It wasn’t just in England that people were noticing, either, in his view. Though he’d barely seen the world, he spoke as if he understood perfecdy his place in it: ‘There’s a new kind of Englishman that I think the general public will be interested in,’ he declared. ‘He’s very masculine, very swinging, very aware, well-dressed and all that but with great physical and mental strength. He’s the working-class boy with a few bob as opposed to the chinless wonder. French girls and American girls used to look on Englishmen as idiots because they only saw the ones that could afford to travel. Now they’re seeing the new type and they think they’re great.’ And no one, in his view, was more a paragon of this new English animal than he: ‘I would like to start a Terence Stamp trend, but of course to do this I would have to be in a more important position than I am now.’
That was a foolish young man talking, of course, unused to having microphones in his face and great swathes of history to describe for the world’s consumption. In later years, Stamp would explain more eloquently what that adrenalin-drunk whelp was thinking: ‘The whole point of the ‘60s was that it was like coming out of prison. I was twenty-two when the ‘60s started. I just couldn’t have been better placed. The working class were just dogsbodies up until then. Suddenly we were Jack the lads. Everybody wanted to be like us. I can’t begin to express what it was like after the Pill and before AIDS. It was a golden section.’
Ah, the Pill.
When he was cast in Billy Budd, Stamp was emerging as a sexual being, engaging in one-off trysts with fellow acting students and an ongoing fling with a wealthy Chelsea girl who lived near the flat he shared with Caine, but he was certainly no one’s idea of Casanova. By the following summer, with his face on movie screens and all over newspapers, his sexual horizons had become seemingly limitless.
The eagle-eyed Caine beheld with wonder his flatmate’s astounding success with women. With the boost their household finances had received from Stamp’s film work – Budd was immediately followed by a turn as a juvenile delinquent in Term of Trial, on which set Stamp was snubbed by Laurence Olivier – their ménage had shifted to a flat on Ebury Street, an address close enough to Chelsea to put them right in the heart of the burgeoning new scene. As opposed to their tiny one-bedroom flat in Ennismore Garden Mews, where they’d perfected a trick of pulling the other’s mattress, bed linen and all, into the sitting room at one fell (and, to some dollies’ eyes, alarmingly proficient) swoop, here they each had a room, with Stamp, the rent-payer, claiming the larger. But the extra room couldn’t quite make up for the added female traffic occasioned by Stamp’s new fame and money.
‘For the first time,’ Caine recalled, ‘I saw what an irresistible aphrodisiac these two can be when combined … The succession of individual dolly birds turned into a flock and I was the flight controller. Getting them in and out of the very busy airfield that our flat had become, without collision, meant keeping them on a very narrow and definite flight path…The job, though stressful, was not without its compensations as the odd damsel in distress was guided, as an emergency, onto my own private runway, bedroom two.’
As Stamp’s reputation and confidence grew, he became almost frighteningly successful as a seducer, even in the eyes of so jaundiced an observer as Caine. There was the time, for instance, when Caine came home perturbed because, as he explained to Stamp, he’d heard a rumour that the two of them were homosexual lovers. Stamp asked who’d been spreading the rumour, and Caine gave him the names, then became alarmed that his friend was going to try to sort the gossips out with his fists. Stamp had no such plan. A few weeks later, he came into the apartment in a merry mood: ‘Remember all those blokes who said we were queers?’ he asked Caine. ‘Well, I’ve screwed all their girlfriends!’
For all his newfound bacchanalian proficiency, Stamp still retained his youthful dreaminess and persisted in falling in love with great beauties he’d seen on TV or in magazines. At times, he was brilliantly successful in seeing these schoolboy crushes through to grown-up affairs. There was Julie Christie, whom he’d swooned over in a TV commercial before she was a name and met through Caine, who knew her through a few connections he had in the business; after a whirlwind romance, Stamp found himself dumped when Christie went off to Bradford to make Billy Liar and become a star. Presently, he hooked up with Catherine Milinaire, an assistant editor at The Queen and stepdaughter of the Duke of Bedford. The romance was, in Stamp’s mind, indicative of the great changes going on in English society: ‘Some yobbo like me could get into the Saddle Room and dance with the Duchess of Bedford’s daughter, and get hold of her, and get taken down to Woburn Abbey to hang out for a long weekend and have dinner in the Canaletto room with the Duke’s sons!’
And all this while, there was another girl he had in mind: doe-eyed, long-legged, with a pert expression and a modern mien and yet somehow comfortably suited to all the lovely clichés about what an English girl ought to be. He’d seen her in the fashion pages and advertisements in magazines and was smitten. And he knew he wasn’t alone. ‘Her cover shots were pinned to the underside of prefects’ desks and bedsit walls across the country,’ he recalled. Caine warned him off, telling him that the girl – Jean Shrimpton – was living with the photographer who took most of those shots, David Bailey; Bailey had even left his wife and set up house with Stamp’s dream girl. ‘Sounds like they’re almost cut-and-carried,’ Caine told him. ‘Besides, I hear he hails from down your manor. Probably a nice bloke.’
Ah well, another dream …
Aside from becoming terribly famous and getting laid in grand houses, of course, Stamp set about the work of finding a follow-up to Billy Budd – no small matter in itself. Following the advice of Peter Ustinov, Stamp had grown picky – indeed, difficult – in selecting new parts, demanding £4000 for a mere ten days of work on Term of Trial.
The producer of that film was Jimmy Woolf, a garrulous, outsized figure who was the son of a producer and the brother and business partner of another. For Stamp, who’d never had much support for his acting ambitions at home, the oversized Woolf was to become a Falstaffian mentor, popping pills, smoking cigars and dispensing insights into the film industry that, in Stamp’s mind, trumped even Michael Caine’s canny advice. ‘He became the superbright adult I’d always wanted in my life,’ Stamp admitted. ‘I was dazzled by the man’s brilliance. Other friendships appeared childlike by comparison.’
Woolf, in fact, tried explicitly to prise Stamp away from Caine’s ministrations, particularly from Caine’s advice that Stamp take any job that came along. ‘Michael Caine is not you,’ Woolf told him when Stamp reported over one of their frequent lunches together that his flatmate was suggesting he should take a part he’d been offered. ‘Michael Caine would do anything. Stars are choosy, they only come out at night. There are lots of fine British actors, but not so many stars. Don’t be in such a rush.’
And so he turned up his nose at such pictures as Youngblood Hawke, a Hollywood adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel about a hot young writer and the mean old publishing world. After the producers offered him £30,000 to sign and £250 a week while working, he said, ‘They sent me the script. It was bad enough reading the lines in this room. To get up in a studio and say them would have been impossible. Far too embarrassing. I turned it down. Being Americans they thought it wasn’t enough money. So they offered double. I still couldn’t do it.’ (Imagine Caine’s horror upon reading that in the paper!)
Hounded by a press that wanted to know when he’d follow up Budd, Stamp complained that the industry wasn’t making it possible for him: “You know, the only two English actors they think they can build up internationally are OToole and me. I reckon I’m now worth around £30,000 a picture and the reason I’ve done nothing this last year is that I’ve been offered nothing but rubbish.’
But the truth wasn’t so much that he’d priced himself out of work as that he’d grown too much to believe Woolf’s protestations that he was utterly unique. By 1964, when, two years after Billy Budd, he was still sifting through offers indifferently, everywhere around him the careers of young English actors were taking off. And he – the most handsome and among the most talented – was putting