Still Trying to Get It Right

When you see that Sylvester Stallone is making movies these days about lost souls seeking redemption, the temptation is to interpret it in the most immediate terms, thinking how much he may need that himself--redemption--after a decade in which many in Hollywood danced on his professional grave. In 1990, as he was trying to make a go of “Rocky V,” you could hear one of those anonymous voices from inside the biz predict that the man was “looking at a downhill slide that may not be salvageable.” And that was when he still had his pick of $20-million roles. By 1997, when he was willing to work for scale on “Cop Land” in a bid to escape his flex-grunt-and-shoot image, another voice from the studios put it more bluntly and cruelly, “Face it, it’s over. Next.” * You also might surmise that he is seeking redemption in his personal life, at 54, after all those years going through statuesque actresses and models, scandals and lawsuits (EX-SERVANTS SEEK $1.5 MIL! CLAIM NO EYE CONTACT ALLOWED!). You don’t have to take the tabloids’ word for some of this stuff--his confession is offered up in the daily rushes of the movie he is filming here in Canada about car racing. Stallone plays an aging driver who left his best races “on the sheets of strange hotel rooms.” His own term for this kind of acting out--and he wrote the script in more ways than one--is “male pattern badness.” His mother Jackie calls it “zipperitis.” * But those are narrow, short-term takes on Stallone’s preoccupation with redemption. That was his theme, after all, from the moment he emerged out of nowhere--it soon will be 25 years--with a script he wouldn’t sell to no one, nohow, unless they let him, a nobody, play Rocky Balboa. Before his fighter took on the Russians and wrestlers and John Wayne’s nephew, he was a “large wound” of a man who needed redemption from nothing less than a wasted life. He didn’t even need to win the fight in the first “Rocky.” A moral victory--being upright at the end--was enough. That and the love of a good woman. * It was the same with his Vietnam vet, Rambo, who helped launch the genre of Alpha Dog One-Man-Army movies, as Stallone dubs them. Before the mumbling fellow became a cartoon character taking on the North Vietnamese and Russian militaries, single-handedly trying to redeem a failed American war effort, he too needed a more basic redemption, from self-destruction. * “Maybe people have one topic they stay with. That’s the one I’ve never gotten bored with,” Stallone says today, witnessing the release of “Get Carter,” his first movie in three years, while also filming “Driven,” the first movie in a decade made from one of his own scripts.

In “Get Carter,” out this weekend, he plays a Vegas hood given a chance to set things right when his brother is murdered. In “Driven,” his over-the-hill driver is given another chance to prove himself on the track.

“There’s no one over 30 who doesn’t ask, ‘What if?’ ” Stallone says. “There’s this horrible sinking feeling, ‘Maybe I married the wrong woman.’ ‘I did this at the wrong time.’ ‘I didn’t listen to that advice.’

“Hey, I’m getting the ultimate fantasy in everyone’s life, to go back to that crossroads and go left rather than right.”

He’s talking about his characters, of course.

*

“OKAAAAY, ACTION DADDY! DADDY, TALK!”

As the high-pitched voice squeals over the loudspeaker, ponytailed Sophia Rose Stallone gets a pat on the head from Renny Harlin, the Finnish director who has been whispering in her ear, feeding the lines guiding her father to begin a night of filming in front of Toronto’s city hall. Papa Stallone hoists the 4-year-old within kiss-kiss range, and smooches her sister, Sistine, 2. Then they’re off with their nanny, headed back to the hotel to meet mom, model Jennifer Flavin, before beddy-bye.

On with the business at hand: a scene with Luc, the lady reporter who hopes to expose racing as the “last bastion of male dominance” but discovers the soft heart of Joe Tanto, the driver played by Stallone. She elicits his admission of Male Pattern Badness and ferrets out how he had an ex-wife who was “outwardly outgoing,” sleeping around on him.

“Every story needs a loser character, right?” he says.

No, she says, his life has been “colorful.”

