STAMP COLLECTION

Movies 2

Terence Stamp, sixties icon and continuingly interesting actor, has two new movies out

KATHLEEN TYNAN

For those of us who lived in London during the sixties, and joined the communal celebration, the actor Terence Stamp was an icon for the times. He had the right credentials: beauty, youth, an impeccable working-class background, and clothes that managed to look right at a psychedelic rave-up or a duchess's dinner. For several years he traveled with Jean Shrimpton, the prettiest model in the Western world. And the two of them were de rigueur at this silly, friendly, mostly delightful nonstop party.

An expanding economy paid for the fun until disillusionment, age, drugs, inflation, and the grown-ups finally brought it all to an end. Mr. Stamp, along with several of the other guests, disappeared. But now, it seems, he has returned, or at any rate it has come to the attention of many that he survived. There have been half a dozen new films on view: most recently The Hit, Wall Street, and, this fall, Young Guns and Alien Nation. Stamp's work, however, remains as hard to pigeonhole as ever.

He first impressed himself upon us in 1962 when, aged twenty-three, he made a brilliant debut in the film Billy Budd. As the eponymous hero of Peter Ustinov's homage to Melville, he became an overnight star, was compared to James Dean and nominated for an Oscar. He offered the camera a heart-shaped face, rosebud mouth, and large, bold eyes. His figure was comely, his manner delicate, though unarguably heterosexual, and the whole ensemble expressed perfectly Budd's pureness of heart.

Stamp's part was that of a merchant seaman pressed into service during the Napoleonic Wars. Though his accent suggests rural West England, it comes as no surprise to learn that this mysterious foundling had been discovered in a silklined basket: he is clearly a natural aristocrat. Budd is also a truth sayer. And something of an idiot savant, who ends up a victim of the noose. The villain of the piece wonders whether it is ignorance or irony that makes him speak so simply and honestly.

Around the same time, Stamp played a teddy boy in Term of Trial with Laurence Olivier. In 1965 he appeared as the psychopath in William Wyler's production of John Fowles's The Collector, a performance that won the Best Actor Award at Cannes. He then played the camp, forgettable Cockney man Friday in Joseph Losey's heavygoing Modesty Blaise. (Dirk Bogarde recalls Stamp saying, "I don't normally play in films where the cameraman doesn't have an Oscar.")

In 1966 he lost the lead in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up. The same year he turned in an honorable performance as the charismatic blackguard and cavalry sergeant in John Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd. Both Stamp and Julie Christie smoked joints offscreen and looked and sounded quintessentially sixties-ish. (Schlesinger admires how hard Stamp worked, but wonders, in retrospect, whether the actor ought not to have switched with Alan Bates and played the goodhearted countryman.)

Budd remained his best work: all he had had to do, he said, was confine his performance to the part of himself that coincided with the character.

hough bom into the working class, Stamp believes himself, like Budd, to be a prince among men. To reinforce this view he has spent a good deal of the last twenty years constructing a fastidious private life-style, one that is discriminating rather than lavish. Gentlemanly, perhaps, rather than princely, seeking expert advice to complement his natural good taste in suits and fabrics, shoes and diet; imposing a fitness discipline both physical and spiritual (Eastern brand) to keep himself in shape; and creating in London's exclusive Albany chambers a bachelor sanctuary where charming and beautiful women are permitted to enter but not to settle.

Stamp's choice of a luncheon spot recently was the St. James's, an upstairs restaurant at the department store Fortnum & Mason. (It is decorated with paintings of glum country landscapes and is patronized by ladies temporarily escaped from those very landscapes.) I was impressed by the survival of his beauty: white-haired now, but wonderfully in trim. The body is relaxed and at ease, the complexion shamingly clear— signal of a long and rigorous vegetarian diet, to which he has only recently added fish. He was elegantly turned out in a pale-pink shirt, rust-colored linen trousers, and handmade brown shoes. The voice, surprisingly guttural and Cockney, is the only part of him that suggests vulgarity, while the moon-shaped concave face implies a pulling away, a wish to be left alone, a failure of energy, and the eyes—large and blue—work to keep your attention, as if under orders. He is a curious fellow.

