Saving Amy (25 page)

Just a few days later Janis flies to St Lucia, just before the jazz festival, to be with her daughter. She has her new boyfriend in tow. Mitch has already told me about him, when I commented on how lonely Janis seems. He says, ‘Not any more’, and proceeds to tell me that Janis has got together with one of his oldest friends over Passover. He says, ‘Amy will have a fit. She has known him since she was a kid.’

I tell him, ‘It is not Amy’s life. It is Janis’s life.’

When I ask if Amy knows, Mitch tells me that Janis is going to break it to Amy in May, just before the festival. Mitch is worried about how she will react to the news.

It is Janis’s decision to come out and I ask Mitch if he thinks it’s the right time. He says, ‘Daphne, I don’t know. Janis’s relationship with Amy is very strange. I cannot tell Janis what to do and when to come.’

I can see the irritation in his face as he says this. Again, it is difficult to judge him because he has been living with the situation, even though he knows it will just add tension and stress to Amy, who is dealing with the expectation of her comeback. On the other hand he has to do something about it, surely? He is Amy’s father. Why can’t he just say to Janis: ‘This is not a good time for you to come and to introduce your new boyfriend NOW! Amy is not as good as I am telling people. Why don’t you do it after the gig?’ Or, ‘This is not the time for her to feel guilty that she doesn’t have the time to spend with you. It will just put pressure on her.’ But he doesn’t.

And, for some reason, while Janis is able to talk to me and Amy is able to talk to me, these two people – mother and daughter – just can’t communicate with each other in a warm, straightforward manner.

Don’t get me wrong, they talk to each other – but they just don’t express what they feel.

After Amy goes on stage on the 8th, I receive countless messages on my phone saying it is her worst performance ever. I had seen it coming – anyone’s dog could have seen it coming – but Mitch couldn’t.

Before Amy went on stage I tell Mitch that Amy shouldn’t perform, ‘If you let her go on stage, the pictures will be worse than those of her crawling around like a horse.’ Mitch has explained that the January photographs of Amy allegedly begging for alcohol on all fours were merely his daughter playing ‘horse’.

‘Moreover,’ I add, ‘it will humiliate her and it will ruin her career for years.’

I am also thinking, why on earth, would you put your frightened daughter on that stage?

He informs me that Raye, Amy’s manager, is over in St Lucia and that he’s seen her and that everything is OK.

But Amy’s manager is not you, I think. He’s not Amy’s father. Why, on earth, is Mitch letting a manager choose what’s best for his own daughter?

On the day of the festival, Amy had reportedly started drinking at 11.00 a.m. Afterwards Mitch comments, ‘
… Now, it’s alcohol.’

Amy flies back to Britain on 12 July 2009 to deal with her marriage and also to face charges of assault. She bursts into tears at Gatwick Airport as she comes through security. The final break from Blake comes on Thursday, 16 July 2009 at the High Court in London. Two years, one jail term, numerous rehab attempts and one front-page scandal after another and the Winehouse–Fielder-Civil union is officially history. Or is it?

I recall Mitch saying to me in London that it is difficult to know what kind of influence Blake has over Amy. ‘He certainly has a power … but by Amy’s own admission he is extremely manipulative and extremely controlling. So, he is able to influence her, … not only her but other people as well, … in ways that you and I can’t imagine.’

I also remember being with Mitch in St Lucia, just before I flew back. We had had several discussions about Amy and Blake’s possible divorce during our time together,
but this time, when it seems a likely event, I point out to Amy’s father, ‘…They can live together even if they are divorced and frankly the forbidden fruit will smell [even] better [to] Amy.’ Mitch agreed at the time, ‘You are right. How do I prevent that?’ The truth is that this is something that even control freak Mitch can’t prevent. If these people are in love and are as co-dependent on each other as they appear, preventing them from seeing each other will just make their relationship all the more appealing.

Sure enough, within weeks of Amy and Blake’s divorce, stories begin to surface about the couple’s continued love for each other, with Blake reportedly declaring in the
News of the World
that he loves Amy as much as ever and that he knows ‘she still loves me’. This is followed by other stories of ‘secret flirting’ on Facebook, alleged 36-hour love trysts and rumours that Amy and Blake will remarry in 2010.

At the time of writing this, Amy is constantly in the press. Will she and Blake get back together? Are they getting married? Is she still on drugs? Is she still anorexic or bulimic? Will she ever produce another album? The attention and focus on Amy and her life is endless – from her latest hairstyle to her boob job. But, where does that leave Amy? What does the future hold for her? Does she still need saving? Or are her problems over?

