Amy, My Daughter

by Mitch Winehouse

  In February Amy was back in the UK, recording the video for ‘Back to Black’, when she got some exciting news. It was bitterly cold and Amy had forgotten to bring her coat, so during the breaks in filming she was freezing in her trailer. Halfway through the day she called Jane, asking her to bring down a coat for her. As I was out in the cab, I took it to her.

  When I arrived she squealed, ‘Dad! I’m number one in Norway!’

  ‘That’s great,’ I said, although I did wonder why she was so keen on making it big in the Norwegian market. She had to explain that to be number one outside the more obvious, if bigger, markets of the US and UK meant she really was on her way to international stardom.

  Shortly before the release of the album in the US, I was at the Turkish baths at Porchester Hall, Notting Hill – I used to go there most Wednesday afternoons and there’d usually be a whole crowd of my pals there, having something to eat and playing cards. Above the baths there’s a fantastic hall where they put on music events, corporate dinners and weddings. Amy was due to do a concert there for The BBC Sessions on the Thursday, but I didn’t know she’d be rehearsing there that afternoon. But she was and, boy, could you hear it! There was the constant muffled thump, thump, thump of the bass and Amy’s incredible voice over the top. ‘Keep your daughter quiet,’ one of my pals joked. ‘I can’t hear myself think.’ They were all ribbing me so I went upstairs to see Amy.

  She was as surprised and delighted to see me as I was to see her. She came over straight away and gave me a big hug. Blake was with her and came over as well. He was very friendly, but he looked agitated and on edge. He said he was okay when I asked, but then he disappeared. When he returned, he was a different person – full of life and energy. You can make your own mind up as to the reason why. I thought back to what Tyler had told me. But I believed then that Amy would give him what for when she found out he was still taking drugs.

  Later that month Amy was back in the US for a tour to promote Back to Black. It began in Austin, Texas, at the SXSW Festival, then went on to West Hollywood, California, where she played the Roxy Theater. There were a lot of big names at that gig and they wanted to go to Amy’s dressing room to say hello. First Raye told Amy that Courtney Love was outside and wanted to meet her.

  ‘God!’ Amy replied. ‘What does she want?’

  Next up was Bruce Willis. It was his birthday and, as Amy put it, ‘He had a bit of a wobbly head on.’

  Bruce said to Amy, ‘Hi, I’m Bruce Willis. Would you like to come to Las Vegas with me to celebrate my birthday?’

  Quick as anything, Amy said, ‘Only if I can bring my dad!’ Bruce was astounded and Amy carried on the joke, ‘Shall I call him and see if he wants to come?’ Apparently Bruce beat a hasty retreat.

  Then Ron Jeremy, the famous porn star, was led into the dressing room. He was accompanied by two women with pneumatic breasts – if you’d stuck a pin in them, Amy said, they might have exploded. Ron was wearing a pair of loose tracksuit bottoms. Amy looked down at them. ‘Been working today, Ron?’

  ‘Funnily enough, yes,’ Ron said, playing along. They sat down for a good ten minutes and had a drink and a chat, minus the women. Amy was very sharp; her spontaneous wit never failed to make me laugh.

  Danny DeVito was at one of the other gigs and Amy kept sidling up to the bar next to him, mouthing to Raye, ‘Look, I’m taller than him.’ And she was, if not by much.

  Amy met a lot of famous people on that tour and they had all come to see her because they loved what she was doing. Some stars get swept away by the conviction that everybody wants to be their friend, but it wasn’t like that with Amy. Those people weren’t jumping on the Amy Winehouse bandwagon: they just wanted to hear her sing. I witnessed it at first hand when I joined the tour in Canada a few weeks later. I turned up after the gig and found Amy with a man she introduced to me as Michael.

  ‘Very nice to meet you,’ I said. ‘What do you do, Michael?’

  He laughed, as Amy hissed, ‘Dad – it’s Michael Bublé.’

  He was a sweet man – I was a fan of his music – and all he wanted to talk about was how fantastic Amy had been that night.

  The following day we walked into a shopping mall and ‘Stronger Than Me’ was playing. ‘Isn’t that me, Dad?’ Amy asked. ‘Isn’t that my song?’

