Clapton (27 page)

I
did not run away from Conor, even though there was to begin with a certain amount of fear involved in my relationship with him. I was, after all, a part-time father. Small children can be quite dismissive and unintentionally cruel, and I tended to take this very personally. However, as the time of my sobriety increased, I began to be more comfortable with him and to really look forward to seeing him. I was very much in this mood in March 1991, when I had arranged to see Conor in New York, where Lori and her new boyfriend, Sylvio, were planning to buy an apartment.

On the evening of March 19, I went to the Galleria, an apartment block on East Fifty-seventh Street where they were staying, to pick up Conor and take him to the circus on Long Island. It was the very first time I had taken him out on my own, and I was both nervous and excited. It was a great night out. Conor never stopped talking and was particularly excited at seeing the elephants. It made me realize for the first time what it meant to have a child and be a father. I remember telling Lori, when I took him back, that from then on, when I had Conor home on visits, I wanted to look after him all on my own.

The following morning I was up early, ready to walk crosstown from my hotel, the Mayfair Regent, on Park and Sixty-fourth Street, to pick up Lori and Conor to take them to the Central Park Zoo, followed by lunch at Bicé, my favorite Italian restaurant. At about 11:00
A.M.
the phone rang, and it was Lori. She was hysterical, screaming that Conor was dead. I thought to myself, “This is ridiculous. How can he be dead?” and I asked her the silliest question, “Are you sure?” And then she told me that he’d fallen out of the window. She was beside herself. Screaming. I said, “I’ll be right there.”

I remember walking up Park Avenue, trying to convince myself that everything was really all right…as if anyone could make a mistake about something like that. When I got near the apartment building, I saw a police line and paramedics on the street, and I walked past the scene, lacking the courage to go in. Finally, I went into the building, where I was asked a few questions by the police. I took the elevator upstairs to the apartment, which was on the fifty-third floor. Lori was out of her mind and talking in a crazy way. By this time I had become very calm and detached. I had stepped back within myself and become one of those people who just attend to others.

By talking to the police and the doctors, I established what had happened without even having to go into the room. The main sitting room had windows down one side that went from floor to ceiling, and they could be cantilevered open for cleaning. There were no window guards, however, since the building was a condominium and escaped the normal building regulations. On this morning the janitor was cleaning the windows and had temporarily left them open. Conor was racing about the apartment playing a game of hide-and-seek with his nanny and, while Lori was distracted by the janitor warning her about the danger, he simply ran into the room and straight out the window. He then fell forty-nine floors before landing on the roof of an adjacent four-story building.

There was no way that Lori was going to come down to the mortuary, so I had to go and identify him on my own. Whatever physical damage he had suffered in the fall, by the time I saw him they had restored his body to some normality. As I looked at his beautiful face in repose, I remember thinking, “This isn’t my son. It looks a bit like him, but he’s gone.” I went to see him again at the funeral home, to say good-bye to him, and to apologize for not being a better father. A few days later, accompanied by various friends and family, Lori and I flew back to England with the coffin. We went back to Hurtwood, where the Italians all wailed, openly expressing their grief, while I remained quite detached, in a permanent daze.

Conor’s funeral took place at St. Mary Magdalen’s Church in Ripley on a cold, bleak March day shortly before my forty-sixth birthday. All the Ripleyites came and it was a very lovely service, but I was speechless. I looked up at his coffin, and I just couldn’t talk. We laid him to rest in a plot right next to the wall of the church, and as his coffin was lowered into the ground, his Italian grandmother became completely hysterical and tried to throw herself into the grave. I remember feeling a bit shocked by this, as I’m not very good at outward emotion. I just don’t grieve that way. When we came out of the churchyard, we were faced with a wall of reporters and photographers, about fifty of them. The curious thing is that while a lot of other people were very upset and insulted because they considered this to be a lack of respect, it didn’t impinge on my own grief in any way. I just didn’t care. All I wanted was for it all to be over.