“Like a bruise,” he says.

And Stallone is in heaven.

On this crisp August night, he’s being the family man amid the fantasyland of moviemaking. Words he scribbled on a yellow legal pad are being played out on a plaza that will be transformed, on film, into Tokyo. Locals gather to get a glimpse, or an autograph, or to call “Hey, Rocky!” He gets to talk, too.

The scene with Luc has him walking around a reflecting pool, shimmering lanterns floating on the surface, and engaging in 2 minutes and 47 seconds of what is known in the theatrical trades as dialogue. Make no mistake--it’s a racing film and there’s lots of Vroom Vroom. When the time comes, it likely will rise or fall on how well it captures the feel of the cars, track and 200-mph speeds. But try finding two-plus minutes of conversation in his save-the-world epics, or in “Cobra,” the 1986 cop pic he personally cites as the start of his descent into dreck. The idea of dialogue in that film was Stallone telling some psycho, between the slashings, “You’re the disease--and I’m the cure.”

He wrote that, so no matter how many times he’s dumped agents, he can’t entirely blame others if he’s found himself being mentioned in the same breath with such non-Shakespearean-caliber head-knockers as Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme. How could he not envy Clint Eastwood or Bruce Willis, who made the transition from squinting and showing their pecs to adult roles and critical acclaim--and still rake in the loot?

Stallone briefly signed with Willis’ agent, who steered him to “Cop Land,” for which he gobbled pancakes to build a gut and played the lazy sheriff of a crooked Jersey town. Performing alongside heavy-hitters Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta, he earned his best reviews since “Rocky” (“Stallone Better than De Niro? Yes,” said the London Times).

But the grosses were disappointing and Hollywood remained skeptical, helping explain why he’s not been seen on screen since--and why none of the usual suspects wanted his racing movie. “Every studio passed,” he says.

He’s puffing on his favorite cigar, an Opus X, during a break to move the cameras, blowing perfect smoke rings into the Canadian air.

“They said, ‘You know, racing movies don’t do well. But Tom Cruise’s film [1990’s “Days of Thunder”] did almost $90 million domestically, with $5 tickets. I said, ‘That’s a pretty lame excuse.’

“They didn’t believe in me, and they didn’t believe in the project.”

He was back where he’d been before “Rocky,” scrambling to find someone willing to take a leap of faith with him.

He did, in the person of Elie Samaha, the Lebanese immigrant who once worked as a bouncer at Studio 54, then made his mark opening dry-cleaning stores and nightclubs around Los Angeles. Samaha took up producing five years ago and found a niche--backing pet projects of big-name stars, often after no one else would.

Samaha’s formula is to get the stars to slash their fees and to cut costs by shooting in Canada, then to count on overseas sales, where names such as Stallone’s still can be magic. He looked like a genius early this year when his Franchise Pictures released “The Whole Nine Yards,” with Willis as a hit man who moves in next to a dentist. But then came this summer’s John Travolta disaster “Battlefield Earth,” based on a book by Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard. Sometimes the studios have good reason to pass.

Loudspeakers send the deep, seductive tones of an old Barry White ballad over the Toronto plaza, background for Stallone’s walk-and-talk scene with the love-interest reporter. No one would ever guess who he modeled her after . . . Susan Faludi, the feminist author, who used him as a case study in her best-selling “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man.” Faludi’s book used Stallone’s life, and Rambo character, to illustrate how men didn’t have adequate role models for finding their place in the post-WWII era. They were abandoned by their fathers “on the fields of masculinity.”

“When she came to interview me, we were, on paper, as diametrically opposed as two human beings could be,” says Stallone. But the legendary screen Neanderthal found Faludi “brilliant and tenacious, nonstop, extraordinary, never boring. So I said, ‘Hum.’ ”

Now his race driver is nervously facing question after question from Luc, worried about what in the world she thinks of him. He and actress Stacy Edwards work the scene past 4 a.m. Barry White is crooning, “You see, baby, I, I, I . . . “

The Faludi character asks, “Does a man need his work to feel like a man?”

