On Tuesday, 8 April, Amy finally made it to Henley. I spoke to Raye, who was with her, and he told me that she and Mark had begun work. He also said that Amy hadn’t taken any drugs and that a nurse was coming to administer the replacements. She might have been drug-free, but within hours, the withdrawal symptoms were making her restless and unable to work. A nurse and a doctor were with her; the doctor gave her diazepam to help her sleep and changed the replacement drug from methadone to Subutex, which started the following morning.
That combination seemed to help. The next day Amy had a meeting with one of the Bond film’s producers, Barbara Broccoli. I wasn’t there but, according to Raye, they had an immediate rapport and ‘Amy charmed the socks off her’.
On the Friday I went to the Henley studio and met David Arnold, who was writing the music for the film. He told me that everyone involved, including Barbara Broccoli, was very excited that Amy was doing the song and he was looking forward to working with her. I had taken Amy some of her favourite Jewish deli food: smoked salmon, fish balls, bagels, chopped liver, and egg and onions. She was asleep upstairs when I arrived, and when she woke, I was told, the first thing she did was to smoke crack. How did that happen?
Someone said to me, ‘She’s sneaky with it, Mitch. We didn’t even know she had anything with her.’
I went upstairs and tried to talk some sense into her but it was a waste of time. When she was high, she would babble about whatever came into her head. It was painful to watch and even worse to listen to. At one point Amy told me to cancel a proposed deal to license a perfume with her name attached to it.
‘I don’t want to hurt my credibility,’ she told me, as she sat there high on crack.
‘Hurt your credibility? What do you think smoking crack cocaine is doing to your credibility?’
It was an impossible conversation. I stormed out, with Amy shouting for me to come back. I felt as low as I’d ever been. I didn’t think Amy would die, but I just couldn’t see a way out of this. You don’t become an expert in anything overnight, and I was still learning how best to deal with an addict. Somehow or other I had to speed up the learning process.
The day-to-day changes in Amy amazed me: the next evening Raye called me from the studio to say that she and Mark had had a really good day working. He also said that she had been able to take her prescribed Subutex, as she had been drug-free for twelve hours. When it came time for her next dose, though, she couldn’t have it as, once again, she had taken other drugs. As a result, she went into withdrawal and the whole process started yet again.
That Sunday, I drove down to the Henley studio to find Amy in bed. She was filthy and suffering the effects of withdrawal. I managed to get her into the shower, realizing again how painfully thin she was. If Amy had died at that point, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
I put her back to bed and stayed with her until she fell asleep. Sitting in a chair next to her bed, I despaired. I was running out of ideas. If she took drugs she couldn’t take Subutex for twelve hours. If she didn’t take Subutex she went into withdrawal so she took more drugs. A horrible vicious circle.
The next day Amy sounded better when I spoke to her on the phone. She said she was working, and determined to beat heroin without Subutex. I doubted that she could do that but gave her lots of encouragement. She said she was missing me.
‘I miss you too, darling. I’m there if you want me, you know that, and I always will be,’ I told her. ‘Why are you crying?’
‘I’m feeling broody, Dad,’ she replied.
‘What? Where’d that come from?’
‘We were in the pub before, me and a few of the guys, and there was a baby and I held it. It was lovely, Dad, and it just made me feel… you know.’
I did know. Amy had always loved kids, and they’d always loved her, but I hadn’t expected this. I told her it would be very difficult for her to have a baby while she was still taking drugs – her periods had stopped as her metabolism was all over the place. Not only that, it wouldn’t be fair on the baby, who might be born with a heroin addiction.
That conversation encouraged me to believe that she had finally found the reason to get clean. I didn’t know it then, but this conversation marked a huge turning-point for Amy: it really was the beginning of the end of the drugs. Amy wanted to have children, and what I said to her hit home. Yes, there were lapses and bad days ahead but, from then on, the tone was different. Amy was on the slow, difficult road to becoming drug-free.
Meanwhile, Mark Ronson had completed the music for the song: all Amy had to do was to write the words. But she couldn’t concentrate on the Bond song, so she left Henley and returned to Prowse Place where one of her first visitors was Geoff. Slow road indeed.
Towards the end of April 2008 there was a series of incidents in pubs when Amy got into arguments and ended up hitting someone. I was away in Tenerife with Jane when she called to tell me she had been in a pub in Camden Town playing pool and an argument had broken out between her and a man about who was using the table next. Apparently the man had threatened her and Amy slapped him. He had reported the matter to the police. On another occasion, this time in the Dublin Castle, another Camden pub, a man had pinched Amy’s bottom and she’d hit him. Quite bloody right, I thought. But it was the last thing we needed as the police were still interested in Amy over the
I told her to go back to Henley and get on with her work, but she resisted: there had been problems with Mark Ronson. I’m not blaming Mark for any of this because dealing with Amy on drugs was never easy. She claimed she already had three songs, words and music that she thought would be suitable for the movie but, of course, that wasn’t her brief. Her brief was to write the words and Mark the music. Mark had listened to the songs and didn’t think they were right.
‘So what?’ I said. ‘You’ve had an artistic difference. Get back to Henley and sort it out with Mark before it’s too late.’
‘All right, I’ll go,’ she told me.
The next day the papers were full of stories about Amy’s fight. Apparently there had been more than one violent incident, and Amy had also walked into a lamp-post. From the way she looked in the photographs, she had either walked into a lamp-post or somebody had hit her very hard indeed. Another story said that she had been thrown out of a club for allegedly taking drugs. I got on the first plane I could and flew home, leaving Jane in Tenerife.
When I got back, Amy was driving around with Geoff and being followed by paps. Meanwhile, the newspapers were full of stories about Amy and Blake’s supposed split – I’d received a call from a journalist at the
When it came time for Amy’s interview with police about the assault, she arrived two hours late at Holborn Police Station, which didn’t go down well. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she was not sober. The police deemed her unfit to answer questions and kept her at the police station overnight. They didn’t put her in a cell. In fact they bought her chocolates and soft drinks and were very nice to her. When Amy was finally questioned, with her solicitor present, she was told that if she admitted to the assault she would be released with a caution, which was what she did.
As usual, I got all the news from Raye, and as I was taking it in, my other phone rang. It was Phil Taylor from the
For weeks the press had been filling their papers with rubbish stories from people who don’t even know Amy – there had been false accounts of her smuggling drugs into Pentonville for Blake, and an incredible story about me going to prison in my youth for seven years. When I told my auntie Rene about that one, she said, ‘Someone in your family might have noticed if you weren’t around for seven years.’
Then the newspapers got all of their Amy Christmases at once. There were stories about her arrest, Blake’s bail hearing and the girl blowing kisses, Amy and Blake splitting up, and Amy’s affair with Alex Haines, which, by the way, was true.