After the funeral, when Lori’s family had all gone home and Hurtwood was quiet and it was just me alone with my thoughts, I found a letter from Conor that he had written for me from Milan, telling me how much he missed me and was looking forward to seeing me in New York. He had written “I love you.” Heartbreaking though it was, I looked upon it as a positive thing. There were thousands of letters of condolence for me to read, written from all over the world, from friends, from strangers, from people like the Kennedys and Prince Charles. I was amazed. One of the first I opened was from Keith Richards. It just said, “If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.” I’ll always be grateful for that.

I cannot deny that there was a moment when I did lose faith, and what saved my life was the unconditional love and understanding that I received from my friends and my fellows in the twelve-step program. I would go to a meeting and people would just quietly gather round and keep me company, buy me coffee, and let me talk about what had happened. I was asked to chair some meetings, and at one of these sessions, when I was doing a chair on the third step, which is about handing your will over to the care of God, I recounted the story of how, during my last stay in Hazelden, I had fallen upon my knees and asked for help to stay sober. I told the meeting that the compulsion was taken away at that moment, and as far as I was concerned, this was physical evidence that my prayers had been answered. Having had that experience, I said, I knew I could get through this.

A woman came up to me after the meeting and said, “You’ve just taken away my last excuse to have a drink.” I asked her what she meant. She said, “I’ve always had this little corner of my mind which held the excuse that, if anything were to happen to my kids, then I’d be justified in getting drunk. You’ve shown me that’s not true.” I was suddenly aware that maybe I had found a way to turn this dreadful tragedy into something positive. I really was in the position to say, “Well, if I can go through this and stay sober, then anyone can.” At that moment I realized that there was no better way of honoring the memory of my son.

T
he first few months after Conor’s death were a waking nightmare, but the condition of shock prevented me from completely breaking down. I also had work commitments to deal with. To begin with, Russ Titleman was sitting in a studio with a pile of tapes from the twenty-four shows I had done at the Royal Albert Hall in February and March. I couldn’t engage with the music at all and didn’t really want to be there, until he played me the version of “Wonderful Tonight.” For some reason, listening to that song had a very calming effect on me, and I went into a deep sleep. I hadn’t slept for weeks until then, so it was a very healing experience. I think it was because the song took me back to a reasonably sane and uncomplicated point in my past, where all I had to worry about was my partner being late getting ready for dinner.

Back in the present, I bought a house in London and built a house in Antigua. I couldn’t stand sitting alone in Hurtwood after what had happened, so I asked one of my oldest friends, Vivien Gibson, to come around every day to check on the mail. Viv and I had been friends for many years, having started out when we had an affair during the eighties, and she was now working full-time as my secretary. She was also one of the only people I wanted to have around me at this time. Somehow she understood my grief and was not afraid of it. It’s amazing how many so-called friends disappear in the face of this kind of tragedy. She is a truly courageous person with tremendous compassion, and a lifelong friend. I also felt I needed a complete change of scenery. So with Roger in tow, I drove around London looking at houses until I found a beautiful house in Chelsea. Set back off the road on a side street, it was perfect. It had a courtyard to park in and a small walled garden.

At the same time, with the help of Leo Hageman, a developer in Antigua, and Colin Peterson, his friend and architect, I set about designing and building a villa within the grounds of a small resort hotel on Galleon Beach in English Harbour, on the south coast of Antigua. What was I doing? I was running, in several directions at once. In fact, until Roger put a raging stop to it, I almost bought another country house, with the intention of selling Hurtwood altogether.

Ostensibly, the London option made sense, the consensus being that I should be around people for a while, as Hurtwood had so many memories. As for Antigua, I had been going on holiday there for years and had brought Lori and Conor there many times. English Harbour had a flourishing community of crazy people, and I felt like I fit right in. The governing factor in all of this, though, was motion—keep moving; under no circumstances stay still and feel the feelings. That would have been unbearable.

I was three years sober, with just enough recovery to stay afloat but no real experience or knowledge to be able to deal with grief on this scale. Many people might have thought it would be dangerous for me to be alone, that I would ultimately drink, but I had the fellowship, and I had my guitar. It was, as it always had been, my salvation. Over the next two or three months, in England and Antigua, I stayed alone, going to meetings and playing the guitar. At first I just played, with no objectives, then songs began to evolve. The first to take shape was “The Circus Left Town,” about the night Conor and I went to the circus, our last night together. Later, in Antigua, I wrote a song linking the loss of Conor with the mystery surrounding the life of my father, called “My Father’s Eyes.” In it I tried to describe the parallel between looking into the eyes of my son, and seeing the eyes of the father that I never met, through the chain of our blood.

