JACKIE NOT JACKIE! If I had a trout pout like her I’d kill myself
ON THE surface, it was one of Hollywood’s most hilarious mix-ups. Onlookers at the premiere of Sylvester Stallone’s latest film were transfixed by the lady- ofindeterminate-age teetering up the red carpet in a mini- skirt, all lips and lashes.
Crikey! Jackie Stallone, Sly’s flamboyant mother (aged 90), had never been a shrinking violet, but this was downright shocking. And what on earth had she done to her face? The pictures of the trout-pout went winging their way around the world, trumpeting everything that is grotesque about Hollywood.
There was only one problem — they weren’t actually of Jackie, but of a fellow guest. And La Stallone was miffed for two reasons: first that the whole world could have so easily thought the ‘ugly hag with a mouth that could swallow a whale’ (her words, not mine) was her; second, and more pressingly, that she was depicted as cavorting around on the red carpet at such a time. In fact, she had been at home, nursing her dying daughter, Toni Ann.
‘I’d actually been on the phone to the paramedics that night because she was so bad,’ she tells me. ‘There was no question of me ever going to that premiere. I’d told Sylvester that I wasn’t going to be able to make it because I had to be with his sister.
‘He got the shock of his life when he got told that his mother was up ahead of him, making a spectacle of herself. That’s the last place I would have been.’
When I speak to Jackie, it is clear that her daughter doesn’t have long. She says herself it ‘could be hours, or days’. Toni Ann D’Alto — an actress and model — does indeed pass away in the days after we speak.
Despite the traumatic circumstances, there are still sparks of the old Jackie, but mostly she sounds lonely and drained when talking about her daughter, whose lung cancer ended her life at the age of 48.
‘The cancer spread to her brain,’ says Jackie. ‘She can’t feed herself. I wipe her face, I spray her perfume. I give her apple sauce. I talk to her, hold her hand.
‘She doesn’t know who she is any more. When she could talk, she would come out with strange things. Once she said I had too many boyfriends in the house. There was no one — only my three dogs. My husband [her third, doctor Stephen Lavine] isn’t even around much. I tell him to eat at a restaurant instead of coming home, because it is easier.
‘Her son is staying with me, too. He is 18, and I don’t know what I am going to do with him. It is so awful. She is too young.’
Although she likes to think of herself as a celebrity in her own right, it’s her status as matriarch that has always defined Jackie Stallone. She was the one who encouraged her sons Sylvester and Frank (a singer-songwriter) into showbusiness. Their half-sister, Toni — the product of Jackie’s second marriage, to Anthony Filiti — was never a household name, but she was as talented in her mother’s eyes.
‘She was the top model in Europe, you know,’ she says. ‘Such a beautiful girl, and a beautiful person. She turned heads wherever she went.’