  ‘Yes, and you’ve just earned twenty-eight cents,’ I joked, ‘so feel free to buy something.’

  She stopped and listened. ‘It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?’

  It was as if somebody else had written and sung the song, as if it didn’t belong to her any more. Wait a second, I thought. This is surreal. She doesn’t know her own song. But when she did listen to her own records, she always thought she could have done better – not that she could have sung better but that she could have written more powerful lyrics. ‘I should have changed that word to this word…’ she’d say.

  She was never satisfied with what she’d done.

  * * *

  In May 2007 Amy and Blake booked to go on holiday to Miami together. Before they left she called me: she wanted to know how I felt about her and Blake getting married. Since they’d got back together, they’d been virtually inseparable, aside from some of her trips to the US to promote the album. I wasn’t too thrilled about the prospect of Amy tying herself to Blake, but I thought I’d have the chance to get to know him better – and for him to get to know the family before they eventually tied the knot.

  ‘I won’t stand in your way,’ I told her. ‘You’re both adults. It’s for you and Blake to decide.’

  The issue of his drug use occurred to me, but I pushed it aside. I was pretty sure by now that Amy’s stance on class-A drugs would have rubbed off on Blake: if he hadn’t stopped on his own, she would have made him. If I was wrong, I thought, there would be enough time before they got married for me to do something about it.

  I wondered then if she planned to marry sooner than we thought. I reminded her what had happened when Janis and I had got married, how upset Janis was that her mother didn’t come to our wedding – she had recently left Janis’s father and run off with another man. Janis still got upset about that and I didn’t want her to miss our daughter’s wedding. She deserved to be there. And me? Well, of course I wanted to be at my little girl’s wedding – but to Blake? I wasn’t sure.

  I told Amy that if they were thinking of getting married while they were in Miami I would fly Janis out so she could be part of it. Amy promised me that Janis and I would both be at the wedding. It seemed to me that Blake couldn’t have cared less if his mother was at his wedding or not, and I think he was partially to blame that neither Janis nor I was there when they were married in Miami on 18 May 2007.

  Just after the ceremony Amy called me, all excited. ‘Dad, we’ve just got married!’

  I was stunned into silence.

  ‘Aren’t you going to congratulate us?’ she carried on, seemingly oblivious to how I felt.

  I couldn’t bring myself to say the words to her. In fact, I couldn’t say anything to her – I pretended I couldn’t hear her properly and hung up. I was beside myself with sadness for Janis, and really angry with Amy. After that she called me back several times, but I didn’t pick up.

  Eventually I phoned her. ‘Amy, you know what?’ I said. ‘Your mum should have been there. Never mind me. Your mum should have been there.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I know that, Dad, but we thought it was the right thing to do at the time…’

  ‘What do you mean we thought it was the right thing to do? What’s it got to do with Blake about your mother being at your wedding?’ I didn’t object to Amy marrying him: she’d told me she loved him and that he loved her. But I took great exception to them preventing Janis from being at the wedding. What business was it of Blake’s? They’d been married five minutes and he’d already put my back up.

  The call ended badly, but I resigned myself to what had happened and made sure that it wouldn’t cause a rift between us, even th
ough I was seething about the snub to Janis. I suggested throwing a wedding party later in the year, but although Amy was up for it, it never happened.

  8

  ATTACK AND THE ‘PAPS’

  Over the next few months I didn’t see much of Amy and Blake – which was not surprising: they were newly married, after all. Amy still found time for me, though, and we met often enough for me to think all was well.

  On the evening of Monday, 6 August 2007, at her flat in Jeffrey’s Place, Amy had her first seizure. She was alone with Blake. He put her on her side in the recovery position, but instead of calling an ambulance, he phoned Juliette. I doubt very much that he told her the severity of the situation. Had he done so, I’m sure Juliette would have told him to call an ambulance right away. Instead she drove from her home in Barnet to Camden Town, which must have taken at least half an hour, and then, in Juliette’s car, they took Amy to University College Hospital in central London, arriving at about one a.m.

