by Daphne Barak
Mitch looks apoplectic. He is trying to control his daughter but he can’t.
Amy keeps repeating, ‘Daphne, I love it,’ as she tries on one dress after another. ‘I love you. Let’s swap dresses.’
Mitch cuts his daughter off, saying, ‘You have to let Daphne and everyone else go to sleep. Daphne does not want your old dresses. [Just] pick one. It is very generous for Daphne to give [a dress] to you. Let’s leave!’
But now Amy has a new urgent plan. She wants me to go to her villa, next door, to look at her dresses. This, she thinks, might convince me to change my mind about swapping the new dresses with two of her old ones. Since this is the only way to get her out of my home and enable the rest of my team to go to sleep, I let her drag me outside. Her worried father follows … as do my entourage; her entourage …
At her bedroom door, she hugs me before showing me what look like two Hervé Léger dresses that are badly stained. Her father is now officially beside himself. He doesn’t know what to do. Even Amy seems to realize at that moment how bad they look. But she says to me, ‘I wore them a few times. But, you can clean them? Right?’
Mitch tries to step in again. ‘No, Amy!’ he exclaims, ‘She can’t!’
But Amy isn’t finished, looking through her wardrobe for another dress for me to try on. She produces a garment that looks like a Jewish bar mitzvah dress from the 1940s. It looks like it is made from a curtain and is probably a size 0.
She says, ‘Daph, this is for you.’
I reply, ‘Take one of the dresses I just gave you and let’s go to sleep.’
Amy replies, ‘I bought it for Mitch’s wife, Jane, but she is too fat.’
Mitch overhears this and comments, ‘Anybody would be too fat for this dress. This dress is size 0.’
Amy ignores her Dad, saying to me, ‘It would be wonderful on you.’
Mitch intervenes, ‘Daphne doesn’t want it.’
There is no point in explaining to her that I don’t like to wear curtains and I don’t need a new dress. Instead, I tell Mitch, ‘Just let me show her it doesn’t fit and that will be the end.’
I go to try it on and funnily enough it almost fits. Amy is jumping up and down in her excitement and she is screaming. She is trying to zip it up and is almost killing me in the process. She yells, ‘Where are the bodyguards? They will zip it all the way up.’
She is about to cut off my oxygen supply, hurting me, as long as I fit into the dress. I have really had enough.
‘Look Amy,’ I tell her. ‘I am giving you a nice beautiful dress. I know you mean well. REALLY. Let’s just go to sleep.’
Amy now wants me to stay with her alone and she cries when I tell her that I am leaving for America the next day. She asks me why I am going.
I say, ‘Not because I don’t love you. I have other work. I would love to stay with you.’
Suddenly, I felt sorry for her. She looks so lonely and sweet; so vulnerable. I hug her and tell her: ‘Look, Amy, it is not about the dress. It doesn’t matter if you wear this dress or anything else. You are going to be beautiful and walk on the stage and show them. If you are not ready, don’t be afraid. Just tell your managers. … It is better to tell them you are not ready and let them make a statement [about it].’
Amy is very quiet but she is listening, although I am not at all sure that she understands what I am saying. She is still holding onto me and hugging me. I continue, ‘If you do go there, whether in this dress or anything [else], just be beautiful and show them how good you are. Show them how big you are.’
She starts crying again and through her tears says, ‘But Daph, I did show them. I did show them how good I am – five years ago.’
I hug her closely because this is the moment of truth and I don’t think any of the people around her are willing or able to deal with it. Amy doesn’t think she can do it again. She doesn’t believe that she can repeat her big successes of five years ago when she surprised the music world. And the insecurity is something she cannot talk about apparently with those very people who should be able to help her. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t know how to deal with it themselves? It is heartbreaking.
I carry on reassuring Amy and eventually I manage to bail out, making my escape. I give her a final supportive hug and, absolutely shattered, leave her to her equally exhausted father.
