You can't help but admire Terence Stamp. Epitomy of the swinging Sixties, heart throb to a generation of women. Who could have guessed that, all this time, he was staggering around crippled with gut ache, developing a duodenal ulcer, the result of his food intolerances. For God's sake, he was Billy Budd, he was Sergeant Troy. He dated Jean Shrimpton and Julie Christie, he lived in a cool flat in Albany on Piccadilly, he hung out in Tramp, he ate in the world's top restaurants. He couldn't possibly have been fretting about the effects of food could he?
But he was. Now we've all heard of food allergies, but back then, apart from a few old hippies eating terrible macrobiotic gloop, it was unheard of. Stamp decided to work it out for himself, excluding food from his diet so that by a process of elimination he could diagnose his problems. Ergo wheat, cow's milk and such an intolerance to wine that he felt really drunk after a glass. Little did we all know that the king of cool, in his kitchen high above Piccadilly, was trying to bake the perfect loaf. (According to Jean Shrimpton, who lived with him for three years at the end of the Sixties and broke his heart, 'Stamp was completely obsessed about what he ate.' 'Very self-absorbed,' she told me.) Perfecting a wheat-free bread was, he says, like finding the holy grail. It took him 15 years, but the morning he could enjoy a piece of breakfast toast that agreed with him and tasted good, made it worthwhile. And, along the way in his search for tasty wheat-free food, he started his own food company, the Stamp Collection.
Our meeting to talk about all this gets off to a very sticky start. We have agreed to meet at the Savoy hotel at 1 pm. Stamp is having his picture taken first (for which he has requested picture approval, and in an unusual show of respect this has been granted by the picture editor). I duly arrive on time, but the reception desk fails to tell him, so by 1.30pm he is sitting at a window table in the River Room with steam coming out of his ears. He is terrifyingly furious. I am just plain terrified.
'Well,' he barks, 'you simply get less time.'
So we proceed, at a gallop, to discuss the Stamp Collection. It came about in 1994 after he'd visited his physiotherapist and Stamp told him he hadn't eaten chocolate or a cake for 15 years. 'I bet Poppy Buxton could cook you a cake,' said the physio. Several weeks later Stamp received a phone call to tell him his cake was ready, and when he arrived at the address, he realised Poppy was a nine-year-old schoolgirl. Her mother, Elizabeth, however, was already embarked on her own food research for her younger daughter, Lucy, who suffered terrible eczema as a reaction to certain foods. One day she sent her to school with a small bag of Kettle Chips in her lunchbox, and she came back with eczema all up her arms. Now that Stamp was in the picture the Buxtons began to realise that Lucy, too, was allergic to wheat. So the Stamp Collection was born as a sort of rescue operation at the Buxton kitchen table. First off they developed a wheat-free pasta range, and Elizabeth started work on wheat-free flour and the perfect loaf. While Stamp is telling me about this, we manage to order lunch. As he has now given up his Albany flat, he bases himself at the Savoy whenever he's in London, so asking the chef to prepare some Stamp Collection spaghetti with vegetables for his first course and my main course, doesn't appear like a totally outrageous request. No one seems to mind anyway.
I am still grieving over his now subsiding fury - and the fact he has relinquished his totally cool flat and put his four-oven red Aga (lugged up 78 steps and then, years later, back down again) in storage. He misses the Aga, he says, plus his dictionaries he often needs for his writing - he's had three volumes of autobiography published; otherwise he likes the asceticism of the nomadic life.
I am further silenced by the news that it was on this wonderful red Aga that he cooked lunch for Princess Di, whom he had met at the premiere of Wall Street. 'She started to do all that official stuff and I just said "Oh stop that" and said I'd seen her dancing that time at Covent Garden and told her how good she was, and she truly blushed. Then I bumped into her with the two kids in San Lorenzo and I asked her to lunch.' (He cooked her brown rice and morel risotto.) They fell to talking about Christmas with the royal family, and Stamp promised to make her one of his famous Christmas puddings. This was particularly satisfactory because it completed the circle. Stamp's father was a stoker on the Thames boats ('virtually a galley slave') and the family lived in the East End in near penury. His mother was an excellent cook who fed a household of seven on £12 a week, albeit relying on plenty of bread and marge, unknowingly paving the way for Stamp's ulcer. Every year she made a traditional Christmas pudding from a recipe that was used for the Queen Mother at Buckingham Palace that she'd cut out of the Daily Herald.
