Alice Ormsby Gore

Short Biography

Alice Magdalen Sarah Ormsby-Gore (22 April 1952 - c. 17 April 1995) was a British socialite and model.She was the youngest daughter of William David Ormsby Gore, 5th Baron Harlech, and his first wife Sylvia Thomas. She had 3 older siblings, Jane, Julian and Victoria, and one younger brother, Francis. She was raised on a farm in Wales before Lord Harlech became British ambassador to Washington during the Kennedy era (October 1961 – fall 1963). After that, she grew up on an idyllic 1, 500-acre estate, Brogyntyn Hall in Shropshire in the West Midlands of England.On May 30 1967, Alice's mother Lady Sylvia Ormsby-Gore was killed in a motor accident.The Chicago Tribune March 18th 1968 issue said that in Oswestry, Lord Harlech's home town, the future of his children-particularly the two younger-was the main subject of gossip among the 12, 000 in the ancient market town. "It is 16-year-old Alice who worries them. The fact that she spent a recent holiday at Woodhill, their home, tearing around the 3, 000-acre estate on a motorcycle, did nothing to calm their fears." "Alice is currently in a London school and living with Lord Harlech's mother, the dowager Lady Harlech, 77."Time magazine reported on Friday, 12 April 1968 that Lord Harlech would be sending his "15-year-old daughter, Alice Ormsby Gore, to Manhattan's Dalton School for the coming spring term. Alice will stay at the East Side apartment of a family friend, John Hay Whitney, former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's."Later in 1968, Ormsby Gore was to encounter guitarist Eric Clapton. There is some speculation as to how they met. 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. Alice was just 16. 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; dragging the teenage Alice down with him. In his autobiography Clapton says, "Alice came back to live with me, and she started using too... It never crossed my mind that it was wrong to bring her into my nightmare". Clapton’s success with the supergroup Cream had made him one of rock’s most revered and richly rewarded stars, but Alice’s life with him soon took a sorry turn. They spent years in reclusion at his Italian-style villa in Surrey, where their diet consisted of alcohol, heroin and junk food.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, until 1974.Alice was soon in a wretched state. There had been scenes of ‘stomach-churning squalor and nastiness’ in her life with Clapton. There is no suggestion that he was in any way responsible for his partner’s choices. But it was all ‘one long, terrible downhill race, as if the two of them were competing to see who could destroy their life first.’In January 1973, a few fans were at least able to slap Clapton on the back as he emerged from a restaurant on a rare visit to London. None of them recognised the haggard, bow-legged woman with broken teeth and matted, greasy hair hobbling along behind him. It was the once-ravishing Alice.The following year, Clapton moved from heroin to alcohol and began a U.S. tour. It was the start of a triumphant professional comeback for him, but an even steeper personal decline for the fragile Alice. In November 1974, aged 22, she went to call on her elder brother Julian, who worked as a waiter, and found him dead on the floor of his Fulham flat. He had shot himself. After that, Alice seemed to drift off into a 20-year-long lost weekend.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.Her favourite uncle, like her mother, had already been killed in a car accident. And when in 1985 her father died, aged 66, also at the wheel of a car, the media began to refer to an ‘Ormsby-Gore curse’.She died of a heroin overdose in Bournemouth, Dorset, in 1995. She was 42.