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By Root 444 0

of all was the feeling that for the first time in British history it didn’t matter where you came from. The only thing that mattered was your talent; the young working class were not going to be deferential any more. A new kind of satire was born and for the first time comedians like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore dared to send up the Establishment – at their club of the same name. For me and for Terence Stamp, my companion in many an adventure in those days, life was a non-stop party, with dolly birds galore and all the time in the world to enjoy them. My beloved London became a playground for my friends and me – a far cry from the black and white gloom of the Fifties: the Sixties was an explosion of Technicolor. But the scene was also incredibly fast-moving. By the time I’d finished Zulu and got back to London with some money in my pocket for the first time, Terry was in love with Julie Christie, Bailey was wooing supermodel Jean Shrimpton and a whole new bunch of groups – many of them produced by my friend and fellow Orphan, Mickie Most – were dominating the charts. And then, it was all change partners once again. The clubs and discotheques came and went at a dizzying speed, too. This was the era when Orphans Johnny Gold and Oscar Lerman came into their own with Ad Lib, at which you really could see the Beatles and the Stones on the same dance floor. There was a creative energy around that I don’t think has been seen before or since, and it was impossible not to be drawn in and swept along by it. It really did seem as if people could become famous overnight – although as someone who took eleven years to become an overnight success, I’ve always felt a bit ambivalent about that!

So it was in those incredibly exciting times that the group that became the Mayfair Orphans had its roots. You would be hard pressed to find a more respectable bunch of elderly blokes these days – but underneath it all, we are still that same rebellious tribe of young men, and proud to have been part of that extraordinary era.

I met the first of the group who would become the Orphans in the late Fifties and it was Roger Moore. I didn’t know, when he accosted me on Piccadilly and told me that I was going to be a star, that he would also become one of my closest friends. Roger is one of the most genuine and trustworthy people you could ever meet, and very, very funny. He is also a generous man and we spent many fabulous holidays in his beautiful villa on the French Riviera, although sadly those privileges were lost to us when he divorced. As a tax exile, these days, Roger has to be classed as an Overseas Orphan and so because of that and his many duties as an official ambassador for UNICEF, he’s too busy to turn up to many lunches, but he distinguishes our organisation in his absence and when he is with us he makes us laugh.

The second Orphan I met was my incomparable agent Dennis Selinger, who gave me such wise counsel in the course of my career and became my guide, confidante and friend. Dennis was diagnosed with cancer in 1998. He would never explain what it was in detail, but he assured us all it was survivable. Dennis – perhaps for the first time in his life – was unfortunately wrong. I had to go to Hollywood to do a film and went to visit him in hospital before I went away. He insisted to me that everything was all right and that he would be out of hospital before I got back. I left and was just walking down the corridor when it suddenly occurred to me that I had not actually said goodbye, which seemed rude. I went back to Dennis’s room, opened the door and there was Dennis on his way to the toilet, wheeling his own portable life support system with needles in his arms and pipes up his nose. ‘I forgot to say goodbye,’ I said lamely. He smiled. ‘See you when you get back,’ he said. I said goodbye and shut the door. That walk down the passage was one of the longest of my life. I was trying not to cry because I knew I would never see him again. He died while I was still in Hollywood and I couldn’t even get home for his funeral. We all miss him