On a freezing New York night shoot, Dolly Parton laid her shawl over a homeless man shivering by the garbage. In her 1994 memoir, Parton wrote that Sylvester Stallone yanked it off, and she quoted him saying, “Don’t you put that good shawl over that scum. He could have made something of himself. We did.”
Parton grabbed it back and told him, “That could have been you, you ungrateful son of a b*tch! Except by the grace of God. Who knows. It could be an angel sent to show you what an a** you really are.”
“Rhinestone,” the 1984 flop that paired Parton with Stallone as a country singer trying to turn a New York cabbie into a star, was shooting in New York in late 1983 when the scene on the street happened.
A crew member told Parton the next day that Stallone had gone back and bought the man a blanket.
The movie bombed. It cost $28 million, grossed about $21.4 million, and won two Razzies, one of them Worst Actor for Stallone. But Parton came into it during what she called a very dark period, an endometriosis diagnosis, roughly 50 pounds of weight gain, and depression that ran close to two years, and she credited Stallone, who she called “full of life,” “crazy,” and “funny,” with getting her “back on track.”
She read him plainly too: “Both he and Burt [Reynolds] are egomaniacs, but Sly is the perfect balance of total ego and total insecurity.”
The two got their Hollywood Walk of Fame stars together on June 14, 1984, and stayed friends for four decades. Parton died in August 2026 at 80.