Clapton (25 page)

Lori had a powerful personality, very confident and flirtatious, and I was flattered by her interest in me. Indeed, the energy between us was very strong, the kind that exists only when you meet someone for the first time. It was also very playful, a quality that had disappeared from my relationship with Pattie. When the tour ended and I went back home to her, we made a further halfhearted attempt to rekindle our marriage, but it didn’t really catch. I realized that my attentions had shifted. I had been home just a few days when I suddenly told Pattie that I was leaving. I had met somebody in Italy and I was going to go and stay with her. I was like a flame in the wind, being blown all over the place, with no concern for other people’s feelings or for the consequences of my actions. In my mind I had persuaded myself that, since I had just turned forty, I was going through a midlife crisis, and that was the explanation for everything.

I turned up on Lori’s doorstep in Milan, right out of the blue, and told her I’d left Pattie and I was coming to live with her. Funnily enough, it was almost as if she was living an existential life herself, because she didn’t bat an eyelid. Her attitude was one of “Come and live here and we’ll see where it takes us.” It was an extraordinary moment for me, because having actually got there, I just thought to myself, “I’m going to start my life again from scratch here in Italy, without any idea at all of where it is going to go.”

We lived in Milan for a while, where Lori was starting a new career as a fashion photographer. She had started doing work for the big fashion houses that were going strong then, like Versace and Armani, and it was through her that I became friendly with the Versace family, particularly with Donatella’s husband, Paul Beck. I was already a huge fan of Gianni’s. I had been buying his things for a while and thought of him as the best tailor in the world. His ideas were revolutionary, but simple at the same time. I loved both Giorgio Armani and Gianni, but at that moment in time, in my opinion, Gianni was the rock ’n’ roll tailor.

For a while I became Lori’s model and spent quite a lot of time doing shoots with her. As our relationship developed, we began to discuss the possibility of having children together. I told her how I had always wanted children, but that Pattie and I had been unable to conceive. I suggested to Lori that the two of us would make the most perfect babies. Looking back on it now, it seems like childish nonsense, but at the time it all made perfect sense. She agreed and said that she would stop using birth control.

The façade crumbled when we were in Rome, where Lori had another flat. One day she went out and left me on my own, and I started to poke around, which was not a great idea. I opened a cupboard and found a pile of photograph albums, which I took out and started looking through. They were full of pictures of Lori with famous men—footballers, actors, politicians, musicians, anyone with any kind of notoriety. I noticed that she struck the same pose in every photograph, wearing the sort of smile that wasn’t really a smile at all. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I went icy cold and my hair stood on end. In that moment I knew we were doomed.

However much I might have wanted to walk out at this point, I realized that I had already set in motion something that was out of control, particularly because of the conversation we had had about pregnancy. So I put this experience on file, as a reason why the relationship would never last, and started dissembling the whole thing, mentally and emotionally withdrawing. I stayed in Rome for a while, and then we both flew to London and stayed a couple of nights in the Connaught before moving into an apartment I had organized for us in Berkeley Square.

Filled with doubts as I was about my life, both the past and the future, it was a hard time for me. After years of living in the country, I also hated the noise and traffic of the city, so to distract myself I filled the apartment with recording equipment to enable myself to make demos for my next album. One of the songs I wrote while living there was called “Tearing Us Apart,” which was about “the committee,” the group of Pattie’s friends whom I now blamed for coming between us. “Your friends are tearing us apart,” I wrote. I could think of little else, so it’s not surprising that only two or three weeks after we moved in together, I told Lori that the relationship just wasn’t working for me anymore and that I had to go back to my wife. “That’s not good news at all,” she said, “because I’m pregnant.”

At that moment, I couldn’t really take this in. I remember getting into my car and driving down to Hurtwood to see Pattie, who had been living there since I had left. Somewhere in my alcoholic mind was the idea that she might be waiting for me. When I arrived it was nighttime, and there were lights on all over the house. I peered in through the kitchen window and saw Pattie and her boyfriend making dinner together. It was like I’d come home to someone else’s house. I knocked on the door and said, “I’m back, I’m home!” Pattie came to the door and said coldly, “You can’t come in here right now. This is not the right time.”

