Alice Ormsby-Gore - Eric Clapton

Eric Clapton

Later in 1968, Ormsby Gore was to encounter guitarist Eric Clapton. There is some speculation as to how they met. One account gives credit for the introduction to Ian Dallas in 1969 when Alice was 17. However, Clapton in his autobiography gives the credit to interior designer David Mlinaric in 1968. Mlinaric was completing some work on Clapton's house, Hurtwood Edge, and had taken Ormsby Gore along with him. David Mlinaric was part of a group of aristocratic hippies who hung out around London in the 1960s and was friends with Alice's siblings, Jane, Julian and Victoria Ormsby Gore, the older children of Lord Harlech, who had been British ambassador to Washington during the Kennedy era.

The couple announced their engagement on 7 September 1969. In 1970, Ormsby Gore moved into Hurtwood Edge with Clapton. Clapton had started using heroin quite heavily in an attempt to get over his continuing obsession with George Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd; Alice also became hooked on the drug. In his autobiography Clapton says, "Alice came back to live with me, and she started using too".

Time magazine reported their intention to marry on Monday, 16 March 1970:

“Rock Guitarist Eric Clapton, 25, son of a bricklayer, may soon marry Alice Ormsby Gore, 17, daughter of former British Ambassador to the U.S. Lord Harlech—with her father's blessing. "She has gone to see him in New York," said Harlech, "and if they want to get married it is entirely their own affair.”

The couple did not marry but stayed together for five years. Clapton maintains he was not in love with Ormsby Gore but she was deeply in love with him. In Ray Coleman's book CLAPTON she says, "Maybe because I was only seventeen I wrongly thought of it as mutual. My extreme youth made any rational analysis of the situation impossible."

Clapton broke the engagement and ended their relationship for good after recovering from his heroin addiction with the help of Ormsby Gore's family.