Confessions of a shoe fetishist
Evening Standard (London),  Aug 7, 1998  by Ros Drinkwater

IT'S breakfast time at Harvey Nichols cafe and Terence Stamp is explaining why he's flown halfway across the world to catch the 4.40 at Newmarket tomorrow. "The 4.40," he says, fixing me with those piercing eyes, "is the George Clev-erley Memorial Handicap in hon-our of his centenary."

George who?

"Cleverley, the best bespoke shoemaker in the western world.

He had two great loves, shoes and racing. They say he took as many orders at the racetrack as he did in Bond Street."

The other reason why Stamp is in town is that he's selling all his own "Cleverleys". They no longer fit him. Terence Stamp at 60 hasn't put on weight, nor has his shoe size changed - he's still a 9 1/2- but "my bone structure has".

Stamp explains that it all began when he was signed up for Superman in 1977. "I spent a lot of my time in a harness performing aerial acrobatics of one kind of another. This had a detrimental effect on my alignment in general and my spine in particular." The years that followed were punctuated by injury and "many visits to the chiropractor".

The final straw was high heels.

Three years ago, when he was making The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, he spent a lot of time in fishnets and staggeringly high stilettoes. The pain returned. It was, he says, the Pilates exercise system that cured him, "at a price". "Over the years, re-orchestrating the vertebrae has resulted in a subtle change to the bone structure of my feet. Now none of my beloved Cleverleys fit me."

Shoes are something of an obsession to Terence Stamp. He can tell you where he was and when by describing what was on his feet.

The Stamp shoe saga spans four decades and starts in the late Fifties when, as an East End messenger boy, he would "loiter in front of St James's Street shoemakers, drooling over bespoke footwear when details like buttons and two-tone leather were the rage."

In 1961, when he made his screen debut in Billy Budd, "the time had come to step out of Clarks, Dolcis and Saxone and into the handcrafted specials I had so coveted as a boy. Even so none gave me the comfort and elegance I sought. Until Mayfair tailor Doug Hayward introduced me to George.

"By now it was the early Seventies, the time when foot fashion took a turn to the pedestrian.

Fifth Avenue was suddenly full of jetsetters wearing trainers. Trainers, I decided, were not for me, so George and I embarked on a resuscitation of the past."

Over the next five years George Cleverley made Stamp more than 30 pairs of shoes. "The whole point of handmade shoes is that they're designed to last a lifetime.

I was set for life with half brogues, full brogues, brogues benched from tan calf and stained down to conker brown." The latter, he tells me, were Humphrey Bogart's favourites. He continues: "Delectable white bucks fashioned from rare Chinese doeskin, black patents with silk laces that went dancing with me and velvet slippers embroidered with my initials, just like the pair George had fitted for Churchill in his wartime bunker underneath Whitehall."

George's other clients included Rudolph Valentino, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Dirk Bogarde, Olivier and Gielgud. "Sadly George is no longer with us - he worked to within two weeks of his 93rd birthday."

As Stamp flies back to rejoin the cast of Bowfingers Big Thing, Steve Martin's take on tax-free cult religions, with Eddie Murphy, he leaves his Cleverley collection behind.

The shoes are for sale, priced GBP 400 to GBP 600. He considered giving them to charity, but changed his mind: "The things I value most are the things I've worked for and paid for. So, anyone out there who would like to own a pair of Clever-leys, partially broken in by yours truly .."