Ten minutes later – it’s about 4 a.m. – and Erbil, Steve and I are sitting on the first floor of our villa, shell-shocked by what we’ve just seen and experienced. We are all so tired that we just stare at each other and no one makes the move to go to our rooms on the second and third floors of the house.
Boom!
We jump as the door is flung open.
What now? I think.
It’s Mitch. He hasn’t rung or knocked to announce himself. He’s just walked in. He looks like he’s been through a war zone.
He doesn’t even try to apologize to Erbil or Steve, who he knows well, just focuses on me and tells me urgently: ‘Daphne! I need to speak to you alone.’
I don’t have the energy to go upstairs for us to talk in private, so I open the door, which leads out to a small swimming pool, where there are some chairs and a table. We turn on the light and I look at Mitch. Frankly, I feel sorry for him; he looks as if all the energy has been sapped out of him.
After a few moments, he says, ‘Daphne, I need you to do a favour for me. I need you to leave with me tomorrow.’
Well, that’s unexpected! I think. And impossible! We are scheduled to stay one more day and we all need the time now, to rest and relax on the beach and think about our next assignment and forget about Saving Amy for a moment or two.
I ask him why I need to do this.
Mitch just repeats, ‘… You have to leave with me! I am so scared for your security. …’
I reply, ‘How can that be? … I am not alone. I have all my people here with me and we all have tickets leaving Wednesday, not tomorrow, and I wouldn’t leave them behind [anyway]. It is now 4 a.m. and my offices in New York and London are closed.’
Mitch doesn’t even seem to hear this. He just looks extremely frightened.
‘Daphne I am scared,’ he admits. ‘I am afraid to leave you here alone. … my daughter … you know … it is not about the drugs and it isn’t about Blake or all the alcohol that she drinks. My daughter is very sick. She has a psychiatric problem … she needs to go for a very long treatment. …
‘I am scared to leave you here because she confuses you with me. She tries to please you all the time but then because of her problems with me she is getting violent and she [could become] violent with you.’
I don’t think I have ever seen Mitch this truthful before. He really believes what he is saying. He doesn’t meet my eyes, though, and instead looks at the table; he also seems to be talking more to himself than to me.
What he is saying is shocking. I try to be practical, all the while thinking, ‘Well what does he want? How can I even get my team out of here in a few hours?’
I ask him to explain: ‘What do you mean you are scared for me? I have Erbil here. I have Steve. I have your security and the hotel security. [Amy] cannot hurt me and frankly I don’t think she [would]. … Yes, she [has been] violent a few times, but not against me. It was more about you and Janis and all [her other] relationships.’
Mitch continues, ‘I am very scared and if I leave you here without me things could get out of control and you are very important to me and I really wouldn’t know what to do!’
At this point it is 4.30 a.m. and Mitch looks frightened, perhaps more from his own admissions to me. Possibly for the first time he has said out loud to someone, ‘My daughter is sick. She has psychiatric problems.’
I am exhausted though. I tell him, ‘Why don’t you go and get some sleep and let me go and talk to everybody… .’ I say to him that if we can’t leave, maybe he should stay another day. ‘We can change your ticket. I can chip in, it makes much more sense?’
He repea
ts something he has said to me before, ‘No I can’t. Jane will divorce me.’ After which he leaves.
All I can think is: ‘Wow’. Even after all that has happened this evening – his daughter’s erratic behaviour, her performance over the dresses and Mitch’s own belief that she might harm me, which led him to storm into my villa at 4 a.m. without any ceremony at all – Mitch’s main concern is that his seemingly lovely wife, Jane, will divorce him if he stays one more day – even if he explains to her that he is worried about my well-being? It just doesn’t make sense. All this serves to convince me further that the mission to ‘save Amy’ might just provide a good cover for so many other problems in this seemingly ‘normal’ family.
beat the point to death
In the end, Erbil, Steve and I don’t get to bed until 6 a.m. I am shocked by Mitch’s revelations and we are also trying to see if we can possibly reschedule our flights. Despite all this, I have agreed to meet Mitch later that morning, around 10.30 a.m., in order to film at the bar Amy has been frequenting on the beach. A storm is brewing, so we postpone that, walking along the beach instead. We are all exhausted.
