Before the Fame, the Lion Cages: Stallone Looks Back on the Climb in "The Steps"

Sylvester Stallone has written a memoir, and he has called it *The Steps*. It's about the stretch of his life before the fame: many years when the answer was no, the money was thin, and he took whatever work kept him going. One of those jobs, by his own account, was cleaning out lion cages. The pages follow him from there to his place among the most recognizable faces American film has ever produced. It's an arrival story, and he tells it from the far side of the arrival, looking back at the long climb. A book like that suits the season, when an afternoon by the water leaves time to read about how a career like his was actually built.

With reporting from Vanity Fair.