Sylvester Stallone Showered With His Clothes on to Survive as He Lived in Extreme Poverty With Just $60 Before 'Rocky' Fame

Sylvester Stallone recalled having only $60 to his name before finding fame.

Before his breakout role as Rocky Balboa in Rocky, the actor struggled to make ends meet in New York City but refused to give up on his dreams.

In his new memoir, The Steps, Stallone recounts the years before Hollywood, including arriving in NYC in 1969, determined to become an actor despite poverty and rejection.

After leaving the American College in Switzerland without graduating and dropping out of the University of Miami just a few credits short of a drama degree, Stallone went back to New York City with not much to his name.

He rented a room so small that he later compared it to the minimum size recommended for a federal jail cell and noted he had to share a bathroom with 10 other people.

Stallone took a job as an usher at a movie theater, earning just $34 a week. He said the job became an education in film, as every night, he studied the movies he watched to keep his dream alive.

Stallone admitted he would shower with his clothes on to save money. If he got lucky, he would find a bar of soap that didn't have a "strange hair" stuck to it and then lather up "my shirt, pants, underwear, socks — and myself."

"I could never afford to go to a laundromat," Stallone said. "My wife thinks this is so gross, 'Why would you take a shower with your clothes on?' I said, 'It made sense to me at the time, rather than going down to the laundromat. But this was a tenement home. It was so bad. But you do what you could to survive.'"

When he was hungry, Stallone would eat spoonfuls of cottage cheese, then down three or four raw eggs. In the book, he recalled later treating himself to chicken breast and apple juice.

"It's the only thing that made sense numerically, financially," he explained. "Of course, it's all wrong. It's terrible. I'm surprised I didn't get salmonella, really. It's really quite remarkable. But these two things at a certain time of year, because in the summer, the cottage cheese would rot, and the eggs would spoil."

"But if you bought it from around October, it would sit on your windowsill until March. So that became my refrigerator. And at the time, I just thought it was so convenient," he continued. "No dishes. You drink the egg, so you don't have to wash anything. You didn't need a fork. And the cottage cheese, it's a spoon, and you throw the cup away."

Stallone wrote in the book, "I wouldn't recommend this diet to anyone. But if you're young and poor, it will suffice, which is why I used eating raw eggs in Rocky to give some insight into Rocky's ways of approaching his life."