Drugs, ulcerous stomachaches, drink, and fast living have long been banished. So what does he do these days?

"I don't really do anything. I try not to let things slip by. I try to pay attention to whether I'm really there or not. And I get depressed.* Some days I get so blue that I can't even look."

"Do you read?"

"I don't read much."

"Do you listen to music?"

"Not really."

"Do you walk?"

"Yeah. I walk. I like to walk. I don't have a car."

"You see friends?"

"Lots of friends."

"You don't drink anymore?"

"I love the taste, I just don't like the effect. I grew up thinking I was Errol Flynn and I was really Freddie Bartholomew. I'm from this really coarse working-class background, and all my brothers can drink and smoke miserable. But I get ill."

As a messenger boy aged seventeen, he happened upon Albany, the apartments where Byron once lived. There, he decided, he would one day have a place. He now occupies an eight-room set on two floors. A Matisse drawing and some Baluchi rugs decorate the living room. Upstairs is a tatami bedroom, also used for exercise, and a traditional Japanese bathroom. Having showered and lit a fire, Stamp enjoys a contemplative soak.

He has made a large investment in his wardrobe in the belief that the best materials and craftsmen ensure longevity. His summer clothes come from the Roman tailor Sceppa; winter suits from his London tailor Anderson & Sheppard. Khadi pajamas of rough white cotton from Bombay; twenty-five pairs of shoes from George Cleverley (now retired), who once made button-up boots for Rudolph Valentino. ("One could go to Cleverley with a grotesque foot and he would make you a beautiful sole.")

Stamp showed me his handmade brown lace-ups. He explained that the shoe trees must be inserted when the shoes are warm. Then it was a matter of maintenance. An ex-guardsman comes once or twice a year to give them a polish. If Stamp is feeling what he calls "psychotic," he bones them himself.

When he isn't at Fortnum & Mason or walking in Green Park, or at the Turkish baths, he sometimes drops in at his club, Brooks's. He likes its privacy, the fact that no one speaks to him. He feels perfectly at home among the aristocrats.

Stamp is an exceptionally loyal friend, though in any group he cannot control he is singularly ill at ease. He knows this, according to someone close to him, and agonizes over it. Devoted to his family, he spends time with them, and helps to support them.

What might be missing in his life? I asked. A wife, perhaps? I had heard that for several years Stamp had had a charming girlfriend called Carol Edge, ex-wife of a pop musician, and that recently he has been seeing a beautiful auburn-haired fledgling actress called Hester MacGregor. (In his Professor Higgins mode, I was told, Stamp had changed her Brooklyn name to a Scottish one.) Their friendship is now thought to be platonic.

"If you don't have any strong sexual urge, you go into business and you work like mad until you get to the top, or you become a priest or a soldier," declares one of Stamp's tailors. Stamp may have taken this maxim a step further to become a bachelor.

"And why not?" says his friend the photographer Terence Donovan. "Who needs to marry when you live in Albany, your aunt comes in every day to look after your every need, you can breakfast at Fortnum's and walk to your shirtmaker? Getting your rocks off isn't difficult."

But another friend surmises that Stamp not only likes his privacy but has no avid sexual urge. "I would have thought that someone like Terry, looked upon as a sexual object, must feel it a terrible burden."

Stamp doesn't believe that married life eases aloneness. His fascination with androgyny reinforces this notion. (He has recently written a filmscript on the subject.) Had he found his other half? "No, but I know it's not outside. So I'm halfway there. Most people I know are still looking out. They're looking for their own twin selves in a frock." Another explanation for Stamp's bachelor condition is that he has not recovered from the pain of being left all those years ago by Jean Shrimpton. If Stamp is to be believed, and Shrimpton was the one and only love of his life, then the exercise, the shoring up of self, can be explained as a sort of prolonged treatment, a lifetime pacification course.

