Alice

About

The Honourable Alice Magdalen Sarah Ormsby-Gore (22 April 1952 - 5 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. She left school at 14 and then held an assortment of jobs from shop clerk to manager of a rock group, as both a photographic model and a runway model, and helped train horses. Aged just 16, in late 1968, she met musician Eric Clapton, who dragged her into heroin. The couple announced their engagement on 7 September 1969. From December 1969 to March 1970, however, Eric Clapton had an affair with Paula Boyd, Pattie Boyd’s younger sister, in order to reach her. David Hepworth says in his 1971. Never a Dull Moment book: “Clapton was conducting affairs with [Pattie] Boyd’s younger sister Paula and Alice Ormsby-Gore, the teenage daughter of Lord Harlech. Alice was drinking two bottles of vodka a day because there was not enough junk to feed both his habit and hers. Clapton’s depression, which was rarely far away, had come in like a storm front following the unaccustomed experience of being rejected by both Pattie and the public who had failed to buy his 1970 album Layla.” When it ended after Paula realised she was not the inspiration for “Layla”, he’d picked up with Alice again, although there was to be no further talk of their getting married. Alice, now eighteen, had developed theatrical aspirations and, during their separation, had won a part in an Israeli production of the “tribal rock musical” Hair. Consequently, for most of that summer she was learning Hebrew for he role, then onstage in Tel Aviv and living in a fishing village beside the Sea of Galilee. When the show’s run ended, the returned to the very different milieu of Hurtwood Edge with Clapton. 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. He, on the other hand, was in love with his friend George Harrison's wife, model Pattie Boyd. Clapton broke the engagement and ended their relationship for good after recovering from his heroin addiction with the help of Ormsby Gore's family. In 1974, aged 22, Ormsby Gore found her elder brother, Julian Ormsby Gore (33), dead in his apartment from gunshot wounds, an apparent suicide. Ormsby Gore's father William David Ormsby Gore died as the result of a car accident in 1985. He was succeeded by Francis Ormsby Gore, 6th Baron Harlech. Alice Ormsby Gore died in poverty in a bedsit in Bournemouth, Dorset aged only 42.