7
Substance
over Style
Welcome to Oz (Where Even
Dorothy Popped a Few Pills)
Choosing subjects for a chapter on tortured artists and drug abuse presents its challenges. For one thing, drugs and alcohol feature prominently in the arts throughout most of history. The Greek dramatists loved their wine. Picasso’s opium use influenced his Rose Period. And God only knows what Moby is on right now.
Although the difference between casual use and outright abuse is not always obvious, determining where such abuse falls in an artist’s overall story arc is somewhat easier. Aldous Huxley recounted his experiences with mescaline for his 1954 nonfiction book, The Doors of Perception. Jim Morrison, whose rock group took its name from Huxley’s book, often called upon his experiences with psychedelic drugs when he wrote song lyrics. But in contrasting the lives of these two wordsmiths, the difference between use and abuse becomes clear. Huxley lived to be sixty-nine. Morrison was found dead in a bathtub at the age of twenty-seven. For both, drug use began as earnest experimentation, but it was Morrison who crossed the line from dabbler to addict.
Jim Morrison
The following profiles feature tortured artists for whom drug and alcohol abuse overtook everything else in their lives. They are stories of lost potential, poor impulse control, and cravings run amok.
(1922–1969)
Abstract: The view from way up high
Birth name: Frances Ethel Gumm
Birthplace: Grand Rapids, Minnesota, USA
Peak Performance: As Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, 1939
Demons: Uppers and downers
“I’ve sung. I’ve entertained. I’ve pleased your wives. I’ve pleased your children. I’ve pleased you—you sons of bitches.”
—From a bootlegged recording of her unpublished memoirs, circa 1965
Some teenagers do drugs to rebel. Judy Garland was just doing what she was told. At fourteen, she was two years into a contract with MGM, tethered to a rigid studio system that dictated her little-girl image right down to her frilly bows and Peter Pan collars. In 1937, the New York Post referred to her as that “plump Judy Garland” in a review of one of her first movies, causing the studio to insist that she shed her baby fat at once. It would not be easy, however. Despite a studio-mandated diet of chicken soup and matzo balls, Judy was helpless against the beckoning of a very persistent sweet tooth. The actress would waste no opportunity to sneak off to Wil Wright’s Ice Cream Parlor, on Hollywood Boulevard, where she would gorge herself on caramel sundaes doused in hot fudge. Such sugary excursions supplemented the secret stashes of candy and cookies she kept hidden in her dressing room. It got so bad that Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, held a meeting with other studio top brass to decide how Judy’s waistline should best be dealt with.
Mayer, a neckless cigar-sucker who presided over the studio like a feisty Russian czar, was one of the first Hollywood producers to recognize the monetary value of movie stars, and he was determined to turn Judy into one. Protecting his investment in Judy meant keeping the girl trim at all costs, even if he had to shame the pounds off of her with insulting nicknames like “My Little Hunchback.” At an age when girls are instinctively self-conscious of their bodies, Judy was plopped down in front of a mirror and compared to a plus-size mannequin. “Do you want to look like that dummy, or do you want to look like a star?” barked one MGM exec.
But a quick fix was on the horizon: a new drug called Benzedrine, which was becoming all the rage in Hollywood. Actors needed to suppress their appetites. Writers needed energy to work longer hours. It’s no wonder this powerful amphetamine was seen as a miracle cure for all that ailed the movie industry. Consequently, no one really thought twice about loading Judy up on fistfuls of Bennies as a means of getting her to lose weight. It was an age of blind faith in medicine, a time when doctors were as quick with a prescription pad as they were with a golf swing. The drugs worked like a charm, melting the pounds from Judy’s waistline like water on a witch. Granted, they had the unfortunate side effect of keeping her up all night, but the studio had a remedy for that as well: barbiturates. It was on this volatile cocktail of uppers and downers that Judy signed on for the movie role that would define her.
In 1937, Walt Disney Productions released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated movie, which shocked studio heads all over Hollywood by showing them that children’s stories could mean big bucks at the box office. Mayer wanted in on the action as well, so in 1938, MGM bought the film rights to L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, about a little girl named Dorothy who gets swept into a cyclone and transported to a magical land. Mayer thought Judy would make a perfect Dorothy, but there was a problem: At fifteen, she was developing the kind of curves that no amount of drug therapy could curb. Though the pills had apparently stunted her growth (she topped out at 411), they could do nothing to hide other signs of Judy’s impending womanhood. The studio’s solution? Tape down her breasts and strap on a corset to flatten her curves. With her self-image already in tatters, Judy was now being forced to change her body again. She could not have known that she was about to star in a future classic—by some accounts the most watched movie of all time—nor would it have mattered. What mattered to the seventeen-year-old girl was the insidious game of Whac-A-Mole being played with every growth spurt she went through. In creating a star, MGM damaged the person—for good.