Mitch is behaving oddly, looking over his shoulder the whole time. ‘Oh, I hope Amy is not up. Let’s finish it before Amy gets up!’ he says. After six days of bizarreness, I am annoyed and say, ‘So what if she is up?! She knows that we are filming. She has been filming with us.’
The wind has picked up so much and is so noisy that it makes it impossible to hear each other, so one of the television crew tells us that we will have to film in one of our villas. Mitch’s would be best because it is bigger than mine, but he refuses: ‘No! What if Amy comes in?’
By this point, I want more than anything to vanish from the island and get some distance from Mitch for a while – instead, I put my foot down. ‘So, what if [Amy] walks in? She knows about the filming. She is very smart. She talked to me about it last night. So what? What do you have to hide?’
We end up going to my villa, which is not very well situated, and film outside, even though it is not the best place and there is too much sunlight.
Mitch murmurs, ‘Maybe I am part of [Amy’s] problem.’
I remain quiet, even though he repeats it again.
I ask Mitch how he feels about the recent events involving his daughter. He must be in a state of turmoil with so much to digest, I think, especially now he is going back to London.
‘What is going on in your mind?’ I say.
‘In the first place I am glad to be going home to see my family. And knowing that Amy is safe and happy, that’s good … but primarily I am glad to be going home,’ he says.
‘There is a lot to digest,’ I tell him. ‘… [And] also there [must be] a lot of continuing worries, right?
‘… Some of the people she speaks to … can hurt her?’ I add.
‘I don’t know about that,’ he says. ‘I don’t know about hurt her. If you mean by selling a story … I would not call that hurting her. I have to say … that’s her business. If she wants to [talk to people] she is going to have to suffer the consequences. The consequences are not going to be great [if] someone … sell[s] a story to one of the tabloids that she ran into the bar topless at dinner. I am just giving you an example – she never did that. [I have] different worries. They are not on the same magnitude as they were six months ago. What it shows is that we are returning to a kind of normality. … We have got an awful long way to go. … It is going to be a rocky road but we are certainly moving in the right direction, there is no question about it,’ he says with conviction.
‘I don’t think people understand what you are going through,’ I tell him. ‘… It is a terrible feeling to know that you are a parent of an adult, right, and in [Amy’s] case, a very talented adult, and you still have to worry all the time. [It’s] like you have a little baby [and] you don’t know what will happen next.’
‘I am glad that you brought that up because a lot of these things that are worrying me wouldn’t be worrying me if I weren’t here. I tend sometimes to make [a] situation worse than what it is … exacerbate [it] and make it much worse because in my mind [Amy] is not talking to a nice woman on the beach, she is talking to a potential drug dealer, [for example]. She is not … but unfortunately that is how my mind has been working.
‘So,’ he continues, ‘what I have got to do is try and retrain my mind so that when I see her talking to a perfectly normal person on the beach, that is fine. I don’t need to intervene. Why shouldn’t she be … saying anything other than pleasantries? Sometimes I think I make the situation worse, unquestionably.’
‘Just by being there?’ I query.
‘Not by being there,’ he replies. ‘But by my reaction …’ ‘… [Amy] is not partying now,’ Mitch says to me later. ‘Now, she is getting down to work. She is getting back into her music.’
‘[But] you [will] always have to worry about her,’ I say to him. ‘It is like you have a beautiful little baby and you have to run after her … Does [it] cross your mind that you always have to be worried [about her]?’
‘Yes,’ Mitch says. ‘… All the time. But I worry about my son [Alex], too – and there is nothing to worry about with my son.
‘I am a worrier. I can’t help it.’
We discuss the forthcoming festival at which Amy is going to make a much anticipated appearance.
‘So what is Amy going to sing?’ I ask.
