Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [131]
By the time Roger and I had parted company, the Crossroads Centre had opened its doors and was up and running, with Anne Vance at the helm and a weekly program, based on the twelve steps, in place. When Anne started to talk about advertising, however, I became nervous because I saw a dichotomy that might prove hard to resolve. While a “treatment center” depends for its existence on being quite vocal and self-promoting, the twelve-step fellowship relies on anonymity and secrecy. Yet we needed publicity and it had to be honest.
I got an idea from an event I had attended just before Christmas 1998, when Bobby Shriver, whose mother Eunice is the founder of the Special Olympics, invited me to play in front of the Clintons at a concert at the White House to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the SO. The event, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, consisted of the artists, who included Mary J. Blige, Sheryl Crow, Jon Bon Jovi, and Tracy Chapman, performing Christmas songs like “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Merry Christmas Baby.” It took place in a tent on the White House lawn. I remember being desperate to pee, but since finding a toilet would have meant going through complicated security and back into the main building, I decided to sneak out and water the lawn. I opened a flap in the tent and walked out into the darkness and had just undone my fly when I heard “Don’t move!” and there was a SWAT man there, all in black and camouflage, pointing an M-16 at me. The event made a huge amount of money for the SO through the release of an album of the show, and it occurred to me that this was the kind of road we should be on.
This was a busy and exciting time. Having let go of Roger, I was traveling all over to try and round up my business, spending time in New York and visiting LA to talk to record companies. I’d bought a house in Venice, California, and was footloose and fancy free, beginning to really enjoy life again. In LA, I talked to Lili Zanuck about the White House concert and what she thought might be the best way to promote Crossroads. She suggested that we do a show in Hollywood, and came up with the idea of a concert combined with a guitar auction. It sounded like a great idea.
In early March, I got a call from my sisters Cheryl and Heather to say that my mother, who had moved to Canada after my grandmother’s death, was dying. She had been ill for a while, and they had been keeping me aware of the growing uncertainty of her condition, so it didn’t come as much of a shock. I flew up to Toronto to be with them. I still had such mixed feelings about Pat. The last few years of her life had inspired a lot of disturbance in my own. Even though I was in my mid-fifties, it seemed like I was still looking for someone to take her place. I tried to kid myself that all my girlfriends since Pattie had been different from one another, all originals, and on the face of it, you could be fooled into thinking that.
But in one or two essential elements, they had all been the same; always unavailable, sometimes unstable, and in terms of my sobriety, even dangerous. Were these the conditions that had governed my feelings about my mother, and was I still unconsciously trying to replicate that relationship? I think so. My low self-esteem had dictated all my choices. I had chosen what I knew and was comfortable with, but they had all been unworkable situations. I had done a lot of family-of-origin work in my recovery, but it