“But this is my home,” I said, to which she replied, “No, you can’t do this…” Suddenly my world was absolutely in tatters. I was disenchanted with my now pregnant mistress, and I’d lost my wife. I was in conflict and bewildered, and felt like I’d opened a vast door into an empty chasm. At some point during this period I decided that the only answer to my problems was suicide. I happened to have a full bottle of blue 5mg Valium tablets, and I downed them all, the whole bloody lot. I was convinced they would kill me, but astonishingly enough, I woke up ten hours later, stone cold sober and full of the realization of what a lucky escape I’d had.

As soon as Lori came to understand that she could never get me to commit to anything, she went back to Milan, where it was possible for her to make a living. I stayed in England and tried to clear up the mess I’d created by, first of all, telling Pattie about the pregnancy. Considering how much she had longed to have our own child, and her deep disappointment at her failure to conceive, it was a dreadful thing to have to tell her. She was utterly devastated, and from then on our life together at Hurtwood was hell.

We hacked along for a while, sleeping in different rooms and living pretty much separate lives until, several months later, on her birthday, March 17, I had a complete meltdown and threw her out of the house. It was a cruel and vicious thing to do, and within a few days I regretted it. I kept replaying our early days over and over in my head, desperately wondering why we couldn’t recapture that essence again, but I knew I had crossed a serious barrier this time and that I would have to leave her alone for a while. Pattie found a very nice apartment in Kensington and things actually settled down. I visited her once a week, and we were quite civil to one another. I stayed out at Hurtwood, doing bits and pieces, drinking in as controlled a manner as I could, but occasionally going on massive benders. It was like being in limbo again, not quite knowing where things were going or what the outcome of all of this would be.

I
was sitting at home one day when I received a mysterious phone call from a lady with a strong European accent, who claimed to know all about my marriage difficulties over the years. She also said she knew how to repair them. I was intrigued, as well as angry. How had this person got my number, and where had she got all this inside information that she appeared to know? Soon after, she began to call quite regularly with bizarre instructions for getting Pattie to return, which I followed to the letter, my reasoning being, “What have I got to lose?” Little did I know what I was getting into.

For starters, I had to take a bath in an assortment of herbs, which left me looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Gradually the rituals got more convoluted and very creepy. For example, I had to cut my finger to draw blood, smear it onto a cross with Pattie’s and my name written on it, and read weird incantations at midnight. Then of course, with great excitement and expectation, I would call Pattie to see if she had changed at all in her demeanor toward me, which, needless to say, never happened.

The lady on the phone had a very sympathetic manner and eventually told me that the spell would only work if she could meet me and take the “sessions” to another level. She lived in New York, where I would be soon, so I agreed to meet her. I knew it was madness, but my rationale was still, “What harm can it do?” She was an extremely strange-looking woman, quite fat with bright red hair, and she told me that sex with a virgin would be necessary in order to complete the spell. “Where do you find a virgin in New York?” I replied, and she said, “I’m a virgin.” God knows why I didn’t just run then. I wish I had, but I was drunk and desperate, and still under the illusion that a reconciliation with Pattie would solve everything, so I went through with it. It was humiliating, and I did run, but only after the damage was done.

I escaped to LA to record songs for a new album, which was to be a collaboration between Phil Collins and Tom Dowd. I had asked Tom to coproduce it because I didn’t feel confident that Phil really knew my musical background well enough to do the job single-handed, and with Tom involved I felt I could oversee the production. We worked at Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood, with the basic band consisting of me on guitar, Phil on drums, Greg Phillinganes on keyboards, and Nathan East on bass. The horns—Michael Brecker on sax, Randy Brecker and Jon Faddis on trumpet, and Dave Bargeron on trombone—were overdubbed in New York, and Tina Turner and I duetted live on “Tearing Us Apart.”

For me these were pretty drunken sessions, and looking back, I don’t know how I got through them. Nigel, who came with me, had rented us a place on Sunset Plaza, and secretly I would drink and do coke until about six in the morning. Then at about eleven, I would go into the studio and somehow stay sober during the day. So from midday till about six in the evening I would try to work while feeling hungover, doing the best I could, until I reached a moment when I felt able to say, “Okay, we’ve had a great day. Let’s call it quits,” at which point I would drive back to the rented villa and hit the booze and coke again. I hardly slept at all. Of course, I was trying my hardest to hide my drinking from everybody, unsuccessfully as it turned out. Nigel had got me a rental car, which didn’t have a proper license plate, so some of the crew, unbeknownst to me, had made a tag out of cardboard that read
CAPTAIN SMIRNOFF
.