The true extent of that damage finally came to a boil a decade later, when a scandal-happy rag called Hollywood Nite Life published a cover story about a young starlet whose personal life was being shattered by addiction. “Miss G,” as the paper called her, had developed an incurable habit. She was a “pill-head,” a victim of unscrupulous movie producers who were content to look the other way. While Judy’s fans were shocked by the news, it came as no surprise to anyone in Hollywood. In the years since The Wizard of Oz, Judy had become a kind of local embarrassment, a mouth-foaming fiend who would beg for pills and raid medicine cabinets at parties. In 1950, less than two years after the news of her addiction went public, MGM canceled Judy’s contract. The studio’s official reason was unconvincingly altruistic: The termination was in “her own best interests.” If nothing else, it was a consistent stance, as if all the years of pill pushing, breast taping, and ego bruising had been for the sake of building Judy’s character. The truth—that MGM did not have the decency to clean up its own mess—would have been far more difficult to spin in a press statement.
As a tortured artist, Judy Garland belongs to an all-too-familiar genus: the tragic movie starlet whose self-esteem was shattered by an industry that chewed her up and spat her out. But she also stands as a quintessential example of an artist for whom substance abuse was less a consequence of her inner problems and more the cause of them. For that, we can no more blame her than we could a crack baby. Pumped full of pills before she was old enough to know better, Judy developed a lifelong habit that completely stifled any chance her career had at longevity. Pictures of the actress at forty-seven, a year before her death, may fool you into thinking she lived into her eighties. In an audio recording, which Judy intended as notes for her autobiography, the malaise of delirium and bitterness into which she descended became clear. “I am an angry lady,” she rants. “I’ve been insulted, slandered, humiliated—but still America’s sweetheart!” By the time Judy’s fifth husband, Mickey Deans, found her dead in their London home, she had already been living “on borrowed time,” according to her doctor, but her cirrhotic liver eventually had to give. In the world of substance abuse, it’s not an uncommon ending. And yet, in Judy’s case, it still feels particularly tragic, if only because her demise stood in such diametric opposition to the far-off rainbow over which her character once wished to fly. 
(1920–1955)
Abstract: Bop till you drop dead
Birth name: Charles Parker Jr.
Birthplace: Kansas City, Kansas, USA
Peak Performance: With “The Quintet,” Massey Hall, Toronto, 1953
Demons: The rumors and realities of dope
“Some of these smart kids who think you have to be completely knocked out to be a good horn man are just plain crazy. It’s not true. I know, believe me.”
—Interview with Down Beat magazine, 1949
Charlie Parker was first introduced to heroin at the age of fifteen, either by a childhood friend or a stranger in a men’s bathroom, depending on how he recalled the story. The details of that first fix may have been fuzzy, but the immense gratification it provided was always in the front of his mind. With one prick of a needle, the struggling high school student whose father had recently abandoned him felt his problems instantly evaporate in a warm flood of orgasmic tingles. And from the very first moment he rose into that ethereal weightlessness, Charlie knew he never wanted to come down.
“You mean there’s something like this in the world?” he asked, digging into his pockets and pulling out his last dollar. “How much will this buy me?” What it bought him, of course, was a lifetime of instability and dependence, which followed him through his rise to the top of the jazz world as well as the rapid fall that followed his success.
Despite his reputation as one of the most innovative horn men in jazz history, Charlie Parker showed little aptitude for musical greatness in his early years. In fact, some of his first attempts to showcase his talents ended in outright humiliation. At the age of sixteen, the eager young saxophone player entered a competitive jam session at the Kansas City jazz nightery the Reno Club, where he hoped to make a positive impression on Count Basie and his band. Unfortunately, those aging jazz greats had grown to believe that the sun rises and sets around musical precision, and Parker was no expert in jazz theory. He had a lot of youthful energy, but he lacked technical ability. When it came time for his solo, Charlie fumbled, evoking critical scowls from everyone in the club. Basie’s drummer, Jo Jones, so objected to Parker’s playing that he sneaked up behind him and threw his cymbal on the floor. The deafening crash marked Parker as a clumsy greenhorn who couldn’t cut it with the pros, and the discouraged youngster packed up his sax and stormed out in a huff. “I’ll get ’em,” he vowed. “They rang a bell on me. I’ll get ’em!”
