We adored Terence Stamp, the best looking of all the East End boys, the new celebrities of the Sixties. He was so glamorous and he was in love with Jean Shrimpton, the pony club girl who’d become a top fashion model. We whispered, “He’s the most beautiful man in the world.”
At a party I asked my host, “Who is the man over there who looks just like Terence Stamp?”
“He is Terence Stamp. I’ll introduce you.”
Terence was polite and disinterested talking to me till I said, “What’s your day? What d’you do after you wake up in the morning?”
His amazing blue eyes looked deep into my far less amazing blue eyes. “I get up at five. Do my yoga exercises. Tie my feet together and stand on my head. That sort of stuff you know. Then I have a bath in my Japanese bath.”
I said, “But you said you live on the top floor of the Albany in Piccadilly and I know there’s no lift, and a Japanese wooden bath has to have water in it so how did you get it all the way up the steep stone stairs?”
“Yes. I had to have it. It was flown back from Japan full of water. I was filthy rich then. It cost me five thousand quid.” He laughed so happily at this crazy act of indulgence.
I asked him, “D’you ever write stories?”
He looked sad and said, “I wrote a novel, a trilogy, based on a game of chess. When Jean Shrimpton left me I threw it on the fire.”
“Any copies?” I asked.
“Nah, I didn’t make a copy.”
“Well you can tell a good story and I’m a literary agent and I love stories so if ever you want to write some more come and find me.” I gave him my little cream coloured card with an owl above my name.
He took to coming round at teatime on Thursdays to Primrose Hill ostensibly to talk about writing but he really enjoyed asking my two little girls, aged four and five, questions. He brought along green tea and told me bossily I should drink it and nothing else. I said it’s a horrible taste, no thanks. He also ate cakes made with no wheat years before gluten-free was a thing. He came via an indirect route, sitting on the top of a double-decker bus. I said it was quicker to get here on the Tube. He said, “I like to take the scenic route and Routemasters are the best things in London.”
One Thursday he said, “I don’t know when I’ll see you again. I’m like that.”
“Where are you going?” I said.
He said, “My mum’s not well and I’m filming.” Three months later, a brown A4 envelope arrived with my name and address written in capitals in sepia ink. His note said, “I’ve begun. Sorry about writing, spelling and grammar. T.” On Desert Island Discs he says, “I met this publisher and she kept on at me.” He just told lies so he always looked superior.
I read his 14 pages, every word in capitals in his sepia ink described being a boy in the East End in a family with not much money. It was lovely to read. He was a natural writer, with cadence and a gentle, ironic humour. Liz Calder and two friends started up Bloomsbury Publishing. Stamp Album was their first non-fiction book. The first of Terence’s memoir trilogy.
He refused the usual advance payment so as to weasel out of paying taxes. I wrote a contract with a £1 advance and put in a clause that committed Bloomsbury to a big print run. An advance is usually the incentive for the publisher to pay for publicity and to risk printing lots of copies. Liz at Bloomsbury said no to my clause, as no precedent for it existed. I said precedent-schmecedent: that’s not a reason to refuse my clause.
Terence said, “Why are Bloomsbury being so slow with my contract?” I told him. He said “they’re making a mistake about not wanting to print a lot of copies. I haven’t done any films for years and people will come out to hear what I’ve been up to. If there aren’t copies to buy it’ll be like when Michael Caine and I shared a West End flat and he goes to all the parties and meets all the girls and I’m too shy to go and he says to me, ‘You can’t fuck girls you ‘aven’t met, Tel!’” I say that to Liz and we laugh and she says OK to the clause going in the contract.
Stamp Album has great reviews. Terence asks me, “I know what being in the top ten sellers is but what’s the TLS? Bloomsbury are very happy I’ve got a good review in the TLS.”
I say, “It’s the Times Literary Supplement and that means you can stop worrying about writing, spelling and grammar. You’re a proper writer.”
It was an extraordinary sensation walking along a street next to Terence Stamp. Every man and woman stared straight at him. No man even glanced at me, though I was quite pretty then. His face, his “threads”, beautifully cut suits, silk shirts, little mother-of-pearl shirt buttons, his own design gold cufflinks, his handmade shoes – and he’d never ever hurry. Passers-by were mesmerised at the sight of him.
He said he’d been taught Kenjutsu, the Japanese samurai skill of running fast, almost flying, around a sword, to show strength before an enemy. He advocated Pilates way before it was fashionable and he faithfully kept on doing meditation. He watched Channel 4 News in his flat in the Albany saying, “It’s the best one, I don’t bother with the others.”
He’d bicycled past the Albany entrance when he was doing paper deliveries. “They wouldn’t let me look inside the gate. I said to myself, ‘I’ll live in there one day.’” Fortnum & Mason across Piccadilly became his local greengrocer and lunch place.
I hardly saw him for years. He’d suddenly call and say, “I’ll meet you up at Louis at 4pm.” Louis is the famous old patisserie in Hampstead. As if I had nothing else to do in my life. I nearly always went. He’d grumble about some film producer who wasn’t paying him enough. I think the East End boy in him was always suspicious he’d get short-changed.
One time I was in pain and he told me to shut my eyes and to think: what shape is the pain? Is it round or square or oblong or what? Then to imagine the shape smaller and my pain would get less. He was a mind-over-matter kind of a man. And seriously spiritual after he’d lived in India.
The last time I saw Terence he called and said, “Have you still got the dog called Sam?”
I said “yes”.
“I’m coming round with my wife. She likes dogs.” He drove a Rolls Royce. Came into the kitchen with his – far younger than him now he was in his sixties – bride. She played with the dog. He told me my two little girls, now teenagers, by chance sat next to him at a youth event at the National Theatre and he’d said to them, “You’re Charlotte and Julia Bulia. D’you remember me?”
The girls said, “No. We don’t know you.”
He said to them, “You can put my name on a letter.”
[See also: Celine Song’s “Materialists” makes a business of love]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment