Hollywood actor Sylvester Stallone has shared a heartfelt tribute to the multi-hyphenate Henry Winkler on the occasion of his birthday, taking to Instagram to post a clip that paired a series of throwback photographs of the two men with a voice-over reading from his memoir, “The Steps.” In the passage, Stallone recalled the occasion when Winkler visited the shabby accommodation where he was then living, a moment that left a lasting impression on a young performer still far from the success he would later achieve. The recollection captures something that is easy to overlook in accounts of Hollywood careers, namely how much of a struggling artist’s endurance depends on a few well-timed words from someone who has already made the journey.
The scene Stallone describes is vivid in its particulars. Winkler had to step over a young homeless man while climbing the five flights of stairs to the apartment, and he arrived to find a dented metal door, black paint on the windows, a library of tattered old books and a small captain’s desk tucked into a corner. Surveying the surroundings, Winkler remarked that it was only temporary, and then his eyes landed on a shelf holding roughly fifteen screenplays, most of them, by Stallone’s own admission, fairly mediocre. Winkler asked what the screenplays were and whether Stallone actually wrote them, and his surprise was genuine. Stallone replied that he did write, and that someday one of those scripts would take him out of that place. It is the kind of declaration that sounds naive in retrospect unless it turns out to be true, and in Stallone’s case it eventually was.
Winkler picked up a few of the scripts and leafed through them, settling on one titled “Poe.” After reading a portion, he exclaimed that it was unbelievable Stallone did this kind of work. Stallone was candid about the difficulty, acknowledging that making it as an actor was hard and that writing was even harder, but insisting that writing would be his way forward. Winkler’s response has the quality of a line worth remembering: each word you write, he said, is a step in the right direction. Stallone told him that was precisely how he thought about it, step by step, and Winkler read a few more pages before pronouncing the work good. Getting representation as a screenwriter was a significant step on Stallone’s journey, but hearing supportive words from someone of Winkler’s calibre carried its own kind of encouragement, the sort that is difficult to quantify but easy to remember decades later.
In his caption, Stallone wrote that the story was offered in honour of Winkler’s birthday, explaining that Winkler’s encouragement when he was just starting out as an actor and writer had meant a great deal to him then and still did. He closed by wishing a happy birthday to a wonderful friend and an incredible talent. What gives the anecdote its weight is the contrast between the circumstances described and the careers that followed. Winkler was already a familiar face from television, while Stallone was living in a walk-up apartment with blacked-out windows and a shelf of unproduced scripts. The visit was not a transaction and carried no promise of a role or an introduction, which is precisely what makes it worth recounting. Encouragement offered without any expectation of return has a different character from the kind that comes attached to an opportunity.
There is also something instructive in the detail about the scripts themselves. Stallone describes most of them as mediocre, which is an unusually honest admission for a memoir and a useful corrective to the way creative careers are often narrated. The breakthrough does not arrive because every attempt was brilliant; it arrives because the attempts kept coming, and because someone was willing to look at the work and say that it was worth continuing. Whether the encouragement actually caused the eventual success is impossible to say, and it would be sentimental to claim otherwise. Talent, timing and stubbornness all played their parts. But the story does suggest that the people who take an interest in someone before there is any reason to do so occupy a particular place in that person’s memory, and Stallone’s tribute is a reminder that such gestures cost little and are sometimes remembered for a lifetime.
