Saving Amy (23 page)

Amy then begins to make hurtful remarks about both of her parents and I can sense an underlying violence in her behaviour.

I have had enough. It is not acceptable. I tell her, ‘Amy does it ever occur to you that maybe the people who you claim are friends of your parents or who are talking to your parents are actually interested in [them] and not only you. You are not the most interesting person in the world. In fact you are becoming very boring. I don’t want to hear all this.’

Amy is shocked. No one talks to her like this. She cries: ‘What do you mean?! [Do] you know how famous I am?’

I say, ‘Amy, … I am more known in some countries than you …’

Even drunk and naked, Amy is funny. She looks at me and says, ‘Let’s wrestle [to see] who is more famous!’

I tell her no. There’s no point. I add that Amy can be
even more famous than she already is, if she just goes back to what she became famous for – her music, her talent – not the things for which she is now
infamous.

My words strike a chord with Amy. She is quiet and then she murmurs finally, ‘Why are you so sweet?’ – before she starts to cry.

Then her mood changes. She asks me again if we can swap dresses and says, ‘I am taking these two. I will give you two.’

Thanks but no thanks, I think. She can have one of them, as I promised, as a gift, but Amy is insistent: she must have both dresses.

‘Amy, just take one dress and go to sleep,’ I say.

But she refuses to listen to me. She is also becoming more aggressive. Mitch is trying to break in, seemingly to both protect me and to control his daughter, but Amy tells him that she doesn’t want him and asks him to send in Neville, her bodyguard, to ask his opinion on the dresses. Neville enters the room, leaving Mitch and Amy’s chief bodyguard, Andrew, outside.

Amy is naked and drunk when Neville comes in and he is obviously uncomfortable, not knowing where to look. I am tired by her behaviour; the evening is becoming increasingly more bizarre.

Amy repeats, ‘I am taking both [dresses]’ and Mitch and Andrew, who are now both in the bedroom, are trying to stop her.

I don’t want this to explode into an even worse situation, so I say to her calmly but coldly, ‘OK Amy. I am giving you one dress as a gift. You want to steal the second one? OK. Go ahead! Steal it … I am not going to report you to the
police because your parents are my friends. I feel sorry for you. If it gives you … pleasure to steal a second dress, please – be my guest.’

The words seem to have the right effect. Amy changes instantly from being almost out of control to a little girl, who needs love and approval. She visibly melts, hugging me again and again, and crying, ‘You are so sweet. You are so nice!’

Mitch steps in, telling Amy authoratively, ‘Amy! [Daphne] is giving you a very expensive gift … one new dress … not two …!’

His words just seem to set Amy off again, however. She begins modelling both dresses, this time for her father, her bodyguards and me. She is in love with both of them. She can’t let them go. The night has become far too long and I am tired.

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 repeats 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.

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.