  By the time they got to the hospital, Amy was unconscious and Juliette called me. I was working in my cab that night and luckily I wasn’t too far away. I got to the hospital about fifteen minutes later. By the time I arrived Blake had gone and Amy had had her stomach pumped. It was reported in the press that she was given an adrenalin shot, but that’s not true. She was very woozy and I couldn’t get much sense out of her. I thought drinking might have caused the seizure.

  When I got home, I wanted to get my head down for a couple of hours but I couldn’t switch my thoughts off. I had a cup of tea and replayed the events of the night. I tried to remember how Amy’s behaviour had changed since she’d got married, and realized I needed to start keeping a daily diary. I wanted a record of events as they happened. Maybe I’d been a bit naïve and missed some obvious signs. How much was she drinking? She was probably still smoking ‘puff’, as she called it, but was there anything else? What had I not noticed?

  The next morning I met Raye and Nick Shymansky at the hospital. Amy was still asleep and I found out that there had been no sign of Blake since the previous day – as far as I knew he hadn’t even bothered to phone the hospital. However, in the press, there were pictures of him outside the hospital with a bunch of flowers for Amy – pity he never made it to her bedside while I was there.

  We decided when Amy was discharged that she could do with a change of scene so I arranged for us to go and stay at the Four Seasons Hotel in Surrey for a few days. To cheer her up, we also booked a room for her friends Juliette and Lauren. Amy wanted to turn it into a girly thing and I hoped that might keep Blake away.

  Amy left hospital the following afternoon and we drove her straight to the hotel, where she settled into her room. Unbeknown to me, though, she had phoned Blake and told him where we were going. At ten o’clock that night he turned up at the hotel.

  Amy wasn’t her usual self. She’d been talking a lot of nonsense throughout the evening, so I made some calls and arranged for a doctor to see her straight away. At eleven p.m. Dr Marios Pierides, a consultant psychiatrist at the Capio Nightingale Hospital, in north-west London, arrived and examined Amy. He said that she had just taken drugs, probably crack cocaine. He warned Amy that if she continued she could have another seizure at any time.

  Words cannot describe the depths to which I plummeted. I had to sit down before I fell. This was a bombshell. Amy had always been dead against hard drugs. Why had that changed? What could I do? I couldn’t believe that Amy was taking drugs but the evidence was there. Now I knew I’d been wrong in thinking Amy was stronger than Blake and had weaned him off class-A drugs. It appeared to be the opposite. But, even so, how had the drugs got into the hotel? I didn’t know what to do, who to turn to. I tried talking to Amy, but she was out of it. I wanted to hear what she had to say for herself. Maybe it had been a one-off. I lay awake all night wondering.

  I didn’t see much of Amy the following day and neither did her friends. She spent most of it in bed with Blake. Juliette and Lauren were really worried about her too and kept going up to the room, but Amy didn’t want to see them because she was with Blake. I was told that Blake, as a result of his ‘withdrawal’, was having a very bad time. Finally people were acknowledging that he was a drug-user.

  Blake and Amy surfaced at about nine p.m. and we sat down to have something to eat, except Blake, who went for a walk in the hotel grounds. I guessed that he’d made arrangements for drugs to be delivered, and when he returned, the look on his face suggested that they had arrived. Later Juliette and I managed to get into the room while Amy and Blake were out. I didn’t know what I was looking for but we came across a scorched strip of silver foil in the bin. This confirmed what we had suspected: that one or both of them had been smoking a class-A drug. I now had to accept that Amy, as well as Blake, was using. I looked about for evidence of other drugs but didn’t find anything.

  I felt sick. Our whole world had been turned upside down. Should I confront Amy here? How should I talk to her about it? Would she listen? I knew Amy had had bad moments with alcohol, but crack? It seemed impossible.

  By this time word had got out about Amy’s seizure and there were reporters all over the hotel looking for a story, so I decided to leave talking to Amy until we got home. The reporters didn’t get anything from any of us, but Blake’s mother, Georgette, spoke to the press from her home that day saying we should all leave Amy and Blake alone, and calling Amy’s friends, whom Amy had known most of her life, ‘hangers-on’.