In the months before Lori’s baby was due, I had come to realize that this was the one thing in my life that something good could come of, and I had been making some attempts to restore the relationship with her. On my return from recording in LA, I went to visit her in Milan a few times, and eventually, a few weeks before the birth, she returned to London, having told me that since I was English, she felt the baby should be born in England. I rented a small house in Chelsea for her, where I used to visit her every day.

Conor was born on August 21, 1986, at St. Mary’s, Paddington. As soon as I heard that Lori had gone into labor, I rushed to the hospital, determined to be in at the birth, though more than a little frightened of what I was going to experience. As it happened, he got stuck upside down, so they had to perform a last-minute cesarean. They put a screen around the bed and a nurse came and stood beside me. She told me that men often faint in these situations. I was determined to try and be present for this. I just had an incredible feeling that this was going to be the first real thing that had ever happened to me. Up till that moment, it seemed like my life had been a series of episodes that had very little meaning. The only time it had seemed real was when I was challenging myself in some way with music. Everything else—the drinking, the tours, even my life with Pattie—it all had an air of artificiality to it. When the baby finally came, they gave him to me to hold. I was spellbound, and I felt so proud, even though I had no idea how to hold a baby.

Lori spent a couple of days in the hospital. While she was there, I remember going down to Lords to watch the cricket. The great English cricketer Ian “Beefy” Botham was playing, whom I knew through David English, former president of the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and after the match he raised a glass of champagne to me in honor of Conor’s birth. By that time it had begun to sink in that I was a father, and that it was time for me to grow up. I considered all my previous irrational behavior to have been reasonably excusable, because it had been conducted with consenting adults. Whereas with this tiny child, so vulnerable as he was, I suddenly became aware that it was time to try and stop fucking around. But the question was, how?

Conor’s birth was commemorated with the release of the new album, which I called
August
, and which turned out to be my biggest-selling solo album to date. It had a hit single in “It’s in the Way You Use It,” which was featured in the Paul Newman film
The Color of Money
, and also included “Holy Mother,” which I had dedicated to Richard Manuel, the great keyboard player of The Band, who had hanged himself in March 1986. One song I decided not to include was “Lady from Verona,” which I had written specially for Lori. That might have been too much for Pattie to bear.

Lori returned to Italy soon after the birth, the idea being that I would go over and visit her and Conor for a few days whenever possible. The problem was that my drinking had become full blown again, and I was finding it harder and harder to control. I really loved this little boy, and yet, when I went to visit him in Milan, I would sit and play with him in the daytime, and, every second of that time, all I could think about was how much longer it would be before Lori would arrive to feed him and take him away to bed so that I could have another drink. I never drank in his presence. I would stay white-knuckle sober all the time he was awake, but as soon as she had put him in his cot, I would get back to my normal consumption, drinking until I passed out. I did this every night until I went back to England.

The company I was hanging out with during this period certainly did little to curb my excesses. Back in 1986, and throughout the summer of ’87, for example, I spent a lot of time with “Beefy” Botham and David English, and the three of us would go on mad sprees. David had been a friend since R.S.O. days, and between us we had formed the E.C. Eleven (which later evolved into the Banburys), a ragtag team of musicians and sportsmen who liked to play cricket for fun, and although some of us would take it fairly seriously, I for one treated it as another excuse for a grand piss-up. Sometimes I would just drive up to watch Beefy play for his county, Worcestershire. He’s a wonderful man, very gregarious and generous, a great player and a natural leader with a scaldingly cruel sense of humor. More often than not, poor David would be the recipient of our scornful attention and suffer extraordinary abuse at our hands, much as Stiggy had with Ahmet and Earl. We were pretty merciless, but I just loved watching Beefy play, and drove all over the country to watch first-class county games. Drinking is a big part of the cricket social scene, and Beefy liked the odd quencher, too, so I fit right in.

