CLAPTON BECAME OBSESSED WITH PATTIE ...AND HEROIN
In the second extract from Slowhand: The Life And Music Of Eric Clapton by PHILIP NORMAN, we reveal how the guitarist wooed George Harrison’s beautiful young wife by playing her Layla, which he had written about her, while living a double life as an addic
ROCK’S most famous love triangle began when Eric Clapton wooed Pattie Boyd with a song he had written in adoration of her. It was the autumn of 1970 and he produced a cassette of Layla which he played three times at a London flat used by his short lived band Derek and the Dominos, studying her reaction.
Blonde-haired, blue-eyed and beautiful, Pattie was married to his friend and fellow musician George Harrison. Yet Clapton was infatuated and Layla’s lovelorn, wailing guitar and pleading lyrics were a shameless bid to win her love.
Listening to it provoked awe that “the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard” should have been written about her, Pattie would later recall. She admitted: “The song got the better of me. I could resist no longer.”
And so, caught between the rival attentions of Clapton and Harrison, the 24-year-old surrendered and an intense affair began. The pair had first met two years earlier after a performance by Cream in London.
Clapton recalled: “She belonged to a powerful man who seemed to have everything I wanted. Amazing cars, an incredible career and a beautiful wife...”
Not long after he had played Pattie Layla, Clapton he turned up unexpectedly at Friar Park, the Surrey home she shared with Harrison, when the ex-beatle was away.
He told her he couldn’t live without her and she had to come away with him this very minute. When she refused, he took a small packet from his pocket and said it contained heroin, which he’d take if she refused.
Horrified, she tried to grab the packet, but he held it in his clenched hand. He said, “Right, that’s it, I’m off,” and left, presumably to plunge into a deadly habit for which Pattie would be to blame. It was emotional blackmail of a peculiarly shameless kind, since he’d already been taking heroin for months.
He had indulged unrestrainedly in pot, LSD, cocaine and every kind of pill but, fearful of injections, he had always held back from smack.
Then his Cream bandmate Ginger Baker had revealed it could also be snorted like cocaine. Baker always warned in olderbrotherly fashion that he’d “have his balls” if Clapton ever tried it. But the drummer was living proof one could take heroin and still appear to function normally.
Clapton later explained how his initiation came about: “The guy I was scoring coke from would only sell it to me if I bought smack as well. So I kept stashing it away in a drawer... Then one day there was no coke around, so I thought I’d have a snort of smack, and it was quite nice.”
Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs had been released in time for Christmas 1970. Its title track was not the only one aimed directly at Pattie. Bell Bottom Blues pleaded, to the point of grovelling, for another rendezvous under the Guildford town clock where the pair enjoyed secret assignations.
TODAY, the album is generally recognised as Clapton’s greatest achievement but at the time it was a commercial failure, reaching only number 16 in America and failing to chart in Britain. And the subsequent collapse of Derek and the Dominos marked Clapton’s transition from occasional heroin-user to serious addict.
In March 1970, a letter marked “Express” had arrived at Friar Park, the stately home near Henley, Oxon, Pattie shared with George Harrison. It said: “What I
want to know is if you still love your husband or if you have another lover? If there is still a feeling in your heart for me you must let me know! All my love E.”
It was from Clapton and, from then on, the pair began a serious flirtation. However, despite his feelings for Pattie, the star had patched things up with his socialite girlfriend Alice Ormsby-gore, 18, youngest daughter of the 5th Baron Harlech, and a fellow addict who took on the job of travelling up to London to rendezvous with their heroin dealer.
Snorting as they did – Clapton with a gold spoon he wore around his neck – used up much more than injecting, so Alice’s trips had to be very frequent.
Like most newcomers to heroin, Clapton believed himself to be in complete control of his habit, able to stop whenever he chose. But the next three years of what should have been the best time in his life were lost to heroin.
During 1971, he and Alice were still to be seen as an enviably coollooking couple in public. Yet at home when their supplies ran out, they’d literally go berserk, banging their heads against walls or burning themselves with cigarettes.
Heroin obliterated Clapton’s creativity and took away his work ethic. Holed up at his Italianate mansion, Hurtwood Edge in Surrey, in a semi-comatose state, he sought no new musical partners, wrote no new material and released no new records.
His appearance rapidly went downhill, his face not only developing the heroin user’s chalky pallor but also crops of belated acne. Nominally, Alice did the cooking but he lived mainly on junk food and his weight ballooned.
He deliberately cut himself off from all his friends, particularly those on whom he’d once relied for advice and guidance.
By now Clapton’s craving had become so powerful that Ormsby, who would never recover from her addiction and died of an overdose in 1995 aged just 42, had to give him almost everything that she scored.
She compensated with neat vodka, two bottles a day, and the cost of the smack rose exponentially when the dealers discovered whom the aristocratic teenager was servicing. Before long, their habit was running at £1,000 per week, equal to £10,000 today.
Clapton’s gardener Arthur Eggby became accustomed to his employer laying out four lines on the kitchen counter and inhaling them through a tightly rolled £50 note he would then toss in the