When Stamp finally diagnosed his wheat and dairy intolerance, he presented his mother with a challenge: make a Christmas pudding that contained no wheat, dairy, suet or sugar, and after some trial, error and grated carrot she did it. The pudding was duly dispatched to Diana in a stocking that contained little presents including a video of one of his favourite films, Razor's Edge, and the pudding so impressed the rest of the royals they have since ordered their own, from the batch now made annually by Stamp since his mother died. Hence the complete royal circle.
At the moment there are no plans to include the pudding in the Stamp Collection, which has otherwise evolved primarily to suit Stamp's diet and includes non-dairy ice cream, organic dairy-free chocolates, organic sheep's cheese (called, ahem, Troy and Priscilla after two of his film characters). They're working on pizza and vegetable chips.
The food company is now a booming business employing six people in their Harley Street office and boasting a seven-figure annual turnover. Elizabeth Buxton thinks their initial naivety was an advantage. 'I rang Sainsbury's to ask if I could talk to them about our wheat-free pasta and they couldn't have been nicer or more helpful,' she tells me.
The range is stocked in most major supermarkets.
By now Stamp is taking delivery of his main course, a Dover sole, and we have a crisis looming. The waiter is quizzed about whether there is butter on the vegetables and has to check with the chef and have them replaced. Then there is a sauce alarm. The tartare clearly contains cream, so he orders horseradish. Now, even I can surmise this too will contain cream, and after it has been dolloped onto his plate he checks it out with the waiter and it has to be ceremoniously scraped - every last tiny little scrap - off the plate. He's perfectly polite about it, but there is something very driven and joyless about this whole eating regime. True, he looks terrific, he says he feels great - he's 62, 11 st 12lb, does yoga and Pilates and looks very trim. But it is, as Shrimpton commented, obsessive and self-absorbed.
Mind you, he has a pattern of getting deeply immersed in everything he does. There aren't that many people I can think of who would spend almost two decades trying to perfect baking. He managed to put himself through drama school without telling his parents or any of his four siblings - they thought he was going out to work every day. The moment of reckoning came after he'd left home, when he was filmed on the six o'clock news at the opening of Billy Budd and a neighbour of the televisionless Stamps rushed them round to their house to watch. When he visited them later that evening and his mother asked the reason for his secrecy, he told her it was to avoid her worrying. 'She was afraid I wasn't eating properly and might put on damp underpants.'
After Shrimpton left him he went away for a year and remained away for 10. It was a period of soul-searching and self-discovery, travelling to India and the East, smoking a lot of dope. He lived in Ibiza with a whole gang of navel-gazers including the singing duo Nina and Frederick, and did peyote, stark naked, with a guru called the Great Elk.
He relishes the fact he is homeless. Wherever he goes in the world he checks out health food shops, local produce, garners ideas for the Stamp Collection. He has regular pit stops: the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles; the New York Athletic Club; the Waterfront in Vancouver where he cooks his own food up in the kitchens and rings Elizabeth with new ideas.
As we leave the Savoy, Stamp has a Valentine's Day menu in his hand. 'There's nothing much on here I can eat,' he says gloomily. I feel like shouting, 'Let's drink a bottle of champagne, eat a ton of chocolate and get rat-arsed'. But it's not on, and I'm too downcast. Shrimpton would probably have just given one of her shrugs.
Seafood spaghetti
serves 2
250g Stamp Collection fresh organic wheat-free spaghetti
10 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp garlic, finely chopped
½ tsp chilli flakes - or to taste
12 small clams in their shells, cleaned; 100g shrimp, peeled and cooked
100g squid, cleaned and sliced into rings
15g flat parsley, chopped, retaining a few sprigs for garnish
2 large cooked prawns to garnish
In a double boiler, cover the bottom of the saucepan with 1cm of water into which place the clams. Into the top steamer, put the squid. Place over a high heat shaking the pan from time to time. The clams are cooked once the shells have opened and the squid is cooked when it turns white - this should only take a couple of minutes. Remove from the heat.
In a large saut¿ pan, put the oil and garlic and cook for 2 minutes, without browning the garlic. Add the chillies and parsley and cook for 1 minute. Add the shrimp, squid, clams and the whole prawns and toss in the hot oil. Set aside while you cook the spaghetti according to the instructions on the pack. Drain the spaghetti, reheat the oil and fish mixture and add the spaghetti. Mix well and divide onto two plates, topping with the large prawns and parsley sprigs.