This then was the pattern of my life over the next year, which reached its climax when I was touring Australia in the autumn of 1987. By then there had been such an erosion of my capabilities that I couldn’t stop shaking. For the second time, I’d reached the point where I couldn’t live without a drink and I couldn’t live with one. I was a mess, and so far as my playing was concerned, I was just about scraping by.

One day, cooped up in my hotel room, a long way from home, with nothing to think about but my own pain and misery, I suddenly knew that I had to go back into treatment. I thought to myself, “This has got to stop.” I really did it for Conor, because I thought no matter what kind of human being I was, I couldn’t stand being around him like that. I couldn’t bear the idea that, as he experienced enough of life to form a picture of me, it would be a picture of the man I was then. I called Roger and told him to book me into Hazelden again, and on November 21, 1987, I went back into treatment.

My second visit to Hazelden was, on the face of it, much like the first, but on a deeper level it was very different. This time I had no reservations about why I was there—I had tried to control my drinking and failed—so there was no more debate, no more gray area for me. Also, my life had become very complicated and completely unmanageable during my relapse. I now had two children, neither of whom I was really administering to, a broken marriage, assorted bewildered girlfriends, and a career that, although it was still ticking over, had lost its direction. I was a mess.

My counselor this time around, a great guy named Phil, having first established a strong bond with me, employed a sort of ridicule method. It threw me completely. I had grown used to people treating me with a certain amount of reverence, maybe just out of fear, and here was this guy laughing at my pomposity and arrogance. I didn’t know how to deal with it. It caught me off balance and helped me see myself as others saw me, and it wasn’t pretty. I was captivated, and tried to engage him as much as I could, but he was rarely available, or made it seem that way. Like my half brother Brian, he had something I wanted. More than that, it was something I knew I needed. I was like a blade of grass in the wind; one day I would be blown up, scornful and full of myself, and the next I was in a pit of despair. But I kept coming back to the thought of Conor, the reality of his life and what it required of me, and the horrible possibility that if I didn’t get it right this time, history would probably repeat itself. The thought of him going through all that was what finally made the difference. I had to break the chain and give him what I had never really had—a father.

Nevertheless, I stumbled through my month in treatment much as I had done the first time, just ticking off the days, hoping that something would change in me without me having to do much about it. Then one day, as my visit was drawing to an end, a panic hit me, and I realized that in fact nothing had changed in me, and that I was going back out into the world again completely unprotected. The noise in my head was deafening, and drinking was in my thoughts all the time. It shocked me to realize that here I was in a treatment center, a supposedly safe environment, and I was in serious danger. I was absolutely terrified, in complete despair.

At that moment, almost of their own accord, my legs gave way and I fell to my knees. In the privacy of my room I begged for help. I had no notion who I thought I was talking to, I just knew that I had come to the end of my tether, I had nothing left to fight with. Then I remembered what I had heard about surrender, something I thought I could never do, my pride just wouldn’t allow it, but I knew that on my own I wasn’t going to make it, so I asked for help, and, getting down on my knees, I surrendered.

Within a few days I realized that something had happened for me. An atheist would probably say it was just a change of attitude, and to a certain extent that’s true, but there was much more to it than that. I had found a place to turn to, a place I’d always known was there but never really wanted, or needed, to believe in. From that day until this, I have never failed to pray in the morning, on my knees, asking for help, and at night, to express gratitude for my life and, most of all, for my sobriety. I choose to kneel because I feel I need to humble myself when I pray, and with my ego, this is the most I can do.

If you are asking why I do all this, I will tell you…because it works, as simple as that. In all this time that I’ve been sober, I have never once seriously thought of taking a drink or a drug. I have no problem with religion, and I grew up with a strong curiosity about spiritual matters, but my searching took me away from church and community worship to the internal journey. Before my recovery began, I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Walter. In some way, in some form, my God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him.

I came home from Hazelden for Christmas, to Lori and Conor at Hurtwood. There was a lot to be done, a lot of wreckage to clear up, and Lori was very supportive. I think she knew intuitively that I was not ready to make a decision about our situation yet, and seemed reasonably content just to see where things would lead. Funnily enough, the first person I wanted to see on my return was Pattie. We had parted on such bad terms, and I wanted to see if there was still a spark there, even if it was only friendship. We met for lunch, and it was great. I couldn’t feel any enmity from her, and we were able to speak without manipulation, which for me was a miracle.