Alice Ormsby-Gore

Alice Magdalen Sarah Ormsby Gore (22 April 1952 - c. 17 April 1995) was a British socialite.

She was the youngest daughter of William David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech and his first wife Sylvia Thomas. She became engaged to guitarist Eric Clapton but they never married. She died of a heroin overdose in 1995.

Teenage years

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."^[1]

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.^[2] 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.^[3] 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;^[4] Alice also became hooked on the drug. In his autobiography Clapton says, "Alice came back to live with me, and she started using too".^[3]

Time magazine reported their intention to marry on Monday, 16 March 1970:^[5]

“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."^[6]

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

Death of her brother

In 1974, aged 22, Ormsby Gore found her elder brother, Julian Ormsby Gore (33), dead in his apartment from gunshot wounds, an apparent suicide.^[7]

Final years

Ormsby Gore's father (William) David Ormsby Gore died as the result of a car accident in 1985. He was succeeded by his youngest son Francis Ormsby Gore, 6th Baron Harlech as his eldest, Julian Ormsby Gore, had committed suicide in the 1970s (see above). The 6th Baron Harlech (Francis Ormsby Gore) died at his home in Gwynedd on Monday 1 February 2016. A North Wales Police spokesman said, “ North Wales Police were called to an address at Talsarnau near Harlech at 11.40am on Monday, following reports of the sudden death of a man in his 60s."

Alice Ormsby Gore died in poverty, found dead in a bedsit in Bournemouth, Dorset, having taken six times the fatal dose of heroin.^[8] The syringe was still in her arm.^[9]

The Independent (London) reported on 21 April 1995, the day before her 43rd birthday:^[10]

Lord Harlech's sister, Alice Ormsby Gore, 42, who was once engaged to the rock guitarist Eric Clapton, died after taking a drug overdose at her flat, an inquest in Bournemouth, Dorset, heard.

References

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