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The life of Eric Clapton, who since this Monday already exceeds the milestone of 75 years on earth, is one of the most torrential, hyperbolic and, in a way, unfortunate in rock history. Apparently, if we look only at material conquests and artistic glory, it could seem that Clapton was a man blessed by fortune: he has lived for years in a magnificent mansion in Surrey, in the green and rural interior of England, he has a yacht valued at nine million pounds (just over 10 million euros), he was identified as a living god by means of a famous graffiti on a London wall, and although he no longer lavishes himself as before - his right hand, one of the More graceful than ever before have played a guitar, it no longer responds as before-, it remains a respected legend almost unanimously. If the best way to live is to leave a mark on your time and on subsequent generations, Slowhand, as it is known, has undoubtedly had an existence worthy of subsequent memory.
But faithful to the devilish dimension that rock is assigned, especially since the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson signed his pact with the devil at a crossroads in the vicinity of the Mississippi River delta, to obtain the glory Clapton also had to visit hell, like the hero of Virgil, and return alive. Throughout his life, in parallel to the successes, Slowhand has also chained an incessant streak of misfortunes, miseries, disappointments, disagreements and addictions to alcohol and drugs. In fact, all those episodes are inseparable from his triumphs in bands like The Yardbirds, Cream or his solo years.
Clapton's biographers seem to have agreed that the whole sad part of Clapton's life begins in childhood - the Freudian wild card, of course, always appears providentially to the rescue of great stories. What happened back then was that his mother abandoned him, putting him in the hands of his grandparents to take care of his childhood. The absence and longing for a maternal figure would be, then, the trigger for the rest of the great episodes in her life: the search for a stable and complicit partner to repair the trauma, the desire to have children to succeed where their parents failed, and dependence on heroin, cocaine, and the bottle at different stages of their turbulent human development.
Eric Clapton's drug addictions have never been hidden, but they have not wanted to magnify themselves in the story of his life. However, they are important, stable and durable over time. Alcohol, ingested in large quantities - also before concerts at their most turbulent stage - has always been the easy way to abandon pain. For years he was also addicted to heroin, and until relatively recently, as he had confessed to his inner circle, cocaine was still part of his empty hours , unable to completely abandon it. While other skulls of his generation had managed to get away from the drug and start a clean old age - this is the case of Keith Richards, who has gotten everything, but whose blood vessels are now like jets of gold -, for Clapton, disengaging It was uphill, it was a difficult process.
That is what would justify, too, the setbacks in his love life. Married three times, the first two marriages either started badly or ended suddenly after a family tragedy. In 1979 he married Patty Boyd, the one who had been the wife of George Harrison. This episode, which irreparably damaged her friendship with the former guitarist of The Beatles, also ended dramatically when, after a decade, all the marital fights and infidelities that marked the relationship were uncovered. Clapton and Boyd tried to have children, but she could not conceive; in the meantime, he had an affair with Yvonne Kelly, who at the time was responsible for a recording studio where Clapton used to work, and from the relationship an illegitimate daughter, Ruth, emerged from whose public existence it was not known until after several years.
Clapton's desire to have children motivated, to a large extent, the divorce with Patty Boyd and the marriage with his second wife, the model Lory del Santo. It was another marriage without electricity: they had a son, Conor, who died at the age of four in 1991 after falling from a balcony. That tragic event was what led Clapton to compose Tears in Heaven, his most popular song after Leyla . In 1998 he married for the third time with Melia McEnery, a 22-year-old girl at the time who has been his partner to this day, in the most stable and least cluttered stage of a Clapton that took its progressive entry into the late phase of maturity with ease. That marriage brought him, finally, the stability and happiness so longed for: three daughters and a grandson that Ruth had, his first illegitimate daughter. Gone are therefore the worst days, and those of quiet old age arrived.
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