This sensitivity was not evident in the early post-Budd macho Stamp, who reportedly told a friend, "Listen, physical control of a woman is vital, and there is nothing like a good right-hander to bring them sharply into line." Stamp told the press that the working class were "banging on a door that's no longer closed." But he complained that there were still those who didn't have the guts to get out. He had shared digs with another workingclass actor, Michael Caine, and together they wrote a screenplay on the problems of two boys from South London who try to escape across the Thames to a mecca of "beautiful birds and fast cars.''

A few years later Stamp's "half-satanic, half-angelic face'' was everywhere. By 1966 a London newspaper wrote, "Every era has its idols, and no single personality symbolises the worldfamous swinging jet-set of London more than Terence Stamp."

After Billy Budd, Stamp chose his film parts carefully—too carefully, by his own admission. He had taken Peter Ustinov's advice to be very choosy, and this decision was reinforced by another influential adviser, the film producer Jimmy Woolf, a homosexual of great charm with a wide circle of friends. He took the actor under his wing and helped educate him.

Not till Woolfs death in 1966 did Stamp begin to realize he had missed out—that he had confused selectivity with his own lack of confidence.

In the meantime, Michael Caine (whom Stamp had successfully pushed for the part of an upper-class officer in Zulu) was solidly building his reputation.

It was in 1964 that Stamp met Jean Shrimpton and fell in love. She was tall, with long legs, long hair, and an adorably calflike face. She had blue eyes like his. In short, they matched. Their story, however, was not idyllic. Miss Shrimpton is a nice, humorous, down-to-earth sort. She complained of waking up to see her companion admiring himself in the mirror. She wondered why he made love to her so infrequently, asking a close male friend of Stamp's whether he might not have another woman.

Shrimpton left Stamp and later married Michael Cox, had children, and settled in Penzance, Cornwall, where she and her husband now run a hotel called the Abbey. Recently Stamp saw her for the first time since they parted. He told a friend that she looked awful, and that he felt such pain because she used to be so lovely. He said he had passed by without speaking to her.

Stamp felt destroyed after Shrimpton walked out on him in 1967. But he went on making films. He played a cowboy in Blue, and a young criminal in Ken Loach's film Poor Cow. Federico Fellini summoned him to Rome to play in "Toby Dammit," a segment of Spirits of the Dead. Stamp was cast as a washed-up drunken actor who goes to work on a film in Rome in return for a Ferrari. While there, he is drawn to his fate by the Devil in the form of a little girl. Stamp did his worthy best. He also met Fellini's astrologer, who pointed out to him that he'd been living under a misconception: he wasn't a Leo—brazen, confident, and theatrical. He had got his birth date wrong. He was a Cancer—the Crab.

Pier Paolo Pasolini next wooed him to play in Teorema. Stamp was cast as the stranger, a godlike supernatural person who brings to each member of a bourgeois Milanese family the dangerous gift of love, and then leaves as mysteriously as he arrived.

Drugs, ulcerous stomachaches, drink, and fast living have long been banished. So what does he do these days?

Despite an excellent performance in a distinguished film, Stamp's life and career were in trouble. He was arrested in the States for possession of marijuana, and labeled in the press as the actor who could never quite make it over the doorstep of success.

With all the cards collapsed, as Stamp puts it, he decided to get off the merrygo-round. He bought a ticket around the world, packed an overnight bag, and began to travel. He had met Krishnamurti in Rome and was persuaded to go to India. He took up yoga and T'ai Chi, went vegetarian, tried fasting, celibacy, and whirling with dervishes. He joined the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Poona and found him irresistible:

"I always felt that one of the things that gave the perfume to the person who was qualified to point the way was that they were hard to find and easy to leave. And Rajneesh is not easy to leave, because he's so wondrous. There isn't a single performer I would measure up to him. And he's funny. There's Brando, there's my dad, and there's Rajneesh. Those are the three funniest guys I've ever come across. Rajneesh pointed the way," Stamp says. "But you have to take responsibility for your own life."

