Saving Amy Read online

  ‘Yeah,’ he comments. ‘It was big inside.’

  I ask him to tell me who lived there with him when he was growing up and he reels off several names – his mother, Cynthia, her twin, Lorna, who shared the first floor room, also his grandmother, his great uncle, and on the top floor, a man named Izzy Hammer, who was a holocaust survivor – they all lived in the house.

  ‘This place has really great memories,’ Mitch says. ‘And Amy and my son, Alex, they love coming here, although obviously my grandmother had gone by the time they came along.’

  Janis and Mitch first met through Martin, Janis’s cousin, who was Mitch’s best friend from the age of 13. Janis was just eight or nine when the boys became friends and Mitch thought she was horrible then. They didn’t really meet again until 1975, when Janis was about 22 or 23 and a pharmacy technician; by then, Mitch was a doubleglazing salesman.

  ‘And all of a sudden this horrible little eight-year-old was now a beautiful young woman,’ Mitch reminisces. ‘And I pestered Martin for a year or two to make the introduction, but he wisely thought I wasn’t good enough for his cousin, but somehow we got together …’.

  Things actually took off between Mitch and Janis after they bumped into each other at a party. Hilary, Mitch’s girlfriend at the time, went off with someone else and Janis and Mitch ended up spending the evening together.

  ‘The rest, as they say, is history,’ Mitch murmurs.

  I get an opportunity to ask Janis about that day when I interview her with Mitch later in November 2008. Mitch had originally told me that it might be a problem speaking to Janis. She suffers from multiple sclerosis (MS) and she walks with a cane. When Mitch describes Janis, he says she is disabled. Mitch is obviously mystified, when Janis agrees to see me: ‘I don’t understand why she agreed so fast,’ he says.

  I like Janis immensely and when we put her and Mitch together, there is no doubt that she steals the show.

  When did they meet? I ask Janis. At a party on 11 October 1975, she replies; Mitch counters that he thought that it was November.

  Janis continues, ‘I’d just come back from America and it was a case of Mitchell asking me to dance. And I knew at that moment that “yes” would mean life. I knew we would be together, the whole time, and it was a case of “yes” or “no”, so I said “yes!”’

  ‘And we were married two hours later!’ Mitch interjects. ‘No! That’s not true.’

  Janis initially kept the fact that she was going out with Mitch a secret from friends and family, even though Mitch had given her a ring by that stage. She comments, ‘… If everyone knew I was with Mitch they’d go: “Oh no! No! No!”’

  Mitch seems surprised by this and asks his ex-wife why she says that. She explains: ‘Because you were like rowdy and it was a case of, like, are you mad? So, I kept to myself … it was a secret that I was going out with Mitchell.’

  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 e
very 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 classes3 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.

  ‘We really did the best that we could and we encouraged them and we didn’t bully them and we didn’t hit them. We did the best that we could in our own limited way without going on a course in how to be the best parents in the world. We did really the best that we could. Maybe we could have done better, I don’t know.’

  I ask Mitch about his relationship with Janis after the divorce. ‘[We] get on great. What is even nicer is that Janis and my wife, Jane, get on very well. … My wife is a nice person. My ex-wife is a nice person and I like to think that I am a nice person.’

  I have to wonder, at this point, if Mitch really understands the dynamic that exists between Janis and Jane. In fact, Janis told me, on one occasion, that one of the hardest things for her to face, when Amy was in hospital in November 2008, was the fact that Jane, the woman that Mitch left her for, was sitting on the other side of her daughter’s bed. It seems that for Janis there is still a lot of pain attached to her divorce from Mitch and so his claim that everyone gets on well doesn’t really ring true. Perhaps it’s just easier for him to think that.

  During the interviews, Mitch looks guilty when the matter of his divorce comes up. He often seems to torment himself, questioning whether his behaviour has led to Amy’s troubles and addictions. He tells me, ‘… The problem was that when we split up, I tried to overindulge the children a little bit too much. … I had a manufacturing company [then]. We had 400 employees. … I would work early in the morning before the children got up. … I came to the house. I got them ready for school. I took them to school. … I came back from work to pick them up from school. … I wouldn’t leave them alone. I wanted to be with them all the time. … I was at the house all the time and Janis had to say to me, “We are divorced; you really aren’t meant to be here.” In a nice way. We were trying to get over the fact that we were divorced, which was difficult for her more than me because I had Jane and it wasn’t appropriate for me to be there all the time.’

  Mitch, at one
point during our early interviews, says that Amy’s brother, Alex, suffered from depression for three years. He adds, ‘Looking back Amy wasn’t affected because she knew Jane from when Amy was two. She has known Jane her whole life. Alex knew Jane from when he was six. I thought it was Alex who was more affected by our breakup but clearly Alex has got over it. Alex is fine. … When we split up, Alex was older.’

  When I first meet Janis in London, I get the chance to ask if she thinks Amy’s troubles began with her divorce from Mitch. ‘No, no, no,’ she denies. ‘I am very much a person of – it was life’s experience – and that’s it. We go through life and we experience it in our way.’

  Yet, when I am with Amy in St Lucia months later, it occurs to me that, while there might not be a rift between Janis and Mitch, Amy still behaves like that 9-year-old kid, trying to grab her parents’ attention. She needs it – craves it.

  I ask Janis what her wish was for Amy and Alex when they were growing up. ‘For them to be happy and do what is best for them. And, that’s all I wanted for them. And they are both, both very, very talented. They are probably equally talented.’

  Janis continues: ‘Mitchell and I always joke about Alex and Amy and Mitchell would always say “Alex, we adopted you” and Alex would be like “What! What! What! What!” – because that was the joke on them. And it would always be that either Alex was adopted or Amy was adopted. Just to throw them off-key.’

  On the occasions that Janis and I meet or speak over the next months, it occurs to me that she continually drops ‘Mitchell and I’ into the conversation, in the way you would do if you were a couple. Although Janis is a woman who was abandoned by her husband and the father of her two children for another woman (about whom Janis had known for quite some time, as had Amy and Alex, from the ages of two and six respectively), in her mind she and Mitch are still a couple, still united.

  When it comes to Amy, Jane is only the other woman and can’t compete. Janis and Mitch are Amy’s parents – Jane simply doesn’t enter into the equation.