Lynn Redgrave, although not a classic beauty, was one beneficiary of these changes. ‘I became an actor, I suppose, at a lucky time,’ she admitted. “The young actors suddenly weren’t aspiring to skip through the French doors looking beautiful. There was this new style of acting. It wasn’t really new, because great acting was always great acting. But suddenly people did behaviour. They didn’t just stand in the perfect position looking beautiful.’
The movies these actors starred in were, picture for picture, as strong as any national cinema had to offer: Room at the Top, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, This Sporting Life, A Kind of Loving, A Taste of Honey, Billy Liar, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Tom Jones, The Damned, The Leather Boys. If, as a group, they seemed to condemn English life and traditions, they also made a great case for London as the capital of world cinema, with new directors availing themselves of some of the techniques that had been developed in the French nouvelle vague or Italian neorealismo and an impressive corps of actors who could play classical or modern with equal flair. At the same time, as the result of arcane legal and financial obligations, American film companies found themselves making more and more films in Europe, England in particular.
With all this activity, and with the public’s new appreciation of lower-class and provincial actors, directors and stories, the early ‘60s marked the first time in the history of British film, when a native performer could become a real international star without having at least one foot in classical drama or serious stage work. And Stamp, who was, for a while, among the most promising of faces in this great new bloom of English cinema, patiently followed Jimmy Woolf’s advice that he only accept the plummiest of parts – much to the suspicion of Stamp’s friends, who thought that Woolf would rather have had the actor as a regular lunch date than see him work steadily. Stamp suspected as much: ‘Although I knew he was somehow preventing me from working,’ he admitted later on, ‘I didn’t care: I thought I could handle it. Jimmy Woolf must have laughed. He read me like a book. Spun me like a top.’
And yet, finally, an offer came that even Woolf agreed Stamp should not ignore. In the midst of a stupendous age for British cinema, with the whole world looking to Britain for new directions in film technique, in acting and in style, Stamp agreed to go off to Los Angeles and act for William Wyler, who’d been directing Hollywood movies since 1925.
The film was The Collector, and it was actually a hell of a good project. Wyler, of course, was a giant, with a resume that included such works as Dead End, Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver, Roman Holiday and Ben-Hur. His new picture was based on John Fowles’ internationally bestselling, prize-winning novel. Stamp was cast in the role of Freddie Clegg, a wormy little clerk who wins a fortune on the football pools and then spends the money on a scheme to kidnap a woman and convince her to love him: a terrific chance for Stamp to expand his screen persona beyond the strong, decent, stuttering angel that was Billy Budd. Playing opposite his old drama school chum (and Budd première date) Samantha Eggar, Stamp would reinvent himself as a twisted, obsessive sociopath, as far a cry as could be imagined from his last role – and, presumably, from himself.
He had dreamed up an entirely new life.
An Ordinary Person Couldn’t Do It
In 1962, businessmen commuting between Liverpool and London didn’t fly or drive but plumped themselves into British Rail carriages at Lime Street or Euston station and spent several hours incommunicado, gazing at the countryside, catching up on paperwork, browsing through newspapers, sampling the dodgy railway cuisine. The 200-mile journey was literally a trip between worlds: the prestige, power, wealth and sophistication of the capital at the southern end; a provincial port city with a queer local dialect and as many cultural and sentimental ties to Ireland as England at the northern. To the extent that there was any notion of a flow of traffic between the two cities, it was a given that one left Liverpool in search of more, more work, more money, more opportunity. Londoners didn’t even go to Liverpool on holiday; if they went there at all, it was to conduct business or see family.
On the evening of 7 February 1962, Brian Epstein, the 27-year-old manager of central Liverpool’s best record store, boarded the northbound train at Euston in a state of gloom and disappointment. He had recently become a semi-regular among the hopeful southbound travellers from his home town, but now he was heading home, tail between his legs, his dreams of more dissolving in front of him.
The day before, he had lunched with executives of Decca, one of England’s largest and most prestigious record labels, to discuss a new business venture on which he had embarked and staked his name and reputation, such as they were. Epstein prided himself on his ability to predict the public appetite for pop music: record company sales reps dined out on stories of his gargantuan orders for little-heralded discs – some of which they themselves had tried to talk him out of – which then became massive hits. Now he thought he could apply the same instincts to managing a pop group; he had just the month before contracted to represent an unknown musical quartet from his home town. Leveraging his standing as a big account, he had stuck a foot in the door at Decca and insisted that their top artist and repertoire men get a load of his new discoveries.
Decca’s chief of A&R at the time was Dick Rowe, a somewhat sourpuss music industry veteran who had risen during the era of smooth ‘50s pop and gotten a foot into the youth market with such acts as Tommy Steel and Billy Fury. He liked to boast that he knew nothing about music except that he knew what he liked. And one thing he didn’t, he admitted some years later, was Brian Epstein: ‘It’s very difficult for me to say a nice word about Epstein. I just didn’t like him. He was too conscious of the fact that he’d been well educated and fancied himself as a gent.’ At the time he made those remarks, Rowe had become world famous for the cost of his aversion to Epstein: ‘It’s unfortunate,’ he admitted, ‘that I didn’t get on with the person I should have got on with the most.’ But in the winter of 1962, nobody knew that Epstein’s act would go on to do just what the presumptuous Liverpool record merchant said they would – become ‘bigger than Elvis’.
For all his personal distaste for the man, Rowe didn’t show Epstein the door immediately; he knew how much his custom meant to Decca. He had the Liverpool band record an hour’s worth of material for him and then spent a month sitting on it, ignoring Epstein’s pleas for a reaction. Then, he and an assistant got Epstein over to the executive restaurant in the company’s Albert Embankment office tower to discuss the band during lunch. They made small talk about business and then, over coffee, the kiss-off: ‘Not to mince words,’ Rowe said, ‘we don’t like your boys. Groups are out; four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished.’ Epstein protested; Rowe cut him dead: 'The boys won’t go … We know these things. You have a good record business in Liverpool. Stick to that.’ (Asked later about Decca’s dismissal, Paul McCartney said of Rowe, ‘He must be kicking himself now,’ to which John Lennon responded flatly, ‘I hope he kicks himself to death!’)
The next evening, after a final rebuff, Epstein phoned Liverpool to ask the members of the band to meet his train. He had been their manager for a matter of weeks, and nothing he’d tried had worked: they’d been rejected by EMI, Pye, Phillips, Columbia, HMV, Oriole and now Decca, which had showed