By 1977 he had gone back to work, playing a villain in Richard Donner's Superman. He next played Prince Lubovedsky in Peter Brook's Meetings with Remarkable Men.

Then, in 1983, the English director Stephen Frears cast him as the "nice guy" in The Hit. As the man under sentence of death, Stamp turned in an elegant, authoritative performance. Frears believes that for too long he has been miscast. "He's a reflective man. Not Errol Flynn."

During the filming of Legal Eagles in 1985, Stamp's mother, Ethel, died, and to hold himself together he began to write the story of his East End childhood and his colorful, close-knit family. He eventually sent the manuscript to an agent, Xandra Hardie, with a note which read, "Well, I started. Sorry about writing, spelling and grammar. Back soon." Hardie persuaded Liz Calder at the burgeoning new firm of Bloomsbury to publish it, and the result, Stamp Album, published in Britain in 1987, produced excellent reviews. The recall is uncanny and the detail precise and sensuous.

Bom in 1939, Stamp was the eldest of four boys and one girl. (His brother Christopher grew up to manage the Who.) His father, Tom, was a tugboat driver, who supported his family on a £12 weekly pay packet. His mother was an indomitable Cockney who encouraged Terence to believe there was nothing he could not do: "She was singleminded about how I appeared to the world, and she imprinted on me a belief that I was destined for a better life than ours was then."

When a huge and bombastic neighbor once complained to Ethel about Terence's conduct, "shouting and pushing her enormous tits into our passage... Mum didn't give an inch. 'I'll deal with my son myself, if it's needed,' and, poking her foreshortened index finger (which even my Dad found disconcerting) into the top of Mrs Hughes's mammaries, she continued, 'And don't stick that bloody shelf out at me, or I'll knock it off.' " When it was suggested that Terence might act, Tom told his son, "People like us don't do things like that."

Stamp's wartime upbringing was "thrilling and full of incident." He would let himself into the house of his paternal grandmother and find her by the stove: "The aroma from the glass of ale would hiss up the narrow hall, as she drew the hot poker from the coals and plunged it into the pint glass." He describes his maternal grandmother, all four feet ten inches: "She was like having a compact battleship all of my own, although she had a heart of wax under that tough exterior. ' '

In the second volume of his memoirs, Coming Attractions (1988), Stamp writes about his early career as an actor at the bleak end of the fifties—a world of coffee bars, Buddy Holly, poverty, and ambition. He eats garlic for the first time, having only heard of its existence on a radio program, and bumps into the legendary, permanently pickled actor, Wilfred Lawson. "Is there any advice you could give me?" Stamp asks. "His eyes rolled, as though scanning an inner dimension where words didn't exist. A cherubic smile moved on his lips. I waited for the great man to speak. 'Oh, I just learn the wordies,' he finally said."

Stamp's flatmate, Michael Caine, was older than he, a strapping twenty-sixyear-old whose eyes, "combined with pink-rimmed eyelids, white-blond lashes and a kind of glaze that myopic people get when they're not wearing specs, gave the impression that he was about to sneeze." Caine would instruct young Stamp about picking up girls.

This volume ends on the threshold of Billy Budd. The third, which he has already written, is about his life during the sixties.

Many actors impersonate others with perfect understanding while nemaining unsure of their own personality. Laurence Olivier, for one, admits freely that he does not know what he is like. Consoled by his genius, he must hardly mind. Peter Sellers, who minded, used to say he lacked the ingredients to put together a personality and depended on screenwriters.

Terence Stamp—a non-role player— falls into a reverse position. His doubt, I sense, is whether he can act at all. But given great beauty, a soulful aura that translates on the screen, intelligence, and a compulsion to make the best of himself, he works on the raw material. There is nothing easy about this devotional and agonizing preoccupation, and at times, I suspect, it makes him exceedingly sad.

Stamp told me that writing his books had been painful, but in a small, unpretentious way, he is a bom writer. And the literary Stamp seems a lot merrier than the bachelor—the diligent Professor Higgins whose Eliza is the creature known as Terence Stamp.