The Method failed, though, to answer some of Stamp’s basic questions about the acting game, and he itched for something more formal in the way of training. He and his acting mates had cottoned onto the fact that there were scholarships available at some of the really good acting schools: the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. It was at the latter that Stamp was awarded a scholarship: two years’ free tuition plus £8 per month stipend – not enough to live on, but sharing a flat and doing odd jobs, he could maintain himself reasonably as an acting student, if not yet an actor.
And so he learned ‘proper’ acting, and to earn extra money he took to stage-crewing in the big houses of theatreland: he saw the original London production of West Side Story scores of times. Then a break: he played Iago in his school’s year-end show and piqued the interest of an agent, Jimmy Fraser, an old Piccadilly hand, widely admired as an essentially decent fellow in a racket full of heels. ‘My God, that’s the sexiest Iago I’ve ever seen,’ Fraser spouted. “Thank goodness he’s not loose on the streets.’
Fraser signed Stamp up and got him work straight away: £12 a week to play a Geordie soldier in a suburban production of The Long and the Short and the Tall, the Second World War play that had launched Peter OToole to stardom. When that brief run closed, the producers decided to mount a touring version of the show, and Stamp was asked to carry on in his role. At the first cast meeting, held at the Duke of Argyll pub in Soho, he got a glimpse of the actor who would play the lead – OToole’s understudy, in fact, from the original West End production: a blond guy, insolent, sardonic and possessed of the most striking hooded blue eyes. He was several crucial years and many, many life lessons more experienced than Stamp, and he would almost right away come to dominate the younger man’s next few formative years: Maurice Micklewhite, or Michael Caine to the trade.
If Stamp had a cameo in Caine’s life story, Caine had a feature role in Stamp’s. He was six years older, he had served in the Korean War (indeed, one grim night he stood sentry at the very front of the demilitarised zone, the tip of the spear of Democracy pointed across the black abyss at the Red hordes), he was divorced – with a child – and he had dozens of film, stage and TV jobs under his belt. Stamp, always looking for gurus, now had a South London know-it-all as his personal guide to the stage life.
Caine was a little suspicious of Stamp’s wide-eyed admiration at first: ‘So you’re one of the lads, then?’ he said to him once they’d become better acquainted. ‘Blimey! I thought you were a poof!’ But he felt kinship with any fellow working-class boy with the gumption to give the acting game a go. As soon as the touring company took to the road, Caine began showing Stamp the ropes – how to get a good hotel room, the idiosyncrasies of various theatres and, most vitally, where to find the best girls in a given town. ‘Mike ran amok with sexual theory even when sitting down,’ Stamp said. When the tour neared an end, Caine mentioned he was between addresses back in London, and Stamp offered him a share of the Harley Street flat. Presently the two acquired lodgings of their own in Ennismore Gardens Mews, south of Hyde Park and east of the Royal Albert Hall in a Kensington that they had only inhabited in dreams.
Here the modernisation of Terence Stamp began: Caine introduced him to the latest novels, movies, coffee bars. They would plan whole days around doing nothing: where to nurse a cup of tea for hours, which library to haunt to read the newspapers, whether to spring for two lamb sandwiches for lunch or just the one, which pub or party or night spot was aptest to yield up a pair of game young ladies (Stamp was in awe of Caine’s skill as a puller of birds). There were auditions and calls to their agents and now and again the flickering prospect of good work; Caine gave Stamp hints and wise advice that constituted something of a makeshift master class in acting; they even – decades before their time – wrote a screenplay together, ‘You Must Be Joking’, about two South London lads who try to break out of their native world. Mostly, as Stamp recalled, there were the luxuries of time and time spent together: ‘The young Mike Caine was heaven to be with.’ And in some ways, he was as happy during these lean days as he ever would be.
They were working together in a Wimbledon theatre in the spring of ‘61, playing in the première of one of the very rare misses in the ascendant career of songwriter Lionel Bart, Why the Chicken, when Stamp got an excited call from Jimmy Fraser. He was to report to an office in Golden Square, Soho, that afternoon: Peter Ustinov wanted him to audition for the new film he was directing, Billy Budd.
‘What’s the part?’ Stamp asked.
‘The lead: Billy Budd.’
He couldn’t believe his ears: They must really be scraping the barrel if they want to see me!’
Fraser levelled with him: They are. They’ve already seen every young actor in town.’
P.S.: He got the part. Ustinov met him and had him read and asked him to come back for a screen test the next day. He took a quick lesson from Caine in how to respond to the intimidating presence of a camera (he’d never even acted for TV before), he wore one of his dad’s old sweaters from the navy for good luck and he was off. With the camera rolling, Ustinov asked him to listen to a heap of abuse and false charges and not respond – just as Herman Melville’s seaman Budd is unable to respond to a slander and is thereby impelled into striking an officer. Relying on a bit of Method trickery, Stamp recalled how he felt when he was unfairly caned at school and had, mutely, to take it. When the test was over, Ustinov came and patted his cheek: That was … tumultuous.’
A little time passed; Stamp despaired, thinking he’d made a botch of so good a chance; but then he heard: he was in. And Ustinov chose to kick off the production with a splashy press conference to introduce his handsome young Cockney leading player to the world. The setting was a lunch-time cocktail party at the Savoy. Wearing his second-ever suit, a shirt borrowed from Lionel Bart, and hair that had just recently been dyed blond for the movie, Stamp stepped into the limelight on 23 May 1961, telling his brief life story while enjoying an ice-cream along the river on which his father was busy at work.
The next day newspapers carried accounts of ‘Tugboat Terry’ – a name, Stamp recalled, ‘that would cling like a hair in my mouth’.
Months later, when he came home to London after filming Billy Budd in Spain, Stamp quickly recognised that the world immediately around him was changing. It wasn’t only the instant fame that the papers heaped at his feet. The city itself and all the young, creative people in it were moving in heady new ways.
His flatmate, Caine, always with an ear to the ground, had heard of a hot new club, the Saddle Room, where the patroness, a former flame of Prince Philip’s named Helen Cordet, egged her customers into trying the new dance craze, the Twist. ‘Can’t get in there,’ Caine explained. ‘It’s a real toffee place, full of high-class crumpet.’ But Stamp was no longer some East End bum with neither prospects nor sway. He told Caine to get dressed and not worry; when they arrived at the club, he told the doorman ‘I’m Stamp, and he’s with me,’ and bang: in they were.
It was like that everywhere. La Discotheque (where a couple of notorious bad girls, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, caught his eye), the best restaurants, posh shops: Stamp’s face was his passport to everything. It almost didn’t matter that, as he showed in Billy Budd, he could act, and act well. He was a one-man vanguard, embodying whatever sense there was in the culture at large that young Britons had arrived. Flush with instant success, drunk on fame, Stamp entered the commotion in early midstream but at full pace. He could rightly consider himself the centre – the first of a new generation to make it smashingly big.
And you couldn’t blame him. His role in Billy Budd, effectively his debut, would garner him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor and worldwide recognition. He was in the middle of something that he had no way to grasp – nor, indeed, could anyone else. Taken up by the press as a symbol of a new wave in British life, he was presented as a standard of his generation, and he was perfectly willing to tell the press as much: ‘People like me, we’re the moderns,’