Before her death, Florence "Rusty" Tullis—Rocky Dennis's mother—publicly broke her decades of silence about the real story behind her son's life, clarifying that the uplifting narrative popularized by Hollywood and the film Mask did not tell the entire truth.
Rusty acknowledged she had accepted and even embraced the heroic depiction because it immortalized Rocky, inspired strangers, and made her a symbol of maternal devotion. Yet, in her final years, she revealed that the widely accepted story had hollowed out important, difficult aspects and had at times suffocated her with a secret burden.
Rusty described how the feel-good myth of Rocky's extraordinary courage and acceptance was only one side. She and Rocky endured far more pain, isolation, and struggle than the public saw. The real Rocky, his mother insisted, bore little resemblance to the saintly, endlessly positive character depicted on-screen. Family tensions, her own struggles, and the difficulties of raising a child with severe disability—along with the unvarnished realities of anger, exhaustion, and grief—were mostly left out of the public narrative.
Florence Tullis lived long enough to see how her son's legacy became a Hollywood legend while the more complicated, darker corners of both his and her lives faded from view. In late-life interviews, Rusty asserted the need for a more honest account, stressing that the reality of their experience was much more complex and sometimes "not good" compared to the sanitized myth so widely remembered.