Saving Amy (24 page)

Mitch murmurs, ‘Maybe I am part of [Amy’s] problem.’

I remain quiet, even though he repeats it again.

I ask Mitch how he feels about the recent events involving his daughter. He must be in a state of turmoil with so much to digest, I think, especially now he is going back to London.

‘What is going on in your mind?’ I say.

‘In the first place I am glad to be going home to see my family. And knowing that Amy is safe and happy, that’s good … but primarily I am glad to be going home,’ he says.

‘There is a lot to digest,’ I tell him. ‘… [And] also there [must be] a lot of continuing worries, right?

‘… Some of the people she speaks to … can hurt her?’ I add.

‘I don’t know about that,’ he says. ‘I don’t know about
hurt
her. If you mean by selling a story … I would not call that hurting her. I have to say … that’s her business. If she wants to [talk to people] she is going to have to suffer the consequences. The consequences are not going to be great
[if] someone … sell[s] a story to one of the tabloids that she ran into the bar topless at dinner. I am just giving you an example – she never did
that.
[I have] different worries. They are not on the same magnitude as they were six months ago. What it shows is that we are returning to a kind of normality. … We have got an awful long way to go. … It is going to be a rocky road but we are certainly moving in the right direction, there is
no
question about it,’ he says with conviction.

‘I don’t think people understand what you are going through,’ I tell him. ‘… It is a terrible feeling to know that you are a parent of an adult, right, and in [Amy’s] case, a very talented adult, and you still have to worry all the time. [It’s] like you have a little baby [and] you don’t know what will happen next.’

‘I am glad that you brought that up because a lot of these things that are worrying me wouldn’t be worrying me if I weren’t here. I tend sometimes to make [a] situation worse than what it is … exacerbate [it] and make it much worse because in my mind [Amy] is not talking to a nice woman on the beach, she is talking to a potential drug dealer, [for example]. She is not … but unfortunately that is how my mind has been working.

‘So,’ he continues, ‘what I have got to do is try and retrain my mind so that when I see her talking to a perfectly normal person on the beach, that is fine. I don’t need to intervene. Why shouldn’t she be … saying anything other than pleasantries? Sometimes I think I make the situation worse, unquestionably.’

‘Just by being there?’ I query.

‘Not by being there,’ he replies. ‘But by my reaction …’
‘… [Amy] is not partying now,’ Mitch says to me later. ‘Now, she is getting down to work. She is getting back into her music.’

‘[But] you [will] always have to worry about her,’ I say to him. ‘It is like you have a beautiful little baby and you have to run after her … Does [it] cross your mind that you always have to be worried [about her]?’

‘Yes,’ Mitch says. ‘… All the time. But I worry about my son [Alex], too – and there is nothing to worry about with my son.

‘I am a worrier. I can’t help it.’

We discuss the forthcoming festival at which Amy is going to make a much anticipated appearance.

‘So what is Amy going to sing?’ I ask.

‘Frankly, I don’t know. The band is not here yet. They are arriving only next week,’ Mitch says. ‘She is working with her producer Salaam [Remi] and the engineers [on] her new record.’ He adds, ‘As you saw Daphne, she has a very short attention span [so] they are recording everything she does. Then, they will select [material].

‘So … over the next couple of weeks, there isn’t going to be as many gaps as there [have been] for her to fill,’ he adds. ‘I am not saying that she will not be able to go down to the beach and go horse riding – she probably will – but she is not going to be able to disappear for five to six hours. She is going to have to come back because everybody is on a tight
schedule, and that is what she wants. She wants that. She wants everything to be so that she can say, “Right, at 9 o’clock we will be in the studio for four hours, and then we do something else, and then we go for a drink”, or whatever it is. She likes that sort of scheduling. … She likes that direction.’

‘So, what is the story with Blake?’ I say.