And he did. Over the next three years, Charlie Parker—nicknamed
“Bird” for his love of chicken—spent nearly every waking hour learning his instrument, training his fingers to perform with the all-fierce exactitude that jazz demanded. By the end of the 1930s, he had moved to New York City, where he could hold his own among the most skillful players in the country. In fact, he had gotten so good that conventional jam sessions were now leaving him bored. “I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else,” he said. “I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it.”
In 1939, during a jam session at Dan Wall’s Chili House, in Harlem, Charlie discovered a solution to the tedium by hitting on higher intervals within standard chord progressions. It was the first time that his fingers pulled off the meta-melodies that he had been hearing in his head, and the resulting chord changes would form the foundation of a complex new style of jazz called bebop. Charlie Parker, once shamed by pedantic players for being musically illiterate, had rewritten the language.
If Charlie’s story had ended there, it might have made for a nice little apologue about one man’s ability to realize his potential. But Charlie never realized his potential, mainly because when he wasn’t out revolutionizing the music world, he was shagging the insatiable cravings of his first love. That first shot of heroin at the age of fifteen gave him a taste for something that had no substitute.
Charlie’s dedication to his instrument, steadfast as it was, often did not supersede his temptation to pawn his saxophone for a helping of smack. He became notorious for his unreliability, repeatedly getting himself thrown out of bands for missing gigs or nodding off on stage. In 1946, he lit his Los Angeles hotel room on fire, was arrested while wandering around in a drug-induced stupor, and was later incarcerated at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. It was the first of three such institutional incarcerations for Charlie, the last of which followed two suicide attempts and the death of his infant daughter, Pree, which only pushed him further into the throes of addiction. Perhaps more troubling to Charlie than heroin itself was the undercurrent of mythologists who kept insisting that his drug of choice was partially responsible for his genius, a rumor that deeply embedded dope into bebop culture. Charlie, aware of his role in that myth, did what he could to dispel it.
“Any musician who says he is playing better [on heroin] is a plain, straight liar,” he complained. Meanwhile, such stereotypes stifled broader acceptance of bebop. Mainstream critics who couldn’t wrap their heads around the music simply dismissed it as the screechy noise of junked-out black guys. And yet, despite such pans, bebop was inspiring a decidedly white counterculture, fronted by skinny young cats in goatees and pork pie hats. Bebop improvisation also captivated figures from Jack Kerouac to Woody Allen, who understood it as a type of jazz that demanded intellectual commitment from the listener. These were not danceable jazz anthems performed by big bands in concert halls but personal expressions by impassioned artists.
Card Games
In 1951, Charlie Parker, by then notorious for rampant drug and alcohol use, had his New York City Cabaret Card revoked, barring him from playing any nightclub in the city that served liquor. He was not alone. The cards, instituted after prohibition and used until 1967, were a kind of witch-hunting tool for city officials who believed they could muscle troublemaking musicians out of town. Among other musicians of the era who had their cards revoked were Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk, and Billie Holiday, all for drug-related charges. One performer who would not play the city’s game, however, was Frank Sinatra. Rather than submit to the lengthy application process, which he found demeaning, Old Blue Eyes came up with his own solution: He simply refused to perform in New York.
For Charlie Parker, that personal expression was one of defenselessness against a substance that, piece by piece, tore his body to shreds. Later in life, debilitated by chronic pain, he thought it ironic that expensive doctors could do nothing for him while a $5 bag purchased in an alleyway could still make his pain disappear. And if Charlie’s self-destruction can be summed up in any particular moment of poignancy, that moment came in 1955, when his erratic behavior got him banned from Birdland, the midtown jazz club named after him. It was a few months later, at the Stanhope Hotel on the Upper East Side, that Charlie stopped breathing while watching TV. Which of his major organs was the first to give way is anyone’s guess, as they were all pretty much shot. Even the coroner who performed the autopsy was stumped, estimating Charlie’s thirty-four-year-old body to be between fifty and sixty years old.