“I’d say that,” Stallone replies.

*

THE STALLONE FAMILY FLEW TO LOS ANGELES OVER LABOR DAY WEEKEND, taking a break from “Driven” so he could promote “Get Carter.” They had barely arrived at their new home above Beverly Hills when the actor’s mother, Jackie, came over with her psychic dogs.

Jackie Stallone is an astrologer and recently added to her repertoire by proclaiming that her two miniature pinschers could foresee the future. She had the dogs dressed in tiny ballet tutus and put them in a circular cage in the kitchen, where they started hopping. That set off a family debate, because her son--for all his appearances in the tabloids--questioned whether the pets’ gyrations were, in fact, psychic messages.

“What, my dogs can’t read your mind?” asked 70-something Jackie, dressed in a miniskirt, her hair vivid auburn.

“They’re hungry, Ma,” said Stallone. “They’re hopping because they want a dog biscuit.”

It was an echo of their interchange last year, when she got into “rumpology,” reading messages off of rear ends. She insisted she had photocopies of the rump of former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, among others. “Mom, you can’t have Gorbachev’s buttocks,” her son lectured, to no avail.

It was a losing proposition with the dogs, also. Mama Stallone got his young daughters in the cage with them, all hopping and barking at once, except Jackie. She was singing “Yankee Doodle.”

“And people wonder,” said Sly Stallone, “why I’m odd.”

He has never tried to conceal his chaotic family history. The details could be spun for comic relief, as when he quipped in 1976 that “the first thing my parents ever bought for me was a leash.” But he could only go so light with a childhood that has left him suspicious and insecure to this day. He recalled how he carried himself like “a dog wanting to be beaten.”

His mother, a chorus girl, hid her pregnancy until the last moment before giving birth to him in a charity ward in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. Stallone says she feared the pregnancy would ruin her figure. His mother says, “I was on the stage and I wasn’t married. [He] didn’t want to marry me. I begged him. Just marry me and give me the name to save my face.”

Stallone’s father--the hairdresser son of Italian immigrants-- finally did. But the forceps used in the charity ward birth severed a nerve in their boy’s face, leaving him with a drooping eye and lip, and the slurred voice many mistook for stupidity. One was his father. Stallone put the line in Rocky: “You weren’t born with much of a brain, so you better start using your body.” That he did, building his “armor” of muscles.

His parents split when he was 12 and he was shuttled from home to home, school to school. He believes he suffered from attention deficit disorder before they had a name for it. His mother placated truant officers by reading their horoscopes. “It’s not like I get up every morning and say, ‘What can I do eccentric?’ ” she says. “But . . . .” She shares the Julie Newmar story.

Mom and son lived in Philadelphia by then. She owed money to this carpenter, Morris, who was infatuated with the actress who later gained fame as TV’s “Catwoman.” To placate him, she said she could introduce him to Newmar--then asked her son, about 16, to help. “I put a wig on him, a hat, a beautiful gown. It worked beautifully,” Jackie says, until “Julie” stumbled in her heels. “Morris said, ‘I thought she’d be more graceful.’ ”

Stallone has made his peace with mom. “I tried to ask myself, ‘What if this was Harrison Ford’s mother and I’m reading about this, or Mel Gibson’s? Would I think, ‘Poor Mel?’ Or would I think, ‘You got a mother and a source of unending entertainment all wrapped up in one, a woman who literally is Paula Pan, Peter’s sister, who is never going to grow up.’ ”

On this day, that mother at least has an upbeat message from her psychic dogs: His racing picture is going to be “like Rocky, even better.” And he’ll find the third franchise role of his career:

“Detective stories.”

*

STALLONE HAS HAD one home or another in Los Angeles since 1974, when he was an unknown hoping that a role in “The Lords of Flatbush” would be his springboard. That December he married Sasha Czack, an actress-waitress with whom he had two sons: Sage, who would appear in some of his films, and Seth, born autistic.

