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娱乐英语新闻:Amy Winehouse and Blake are killing each other,says her mother-in-law

2007-09-02来源:和谐英语
In a despairing, no-holds-barred interview, Amy Winehouse's mother-in-law says her son and the singer will be lucky to survive the year - and will NEVER quit drugs while they are together...

Every time the phone rings, Georgette Civil's stomach lurches with dread. Will this, she wonders, be the call saying that her son Blake and his wife Amy Winehouse are dead?

This is what she fully expects to happen some time soon, and who could blame Georgette for sounding melodramatic after the "nightmarish" events of the past three weeks?

On honeymoon: Amy Winehouse and husband Blake Fielder-Civil pose for these previously unseen family pictures

The couple married in Miami in May - seemingly on a whim in a £60 ceremony

three-day drugs binge said to include heroin, ecstasy, cocaine and the horse tranquilliser ketamine.

Then the emergency "crisis" summit between the couple and their respective parents at a five-star hotel descended into farce when Amy's father, Mitch, attacked Georgette's husband, Giles, blaming Blake for his daughter's very public downfall.

Amy, 23, and Blake, 24, then fled to a London hotel, having quit rehab after just five days, to be photographed dazed and bloodied in Soho following a furious bust-up when Blake reportedly walked into their room to find Amy about to take heroin with a prostitute.

Amy with her mother-in-law Georgette Civil

Now, amid fears that her behaviour will alienate U.S. audiences, Amy may be dropped by her record label, Universal/Republic, which has told her that she's on her last warning, and has ordered her to "clean up or clear out" with an all-expenses-paid Caribbean holiday.

She and Blake are now on the island of St Lucia talking of their "recovery", which - if reports are to be believed - involves "cutting back" on drugs and alcohol rather than forgoing them.

Meanwhile, Georgette is in despair.

In an emotional BBC radio broadcast this week, she begged fans not to buy Amy's records and asked the music industry not to give the singer any more awards, to shock her and Blake into confronting their problems.

"All we can think about as we lie awake at night is will we be burying our son in the next few weeks?

"If he's alive for another year, I think we'll be very lucky," says hair salon owner Georgette, 42, in her first full newspaper interview.

"I'm so desperate to get Blake away from drugs that I'm even considering paying to have him kidnapped and taken to a safe house where we could get professional help for him.

"Blake and Amy are like two separate accidents waiting to happen. Their meeting simply exacerbated everything that was wrong in their lives to the verge of tragedy.

"Our greatest fear is that if one of them dies, the other will commit suicide, such is their love for one another.

"If Amy died, Blake's life wouldn't be worth living because he'd be vilified.

"He told me as much himself.

"He told me that if Amy died on a Monday he would be dead by Monday night."

 
A tender moment for Amy and Blake on holiday in St Lucia this week

If Georgette, and her husband, primary school headteacher Giles, 42, Blake's stepfather - she was divorced from Blake's father, retired businessman Lance Fielder, some 20 years ago - had their way, the young couple would still be at the Causeway Centre in Essex, halfway through a six-week rehab stay.

But they are not, and Georgette believes both her son and Amy are in complete denial of their problems.

They cannot see, she says, how much danger they are in or how destructive their relationship is, based on an unhealthy codependency, obsessive love and a shared fondness for hard drugs and alcohol which has, apparently, deepened since their marriage in May.

She believes their only hope of survival is to part, arguing that they each bring out the very worst in the other, but concedes this is unlikely while they remain hopelessly in each other's thrall and under the influence of drugs.

"Blake has texted me most days from St Lucia saying they are having a nice time," says Georgette, who lives in an immaculate double-fronted house in a pretty Nottinghamshire village with Giles and their two sons, aged 15 and 14.

Ever since Amy fell in love two years ago with Blake, a film industry runner and heavy drug user, the finger of suspicion for her increasingly erratic behaviour has pointed at him.

When the couple briefly split up last year, he inspired her best-selling No 1 album Back To Black, but their subsequent marriage has brought no stability.

Instead, Amy's self-harming has become more apparent, her emaciated frame ever more stick-like, her drug-taking more pronounced, her drinking more ferocious.

'Wino', in recent weeks, has been re-christened 'No Show', for her failure to turn up to scheduled concerts.

Despite criticism from Amy's father Mitch, Georgette is no apologist for her son.

In fact, she is the first to condemn his drug taking.

"I'd like to be able to say my son was wonderful until he met Mitch's daughter, and Mitch would like to be able to say that Amy was wonderful until she met my son, but neither would be true," says Georgette.

"She and Blake are two troubled souls who are as bad as one another.

"We like Amy, she's a talented and lovely woman, but she clearly has a lot of problems, as does our son.

