Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [116]
During the Journeyman recording sessions, I was introduced to a pretty young Italian model named Carla, who, by default, would become my next life teacher. Carla was introduced to me by a friend of Lori’s, which in itself was a little odd, and caused a lot of problems for everyone over the next few months. Initially I wasn’t overly interested, but she was clearly a music fan and seemed quite taken with me. I was very flattered because she was only twenty-one and very sexy, with long hair, a remarkable figure, and a young-looking face that was slightly Asian, with high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. We began dating, and in a very short time I became obsessed with her.
I was living in New York while I made the record, and it served as a backdrop for our affair, very fast and very romantic. Carla took me to a great restaurant, called Bilboquet, where I met and became friends with the proprietor, Philippe Delgrange. This place was the big hangout for all the rich and fashionable Europeans in New York, and in my naivety, I believed I fit right in. While it was still going strong, the Stones came through town on their Steel Wheels tour, and Carla mentioned that she was a fan of theirs and asked me if I would take her to see them. We went to the show, and afterward I took her backstage to meet the guys. I remember saying to Jagger, “Please, Mick, not this one. I think I’m in love.” In the past he had made several unsuccessful passes at Pattie, and I knew Carla would appeal to his eye. For all my pleadings, it was only a matter of days before they started a clandestine affair. In the interim, I went to Africa to play a short tour, starting in Swaziland and going on to Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique.
On my return, I visited Carla’s family home in St. Tropez, where I got a fairly chilly reception from Carla, but also got the chance to meet a couple of her previous boyfriends. They seemed like great guys and commiserated with me on my plight, implying that Carla tended to move through men quite quickly, sometimes quite ruthlessly. A short while later, after Carla had stood me up a couple of times, I got a call from the girl who had introduced us, telling me that Carla was definitely seeing Mick and it was serious. I had heard rumors, and now apparently it was true. The obsession gripped me for the rest of that year and took some grizzly turns when I found myself guesting with the Stones on a couple of shows, knowing that she was lurking somewhere in the background.
What did I learn from Carla? Not much at the time, but as time passed, I learned to differentiate between lust and love, and a little bit later between pleasure and happiness. To her credit, once the seduction was complete, she didn’t continue to lead me on, and at no time did she ever really express any deep feelings for me, but in my madness, I was able to convince myself that this was the love of my life. The deception involved in her affair with Jagger drove a deep wedge between me and him, and for a while I found it hard to think of him without malice. Later on, of course, I quietly felt both gratitude and compassion toward him, first for delivering me from certain doom, and second for apparently suffering such prolonged agony in her service.
Prompted by my obsession with Carla and Mick, I began to do some proper recovery work. For a start, it was deemed necessary by my sponsor that a “fourth step” inventory be taken on the subject of my resentment toward them both. The fourth step is generally practiced as an honest review of the past in order to identify the