His post-Rocky wealth enabled him to provide for the boy in a private home, but his marriage could not survive his celebrity. “I’m not manufacturing an excuse,” he says, “but it was a very seductive time.”

The gossip columns chronicled his liaisons with Susan Anton and Brigitte Nielsen (“extraordinary genetics,” he said) and his 18-month marriage to the latter, who apparently remained as wild as the men in Hollywood’s circle of endless temptation. In 1988, the year after their divorce, he ran into Flavin, a shy 19-year-old track athlete from the Valley who had just started modeling. She endured reading accounts in which he said the relationship was great, but “no strings” when apart. She also read of his romances with models Janice Dickinson and Angie Everhart, and then got a goodbye letter via FedEx.

By the time they reconnected in 1995, Flavin was a public figure in her own right, a partner in a firm whose cosmetics and jewelry were top sellers on the Home Shopping Network, thanks largely to her appeal as the on-air pitcher.

Their first daughter was born with a hole in her heart. Stallone says the most helpless moment was when a tactless nurse took the child into surgery. “She said, ‘OK, say goodbye to your daughter!’ Then the doors swung shut.”

Flavin was “the stabilizing force” as Sophia got better, he says. But they still were not married. “I said, ‘Keep carrying your wedding gown. We’re going to get married in this little adobe hut.’ ”

In fact, Robert Earl, head of the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain, had gotten the chapel at Blenheim Palace outside London. On May 17, 1997, there were trumpeters, a yellow Rolls-Royce and ladies-in-waiting.

The next year, Stallone put his famous Miami bachelor pad on the market for $27 million and his Malibu beach house on the block, too. They settled on a Tuscan villa-style house in the 90210 ZIP Code, in a gated community more suitable for raising kids. The 16,000-square-foot home still isn’t finished. Just as Stallone is forever rewriting scripts, he never stops redecorating houses. He has collected classical art from around the world--and a bronze statue of Rocky, fists raised, by the pool. The breakfast room’s stained glass is from Venice, circa 1536. The painted walls re-create a chamber from Pompei, with scenes of Baby Hercules. The living room has two paintings by 19th century artist Bouguereau, one of a bare-breasted Mother France.

In the screening room are mementos from when Stallone was viewed as a budding artist. There are three Oscars won by “Rocky” for best Editing, Director and Best Picture. There are framed congrats from Kirk Douglas, William Holden and the great director Frank Capra, who addressed him as “Big Boy” and wrote, “It befits the character you created that he should win Oscars for others but not for himself. But remember, the angels take notice of these little things.”

Stallone had been nominated as best actor and screenwriter, but didn’t win. Not the biggest deal--he had the movie “F.I.S.T.” in the works, and others. He figured he would have another shot.

Next to the screening room is his study, which displays the Leroy Neiman painting of him as “Rocky,” along with old swords and rifles. And books--collections of Balzac, Dickens--though Stallone has learned the risks of discussing folks like these.

He still chides himself for his Madame Bovary comment, 24 years ago , during his first interview with the New York Times, before “Rocky.” He was quoted saying he completed his script in 3 1/2 days, and he couldn’t understand how anyone could take 18 years to write something--as Flaubert did. “And was that ever on a best-seller list? No. It was a lousy book and a lousy movie.”

Stallone shakes his head. Why couldn’t he have seen that people would think he was serious--and a total idiot? “I was JOKING!”

The clip is stashed in a cabinet here, as is the book by a humorist who couldn’t get over that Stallone had written a script on the life of Edgar Allan Poe, whose isolation he “identified with.” The book has a cartoon Stallone on the cover in a Rambo headband. The title is, “Yo, Poe.”

*

FRIDAY AFTER LABOR DAY, STALLONE and his support crew drive to Burbank for “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.” His purpose is to plug “Get Carter,” but it’s also his first chance to face Leno since the host unleashed a series of jokes inspired by the possibility there might be a “Rocky VI.”