I had asked Mitch when I first arrived on the island why he thought Blake had been so quiet. At that time, Mitch was dismissive of his son-in-law, saying, ‘Who cares about him? He has nothing to say?’, which I took at the time to be denial, denial, denial. Blake is someone who, whether he is being good or bad, sells interviews to newspapers and he hadn’t, at that point, really spoken to anyone since his release from jail. I told Mitch then, ‘There is a newspaper out there, whether it is the
News of the World,
or the
Sun
or somebody else, who is [probably] paying him a lot of money to shut up [now] and they will come and interview him at the right time.’

But Mitch didn’t like that. He didn’t want to deal with that reality. And – a few months later – Blake gave an exclusive interview to
The Sun.

But, of course, today, Mitch surprises me when I ask him about Blake as his attitude seems much more conciliatory. He says that Amy and Blake aren’t in touch with each other, but adds, ‘I can understand what she is going through and also what
he
is going through. They are two people who love each other. And have come to
the realization that they cannot see each other. It will be dangerous for both of them. But I understand how difficult it must be, not to be able to see the person you are in love with.

‘I am in love with Jane, my wife, and if I couldn’t see her – it will be the most painful thing for me. Look, maybe one day – if they are both clean and strong enough – they can see each other. But for now – they both understand that it can’t be.’

After the interview, I say to him in private that I’m surprised at his mellow attitude towards Blake. Mitch explains, ‘I am upset and I miss Jane. I want to see Jane and I want to see my son. I want to be out of here.’

And that frankly makes two of us.

I feel bad for him because I know Mitch loves Jane and I know he means what he says. He feels helpless seeing Amy drinking but things are not going well and I feel so tired, watching Mitch lying to himself again.

The reality of the situation is that despite Mitch’s seemingly optimistic attitude towards his daughter, one which leads him constantly to be disappointed, there is no record on the horizon, as the London producer has already informed us. The musicians who have flown out to work with Amy are lovely but there isn’t much going on creatively in Amy’s studio. They are just hanging out there most of the time, although the studio is paying them.

Universal had sent out a lovely couple of executives to talk to Amy about her options since she hasn’t released a
record in years. She is a challenge for them as she hasn’t performed recently and her last gigs were troubled, to say the least, but the couple are game. They bring out papers for her to sign via Mitch but, as Amy made clear the night before we left the island, she wants people to deal with her directly. And so, she decides not to deal with the people from Universal at all, even going so far as to insult the woman at my birthday meal. The two record executives are very nice people but they leave the island looking frustrated. They have taken a nine-hour flight, a three-hour cab journey and a helicopter ride to see Amy and work with her. They leave empty handed. This is Amyland.

After we finish filming, Amy shows up later at my villa to say goodbye. Mitch is with her. She has on her trademark denim cutoffs and a bikini top. This morning’s femme fatale is back to being a little girl. She hugs me again and again.

At one point, she sucks her thumb, which she has done before in my company. But this time Mitch, who is aware that a New York film crew is present, just pushes her thumb away – like you do with a small child. I suddenly have a flashback to yesterday’s shoot – so, it’s okay for Mitch to kiss his daughter on the lips, but not for Amy to suck her thumb in front of the cameras?

I repeat what I said to her in the early hours, before I left her villa. To make it big on the 8 May.

But now Amy is on the defence: ‘I
AM
BIG!’ she cries.

‘Great,’ I say, adding, ‘Go and make everybody in the audience fall in love with you.’

‘But they are!’
Amy replies, immediately.
‘Everybody is.
I
know
it. When [I] go on stage, I
feel
it.’

She hugs Erbil goodbye and he wishes Amy good luck, in turn, but she doesn’t like this either and tells him, ‘I don’t
need
luck. …’

As we leave, Amy says to me, ‘Daphne, I love you. I really love you. I
really
love this girl ….’

We bump into Amy again, a little while later, outside. This time she is even sweeter. She hugs me again and says simply, ‘Let me walk with you and wait for the car.’