Saving Amy (3 page)

Janis always refers to her ex-husband as Mitchell during our conversations.

‘She was ashamed!’ Mitch comments, laughing.

Janis just says, ‘It was a case of people would say “Why?! WHY?!”’

I ask them if it was love at first sight for both of them. Mitch says that it’s hard to explain how it works, but adds that he just knew that it was right. Even so, the road to marriage wasn’t plain sailing for them by any means. As Mitch says, ‘We had a few ups and downs. Janis was very good with money and I wasn’t so she had to discipline me on a number of occasions. … Actually she called our engagement off.’

He continues, ‘I felt so ill, I couldn’t go to work. I begged her to come out with me for the day. I thought, “I’ve got to do something to make it up”, so I phoned in and said my grandmother had passed away. And, it’s what happened that day. My grandmother passed away. On that day … You’ve gotta be careful what you wish for …’.

‘My grandmother passed away,’ he repeats, ‘but Janis and I were still together. That was the summer of ’75 or ’76. Then, we got married in December of that year.’

But not everyone was happy about it. Janis’s mother thought her daughter would marry a professional. Mitch says when his mother found out what Janis’s mother had said, she ‘wiped the floor with her.’

‘I was a professional,’ Mitch protests. ‘A professional croupier!’, but adds that Janis’s mother never really came to terms with their relationship.

Janis and Mitch settled down to married life in a small two-bedroom flat in Southgate in North London and the heart of the Jewish community. In 1979, their son, Alex, was born, followed four years later, on 14 September 1983 by Amy.

In one of our early interviews, Mitch described Amy’s birth at Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield, commenting that his daughter has always been in a hurry and her birth seemed to be no different.

‘… That particular night she was in a hurry because my ex-wife Janis had been taking – I think it’s called extract of raspberry to help her with the birth because when my son was born she found it quite traumatic, and she was advised this extract of raspberry or strawberry, something like that, would help with the birth, so Janis went into labour and literally 10 minutes later Amy was born. It was possibly the quickest labour in the world and they had to catch her; she nearly fell off the table. She flew out literally, so – now we joke, she was in a hurry to get out and she’s always in a rush.’

Janis says, ‘… She was four days late.’

‘Was she? I don’t remember that. I think she and Alex were both four days late!’

Janis says that she thought Amy would be another boy, like Alex. ‘I thought, I don’t know what to do with a girl. I knew what to do with a boy, changing nappies and everything. I didn’t know what to do with a girl! And then she arrived and she looked just like her brother did. Exactly! Same baby, yeah!’

Both Mitch and Janis have commented in many interviews on how beautiful Amy was. Amy was a lovely baby, Mitch agrees, and did indeed look like her brother, Alex. She now, Mitch insists, looks the spitting image of Janis. ‘She has her hair short and if I showed you a picture of Janis when she was 25 you can barely tell the difference. They are very much alike.’

This is still true. It strikes me when I finally meet Janis with my film crew at the Hotel Intercontinental in London. My first thoughts are: ‘Here comes Amy. She is
so
Amy – before the heavy drugs and alcohol kick in.’

When you have a daughter who is as famous as Amy Winehouse, a singer renowned for her unique voice and brilliance as a musician, you would think that there must have been some indication of that talent early on in her childhood. Or was there? I ask Mitch and Janis about this.

‘She always loved music,’ Mitch says. ‘We were a family that sang and danced.’

Certainly music is in both Mitch and Janis’s backgrounds. Mitch’s mother, Cynthia, who Amy was really close to, was once engaged to the legendary jazz saxophonist Ronnie Scott, and her uncle Leon was a professional horn player. Amy grew up in a house full of music – Janis listening to Carole King and James Taylor, Mitch listening to the artists he now covers when he performs live, as he shows me later at his club in Chiswick, West London. ‘Jazz, Sinatra, whatever my voice can handle. It’s enjoyable,’ he says.

Mitch is a surprisingly entertaining performer – he has a pleasant voice and you can see that he loves to be in the limelight. Of course, there’s a big difference between having a good voice and being an artist – Amy expresses her pain, love and even her addictions in her songs and this is something that Mitch cannot compete with. He can never
steal the show from Amy completely, but there’s no doubt that he enjoys the attention.

I ask Mitch when the first time was that he thought, ‘My God, my baby can sing?’

‘There was no real indication, apart from the fact that we were always singing, there was no indication as a child or a baby … she was very clever as a small child, very manipulative. She would know how to pull everyone’s chain. She knew how to in a nice way, not a bad way,’ Mitch adds.

That’s
every
girl, I comment.

Mitch continues, ‘… She was quite clever, and she knew how to kind of manipulate people. But in a nice way,’ he repeats.

He talks about the first time he can really remember Amy performing, at probably 15 or 16 months old. ‘I would sing to her, even before she spoke. I would sing a little song and I would leave a word out and she would fill the word in, so I would sing –’

‘Can you sing it?’ I interrupt.

