Thank you, Amy

For a lovely - if unexpected and strange - afternoon with you

I stared down the long hospital corridor and saw a very thin young woman, with a super high beehive hairdo, sprayed-on skinny jeans, a tiny tight black tank top and ballet flats. ‘Wow,’ I thought to myself, ‘That girl is really trying to look like Amy Winehouse.’  

I was there to have some stitches removed after some surgery for endometriosis. I’d been sitting in the waiting room for about five minutes when the beehive rolled in and sat across from me, water and pill bottles spilling out of her arms onto the tiny brown coffee table. You know what I’m about to say: It bloody was Amy Winehouse. 

She looked up, embarrassed by the clatter, half smile/laughed: ‘Sorry.’

‘That’s alright,’ I laughed so as to to indicate this was not something to apologise for. What happened next still stuns me.  She stared at me, double-take style, pointed a finger: ‘Wait, how do I know you?’

I said, ‘Well, of course I know who you are, but I don’t think we’ve ever met.’

‘Oh I know - you’re Jo! Glamour, right?’ 

No one witnessed this. But I already feel like an arse writing it down. I’d have to be a massive arse to make up that Amy Winehouse recognised me. She carried on to say she loved reading Glamour but actually had been aware of me since she was a kid, because she was an avid reader of Sugar magazine. My jaw was on the floor.  

‘I really wanted to be a magazine writer,’ she said. ‘But then the singing sort of took over.’

This time my laugh was loud and hard. ‘Yeah it kind of took over a little bit, right? Thank god you did not choose magazines over music, Amy.’ 

She laughed, but said she was serious. And for a time she had actually worked as a journalist for an entertainment network. She asked me if I was alright - we were, after all, sitting together in a hospital. I explained the stitches. I did not ask why she was here, but she volunteered ‘tattoo removal’. I decided to believe her. 

Anyway, of all the ways that a magazine editor might well meet a famous singer, this was not on my list. 

A nurse called my name, I said lovely to meet you, hope all will be well.. She said, ‘I’m here for a few days, and I’m so bored, come and have a coffee with me when you’re done!’ I didn’t think for a second think she meant it.  I thought it was just one of those ‘you must come round’ sign-offs  we all say and don’t really mean.

As I lay there for the nurse, I chatted about the surreal encounter. She asked me if I was staying to have a coffee with Amy. I said, ‘No, I can’t imagine Amy Winehouse wants to spend time talking to a journalist while she’s in hospital.’ 

After a long pause, she said, ‘I think Amy’s quite lonely actually.’

Oh god. I could tell the nurse wanted me to stay and keep her company, if only for a little while. 

From the back of the hospital cafeteria, Amy smiled and waved frantically. She was with a very imposing looking bodyguard. A man mountain who regarded me, mutely, with either derision or boredom, I couldn’t tell. 

As I feared, I didn’t really know what to say to Amy. This was November 2009, and so I’m trying to think back to where where we were with her story. She was so fricking famous, for a mixed bag of good and bad reasons. Back To Black had already cemented her as the most unique voice of a generation. A newspaper piece from summer of that year notes that she looks ‘much healthier’ than she had 12 months earlier. We’d had those shocking pictures of her and husband, Blake Fielder-Civil bloodied after an apparent fight. But by then she had also reportedly split from him and was in a much better place all round. But you know, we were in a hospital so who knows what was true and what wasn’t about her health.

This is all why, anything I could think to say or ask felt like a massive intrusion. She was flicking through a copy of The Sun. We talked about the celeby gossip stories in Bizarre, but I genuinely can’t remember exactly what we discussed. We found a groove though when she started asking me about make-up and skincare products. She wanted to know what I rated, what I didn’t. I confessed I don’t buy a lot because there’s a bloody great cupboard full of products in the office. ‘Really?’ she said, those eyes  - heavily kohl-lined, yes, even in hospital, which I loved - wide with wonder. As if I’d just said I have a pet unicorn. The questions were thick and fast after that. What kind of stuff, do you get to keep it, how come they just send it. 

‘Amy, I’m sure you could get any products you wanted sent to you.’

She doubted it. 

I said, ‘Well, if you ever want to come to the office and have a rummage around my cupboard, you’re always welcome!’

‘Can we go now?’

I laughed. Those big saucer-like eyes again. 

‘Oh! You really want to go… right now? Are you allowed to?’

Apparently arrangements needed to be made that would take about 20 minutes, but the mountain nodded.

I was actually still on sick leave from my surgery and supposed to be just going straight home. I was still feeling quite rough, truth be told, from a general anaesthetic. But this was now an extraordinary turn of events that would need to be seen through.

From the back of a taxi, I tried to explain that I was now coming into the office to prepare for the arrival of superstar, Amy Winehouse and the looting of the Glamour beauty cupboard that I had apparently just agreed to. 

‘I know, yes I realise this makes no sense at all,’ I said to Michelle, deputy editor. ‘But please tell me, that the beauty cupboard has a healthy stock and that I’ll be allowed to just give her some shit from it.’

Half an hour after me, in came Amy, a teeny grasshopper of a thing now being towered over by not one but now two man mountains.

Cue about 25 Glamour staff trying to act cool, not stare too much, not look too starstruck or excited that a global superstar has just sauntered in. But Amy was also meek and shy. She said a barely audible hi to no one in particular. 

