Eric Clapton’s son Conor was supposed to spend March 20, 1991, at the Bronx Zoo with his father. Instead, the four-year-old died that morning after falling from the window of a 53rd-floor apartment in Manhattan, weeks before his fifth birthday.
The trip was the last promise Clapton made to his boy. More than three decades later, the details of those final days still explain why one of rock’s most guarded stars wrote the most personal song of his career.
A day at the circus
Clapton and Conor’s mother, Italian actress Lory Del Santo, were no longer a couple in 1991. Del Santo had full custody of their son. That spring she brought Conor to New York so the boy could spend Easter with his father.
On March 19, Clapton took Conor to a circus on Long Island. It was the first time the two had spent a whole day alone together.
Biographer Philip Norman describes the outing in his book Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton. According to Norman, Conor came back to the apartment full of talk about clowns and elephants. That evening, Clapton told Del Santo he meant to become a proper father from then on.
He had bigger plans, too. Clapton hoped to bring Conor and Del Santo to live with him in London. For the next day, he promised his son a visit to the Bronx Zoo, followed by lunch at an Italian restaurant nearby.
The morning everything changed
Clapton was elsewhere in the city that morning, getting ready to collect Conor. At the apartment, a housekeeper had just finished cleaning and had left a window open and unlatched. Conor was running around the rooms in high spirits. He ran past the window and fell.
Del Santo later described the moments before it happened. She had heard the fax machine and gone to check it before looking in on her son. When she reached the room, he was already gone.
“If I hadn’t checked the fax, he’d still be alive,” she said.
Clapton rushed to the building as soon as he heard. Del Santo has said that when she told him what had happened, he froze and said nothing at all. She has also said their relationship ended the day their son died.
A letter that came too late
Clapton flew Conor’s body back to England, together with the boy’s relatives from Italy. Conor was buried in Ripley, the Surrey village where Clapton grew up, about 25 miles southwest of London.
After the funeral, one more blow arrived in the post. A few days before the accident, Conor had written his first-ever letter to his father, with his mother helping him. He asked her what to write, and she suggested “I love you.” They mailed it to Clapton’s London home like any ordinary letter.
It arrived after Conor was gone. Del Santo was with Clapton when he opened his mail just after the funeral and found it. She has called it a moment she cannot forget.
How Eric Clapton’s son Conor shaped Tears in Heaven
Clapton withdrew almost completely from public life. He rented a small cottage in Antigua and, by his own account, stayed there for close to a year, speaking to very few people. His main companion was a little Spanish string guitar. He played it constantly, writing songs and rewriting them over and over until he felt he was moving back toward the surface.
The most famous of those songs began as a film commission. Clapton was writing music for the 1991 film Rush when he finished “Tears in Heaven” with songwriter Will Jennings. The song’s director, Lili Zanuck, persuaded Clapton to use it in the film, even though he wasn’t sure he wanted it released at all.
It became one of the defining records of the early 1990s. The song reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992. Clapton also performed an acoustic version on his MTV Unplugged session. In 1993 it won three Grammys: Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.
Why he put the song away
For years, Clapton sang about his son’s death night after night. In 2004 he dropped the song from his set lists. “I didn’t feel the loss anymore, which is so much a part of performing those songs,” he explained.
The break was not permanent. He brought “Tears in Heaven” back to his concerts in 2013 and still plays it now and then.
Conor never got to the Bronx Zoo. His father’s promise survives in a song millions of people know by heart, and in a short letter that said “I love you.”