  That Friday it was Jane’s birthday, so after work that night she came to the hotel to join us for the weekend. Blake’s mother and stepfather, Georgette and Giles, were there too, having travelled from their home in Newark, Lincolnshire. Raye and I had asked them to come so we could discuss what to do about the evidence of drugs we’d found in their room and that had been in Amy’s system.

  When we sat down together, Georgette did not apologize for her ‘hangers-on’ remark. This was the first time we’d met and already she had offended me. As we spoke, I realized how little they knew about Blake’s drug abuse. They had decided that it had been Amy who had introduced drugs to Blake, which I, and all of Amy’s friends, knew wasn’t true. It’s going to be difficult moving forward, I thought, unless we’re all on the same side.

  Later that night we sat down to dinner in a private dining room. Amy was at one end of the table and Georgette at the other. Georgette kept waving a designer bag at Amy. ‘Ooh, look at the bag you bought me, look at the bag…’ she was saying.

  What was wrong with her? She’d just learned that her son was a drug addict, but all she could go on about was a handbag. She and her husband were in complete denial about their son’s problems, and remained so for the rest of the evening. That was the first time I met the Civils: I thought they were obnoxious.

  The next morning Raye arrived and we had breakfast on the terrace. Amy, Jane, Georgette and Giles were at the next table. I went over to them and suggested that we walk along the terrace for some privacy. I told Giles about the silver foil I’d found in Amy and Blake’s room; he said he didn’t believe me, he didn’t think it had anything to do with Blake. I told him he was deluding himself about his stepson, but he was adamant that it was Amy’s fault.

  The conversation quickly became heated and, forgetting there were reporters in the hotel, I lost my temper. We were both shouting. It was a surreal moment: a wedding was to take place in the hotel that day, and while I was arguing with Giles on the terrace, I could see the guests starting to arrive. Fortunately, Raye came out onto the terrace, put his hand on my shoulder and said quietly, ‘Calm down, Mitch, calm down.’ And I did. But, believe me, I was so angry with Giles that I was shaking.

  Earlier that day, before breakfast, I had called Amy’s doctor, Paul Ettlinger, to ask him to come and examine her again. He did so, and suggested that Amy and Blake should spend some time at the Causeway Retreat, an addiction treatment centre on Osea Island in Essex. It’s in the Blackwater estuary, not far from the town of Maldon.
The island is only accessible for an hour or so a day via a causeway. Once you’re on the island, you’re stuck there – at least until the next low tide. He told me that the Causeway was almost impenetrable, which was just what we needed, especially after the previous night when Blake had arranged for drugs to be brought to the hotel. I was desperate to get help for Amy and agreed to this right away.

  Naturally Amy didn’t want to go, but this time, unlike her previous trip to rehab, we weren’t taking no for an answer. ‘Listen,’ I said to her, ‘you’re going. You’re a drug addict now, and that’s the end of it.’

  I was angry with her, and she knew it. She looked to Blake for support but I told them they were both going.

  Later that day Raye and I drove Amy and Blake to Battersea Heliport from where a helicopter took them to the island. But before Blake got into the helicopter, he took me to one side. I was so shocked by what came next that I recorded his exact words in my diary: ‘I am going to Osea Island for Amy’s sake. I have no intention of getting clean, I like being a drug addict.’

  I was dumbfounded. I got back into the car and told Raye, who just shook his head. What chance had Amy got if her husband felt like that? I hoped rehab would work for them.

  Amy and Blake were meant to stay at the Causeway Retreat for an indefinite period, but after just three days they came back. I met them at Battersea Heliport, but Amy brushed past me and got into the back of the car. I banged on the window and made her open the door.

  ‘Why’d you leave early, Amy?’ I asked, trying hard to sound reasonable.

  ‘I ain’t talking to you, Dad. It was you made us go to that place.’

  She slammed the door and told the driver to take them home. I was left standing there alone. As I replayed the events in my head, I was sick about it all. I was devastated that Amy had given up on rehab so quickly, but even worse, this was the first time that Amy and I had fallen out. All I’d been doing was trying to prevent a dangerous problem becoming worse – I hadn’t expected gratitude (I’m not that naïve), but I was shocked that she wouldn’t speak to me.