Alice Ormsby-Gore

Early life

Ormsby-Gore was born at her family's ancestral home, Brogyntyn Hall, in Shropshire, England. She was the youngest daughter of David Ormsby-Gore, M.P., and his first wife, Sylvia Lloyd-Thomas. The Ormsby-Gore family were, by descent, an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family who once owned a large country estate in County Leitrim.

David Ormsby-Gore succeeded as the 5th Baron Harlech in February 1964. From 1961 to 1965, Lord Harlech served as British Ambassador to the United States. The Ormsby-Gores enjoyed a close social relationship with the President and First Lady during their time in Washington. Alice played with some of the Kennedy children, including during visits to Robert F. Kennedy's home at Hickory Hill, and attended charity concerts at the White House, as on 19 November 1962.

The Ormsby-Gore family attracted the attention of the American media. The Washington Post published a picture of Alice and Francis on their bikes taken by staff photographer Douglas Chevalier: 'They are the Newest on the New Frontier ... When not taking lessons at the Embassy from their governess Elizabeth Shenton, they ride their bicycles, build miniature paper houses and gardens, or discuss farming at the family's country place Woodhill in Oswestry, Shropshire.' By February 1962 Alice was enrolled at the Stone Ridge Country Day school, a Catholic, independent school for girls at Bethesda, Maryland, US about 30 minutes from the British Embassy.

Ormsby-Gore returned to the UK in 1965 with her parents, and had only just turned 15 when on 30 May 1967 her mother was killed in a car accident. Early in 1968 she was reported as being in a London school and living with Lord Harlech's mother, the dowager Lady Harlech. 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."

While in New York in 1968, Ormsby-Gore appeared in a film by Gerard Joseph Malanga. A later New York Times article mentions this film: 'When Alice Ormsby-Gore shows up in town, it's usually an event. When she was here in 1968 she got up at dawn so she and Looloo de la Falaise [1948–2011] could sweep down the steps leading to Bethesda Fountain in their long, flowing dresses while Andy Warhol's octagonal, prismatic lens recorded it all for his 20-minute short, "pre-Raphaelite Dream".

Career

By the mid-1960s, Ormsby-Gore's elder siblings had established themselves in what had become Swinging London. Jane Ormsby-Gore's partner Michael Rainey opened the boutique Hung on You in 1964 which moved to the Kings Road in 1966. Julian and Jane signed with the English Boys model agency run by Sir Mark Palmer. With her siblings Alice was involved in various charity projects. One such was called 'Circus Alpha Centauri' which mounted concerts in London at Christmas 1967 to raise money for deprived children. One of the performers was the then unknown singer / guitarist Nick Drake, one of many musicians with whom the Ormsby-Gores had personal connections.

A year later Daily Mail columnist Charles Greville wrote that Victoria and Alice had started a company to 'generate peace and love between all races and creeds of this world ...

Called Circus Alpha Centauri, the Ormsby girls, with several other friends and backers, have just taken over business premises in Ludgate Circus. "We began the company a year ago," says Alice who is 16, "but after a period of inactivity we now have started again. The first thing we will do to raise money is to stage a festival of music in Lagos, Nigeria. We have already opened an office there and the Rolling Stones have said they'll perform. The whole idea is to bridge the great gap that exists between children who are rich and children that have nothing."

Greville wrote again about Ormsby-Gore's involvement with charitable work in 1970, contrasting her life with those of her elder sisters who are described as having moved into "hippy land", with some of their friends having been in court.

She is working for a welfare organisation which, among other things, helps drug addicts back to a normal life. "I'm not qualified to do anything really, so I thought I'd be a do-gooder," she tells me. Her father is, she says, "rather pleased that I'm doing something else besides learning to play the guitar." At the moment she is working part-time for the organisation known as Release, but she tells me that she's "hoping to do it full-time soon". She first came into contact with this lot of "do-gooders" when she was running a "peace circus" ... "I'm not very good at finances and we kept getting evicted from our offices," she explained. "Release helps young people who are being evicted and that's how I came to know about them."

Personal life

According to Ray Coleman, who conducted a lengthy interview with Ormsby-Gore for his 1985 biography of Eric Clapton, she was first attracted to the guitarist 'when they met at a party in Glebe Place, Chelsea during November 1968.' Cream played their final concert on 26 November. They met again the following spring, by which time Clapton had purchased Hurtwood Edge, a large Italianate villa in Surrey, and was forming his next group, Blind Faith. One account gives credit for the introduction to Ian Dallas in 1969 when Alice was 17. It was Dallas who first introduced Clapton to the Persian tale of Layla and Majnun, with Dallas suggesting Ormsby-Gore would be Layla (in fact, Clapton would identify Pattie Harrison as Layla). However, Clapton in his autobiography credits David Mlinaric, who did some interior design work for Clapton in March 1969. Mlinaric, a friend of Ormsby-Gore, took her with him, when visiting Clapton. Within a few weeks Clapton and Ormsby-Gore had formed a relationship. She was named as his girlfriend in an interview with Chris Welch, and lived thereafter partially at Hurtwood Edge.

On 7 June, Ormsby-Gore was photographed with Clapton, Ginger Baker and Germaine Greer backstage at Blind Faith's concert in Hyde Park. A few days later Ormsby-Gore travelled to Scandinavia during Blind Faith's 8-date tour, and was photographed with Clapton on 14 June in Oslo; and at Madison Square Garden on 12 July when the band played their first US gig.