A few years later, in 1998, a Canadian journalist, Michael Woloschuk, took it upon himself to track down my real father, only to find out, when his search was done, that the man he was supposed to be, Edward Fryer, had died back in 1985. I suppose it shamed me into setting about a search of my own, or at least an attempt to authenticate his findings. I didn’t get very far. The trail was muddy and I was never convinced that this man was really my dad. At best all I could do was verify what the reporter had already found out. All through my life, people had asked about my father, to the point where I had taken an “I don’t want to know” stance just to close the subject. Consequently, I had always resisted any impulse to find out the real truth, and by the time I did try, it was, it seemed, too late.

The most powerful of the new songs was “Tears in Heaven.” Musically, I had always been haunted by Jimmy Cliff’s song “Many Rivers to Cross” and wanted to borrow from that chord progression, but essentially I wrote this one to ask the question I had been asking myself ever since my grandfather had died. Will we really meet again? It’s difficult to talk about these songs in depth, that’s why they’re songs. Their birth and development is what kept me alive through the darkest period of my life. When I try to take myself back to that time, to recall the terrible numbness that I lived in, I recoil in fear. I never want to go through anything like that again. Originally, these songs were never meant for publication or public consumption; they were just what I did to stop from going mad. I played them to myself, over and over, constantly changing or refining them, until they were part of my being.

Toward the end of my stay in Antigua, I chartered a boat for a two-week trip around the islands with Roger and his wife. I have always loved being by or on the sea, and although I have no ambitions to be a sailor, I find the scale of the ocean very calming and revitalizing. The start of the trip, however, wasn’t a great success. Roger and I were still at loggerheads over various things, and the atmosphere was chilly. Later we were joined first by Russ Titleman, and then by Yvonne Kelly and my six-year-old daughter, whom she had named Ruth. This lifted the mood, and the cruise took an upward turn.

Among the letters that had come in about Conor was one from Yvonne, in which, to help me in my loss, she had offered me the opportunity to become fully acquainted with Ruth as her father. It was an incredibly generous act and gave me some direction until the fog cleared. This little sea cruise was in fact the first of many small visitations that took place to test the waters for this idea, and it worked. It was great to be in the company of a child again, my child. I will always be grateful to Yvonne for giving me this second chance. It was a lifeline in a sea of bewilderment and confusion. Over the next couple of years I visited them in Montserrat, slowly establishing a rapport with my daughter, until Yvonne decided that in order for Ruth to get a proper education, and spend more time with me, they would come home to Doncaster, the Yorkshire town where Yvonne had been brought up.

So far as helping me cope with the death of Conor, developing a relationship with Ruth was, at first, no more than a Band-Aid solution. It wasn’t until the pity was taken out of the equation and we started to have fun that it became a real thing for me. It took time because first I had a lot of work to do repairing myself, and until that was done, my ability to be emotionally intimate with my daughter was seriously limited. As for discipline, I had a lot to learn and was very unsure of my entitlements with her, but slowly, bit by bit, we got to know one another, and I learned through therapy how to express my disapproval when necessary. Looking back on those years, I realize what a profound effect she had on my well-being as a whole. Her presence in my life was absolutely vital to my recovery. In her I had again found something real to be concerned about, and that was very instrumental in my becoming an active human being again.

In the early summer of 1991, I took a trip to New York to look at a film being made by Lili Zanuck, wife of the American movie producer Richard Zanuck. Called
Rush
, it is based on a true story about a female undercover narcotics agent who becomes an addict herself. Lili was a big fan and wanted me to do the score for the film. I had never taken on an entire project like this before, most of the film work I had done up until then having been supervised by the American arranger and composer Michael Kamen. We had got together to do music for an English thriller TV series called
Edge of Darkness
, and then the
Lethal Weapon
films that had followed from that. In all honesty, from what I had seen thus far, I had no great passion for the movie industry. I love film and am a real movie buff, but being behind the scenes left me cold.