‘I used to sing, you know that song …
“Are the stars out tonight, I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright, for I only have eyes for
…” and she would go “
You!”
And I would sing another line and she would fill in a little word. She was very cute!

‘… She was kind of talking and singing at the same time. As she got bigger, maybe two, we would stand her on the table and she would sing a little song. My son [Alex] would sing too.’

‘Your son sings as well?’ I ask, interested to hear something about Alex.

‘No, he’s not a good singer.’ Mitch replies. ‘You know, as a child he would sing.’

‘… [But] I have been taking him to Spurs since he was two.’ Alex is more into football, it seems.

Mitch tells me that Amy also used to be keen on ice skating and Mitch took her to Alexandra Palace in North London. ‘She was a very good ice skater and I remember the first time I took her, I couldn’t believe it. She was messing about and she was really good.’

After Amy was born, the family moved to a 1930s semidetached house, also in Southgate. Both of Jewish ancestry, Mitch and Janis made sure that their children were culturally aware. Amy attended cheder classes
³
every Saturday, and as a family, the Winehouses went to the synagogue on Yom Kippur, but for Amy, being Jewish was all about being together as a real family.

When Amy was four years old, she went to Osidge Primary School in North London, which has a strong music focus. It was there that she began to show a real interest in performing. Pretending to be Pepsi & Shirley, the backing singers of 1980s pop band Wham!, Amy sang with her friend Juliette Ashby, who Amy later wrote about in her song ‘Best Friends’. Speaking to the
Observer
about that friendship, Amy said, ‘I think we clicked because we were both a bit off-key.’

Off-key or not, Amy sang all the time, Janis recalls.

‘Well, you’d remember that more than me,’ Mitch comments.

‘… Amy would sing, all the time, all the time, and whatever she was doing she’d sing and Alex and myself,’
Janis recalls, ‘would say, “Shut up, Amy!” She just would never stop singing.’

‘I don’t remember that,’ Mitch murmurs.

I ask Janis what Amy used to sing.

‘Whatever the current record of the moment was. … Or Mitchell would sing a song and Amy would imitate him.’

I ask Janis if she can sing. She immediately recounts a story about Amy being asked that very question on a radio show. Amy said she’d originally thought everyone in the family could sing because she could and her Dad could. ‘But then she said, “I heard my Mum sing and I realized that not
everyone
could …!”’

Amy was about eight or nine years old when Janis really started to realize that her daughter had something special. Amy, Janis and her mother-in-law, Cynthia, who Janis thought of more as a mother, went to Cyprus together. Amy took part in a cabaret with some other children. ‘Somebody there said, “Oh! Have you got a manager? You know she [Amy] could be really professional” and we were like, “No, no, no!” and we just pushed it away.”’

The family also had other things to deal with at the time. When Amy was nine years old, Mitch and Janis separated. Mitch had been openly involved for a very long time with another woman, Jane, who went on to become his second wife.

In an interview in 2007, Janis spoke about the break-up. ‘We’d had a very agreeable marriage but he was never there. He was a salesman so he was away a lot, but for a
long time there was also another woman, Jane, who became his second wife. I think Mitchell would have liked to have both of us but I wasn’t happy to do that.’

I witnessed this firsthand at the party I threw for Mitch in late December at
Les Ambassadeurs
club, in London. Flanked by his beautifully turned out first and second wives, Janis and Jane, Mitch made his strong but perhaps ambivalent feelings for them known when he said, ‘… Somehow I managed to find this woman [gesturing to Janis], first of all, and this lovely lady [Jane], after that. And, erm, it’s their misfortune, I understand, but I’m the lucky one. They’re not so lucky. I’m the lucky one and this is what it’s all about. … Okay, these women are just fantastic. They are strong women, Janis and Jane. I love them both – only Jane just a little bit more. So, that’s the way that it goes.’

Their parent’s breakup was tough for both Amy and Alex. As Mitch commented in one of our first interviews together, they were always a loving family. ‘There’s lot of kisses and cuddles. Lots of telling stories before they [went] to bed and things like that. Just a normal, perfectly normal, loving family.’

And, of course, this dynamic had to change after the divorce when Jane replaced their mother as Mitch’s wife.

I tell Mitch, ‘I know you are very close [to Amy], that is why we are here. There is no good recipe to be a good parent. And every parent questions himself or herself and says, “Did I do the right thing?”’

He comments, ‘… I have looked back and thought how could we have done things differently. Maybe if I had stayed with Amy’s Mum. I am not saying I was unhappy with Amy’s Mum. I wanted to be with Jane. What would
that have done to me? Maybe that would have made the situation worse. Maybe if I had been firmer with her [Amy]. Maybe I was too firm with her.

‘It is difficult to look back through the course of time as to one’s parenting skills. We always did the best that we could. Our children were always the most important things for us. They weren’t an appendage. They weren’t a possession. They were our little friends. They were there to be helped and cherished and nourished and looked after, and we did the best that we could.