Over the time I spent with Mitch, Janis, Jane and Amy, I learned a lot about their family and their relationship to ‘saving Amy’ and how it has impacted on the way they
behave with each other. Sometimes, I feel, Amy’s problems are used as an excuse to mask other underlying and undealt-with issues in the family. Certainly this seems to be the case in Mitch and Jane’s relationship, among others.

In the end, I filmed 40 hours of sit-down interviews with regard to
Saving Amy,
and some of the events and conversations that took place are recorded in this book, but also during the time I spent with the Winehouses, we had several times more that in informal conversations. This allowed my crew and myself to learn lot about Amy and the family. There is, after all, nothing like those personal one-to-one conversations, when you are with someone in a relaxed environment, for allowing one to learn and understand the needs, fears, expectations and other emotions of the people who you are interviewing. Such conversations, over the years, have allowed me a much better understanding of my many celebrity interviewees – entertainers such as Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton and Liza Minnelli, politicians and heads of state such as Hillary Clinton and Nelson Mandela and actors such as Lauren Bacall, Johnny Depp and Mia Farrow.

One of the main things I learned about the Winehouses during that time is that they are not shy of talking to the press. Mitch, the man who informed me in one of our early meetings in London that he would talk about his private life, his family’s private life ‘only once’, has spoken about it many times since.

I experienced this first hand, shortly after we began filming the documentary. The French magazine
Closer
called to tell me that Janis and Mitch had already spoken to them via TF1, the leading national television station. I was
surprised, but when I asked Mitch about it all he said was,
‘Oh, but that was just before we met you. A few days before we met you
.’ It seemed odd but I didn’t comment any further on his behaviour at the time. Then, the matter arose months later in March 2009, when Mitch was with my crew, Bitu and me at the Trader Vic’s bar in London’s Hilton Park Lane hotel. I had had a busy few months not just filming
Saving Amy,
but also working on my many other exclusives and for the several charities that I host. Mitch suddenly accused me of ignoring him and not paying him enough attention. An interview, published in
Closer
magazine that week, came up during our subsequent conversation and I commented that none of my other interviewees, be it Michael Jackson’s parents or Liza Minnelli, for example, had ever spoken to the press while I was interviewing them.
‘I don’t understand what we’re doing anymore,’
I told him.

He denied having spoken to the magazine, saying he didn’t even know who
Closer
was. He continued, ‘You know Daphne, there are some satellites right now, I heard, that can just tape you from above and get what you’re saying.
I never talked to anybody!’

Mitch then mentioned that he had been approached by a company who wanted to film him interviewing the families of addicted people. He told me, ‘I said “No. I’m doing things with Daphne.”’

Later, we were astonished to learn that by this time Mitch had already been filming for three months with another company. Fame was that important to him. Now Mitch seems to be getting his 15 minutes of fame. As the
Guardian,
among other papers, commented in November
2009, ‘
Who will play the eponymous hero in 2015’s most hotly anticipated biopic, The Mitch Winehouse Story
?’

Once a London cabbie, it now seems the sky’s the limit for Amy’s Dad. The documentary he talked about subsequently aired as
My Daughter Amy
on Channel 4 in January 2010, which led Amy to Tweet in response: ‘
Why don’t my Dad WRITE a SONG when something bothers him instead of going on national tv? An you thought YOUR parents were embarrassing [sic].’

Mitch got a chatshow and had a reported record deal lined up – and he testified at a UK Home Affairs select committee hearing on the cocaine trade, about which he admitted he knew nothing.

As Mitch himself has stated, sometimes he makes situations worse through his actions or words. Certainly this seemed to be the case when he was asked about Amy’s health on UK national television in October 2009. He replied ‘fantastic, fantastic’, but then added ‘And her boobs are great as well’, commenting on Amy’s £35,000 breast enlargement job. Then he saw everyone’s expressions, and added: ‘I shouldn’t have said that, should I? She looks absolutely fantastic’. He did, however, admit that Amy still has a long way to go in terms of her recovery.

‘We’re all recovering,’ he stated.

At the time this begged the question –
recovering from what?

So, after all this, what would be the best way to sum up how the Winehouses view Amy and her problems? Perhaps, it is
best to leave you with something Mitch said to me during our many conversations:

‘[Amy] is a wonderful person who only thinks about other people. … so in that regard I think to myself I am the luckiest man in the world. Unfortunately, there is another aspect … that she has a problem and in my family we have had situations like this – not with drugs but … when people have been sick – and the way we deal with [them] is not to shun them, not to move away from them but to move closer to them. Not smother them [but just] say “we are here for you” … “we love you” and “we will support you.” And “if there is anything that we can do for you we are here.”’