Nevertheless, I took the job, mainly because I liked Lili. She was outrageously funny, and I loved and identified with her views, be it on movies, music, or just life. At the end of the summer I took up residence in LA and started working on the film. Lili assigned a guy named Randy Kirber to be my assistant, and he was fantastic. He showed me the ropes and created beautiful musical pastiches for me to compose over. We were a great team, and I hope one day we can do it again. I remember at some point playing “Tears in Heaven” to Lili, and her insistence that we put it in the movie. I was very reluctant. After all, I was still unsure about whether or not it should ever be made public, but her argument was that it might in some way help somebody, and that got my vote.

The song was released as a single and was a massive hit, my only self-penned number one as far as I can remember. The film didn’t do so well, although it deserved to. It was a controversial subject, and some scenes were quite harrowing to watch, but I thought it was sensitive and true to its purpose. It’s since become something of a cult hit, and I’m extremely proud of the music. I finished up the year by touring Japan with George Harrison. He and Olivia had been really kind to me over the last few months, and I wanted to express my gratitude.

During the trip, Lori showed up out of the blue and just checked into our hotel. Her boyfriend Sylvio had faxed me, warning me that she was coming to see me. They had broken up, and he was worried about her sanity. I couldn’t handle it. I was barely holding myself together emotionally, and there was work to do. Curiously enough, George stepped in and took control. They traveled around together, and he seemed to have a calming influence on her. I felt very guilty about not being able to comfort her, but I was experiencing tremendous feelings of anger and sadness, with no real idea of how to cope with that and her at the same time.

By Christmas I had moved to London and was enjoying being back in Chelsea after a twenty-year absence. The neighborhood at the World’s End hadn’t really changed much at all, although Kings Road east of the town hall was almost unrecognizable. In the sixties there had been literally only three, maybe four, boutiques in the whole of Chelsea, and now the Sloane Square end was wall-to-wall clothing shops, mostly rubbish. But I loved being back and pictured a new era of bachelorhood dawning. I still thought that diversion might be the solution for my grief and that dating would take my mind off the loss of my son, as if it really worked like that.

Part of the reason for moving into London was to stop myself from isolating, and to try and develop new friendships. Although London is a notoriously lonely town, I found within a few months that I had met and become friends with quite a few new people. My oldest friendships to this date, apart from my school friends, come from these days in Chelsea: Jack English, who is a great photographer; Chip Somers, who now runs a successful rehab counseling service called Focus 12; Paul Wassif, a great guitar player and counselor; Emma Turner, who now works for Goldman Sachs and sits on the Crossroads board; and Richard and Chris Steele, who ran the rehab section of the London Priory Clinic for a number of years. Over the next decade in London, my life began to fill up with all kinds of interesting people, many of whom also happened to be in recovery.

I also got a big kick out of watching Monster restore and furnish my new house with beautiful antiques, and, inspired by his passion, I started buying art for the walls. I had just stumbled onto the work of Sandro Chia and Carlo Maria Mariani, and began filling up the house with their canvases. It was the first time I had spent big money on art, and I remember showing Roger a Richter I had just bought in an auction for £40,000. It was gray brushstrokes from top to bottom. Roger couldn’t believe it. I wish I had a picture of his face when I told him how much it cost. Over the next couple of years I built up quite a respectable collection of contemporary painters and became deeply interested in art all over again.

The year 1991 was horrendous on the face of it, but some precious seeds were sown. My recovery from alcoholism had taken on a new meaning. Staying sober really was the most important thing in my life now and had given me direction when I thought I had none. I had also been shown how fragile life really is, and strangely enough had somehow been cheered by this, as if my powerlessness had become a source of relief for me. The music, too, took on a new energy. I had a need to perform these new songs about my son, and I really believed that they were meant to help not just me, but anybody who had or would suffer such extraordinary loss. The opportunity to showcase them came in the guise of an
Unplugged
TV show for MTV. I had been approached to do it, and wasn’t sure, but now it seemed like the ideal platform. I sat in my house in Chelsea and worked out a repertoire for the show that would allow me to really revisit my roots and present these new songs in a safe and careful environment.