Amy, My Daughter (15 page)

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
Sun
's crack-cocaine video.

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
Sun
about it a few days earlier. Blake had had a bail hearing but Amy couldn't go as she'd had to see the police over assault charges. Apparently a girl had been in court and had kept blowing Blake kisses. For all I knew she might have been working for a newspaper and doing that to fuel the story of the split.

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
News of the World
asking how I felt about Amy having an affair with Raye's assistant, Alex Haines. I was flabbergasted. I asked him where this had come from and he told me he had got the information from Alex Haines himself, who wanted to sell a story.

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.

I wasn't angry with Alex Haines. After all, I would much rather Amy was with him than with Blake. Raye was understandably upset that one of his employees would do something like that. He came back from LA and sacked Alex Haines. When I spoke to Amy about what had happened, she was a little ashamed, but as she saw that I wasn't annoyed with her, she opened up: it had been more of a fling than an affair and she was no longer seeing Alex.

The end result was that Raye decided to pull the Bond gig and cancel everything booked for the near future. I agreed with this and he left me to tell Amy. She was very upset, but so was I.

‘You know who's to blame for this, don't you?' I carried on. ‘It's you. And I tell you something else. If you want to work again you're going to have to stop living this druggy life.'

‘Dad, can't you talk to Raye? I really want to do this Bond thing.'

‘Look,' I sighed, ‘if you behave yourself during the next few days, we'll see.' I thought about what was coming up in the week ahead. ‘And another thing, don't forget you're going to see the police drugs counsellor at the end of the week and that if you don't go you could end up in jail.'

‘The police are just bullying me into going, Dad.'

‘Nonsense,' I said. ‘They couldn't have been more caring or helpful to you.'

She agreed to try her hardest and I said I'd talk to Raye, try to persuade him to hold off pulling the Bond gig.

Amy did behave herself for the next few days, and on 29 April I went to pick her up from Prowse Place to drive her to Henley to continue with the Bond song. When I arrived the house was full of ne'er-do-wells, hangers-on and drug-dealers. I threw them all out, getting the usual protests from Amy, ‘No, Dad, no, Dad, no, Dad,' which I ignored. One of the hangers-on got a bit shirty so I punched him, and the others left as fast as they could. Again, it was my frustration coming out. Despite the presence of the lowlifes, Amy was completely sober but said she was too upset to go to Henley.

The next day there was bad news about the
Sun
crack-cocaine video. The police intended to arrest Amy for supplying drugs. I thought this was their way of getting Amy to name the man who had shot the video. What I didn't know was that the police already knew who he was: Johnny Blagrove, a friend of Blake's. Blagrove and his girlfriend, Cara Burton, had been arrested and bailed pending further enquiries. Of course Amy hadn't supplied the drugs, but when I told her how serious this allegation was, she didn't seem at all concerned and referred to Blagrove and his pals as her friends. I wrote in my diary, ‘Brian Spiro told me that if the police are successful, Amy will get a custodial sentence. Is this the rock bottom that we have been waiting for?'

I met with our solicitors Brian Spiro and John Reid, and the two police officers who were in charge of the crack-cocaine video case. Fortunately the press didn't know about the meeting and there wasn't a pap in sight. The policemen were very nice, but annoyed with Amy because they felt she was making idiots of them. They told us that the following Wednesday she would be charged with ‘allowing her premises to be used for taking drugs and the intent to supply drugs'. To make matters worse, there was another assault complaint against her.

The next day I explained to Amy what the police had told me, and she agreed to go back to Henley to finish recording. After she had been to see Blake in Pentonville Prison, I drove her back to Prowse Place to pick up a few things. I talked to her about her options – there weren't many. I tried to put a positive spin on it but deep down I couldn't see how she would avoid prison. On the way Amy received a ‘helpful' call from Blake, telling her not to be bullied into doing anything I told her to do.

When we got back to Prowse Place Amy started messing about, and after an hour or so, I could see that she had no intention of going to Henley, so I left, feeling very down. I called Raye and told him to cancel the Bond gig.

In many ways I was resigned to whatever was going to happen. Her attitude disgusted me. It was one thing for her to be disrespectful to any number of people, including herself, but now it was clear to me that she thought she was above the law. I couldn't see her recovering personally or professionally from this. I wrote in my diary: ‘If she carries on taking drugs like this she will die and Blake will be responsible.'

Early on Thursday, 1 May 2008, I found out that Amy had gone to Henley at three a.m. Hurriedly I called Raye but he already knew. Fortunately he hadn't made the call to cancel the Bond song. However, the next day Mark Ronson was on Sky News saying that Amy wasn't fit to work and he doubted the Bond song would go ahead. I knew how upset he had been but I didn't see why he'd needed to go on television news to talk about it.

Amy was working at Henley, but it didn't last long. A few days after she arrived, the
News of the World
ran the crack-cocaine video story, explaining that their sister paper, the
Sun
, had passed footage of Amy allegedly smoking class-A drugs to the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in January and that the police had later arrested Johnny Blagrove and Cara Burton on suspicion of supplying a controlled drug.

The next day Raye rang: Amy was flipping out at Henley. She had hit someone and cut herself. I shot down to Henley. I had never seen Amy so bad. She had cuts on her arms and face; she had stubbed out a cigarette on her cheek and had a bad cut on her hand where she had punched a mirror. She had been on a two-day bender and, during the course of it, had told Blake she had slept with Alex Haines. What had happened at the Sanderson Hotel was happening all over again: out of shame and guilt she had cut herself.

All this was still going on when I got there and I had to force her on to her bed to stop her harming herself even more. I held her in my arms until she finally calmed down, then got a nurse to patch her up and to stay with her. I wrote in my diary, ‘This has been one of the worst days of my life. I don't know what to do next. Please God, give me the strength and wisdom to help Amy.'

Every day brought a new set of horrors.

The following week Amy presented herself, on schedule, at Limehouse Police Station, accompanied by Raye and Brian Spiro, to talk to them about the crack-cocaine video. Of course, she was high on drugs and drink. Amy was charged and bailed to return there later that month. When I mentioned rehab, all Amy could say, in her drink- and drug-fuelled state, was, ‘I'm not going to any facility, I want to go to Holloway,' meaning the women's prison in north London.

Although the Bond song had now been cancelled, a couple of days later Amy wanted to go back to Henley to work on other stuff, so I arranged for her to go while I stayed in London. Over the week, I checked in regularly with Dale Davis, her bassist and musical director. Some days they were getting work done, on others Amy was being yelled at on the phone by Blake so she'd get high to console herself.

I drove to Henley to see for myself how she was getting on. When I got there, Amy greeted me with news that I'd heard all too often before: she wanted to quit drugs. I had little faith in this but went through the motions and talked to her about the best way for her to do it. While I was there Raye rang: Salaam Remi wanted to come to Henley the following week to work with Amy. She was delighted, and I was pleased when she told me that she had been drug-free for three days! The nurse confirmed this.