(1949–1982)
Abstract: Voted least likely to survive
Birth name: John Adam Belushi
Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois, USA
Peak Performance: The first three seasons of Saturday Night Live
Demons: Instant gratification
“I guess happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time.”
—Interview with Cosmopolitan magazine, 1981
Long before DVRs freed us from the rigid airtimes of our favorite shows, conventional wisdom maintained that very few people enjoyed television enough to stay home and watch it on a Saturday night. So when NBC tapped Lorne Michaels to fill that shunned time slot, the twenty-eight-year-old writer banked on the hope that not even Peacock censors would be tuning in to see what he came up with. Hoping to create something truly edgy, Lorne began scouring the clubs and theaters of New York City for risqué young talent. He soon stumbled upon a stage show by National Lampoon Inc., helmed by a hilarious troupe of spoofsters whose roster included such performers as Chevy Chase and Gilda Radner.
It was pretty much all the talent Lorne needed. One by one, he signed the Lampooners for his new sketch-comedy program, but when he sat down with John Belushi—a manic, intense scene-stealer who seemed to lack even the slightest trace of inhibition—the meeting didn’t go so smoothly. “My television has spit all over it,” John blurted, effectively ending the conversation before it started.
For John, acting was an interactive sport, meaningless without the immediate feedback of a live audience. Born and raised in Chicago, where improvisational comedy trumps Shakespeare on the theatrical totem pole, the actor cut his teeth working with the legendary improv troupe Second City. Although he later became known for ingesting enough drugs to violate the Geneva Protocol’s provisions on chemical warfare, John, as a younger man, preferred instant gratification of a more natural grade. Howling laughter and raucous applause gave him a blissful rush, keeping his feet on a stage and his TV covered in saliva. As he insisted to Lorne, he had no use for a medium so steeped in sterility and solitude. What John did not realize, however, was just how well the late-night program would mesh with his anti-TV stance. The show would be edgy, unapologetic. It would embrace controversial humor and mock current events. Most of all, though, it would air live—something TV audiences hadn’t seen since the fifties. John, after repeated goading from his fellow Lampooners, reluctantly joined the cast of Saturday Night Live. He was so torn by the decision, in fact, that he refused to sign his contract until the day of the first airing, October 11, 1975, mere months before he would emerge as the quintessential Not Ready for Prime-Timer, only to morph into one of the fastest-living cautionary tales of the live-fast-die-young seventies.
But it was John’s addiction to the rush of audience praise that fueled his performances. His stage work, as well as his first few seasons on SNL, provided the fix he needed. But by the time he signed on to SNL, the natural highs provided by his audiences were dangerously supplemented by a potpourri of mind-altering chemicals. (In one early SNL screen test, John can already be seen sniffing his way through an entire four minutes of Brando impressions and eyebrow exercises.) Drugs had not yet seized control of John’s life, but then the $750 a week he received as an SNL cast member did not exactly leave room for overindulgence.
That would soon change. In 1978, John catapulted from SNL into the American crass-consciousness as Bluto, the beer-guzzling cretin of National Lampoon’s Animal House, which became the top comedy of the year. (Gross-out masters from the Farrelly brothers to Judd Apatow can thank their careers to John’s potato-spitting imitation of a zit.) By the following year, John had the number-one late-night television show, the top-selling album on the Billboard charts, and the highest-grossing comedy in cinema history. Now wealthy enough to afford any cocktail of drugs his overtaxed heart desired, he alternated between rampant binges and hiring bodyguards to help keep him from using.
John, as his coworkers routinely noted, had no off switch. Unfortunately, moviegoers did. They cooled significantly to his antics by 1981, when he tried to pass himself off as a romantic lead in the flop Continental Divide. His screen cred slipped even further with his next film, Neighbors, which would also be his last. That movie’s oddly counterintuitive story line had John playing straight man to a wacky Dan Aykroyd, a device that made it feel like a reject from the body-switch genre popularized by Freaky Friday.
With his movie career in shambles, John decided to take matters into his own hands and write his own film, Noble Rot—a comedy set in wine country, which he hoped would help him reclaim his Bluto glory. The truth was he had already strayed too far from his live-comedy roots. Whereas his work once produced the instantly gratifying feedback of enthusiastic applause, it now produced jeers from film critics and indifference from Paramount execs, who were unimpressed by early drafts of Noble Rot.
John’s all-or-nothing performance style took him from intimate off-Broadway stages to the recesses of the Chateau Marmont, on the Sunset Strip, where he spent his final days hammering out rewrites and partying with Robin Williams.
