Off The Record
As The Singing Icon Turns 80, Eric Clapton’s Heartbreaking Last Vow To His 4-Year-Old Son Conor, Who Passed Away After Falling 53 Stories From A New York Apartment
Eric Clapton made one sad last promise to his son Conor, who was four years old. Conor died when he fell 53 floors from an apartment in New York and broke it.
Clapton, now 79, and model Lory Del Santo, 66, had a son named Conor. On March 20, 1991, five months before his fifth birthday, Conor died when he fell from the 53rd floor of a New York building.
The child fell out of a Brooklyn apartment window that a cleaner had left open. His mother was renting the apartment.
The singing star, who turned 80 on Sunday, found out about the terrible event the day before. The day before, he had made a touching promise to Lory, his ex-wife at the time who had custody of Conor after they broke up.
Eric took Conor on his first date by himself the day before he died. They went to Nassau Coliseum on North Island.
Philip Norman, a historian, told The Mirror about the important day: “That sawdust-scented afternoon showed him what he’d been missing.”
“When they returned to the apartment, with Conor chattering excitedly about the clowns and elephants, Eric told Lory that, from now on, he intended to be a proper father.”
Eric had planned to take his son to the Bronx Zoo and an Italian restaurant the next day, but they didn’t get the chance.
In a new TV show that aired in January, Eric talked about how the song “Tears In Heaven” helped him deal with the death of his four-year-old son Conor.
Clapton released Tears in Heaven in December 1991. In an interview for his 1992 MTV special, Eric Clapton Unplugged, the famous singer talked about how the song helped him deal with his sadness over losing his only son. After More Than 30 Years.
“It was really needed to show loss because of what happens in the movie,” he said of the song that was on the music for the movie Rush. “It was also a good chance for me to write about my son and the loss of my son and have somewhere to put it, to channel it.”
“And I really wanted to say something about what had happened to me. The movie gave me a great chance to do that—I could write this song for the movie and talk about how I felt.”
He said he wanted to include his fans in his grief ‘ in a way’ adding: “I do intend to make these things known and I will play them in concert and put them on record. And it is, for me, a healing process and I think it’s important that you share that with people that love your music.”
“It’s a very personal matter, but I never met my father, and I’d realized it when I was with my son — the closest I ever came to looking in my father’s eyes was when I looked in my son’s eyes.”
“So I wrote a song about that. It was kind of a strange, like a strange cycle thing that occurred to me and another thing that I felt I would like to share.”
He said that having a 40-year-old daughter named Ruth, who is two years older than Conor and whose mom is Yvonne Kelly, helped him deal with his sadness.
He said, “Yvonne knew that [being close to Ruth] would help and it was true. I was able to hold a child again and to be held by a child.”
“Ruth has been a tremendous support. I had no idea how much power a child could have on an adult’s life, how much it could make you feel valid, unique and strong.”
Unplugged with Eric Clapton The movie Over 30 Years Later was streamed on Paramount+ on February 12.
He got married to Melia McEnery in 2002, and they have three kids together: Julie, 23, Ella, 22, and Sophie, 19.
Clapton told the world in 2018 that after Conor’s death, he went to Antigua to live alone for a year.
The famous musician locked himself up on an island in the Caribbean and spent all of his time writing songs, hoping that they would help him “heal.”
Recalling the gut-wrenching days after Conor’s death, Eric said, “I brought him home from New York with all of the Italian side of his mother’s family and we went through the process of the funeral.”
He said that after the funeral, he rented a house in Antigua and played his guitar there for almost a year without talking to anyone else.
“When they left, I had this little Spanish string guitar, I became attached to that I went off to Antigua and I rented a little cottage there in a community and I just swatted mosquitos all day and played this guitar and stayed there for almost a whole year, without much contact with the outside world, and I tried to heal myself,” he said.
“All I could do was play and write these songs and I re-wrote and re-performed them again and again and again and again until I felt like I had made some sort of move towards the surface of my being and then I was able to come out.”
A sad letter from Conor was sent to the rock guitarist just hours after the child’s funeral.
The child wrote his first letter to his father just days before the accident. His mother, Lory, sent it to Clapton’s London home, but it didn’t get there until after the child had died.
Lory said, The baby had learned to write a few words and he said to me, “Oh mummy, I want to write a letter to daddy, what shall I write?” I told him, “Well, write, I love you”. He wrote that and we posted it like a regular letter.
“After Conor died, Eric and I arrived in London for the funeral. I was there when Eric received his mail just after the funeral and he opened it up and it was Conor’s letter. That is a moment I cannot forget.”
Clapton wrote the song “Tears in Heaven” for Conor. Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male, Song of the Year, and Record of the Year are the three awards it won.
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