet from one to another to the next. He has said that he was kicked out of thirteen schools—no, make that fourteen, according to another report—and ran away from home ‘at least a dozen times.’” Stallone “got suspended for everything, great or small, for which a kid could be suspended: fighting, being a smart mouth in class, being a smart mouth out of class, showing up late to school, not showing up at all to school.”
It’s wild to think that in the 1970s a posh place like Potomac was the turf of madmen like Stallone, Henry Rollins—and my next door neighbor, Scott “Wino” Weinrich.
Last year a writer from Washingtonian was doing a profile of me—a story that was spiked because Washingtonian is run by cowards—and I heard that one of my high school friends referred to me in the 1970s as “the bad boy of Potomac.” Please. I couldn’t hold my own against the real tough guys of the hood. Also, to me being a bad boy of Potomac is like being the baddest dude in Liberace’s posse.
Still, Stallone showed real stones to get Rocky made in 1976, just two years after I was delivered by Candi. He also went up against Communists in 2013. It’s a long-forgotten episode, here reported by the Hollywood Reporter:
MOSCOW — St. Petersburg communists have unsuccessfully tried to ban an exhibition of paintings by Sylvester Stallone, calling him “an embodiment of the U.S. military machine.”
An exhibition of Stallone’s paintings is on show at one of the country’s best-known art institutions, the State Russian Museum, featuring his works made between 1973 and 2013.
“For those who were born and raised in the Soviet Union, Rambo/Stallone will always be an embodiment of Cold War and the U.S. military machine, someone who kills countless Soviet soldiers and our Vietnamese comrades, a maniacal fighter against the so called ‘red threat’,” reads a statement issued by the Communist Party of Leningrad Oblast.
The St. Pete communists were especially upset by the fact that the Stallone exhibition opened at the Russian Museum, which they see as a symbol of Russian culture.
“An insolent American invader, sadist and Russophobe has settled for a month [at a venue] where masterpieces of Russian painting have been on display for more than a century,” reads the statement.
“Stallone referred to our country as an evil empire, he was a soldier of [Ronald] Reagan,” Sergei Malinkovich, a leader of St Petersburg’s communists, wrote in an address to the Russian Museum, in which he called for cancelling Stallone’s exhibition. “Renowned artists and characters of their paintings wouldn’t want to be placed next to daub by a Cold War relic, filled with hatred.”
The “Bad Boy of Potomac” still has bigger balls than most people in Hollywood.