Sylvester Stallone

Sylvester Stallone emerges in Andy Warhol’s diary not through a continuous account of his life, but through a recurring set of encounters in which his celebrity image is watched, photographed, reconsidered, and circulated. Warhol’s attention shifts between Stallone’s changing appearance, the work of making his portrait, and the machinery of film and magazine publicity. The result is a portrait of a public figure as a subject repeatedly being remade for the camera—and of an artist and celebrity recognizing something of their own practiced public selves in one another.

Encounters in New York

In January 1980, Warhol and Catherine Guinness saw two limousines outside Halston’s home and went inside, where Stallone was among a small group of people preparing to go to Studio 54. The club was empty, but Stallone had a practical interest in the space: he was looking around to see how it might work as a film location. Warhol also recorded the personal drama around the visit, noting that Stallone was pursuing Bianca Jagger and that the two disappeared together. This was an impression from the night, not a confirmed account of what happened after they left. Even in this brief scene, Stallone appears at the intersection of filmmaking, nightlife, and celebrity gossip.

Warhol’s interest soon became more directly professional. Richard Weisman asked whether he wanted to meet Stallone for lunch on a film set, adding that Stallone might want a portrait. Warhol later visited the production of Hawks on First Avenue, where about 300 extras were assembled. The visit brought him into contact with Stallone as a working filmmaker as well as an actor: Stallone had taken over directing, and a dispute with the union had arisen after he was filmed calling for the crew to begin. At lunch, Stallone recounted the friction between his schedule and the crew’s rules. He described a carefully prepared fight shot, with performers in costume and makeup and snow falling, that had to be abandoned when the crew stopped for dinner. His appeal to be allowed to finish it failed, leaving him to start again later. The anecdote gave Warhol a view of production not as finished spectacle but as a negotiation over labor, timing, and control.

The body as portrait subject

The prospect of a commission led to a formal sitting on March 2, 1980, at the Regency, where Stallone was back with his wife. Warhol asked him to remove his shirt and photographed him in ten rolls of film. The difficulty was not a lack of striking features but their inconsistent appearance from one angle to another. Warhol noted that Stallone’s neck seemed slender from the front and exceptionally wide from the side; his chest, too, appeared large in front view and much less prominent from the side. His hands could look either tiny or huge. The session made the instability of a photographic image tangible: a body that seemed unmistakable in public could become difficult to define when the camera moved around it.

That problem mattered within Warhol’s broader portrait practice. A commissioned portrait typically began with about sixty Polaroids, taken with a Polaroid Big Shot; Warhol selected a few images, chose and cosmetically adjusted one, and had it enlarged into a silkscreen image. Assistants prepared canvases in flesh-toned backgrounds, while painted areas and the printed image were aligned to produce the characteristic slight shifts in the finished portrait. The diary does not specify that every step of this process was used for Stallone’s portrait, but it records the photographic labor that shaped Warhol’s approach to commissioned sitters. Stallone’s ten-roll sitting, and Warhol’s attention to the discrepancies between front and side views, show why choosing and constructing an image was more than simply recording a likeness.

In July, the two met again in Monte Carlo. Stallone had returned from Budapest, had cut his beard, and looked sufficiently different to prompt Warhol to ask to photograph him again without it. On the beach, Warhol saw him through another set of visual contrasts: he seemed very thin, yet also like a carefully built American muscleman. People on the beach were taking his picture, making the public’s appetite for his image part of the scene. Stallone said he would need to regain weight for Rocky III; Warhol suggested a fat suit instead. The exchange treated physical appearance as something that could be adjusted for a role, while the immediate sight of fans photographing Stallone showed that his body already circulated as a spectacle beyond the film set.

Warhol and Fred Hughes photographed Stallone again the next day. The session took place in a smaller hotel room after Stallone had been moved from a larger suite, a change he complained about. He wore a blue bikini, and the photographers used three rolls of film. Afterward, they chatted, became somewhat nervous, and left. The diary does not explain the unease, but it records it alongside the practical details of the sitting: room, clothing, number of rolls, and the photographers’ departure. That combination makes the portrait encounter feel less like a polished publicity event than a specific, somewhat awkward appointment.

Interview and the making of a public image

Warhol’s concern with Stallone’s photographs extended beyond the sitting itself to the way images were used in Interview. While looking at material for a September Movies issue in 1985, he criticized photographs Herb Ritts had taken of Stallone in boxing trunks. To Warhol, they looked too much like ordinary movie stills and did not establish a visual identity specific to Interview. His complaint was revealing: a recognizable star and a professionally made photograph were not enough. The image needed some element that would distinguish the magazine’s portrait from material already attached to a film, such as Rocky IV.

The issue nevertheless became a major commercial success. Warhol recorded that the returns showed the Stallone issue of Interview to be the magazine’s biggest seller ever. The contrast between his dissatisfaction with the photographs and the issue’s sales is central to the diary’s account of celebrity media. An image might fail to satisfy Warhol’s demand for a distinctive editorial look while the celebrity’s name still drew readers in unprecedented numbers. Stallone’s public image was thus not simply an artistic construction: it was also a commercial force whose value could be measured at the newsstand.

Recognition and exchange

In February 1986, Warhol attended a party at Martin Poll’s Park Avenue apartment for Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen. The guests were expected to wear red and black; Nielsen wore green. Stallone spoke to Warhol near the end of the evening, remarking, “I read about you in every paper.” Warhol replied with the same line. The brief exchange turned the usual celebrity compliment into a mirror: each man acknowledged the other as a figure continually made visible through press coverage.

Warhol also gave Stallone a painting, Be Somebody with a Body, which Stallone liked. The gift returned the encounter to the question that had run through their earlier meetings: how a body becomes an image, and how that image acquires value through performance, photography, and circulation. Stallone appears in the diary as an actor and filmmaker, a possible portrait client, a body studied from changing angles, and a star whose magazine issue could set a sales record. The repeated encounters do not resolve those roles into one definitive likeness. Instead, they show how Stallone’s visibility was sustained by the successive acts of posing, looking, photographing, publishing, and recognition.