This is an edited extract from Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man, by Susan Faludi. Published by Chatto & Windus on September 23 at £14,

All conversations with Sylvester Stallone led, sooner or later, generally sooner, to life with his father. At 52, he was still trying to kick the post-Frank Stallone syndrome. "Everything with him was a competition, a challenge," Stallone said one evening at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in New York. My meetings with Stallone were always in such predictably first-class surroundings, yet his demeanour was that of the vagabond boy who had sneaked into the palace and could be tossed out at a moment's notice. "My father always had a challenge going. So if it's cold, and you say, 'I need a coat,' he'd say, 'Cold! It's nothing!' So now he's gotta prove it. So now he has to throw his shirt off . . . There was never any explanation about how to do anything, just this challenge that he could do it, whatever it was, better than me."

Stallone's father was the son of working-class Italian immigrants who measured manhood by artisan skill and physical labour. Jackie, his former wife, recalled that his competitive violence was on display much of the time in angry street encounters, and her first-born son suffered the brunt of it. "He'd step on Sylvester, jump right on him, in the middle of his stomach. It's a wonder this kid's still alive." When Stallone became famous, she recalled that Frank complained to her that "he should be getting the Oscar, that was his talent. Sylvester 'inherited' it from him, and by rights [the Oscar] belonged to him; Sylvester didn't deserve it. I cannot imagine a father being jealous of his son being successful, can you? But he was."

Whether he was violent, competitive or jealous, Frank Stallone will now not say. "I'd rather not get into it," he told me, deflecting further inquiry. "No, I'd rather not say. I have nothing much to say. Whatever [Jackie] said, you can take with a grain of salt . . . something that's conjured in her own mind." He told Vanity Fair in 1990: "I guess you could say I was rough with him, yeah. But I didn't beat him three times a day."

The young Stallone emulated rather than eschewed his father's example. "I remember there was this Catholic retreat for children I went to. And the priest was talking about hellfire and damnation and he goes, 'Just to give you an example of how hot hell will be . . .' and he took this candle and he said, 'If anyone here would stick their hand over this flame for five seconds, you'd be scarred for life.' So I volunteered. I was about nine or 10. I stuck my hand over the flame. And I went, 'one... two... three...' It was excruciating. At four, he snatched the candle away. And it never made any sense why I, among those 500 people there, would volunteer, except I had something to prove. Even though my father wasn't there, his life lessons were always there. And it was always about pain."

Pain was both to be endured and inflicted. At home, Jackie Stallone said, Frank inflicted the pain and they endured it. He beat her, by her account, choked her till she blacked out, threw her out of a moving car, and once stood her in front of the mantelpiece and "just fired rounds, just kept shooting all around me".

"Every picture I have as a child, I'm flexing," said Stallone. "Every one. This skinny, malnourished body, but there I am, shirt off, flexing." If he could just make his body powerful enough, he imagined, not only would he be able to endure in the contests with his father, he might soar above them. That fantasy would later attract him to the boxing ring. "It's being able to take it," he said of boxing's lure. "That you can take the anger because you have this fuel, to go, to make yourself airborne."

Stallone could never travel far enough to free himself from the familial combat. He came to understand that only in 1991, on a polo field. "My father wanted to play on the number-one polo field, where Prince Charles plays. So I set up the game, at great expense. We go down there... we're on opposite teams. All of a sudden I'm speared in the back by a horse, knocked to the ground. The horse just misses stepping on my chest cavity. I'm laying there. And I look up. And it's my father who speared me. After the game, I said, 'You almost killed me. You could've crippled me. You coulda broke my spine!' He said, 'It's a fuckin' accident, whadya crying about?' "

Said Sylvester, "When the bell rang at the end, I never got on a horse again. I was finished. I sold the ranch, 40 horses, everything . . . When I saw that guy on that charger, on that horse, with that mallet, looking down at me, I said, this is fucking perfect. You know what, this has really brought into crystal focus exactly what he always thought of me. What I am. I'm not his son. I'm an opponent." Stallone was never going to win the recognition he craved from his father, because to do so meant his father had to lose.