"From what we understand she was dabbling in drugs and had an eating disorder long before she met Blake.

"We certainly don't blame her or Blake in isolation for what's happening - they are equally responsible for the situation they are in and they have to be equally responsible and determined to get out of it."

After quitting rehab after just five days, Amy and Blake were photographed dazed and bloodied in London's Soho

The Civils first met Amy one Saturday evening last summer, when Blake brought her home to meet them.

They'd dated two years earlier, but had broken up when Blake went back to his girlfriend, Chloe, who worked for a magazine.

Amy last week with bandages covering her arm, blood-spattered shoes and a gashed knee

According to Georgette, Amy sent Blake an avalanche of text messages the whole time they were apart, convincing him of her love for him - so much so that he dumped Chloe.

Cynics have suggested that Blake, with no obvious income of his own, took up with Amy again just as she was becoming a major star, not to mention a rich one.

A bright grammar school boy with ambitions to become a journalist, he had dropped out of sixth form college and headed for the bright lights of London with a friend and started work in a hairdressing salon.

"Looking at him now, all dishevelled and unkempt, it's hard to believe that back then he wouldn't leave the house without showering, doing his hair and putting on aftershave," says Georgette ruefully.

Unknown to her, Blake - who did hairstyling on fashion shoots and also worked as a film runner - was being drawn increasingly into the drugs culture.

Indeed, some reports suggest he became a drug dealer, selling cocaine to young women on the London party circuit to finance his own habit.

One source, who claimed Blake had introduced Amy to hard drugs, told a newspaper: "He had all these girlie disciples under his spell and Amy was one of them.

"She was just another bird he could sleep with."

But Georgette refuses to accept this version of events, which absolves Amy of any responsibility for her own actions or her seeming determination, pre-dating Blake, to follow a path of self-mutilation.

"It was four years ago when we first suspected Blake was taking drugs.

"When he came home he was sniffing constantly, and when we visited him in London, he kept disappearing to the toilets in restaurants with his friends," says Georgette.

"We were horrified at the thought, and confronted him at once, and he didn't deny it.

"He told me: 'It's normal, mum, everyone takes a bit of cocaine.'

"I couldn't believe what I was hearing from my own son, but he was quite nonchalant about it.

"And the evidence of what he was saying was staring us in the face. He was more verbally aggressive, edgy and tense."

Pre-Blake: Amy in 2003 when she was first fame with her debut album Frank

Desperate to lure their son away from London and the drugs culture, the Civils offered to buy Blake a house near them, but he declined. They simply hoped he would grow out of it, meet a nice girl and settle down.

"When we first met Amy, she was very friendly and talkative, but she and Blake were very clingy with one another in a way that went beyond just being tactile.

"There was something a bit desperate-about the way they wouldn't let one another go, even in our company," says Georgette.

"When they first came to see us, they stayed the night then went back to London the next morning and that was the last we saw of them together until April this year, so we assumed, wrongly, that the relationship couldn't have been that serious.

"When they visited again in April, Giles and I booked a table at a restaurant in Newark, but when Amy and Blake arrived, they were shockingly different.

"Both looked in desperate need of a shower. Blake was tired and edgy while Amy seemed dreadfully emaciated and docile.

"It was a shock and we didn't know what was going on.

"At the restaurant, the pair were going backwards and forwards to the toilets and we suspected they must be taking drugs.

"Back home, we confronted them, but they denied drug-taking and said they were simply exhausted.

"Giles and I made it very clear that we would not tolerate any drugs being brought into our house.

"Blake and Amy continued in their denials, but they were very erratic and emotional, sitting huddled at our kitchen table, virtually in tears at one point and yet unable to articulate why.

"We were very anxious about their physical and emotional state."

The following month, Amy and Blake married - seemingly on a whim - while on holiday in Miami, in a £60 ceremony, followed by burger and chips and a 48-hour lock-in at a hotel. No parents were present.

Georgette continues: "Blake called us and said: 'Mum, congratulate me, I'm married. Would you like to speak to my wife?'

"I spoke to Amy and they both sounded so happy. When they came home they e-mailed us photos of the day they got married, and of them speeding around Miami on a boat. But I can't pretend that it was what I had hoped for for my son."

Amy's divorced parents Mitch, a cab driver from Kent, and Janis, a pharmacist, were equally upset.

Janis, 52, has said: "I think they were probably both so out of it that when he said 'Let's do it', she said 'OK then'."

 
Amy and Blake had dated two years before marrying, but broke up when he returned to his girlfriend, Chloe

Amy promised to throw a big family party to celebrate when they returned home, to appease their parents.