“Rocky’s getting kind of old,” Leno had said. “In this one he fights a Carrow’s waitress who said he got there too late for the Early Bird Special.” The next night: “Stallone says he wants to star in it himself, write it by himself, produce it by himself and direct it by himself. If he does, there’s a good chance he’ll be watching it by himself!”

Now, this evening, Leno announces, “Sylvester Stallone, the greatest actor in the world!” The Adonis in blue jeans comes out through the curtains--with boxing gloves. Stallone tapes a bull’s-eye on the host’s famous chin. What was that about Rocky fighting “Barney Fife?”

“You take this so personal,” Leno deadpans.

There’s only one way to handle it: smile, turn it into a bit, and make like you don’t care.

Even if you do. Stallone would love to make a “Rocky VI,” and his Poe movie.

His inspiration for “Rocky VI” is George Foreman, boxing’s real-life redemption story.

Once a mugger on the streets of Houston, Foreman was cast as the inarticulate villain when matched against Muhammad Ali in Zaire in 1974, and gave up boxing after experiencing a religious vision. When he later came back to raise money for his youth center, he was nearly 40 and 300 pounds, but he was funny and humble, poised to earn millions peddling mufflers and hamburger grills on TV.

Stallone met Foreman early in the comeback, at a gym in New Jersey. The former champ was changing in a broom closet. “He was pulling up his shorts, this little bulb hanging over his head. He said, ‘Well, bless yourself, Rocky man, you be good.’ ”

“I don’t care if it’s a put-on,” Stallone says of the “new” Foreman. “He should open up a school for people to reevaluate and retool. ‘Hey, forget changing your muffler. Change your persona!’ ”

Under his scenario for “Rocky VI,” the Italian Stallion returns to the ring, defying the skeptics, to raise money for his own youth center. Stallone would have liked to have it ready for next year’s 25th anniversary of the original, but no studio has bought a ticket to that Rocky fight.

“I think they’re at a point of perhaps wanting to see how other films do,” Stallone says. The film has merit, in his eyes, “because life is changing. People are no longer at 45 years old saying, ‘I’ve had it.’

“I like the message in that.”

That’s also why he changed the ending of “Get Carter.” It’s a remake of a 1971 British film whose lead character was beyond redemption. Michael Caine won acclaim for his portrayal of a London strong-arm man who returns home for his brother’s funeral and becomes suspicious about the car “accident” that killed him. When he seeks vengeance, there is no high motive--the local hoods have offended him. If Jack Carter achieves justice, his own demise is part of it.

For the remake, Caine was recruited to play a supporting role-- and to add legitimacy. But Stallone wanted his Carter to be different from the pure anti-hero in the original. He saw himself as one of those actors whom audiences do not want to see killed off. How often did John Wayne get it?

He also likes happy endings. Always has.

“I’ve been a bad guy and I do a good deed, but I still have to die? No. NO!” he says.

He was the one who changed the plight of Rambo two decades ago. The initial script brought to him for “First Blood” had Rambo hopelessly deranged and not fit to survive--he kills himself after his confrontations with unwelcoming locals in a small town. Stallone rewrote it so that Rambo could fight another day.

“It’s very easy to kill someone off, to fall prey to a Hemingway-esque dramatic ending,” he says. “I like it if there’s some hope. For me, it gives validation to people who are saying, ‘Hey, I’ve been bad my whole life, but I can do something about it.’ ”

He has been telling us this for years--he believes in second chances. But he’s seen how difficult it can be to take advantage of them.

Stallone says he only sent a fan letter once. To comedian Sam Kinison.

The onetime preacher looked like a flasher in his raincoat, an outcast confessing how women dumped him and screaming “OH, OHH, OOOOHHHHH!” He had a routine on Jesus as a married man trying to explain why he needs to hit the road with his entourage, and the Mrs. replies, “Sure, honey, you got 13 bums . . . . “

“I really wanted to know this man,” Stallone says.

