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Seeing Paris. When he was 15 Stallone and his mother moved to Philadelphia, the setting of Rocky. Soon bored with street-gamy life there, he took off for Europe and landed a job as a bouncer in the girls' dorm of The American School of Switzerland. "It was fox-in- the-hen-house time," says Stallone with a grin. The highlight of his bouncer career came when he chaperoned a group of girls on a visit to Paris, boarded them in a cheap pension and pocketed most of the ample hotel money. "What the hell," he says. "They saw the real Paris that way."
Stallone spent the past six years in New York and Los Angeles looking for acting jobs and trying to write. In addition to working the Walter Reade theater, he sold a few scripts and landed his only lead role (along with Da Fonz, Henry Winkler) in the 1974 low-budget turkey The Lords of Flatbush.
Now he is flushed by his rise "from roaches to riches." He has 10% of Rocky, which U.A. hopes will gross more than $40 million and a five-picture contract with the studio. He is holding out for a seven-figure deal on his next project, a "great romantic gothic" movie about Edgar Allan Poe. He also wants to star in the upcoming version of Superman. But Marlon Brando, who will play Superman's father, has veto rights on casting. Says Sly: "I hope he doesn't think I do a cheap imitation of him in the love scene with the undershirt. Italians do wear undershirts."
Onscreen, Stallone radiates more boyish bravado than Brando's brooding rage. Says Co-star Talia Shire, sister of Francis Ford Coppola: "Francis was an innocent when he first succeeded and so is Sly." Innocent or not, Stallone is probably onto the right screen image at the right time. Boggled by grim, paranoid plots like Marathon Man and savage heroes like the Taxi Driver, audiences may be ready to buy his gentler, uncomplicated machismo. Stallone is sure of it. At a private screening of Rocky for his mother last week he leaped on-stage during the first reel and shouted, "Hey, Ma, I made it. I made it, Ma." Ma nodded and wiped away a tear.