This never happened. Instead, three weeks ago, Amy was taken to hospital by Blake at 1am after a drugs binge.

Georgette found out only when a friend read about it in the paper and called her.

"We spent all day trying to get hold of Blake, with no success, and the next day we had a call from Mitch to say she'd been in hospital and that the pair of them had a problem that we needed to address," recalls Georgette.

"We were frantic with worry and the next day we raced to the Four Seasons hotel in Hook, Hampshire, for a very hastily arranged emergency summit with Blake and Amy.

"Mitch, Amy's stepmother Jane and mother Janis were also there.

"We arrived on the Friday night and the others on Saturday morning.

"When we went out onto the hotel terrace to say good morning to Amy, Blake, Mitch and Janis, by the look of anger on Mitch's face we could see he was unhappy about something.

"He launched straight into a torrent of abuse at Giles, shouting that everything was Blake's fault, then he tried to grab him around the throat.

"I was looking on, horrified, while Amy was yelling at her dad to get off Giles. I don't know what prompted it, but I do know that we had done nothing to deserve it."

Today, Mitch Winehouse refuses to blame Blake publicly, saying that Amy is responsible for her own predicament, but sources say that in private Amy's family feel very bitter towards her new husband, feeling he has drawn her into a drug-fuelled world from which she cannot escape.

Was that the reason for the altercation?

Georgette recalls: "Amy apologised profusely for her dad's behaviour, and Mitch has since apologised unreservedly, but it's just not acceptable behaviour.

"We thought it was going to be a private meeting between two families worried sick about their children, but Amy's manager was there and four people claiming to be her friends. I'd call them hangers-on.

"We didn't ask for the tragedy of our son's drug addiction to be played out so publicly, but that is the beast we are dealing with because of Amy's fame and we are doing our best to deal with it.

"We are still coming to terms with the fact that our son is a drug addict. It is very hard to accept.

"At that hotel in Hook, I tried to talk to Blake privately, but every time I went outside for a cigarette with him, one of these "friends" of Amy would appear. My son said he felt he wasn't being allowed to speak.

"He told me he'd even been banned from seeing his wife in hospital by Mitch and these friends - when he was the one who'd taken her there and probably saved her life.

"Eventually, at around one in the morning we went to our room and Blake and Amy came with us. She ordered hot chocolate and cakes and when we pushed them for answers, they admitted they were recreational drug users but insisted they were in control.

"They admitted taking cocaine, and nothing else.

"But we have since learned they have taken crack and probably heroin, which is very hard for us, as parents, to come to terms with.

"We have never asked them outright if they use heroin because we are frightened of what the answer will be.

"Amy was insistent that it had all been blown out of proportion and was fed up of everyone interfering in their lives. It became clear to me that neither realised their drug use was the big problem it really was."

Under parental pressure, Amy and Blake agreed to enter the Causeway Clinic in Essex on the weekend of August 11 for rehab, but fled to London after just a few days.

Then came the photographs following their bust-up in the capital. Amy was pictured with a bruised neck, make-up smeared over her face, cuts on her arms and blood seeping through her satin ballet pumps, while Blake's face was a criss-cross of deep scratches.

Again, Blake was blamed after it was reported he chased Amy through the streets of Soho before she flagged down a car and was driven away by strangers.

Amy has since insisted the fight was all her fault and that Blake had once again saved her life.

Wiping away tears, she revealed just how troubled a diva she really is by saying: "I'm nothing without my husband. I love him so much sometimes it hurts. I owe him everything. Without him I would be nothing.

"I can't beat the drugs without him. He's my rock...I know I need help, but Blake is the only one who can help me. I don't want to lose him. I won't lose him.

"I feel disgusting and Blake's the only person who stops me feeling like this. I don't deserve him."

But the Civils believe - like Amy's family - that the couple would be better off apart.

Says Georgette: "Those photographs were incredibly distressing for us to see as Blake's parents. This wasn't the life we'd wished for him.

"Do I think Amy and Blake can ever be clean?

"I think Blake could be drug-free separately, but together they are just feeding off one another."

In a show of parental support, the Civils have decided to buy a second home close to them, so that at any time he wants, Blake - and Amy, too, if she chooses - can move away from London.

"Our greatest wish is for them to go to a proper clinic abroad and deal with their demons.

"If they came back clean, people would have so much admiration for them. It's up to them now to take responsibility," says Georgette.

"Blake may see this interview as an act of betrayal on my part, but I've done it because we love him.

"If it prompts him to channel any anger he feels into getting clean then it will have been well worth it, even if the price I pay is that he never speaks to me again.

"At least my son will be alive.

"For now we have to accept the harsh reality that there's nothing more we can do for them."