Also during the summer of 1969 Ormsby-Gore entertained Marc Bolan and his girlfriend June Child at Hurtwood Edge. The friendship between Bolan, Child and Ormsby-Gore led to her being a witness at their wedding on 30 January 1970. Another mutual friend was the British singer Linda Lewis.

Ormsby-Gore is often described as being a fiancée of Clapton, but it is doubtful that this was ever more than newspaper speculation and leading questions by journalists. Talk of an engagement between Clapton and Ormsby-Gore appeared on 17 September 1969, but the couple were quick to debunk these remarks:

"While Lord Harlech's wedding plans run the course of true love, the marriage of his 17-year-old daughter Alice Ormsby-Gore, to 24-year-old guitarist Eric Clapton, a plasterer's son, seems rather more remote. Two months ago they admitted to being 'more or less engaged', with Eric adding, "Yes, I'd say there is more than a 50–50 chance we will get married soon". But yesterday Alice was saying: "We're certainly not thinking of getting married at the moment. But we do love each other and maybe it will happen in due course." A colleague of Clapton tried to explain: "Eric and Alice were a bit fraught after they said they were more or less engaged. I think they'll just go out and get married when they think their relationship needs the State's blessing. But I know they are not sitting around planning a wedding."

Death of her brother

On 5 November 1974, aged 22, Ormsby-Gore found her elder brother, Julian, dead in his apartment from gunshot wounds, an apparent suicide.

Ormsby-Gore told the coroner at her brother's inquest that "He hadn't been working very much because he was receiving treatment from doctors. The last time I heard from him was 10 days before his death when he phoned me at home; I suggested he should visit me but he didn't come".

Wales and Paris

Ormsby-Gore's life showed none of the usual traits of the 'socialite'. She most likely shared the outlook of her sister Victoria in this regard: "I despise The Social Life because it degrades the spirit. It is belittling to drag yourself to parties with utterly pointless people whose main activity is clamouring for glamorous recognition." After living near her ancestral home in the late 1970s, Ormsby-Gore moved to Paris, France in 1982 where she lived a private and Bohemian life, including on a houseboat near the Sixth Arrondissement. She also travelled to Istanbul. In 1984 Ray Coleman interviewed her extensively in Paris for the first full-length biography of Eric Clapton. Coleman found her a willing and lucid interviewee; she had an 'exceptional memory for detail' and gave 'hours of heartfelt (...) crucially important recollections of the five years in which she and Eric lived together.'. Giving this interview may have led to the call she made to Clapton in December 1984, extending an invitation to Paris, which, despite the imminent break-up of his marriage to Pattie, he declined.

On 25 January 1985, her father Lord Harlech was killed in a car accident. Ormsby-Gore and her three surviving siblings (including her younger brother Francis Ormsby-Gore who succeeded their father in the title of Lord Harlech) and her half-sister, Pandora Colin attended the funeral, along with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whom David Ormsby-Gore was romantically linked to in the late 1960s.

Final years

Alice Ormsby-Gore returned to England in 1994. She was treated in the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital for a time with liver and pancreas illness caused by alcohol. Later press coverage mentioned that in recent years she also had heart problems. She was persuaded to register at the Priory Hospital in South West London for treatment for heroin and alcohol addiction for three weeks in October 1994. While there she contacted Pete Townshend:

"She said it was hard to deal with the group therapy on offer because she felt she couldn't speak openly about her time with Eric. I told her that if she didn't speak about it she wouldn't get clean. As much as I loved Eric I told Alice to take care of herself for once. She stuck to her guns and died, tragically, the following year."

Clapton described how at The Priory there was a confrontational private session with him which indicated she was haunted by aspects of their time together during the years 1969–74. However, he also reported that she seemed optimistic about her treatment: "I was confident that she was making progress and anticipated that she would soon be on the road to a full and complete recovery." Ormsby-Gore told Chris Steele of The Priory that "she could not stand the pain of being sober."

Ormsby-Gore's last months were spent in Bournemouth, Dorset, living on benefits under the name of "Deirdre Stevenson" at several addresses, including a "half-way house" rehabilitation centre, with some support from Narcotics Anonymous. Her final address from March was a bedsit in Aylesbury Road, Boscombe, an area then notorious for drug dealing. Shortly before her death she was in hospital with injuries to her head, leg and arms which she said were from an assault by three men on nearby Walpole Road. One visitor to the flats at Aylesbury Road saw her sitting with two black eyes, a swollen jaw and her arm in plaster a few days before her death. She was also known to suffer black-outs.

Alice Ormsby-Gore died on 5 April 1995 after taking heroin which unwittingly was six times the fatal dose. Her body was discovered three days later at 10am on 8 April in her bedsit, with a belt in one hand and a syringe in another, a single needle mark in her arm. Her death was widely reported in the press. Her funeral took place on 22 April. By the time of the inquest in early May six other people had overdosed in the Bournemouth area owing to the heroin being unusually pure.

Titles

22 April 1952 – 14 February 1964: Miss Alice Magdalen Sarah Ormsby-Gore

14 February 1964 – 5 April 1995: The Honourable Alice Magdalen Sarah Ormsby-Gore