Anyway, we all knew why we were here. I led her to the hallowed beauty cupboard. Which was actually cupboards - a whole wall length of floor to ceiling shelves and stuffed to bursting with eyeshadows, mascaras, lipsticks, moisturiser, shampoos, nail polishes and that was before you got to all the hardware like hairdryers and straighteners. We could have opened 25 branches of Boots, np. Amy regarded those shelves with a silent reverence not seen since those Nazi villains in Indiana Jones laid eyes on the Lost Ark. 

I invited her to go through and take some stuff. But then, she spied a bottle of Champagne on the beauty editor’s desk - they were more common than pens on our desks in those days. We weren’t all boozing it up at work (most days anyway), but we were all regularly being sent Champagne by PRs. She asked if she could open it.

I didn’t know how to react. Of course we all knew Amy’s ‘struggles’ by this time. I ventured, ‘Well…. I mean… it’s warm.’ She wasn’t bothered by that. I looked at her henchmen, figuring part of the reason they were in tow was to intervene at such moments. But one of them shrugged and nodded and I felt like it wasn’t my place to tell Amy what she could or could not do. The cork was popped. Amy swigged from the bottle. She had mentioned, in the coffee shop, that she had been under a general anaesthetic the day before, so I asked if maybe it would be a bad idea to mix those after effects with alcohol. She shrugged and took another swig. 

I remember a lot of gasps as she pulled one big box of products after another off of the shelves. Of course she zoomed in on the eyeliners and everyone wanted to know how the hell hers always looked so banging. Practice was the obvious, if somewhat deflating, answer. 

The beauty team started to shoot me panicked expressions behind her back, and even though I shot back ‘Just chill'!’ grin-glares, I have to admit it was all getting a bit out of hand. Amy was saying things like, ‘I don’t know which of these nail polishes to choose, they look almost identical’, before then immediately putting both in a carry bag. An expensive hairdryer was taken, as was multiple cleansers and moisturisers. The cupboard was getting really locusted but we were in it now. If a big beauty brand needed to yell at me about something we were actually supposed to send back, I was just going to have to get yelled at now.

At one point, Amy mentioned she was hoping to do more music with Mark Ronson, before adding, ‘If he gets over himself….’ mysteriously!

Of course we also wanted to know the rules of getting a great beehive together and she swore she could beehive anyone in the room. ‘My family’s full of hairdressers, we know this stuff,’ she laughed as she positioned herself behind our fashion editor, Sarah’s chair and started piling her long blonde hair this way and that to prove her point.

She stopped and gasped when she noticed Sarah was pregnant. 

‘It’s twins!’ I said. 

She ooh’d and ahh’d and congratulated and said in a comically whiny voice, ‘Oh I really want to have a baby, I hope I get to. But can I tell you something?’ She lowered her voice to a whisper:  ‘I used to do a lot of drugs. I’m worried that I might not be able to.’

I really didn’t know what to say or where to look. The vulnerability, the honesty and the trust placed in this room full of strangers… it broke my heart. This insanely talented woman laying bare that perhaps the thing she really wanted might be out of her reach. It would prove to be so, but we didn’t know this on that day, almost two years before her tragic death. 

I think she was with us that day for about an hour and a half. She thanked me profusely, repeatedly, for the now multiple stuffed bags of products. She was going to spend the afternoon in her hospital room having a play with it all and figuring out which bits to send to her cousin Dionne Bromfield. ‘Will you keep an eye out for her? She’s so talented she’s going to be big. Write her name down!’ I did and we featured her not long after in the mag.

Before she left, she gave me her mobile number on a yellow post-it note that I kept for years. It read Amy Fielder-Civil above the digits. She was still using her married name. I didn’t ask.

There was just one time I dared to dial that number. I’d had no luck getting a response from any of her team about inviting her to 2010 Glamour Awards. So I thought, screw it, and texted her about it directly. She responded within two minutes: ‘I will be in the States! Otherwise I’d have loved to be there. Xx’

Anyone who organises a huge event will you tell you: A quick no is the kindest no and always appreciated. I loved her for that. 

About half an hour after she left the office, I had to laugh when her nervous crisis PR manager phoned me. He and I are mates, and have always gotten on very well. I’m sure he felt a bit embarrassed to be following up to ensure I wasn’t writing some ‘gotcha’ type scurrilous piece about her visit. ‘Honestly, you don’t need to worry, but thanks for the trust,’ I teased him. ‘I can’t help that I ran into her in hospital! But I haven’t phoned The Sun, and you know I won’t. So unclench.’

I wrote the briefest version of this story when the news broke that she had died. I was standing in a queue at Heathrow when I saw the headline come through. There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t already been said. But when I thought back to this encounter and the essence we saw that day - a sweet, kind, and quite childlike soul - I felt so damn sad.   

I haven’t seen Back To Black yet. I’m sure I will at some point. I’m an admirer of both director Sam Taylor-Johnson and producer Alison Owen. I wonder if they agree with my interpretation of the woman I met once.

We took one photo of us together in the office. Me sitting in her lap, both of us grinning. But I can’t find it. It was taken on an ancient Blackberry, I have no idea how to access it. So you’ll just have to believe me when I say this all really happened. Even though sometimes I still can’t believe it myself.