He was working the river that May, the 23rd, and perhaps he steered as far west as Waterloo Bridge. If he had, he probably didn’t notice the little knot of newspaper reporters and photographers on the embankment surrounding a young man who was eating an ice-cream cone and trying to wrap his mind and words around a new world. It was Tom’s eldest boy, Terence, and as he sat there he was becoming famous. He was talking about a part he had in a new movie – the part of a seaman.
Terence Stamp wasn’t the first East End boy to become a Face in the ‘60s: the photographers Bailey, Donovan and Duffy preceded him, as had Vidal Sassoon. But none of them had anything like his sudden, widespread fame, an absolute rocket-to-the-moon that stunned the people around him and even the most jaundiced observers of the British celebrity scene. Within a year of that May afternoon, he was an Oscar nominee who commanded thousands of pounds a week in salary, escorted the most desirable women in London and was considered one of the most beautiful men in the world.
The metamorphosis turned even Stamp’s own head: ‘For the first three or four years of my success,’ he said, ‘I thought the ‘60s were happening only to me.’
Perhaps that was because Stamp was raised to feel one-of-a-kind. He didn’t acquire such a sense from the family’s circumstances. For most of his young life, they inhabited a typical two-up, two-down terraced house with an outside loo, on Chadwin Road, Plaistow, a working-class enclave east of Bow, albeit with a slightly genteel air. (Terence Donovan would rib him about his relatively cushy upbringing: ‘Don’t believe all that guff about Stamp being a Cockney. He was brought up in Plaistow, and that’s like chalk and cheese.’)
Rather, he was imbued with a curious notion of his special qualities by his mother, who encouraged him with nice clothes, pennies for sweets, trips to the cinema, and indulgence of his childish tastes, affectations and, when she could afford it, desires: ‘Having encouraged me to think of myself as special,’ Stamp recalled, ‘she wanted to see what I would make of myself.’ He had fantasies of being rescued from his dogsbody life by a mysterious woman in a black gown, who would pull up in a limousine, inform him that he was no Stamp but rather heir to some unclaimed fortune, and whisk him off to a new life of comforts and wonders. He was a dreamer and an introvert and, no surprise, a mother’s boy, a status driven home with the arrival on the scene of his brother Chris in 1942.
Conceived while Tom was on leave, Chris became his dad’s favourite. Terry was never, as Chris was, invited to join Tom for a day out on the tug, and where Chris was taught to scrap and fight by his father, Tom never bothered to teach his older boy how to use his fists; eventually, Stamp recalled, he stopped fighting with Chris because ‘it was too dangerous’. Indeed, though three years younger, Chris grew burlier than Terry, who was only to discover years later that his lifelong finickiness at table was a symptom of food allergies and not a tendency towards femininity.
To be fair to Tom, Ethel, too, had her doubts about her eldest boy: ‘Mum’s big fear,’ he would recall, ‘was that I would turn out to be a pansy. It was for this reason that I was never allowed to wear jeans. Apparently, during her evenings as a barmaid at the Abbey Arms she had served a male couple; the extremely feminine one had been encased in a pair of denims and this, combined with a fully made-up face, had given her a shock.’
Yet fears of this sort didn’t stop Ethel from encouraging Terry to take dancing classes or to primp in nice clothes or even, after the onset of puberty, to continue to indulge his taste for the Rupert the Bear story books of Alfred Bestall – a fancy so abhorrent to Tom that he was once actually caught in the act of throwing one of Terry’s beloved volumes out with the rubbish. (Years later, still atavistically enthralled by thoughts of his beloved Rupert, Stamp tried to buy a bear cub from Harrod’s as a pet at a time when he was sharing a flat with another young actor, fellow by the name of Caine. His mate put his foot down: ‘It’s a bear, and they bloody well grow up!’)
At school Stamp evinced no special attitude or ambition – ‘I don’t know about you, Stamp. You’re a monkey puzzle,’ a teacher told him. He drifted into acting in a local amateur drama group, managing the rare trick of being singled out for opprobrium in a small East London newspaper for his brief performance. Sent to the local gymnasium to build up his body, he found a group of friends and a sport – table tennis, as it turned out, another point of worry for his distrustful dad, who had taken to calling his oldest son ‘Lord Flaunt’ – after Little Lord Fauntleroy – for his vanity.
Stamp also tried his hand at being a golf pro – another means, perhaps, of fulfilling his mother’s intuition that he would stand out. But he flopped and soon was taken down to the Youth Employment Bureau, where he was pointed towards a job as a boy Friday – messenger with an advertising firm in Cheapside, just east of St Paul’s and the farthest west in the city he’d ever ventured regularly in his life. He was 16 years old, and he had no clue where he was going.
One night a year or so later, as he sat nicely dressed in the family’s tiny front room watching the new television Tom and Ethel had managed to acquire, he came to the conviction that the English actors he was watching weren’t particularly skilled at their profession. He’d had this impression previously, but this time he voiced it: ‘I could do better than that myself!’
Tom, still unsure about the boy, turned firmly towards him: ‘People like us don’t do things like that,’ he declared. And then, before Stamp could offer a rebuttal, he nailed the door shut: ‘Just don’t talk about it anymore. I don’t want you to even think about it.’
‘He didn’t say it unkindly,’ Stamp recalled. ‘In retrospect, I’m sure he felt he was saving me a lot of heartache. I never spoke about it again.’
So he kept on at the ad game, rising – through some lies about his experience and a combined talent for handwriting and mimicry – to the rank of typographer at a more toity firm in Soho. He had taken to lazing about the West End after work, becoming a semi-regular at movie houses and chatting up the sorts of girls he would never meet back at home. Gaining a taste for this new life, he did something few in his situation would have dared: he found a cheap flat at a posh address on Harley Street, where Mayfair’s priciest doctors lived—and he moved away from Plaistow.
It was a stunning decision – another thing ‘people like us’ never did – and Stamp’s own closest friend, with whom he’d planned the getaway, couldn’t find the nerve to make the leap with him at the crucial moment, choosing to continue living with his parents. Later, reflecting on the limited horizons bred into his fellow East Enders, Stamp could get huffy: ‘They’re scared of nothing except being told they’re putting on airs and acting posh. And that stops them from trying to do anything. They’re smart and good-looking and sharp and tough as nails. But the nits waste their lives because they don’t know that there’s so much lying around waiting to be picked up by the boy with a bit of talent.’
But that was the movie star talking, the toast of the trattorias and the discotheques, and he hadn’t been born yet. This Terence Stamp was still a vague young wanderer, killing a year before his compulsory military service with life as a would-be among the rich and swell.
It turned out that the army didn’t want him – flat feet, or something. The guaranteed two years of regimentation and routine vanished – poof! It was like a free play on life’s pinball machine, and Stamp determined to use it audaciously. He’d been musing along with a buddy from work about taking acting classes. Now he would reward himself with two years’ pursuit of the chimera of a thespian career. He’d be no worse off, he reckoned, than if he’d spent two years on a rifle range or digging latrines.
It being the ‘50s and he a James Dean fan, he decided to study the Method and signed up with guru Jos Tregoningo’s Dean Street studio in Soho. It was quite the hip scene, with pretty girls and even, one night, a BBC TV crew filming the exotic goings-on. Stamp and his