He got to. The fitness fanatic who dines on skinless chicken breasts befriended the mound of flesh who had no self-control.

Stallone says the comedian told him, his lips purple from wine, “ ‘I’ve done a lot of drugs and a lot of things, and the doctor said if I quit right now, I can make it, I’m even. But look into my eyes.’

“I’ll never forget it. He goes, ‘Can you see the bottom? Cause I can’t. I can’t. It’s so dark in there. And it’s going to take a lot of s - - - to fill it up.’ ”

They hung out until 1992, when Kinison’s car was struck head-on at the Nevada border by a pickup driven by a drinking teen. In the best PR tradition, Kinison’s friends said he had been sobering up. The autopsy found cocaine and tranquilizers in his system.

*

STALLONE WILL NOT EASILY ESCAPE the anonymous voices skeptical that he’ll find a second act. Universal has been sitting on his film “Eye See You” for well over a year. And when “Get Carter” promos hit TV a few weeks ago, one Hollywood power broker observed, “He’s still got an ad with a gun in his hand. What’s he thinking?”

Stallone figures he can’t totally betray an audience expecting “a certain kind of ride” from him. Besides, some old friends say he needs more pyrotechnics, like the old days--and he does play a cop locked up with a killer in a detox ward in “Eye See You,” which Universal promises to release next year. His philosophy for getting through these coming films is “to take off my rearview mirror and not look back.”

It has helped him to talk to Burt Reynolds.

Reynolds plays the owner of his racing team in “Driven.” He’s the one who accuses Stallone of having wasted his talent, “and 90% of your brainpower,” in strange hotels.

In real life, “we’ve fought a lot of the same devils,” Reynolds says.

Both have been the No. 1 movie star, male icons on screen, then had their professional obituaries written and their personal peccadilloes chronicled. Both also know that you are not allowed to ask for pity when you have a Ferrari on order and a bathroom the size of some homes. You can’t be singing “ ‘So please love me do,’ that Beatles song,” Stallone says, “and yet there’s a need to actually cry out.”

On lulls in shooting “Driven,” they talk about careers, and art. Both collect as well as paint. When Reynolds wasn’t needed for several weeks, he went back to Florida. He returned with a self-portrait in bright yellow, a surrealistic journey through his “little devils.”

The master of self-deprecating humor, Reynolds helped make his career by mocking his stud image on the “Tonight Show.” He jokes now that we’ve become so confessional that actors have to write three autobiographies: “ ‘Movie Stars I Have Screwed,’ ‘Co-Stars I Have Screwed,’ and then ‘Extras I Have Screwed,’ because you’re down to them.”

Stallone swears he’s gotten the message on this Male Pattern Badness thing. “It gets down to will over skill,” he says. “You go, ‘OK, is the pleasure worth the pain? Is a short amount of time worth, maybe for the rest of your life, pain--once again affirming that you have no willpower?

“No,” he says. “It’s NOT.”

Reynolds agrees that you can grow out of it. He even gives a name--Joe Namath. He says the former quarterback lives near him and is now a Mr. Mom. “Absolutely. It’s amazing. It’s not a guy in a convertible with a young gal who could be his daughter--those are his daughters.”

It’s hard, though. All of it’s hard.

Stallone once looked into the eyes of Sam Kinison. Reynolds looked into Spencer Tracy’s.

As a young performer, Reynolds was in awe of the legends of the business and sought them out--Orson Welles, Jimmy Stewart, others. So he followed Tracy around one shoot like a puppy, until the actor invited him to walk along and talk. There was no one more natural in front of a camera, but Tracy drank too much and endured the domestic tangle of being married to one woman and living with another, Katharine Hepburn.

“I asked him, ‘Is there anything you can’t do well?’ ” Reynolds recalls.

“He said, ‘Life.’ ”