‘Frankly, I don’t know. The band is not here yet. They are arriving only next week,’ Mitch says. ‘She is working with her producer Salaam [Remi] and the engineers [on] her new record.’ He adds, ‘As you saw Daphne, she has a very short attention span [so] they are recording everything she does. Then, they will select [material].
‘So … over the next couple of weeks, there isn’t going to be as many gaps as there [have been] for her to fill,’ he adds. ‘I am not saying that she will not be able to go down to the beach and go horse riding – she probably will – but she is not going to be able to disappear for five to six hours. She is going to have to come back because everybody is on a tight schedule, and that is what she wants. She wants that. She wants everything to be so that she can say, “Right, at 9 o’clock we will be in the studio for four hours, and then we do something else, and then we go for a drink”, or whatever it is. She likes that sort of scheduling. … She likes that direction.’
‘So, what is the story with Blake?’ I say.
I had asked Mitch when I first arrived on the island why he thought Blake had been so quiet. At that time, Mitch was dismissive of his son-in-law, saying, ‘Who cares about him? He has nothing to say?’, which I took at the time to be denial, denial, denial. Blake is someone who, whether he is being good or bad, sells interviews to newspapers and he hadn’t, at that point, really spoken to anyone since his release from jail. I told Mitch then, ‘There is a newspaper out there, whether it is the News of the World, or the Sun or somebody else, who is [probably] paying him a lot of money to shut up [now] and they will come and interview him at the right time.’
But Mitch didn’t like that. He didn’t want to deal with that reality. And – a few months later – Blake gave an exclusive interview to The Sun.
But, of course, today, Mitch surprises me when I ask him about Blake as his attitude seems much more conciliatory. He says that Amy and Blake aren’t in touch with each other, but adds, ‘I can understand what she is going through and also what he is going through. They are two people who love each other. And have come to the realization that they cannot see each other. It will be dangerous for both of them. But I understand how difficult it must be, not to be able to see the person you are in love with.
‘I am in love with Jane, my wife, and if I couldn’t see her – it will be the most painful thing for me. Look, maybe one day – if they are both clean and strong enough – they can see each other. But for now – they both understand that it can’t be.’
After the interview, I say to him in private that I’m surprised at
his mellow attitude towards Blake. Mitch explains, ‘I am upset and I miss Jane. I want to see Jane and I want to see my son. I want to be out of here.’
And that frankly makes two of us.
I feel bad for him because I know Mitch loves Jane and I know he means what he says. He feels helpless seeing Amy drinking but things are not going well and I feel so tired, watching Mitch lying to himself again.
The reality of the situation is that despite Mitch’s seemingly optimistic attitude towards his daughter, one which leads him constantly to be disappointed, there is no record on the horizon, as the London producer has already informed us. The musicians who have flown out to work with Amy are lovely but there isn’t much going on creatively in Amy’s studio. They are just hanging out there most of the time, although the studio is paying them.
Universal had sent out a lovely couple of executives to talk to Amy about her options since she hasn’t released a record in years. She is a challenge for them as she hasn’t performed recently and her last gigs were troubled, to say the least, but the couple are game. They bring out papers for her to sign via Mitch but, as Amy made clear the night before we left the island, she wants people to deal with her directly. And so, she decides not to deal with the people from Universal at all, even going so far as to insult the woman at my birthday meal. The two record executives are very nice people but they leave the island looking frustrated. They have taken a nine-hour flight, a three-hour cab journey and a helicopter ride to see Amy and work with her. They leave empty handed. This is Amyland.
After we finish filming, Amy shows up later at my villa to say goodbye. Mitch is with her. She has on her trademark denim cutoffs and a bikini top. This morning’s femme fatale is back to being a little girl. She hugs me again and again.
At one point, she sucks her thumb, which she has done before in my company. But this time Mitch, who is aware that a New York film crew is present, just pushes her thumb away – like you do with a small child. I suddenly have a flashback to yesterday’s shoot – so, it’s okay for Mitch to kiss his daughter on the lips, but not for Amy to suck her thumb in front of the cameras?
