Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [108]
The autumn of 1985 found us touring Italy. From my initial visit there a few years earlier, when I was first exposed to its architecture, fashion, cars, and food, I had had a fascination with the country and its lifestyle in general, but I had never dated an Italian woman. I was telling this to the Italian promoter, who told me that he knew a really interesting girl and that he would introduce us. We were playing a couple of shows in Milan, and after one of them, at dinner, he brought along a strikingly attractive girl named Lori del Santo. Born in Verona, Lori was the second daughter of a poor Catholic family. When her father died young, she was sent to a convent school to be educated while her mother worked all hours to make ends meet.
As soon as she left school, she made the decision that she would never be poor again. She went to Rome with the intention of making a career in modeling and TV, and by the age of twenty had got parts in various films and sitcoms, and had become the girlfriend of the international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. By the time I met her, seven years later, she was famous throughout Italy as the star of a popular weekly TV show called Drive-In, which was the Italian equivalent of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. With her long, rich, dark curly hair, strong bone structure, and voluptuous figure, she was a real southern Italian–style beauty, and I was immediately smitten.
Lori had a powerful personality, very confident and flirtatious, and I was flattered by her interest in me. Indeed, the energy between us was very strong, the kind that exists only when you meet someone for the first time. It was also very playful, a quality that had disappeared from my relationship with Pattie. When the tour ended and I went back home to her, we made a further halfhearted attempt to rekindle our marriage, but it didn’t really catch. I realized that my attentions had shifted. I had been home just a few days when I suddenly told Pattie that I was leaving. I had met somebody in Italy and I was going to go and stay with her. I was like a flame in the wind, being blown all over the place, with no concern for other people’s feelings or for the consequences of my actions. In my mind I had persuaded myself that, since I had just turned forty, I was going through a midlife crisis, and that was the explanation for everything.
I turned up on Lori’s doorstep in Milan, right out of the blue, and told her I’d left Pattie and I was coming to live with her. Funnily enough, it was almost as if she was living an existential life herself, because she didn’t bat an eyelid. Her attitude was one of “Come and live here and we’ll see where it takes us.” It was an extraordinary moment for me, because having actually got there, I just thought to myself, “I’m going to start my life again from scratch here in Italy, without any idea at all of where it is going to go.”
We lived in Milan for a while, where Lori was starting a new career as a fashion photographer. She had started doing work for the big fashion houses that were going strong then, like Versace and Armani, and it was through her that I became friendly with the Versace family, particularly with Donatella’s husband, Paul Beck. I was already a huge fan of Gianni’s. I had been buying his things for a while and thought of him as the best tailor in the world. His ideas were revolutionary, but simple at the same time. I loved both Giorgio Armani and Gianni, but at that moment in time, in my opinion, Gianni was the rock ’n’ roll tailor.
For a while I became Lori’s model and spent quite a lot of time doing shoots with her. As our relationship