On March 5, 1982, a partygoer at John’s bungalow injected him with the speedball that ended his life at the age of thirty-three. The woman eventually served a fifteen-month prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter.
In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Dan Aykroyd imagined what John would be doing today had he survived the early eighties: He would have given up movies, according to his Blues Brothers costar, and returned to the stage. The prospect of an old-and-gray John Belushi recalls the famous SNL sketch “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” in which John plays himself as an old man, visiting—
and dancing on—the graves of his former cast mates. The irony, of course, is that John had already been voted the least likely to survive. If the sketch seems less funny in retrospect, it helps to know that John himself was in on the joke, even if it was at his own expense. Anything for a laugh. And a rush.
(1979–2008)
Abstract: Sleep no more
Birth name: Heath Andrew Ledger
Birthplace: Perth, Australia
Peak Performance: As Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain, 2005
Demons: Being under the microscope
“I love acting. Oh, God, I love it. But all this fame and all this bullshit attention. I’m not supernatural. I’ve done nothing extremely special to deserve the position.”
—Interview with Newsweek magazine, 2000
Executives at Sony Pictures Entertainment had a plan for Heath Ledger: They were going to turn him into a teen heartthrob. In 2001, shortly before the release of A Knight’s Tale, Sony bigwigs sat down for a meeting with the film’s twenty-two-year-old leading man to discuss promotional strategies. Everyone agreed that Heath exhibited just the right combination of dangerous charm and nontoxic good looks—an edgy rock star with a little Doogie Howser thrown in for good measure. But A Knight’s Tale was his first starring role in a Hollywood movie, and the campaign to promote it would need to be aggressive. Heath would have to tour the country. He would have to appear in malls and at video stores, posing for photo ops under movie posters bearing the tag line, “He will rock you!” However, what sounded like Tiger Beat gold to Sony sounded like a nightmare to Heath. He never finished the meeting that day. Panicked by the thought of press junkets and publicity tours, he leapt from the table, darted out of the room, and locked himself in a bathroom stall.
Anyone familiar with Heath Ledger’s trajectory after the success of A Knight’s Tale knows that his career ended abruptly. Less than seven years later, he was found dead in his SoHo loft from a toxic combination of Xanax, Valium, Vicodin, OxyContin, and cold medicine. The Australian actor did not become the blond-haired heartthrob that Sony execs had hoped, nor did he circumvent the scrutiny and idolatry he wished to avoid. Instead, his short time in the spotlight was undone by an age-old actor-as-artist paradox, in which the need for notoriety clashes with the desire for anonymity.
Heath once called himself an “illusionist.” An actor’s job, he believed, was not just to dive into a role but to completely disappear within it. He realized this acting philosophy most fully in 2004, when he signed on to play the closed-off and closeted Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain. Ang Lee’s willfully contemplative indie drama followed a secret love affair between two ranchmen in 1960s Wyoming, but what began as a project of dubious commercial appeal—“the gay cowboy movie,” as casual observers called it—seeped into the mainstream. At the center of the film’s universal appeal was Heath’s performance. His subtle, Brando-esque mumbling brought Ennis’s hopeless longing into delicate fruition. Brokeback went on to be the most honored movie of 2005, propelling Heath to the forefront of awards season with an Oscar nod for best actor. For Heath, winning an Oscar meant the freedom to take on even more challenging roles. However, going for the brass ring involved paying a steep price, at least for the publicity-averse Heath. It meant more of everything he despised—more events, more photo ops. The whole effort amounted to an artless political campaign, jumping in the fray and joining the ranks of would-be Oscar winners as they clamored for the attention of Academy voters. Nevertheless, Heath played the game for the promise of Oscar gold.
“He really did whore himself around, doing all the things he hated,” Terry Gilliam, who directed Heath in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, told Vanity Fair magazine. “He felt angry with himself for going along with the way the system worked. He felt dirty.” If the debasing process of “For Your Consideration” crusades made Heath feel dirty, then perhaps it’s fitting that he took a bath in the race for statuette glory, losing to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s helium-voiced take on Truman Capote.
Hollywood politics may have left Heath with a bitter taste in his mouth, but they would be nothing compared to the treatment he would receive in his native Australia, where swarms of pestering paparazzi badgered him right off the continent. Uncomfortable with his growing fame, Heath reacted with more and more hostility toward the throngs of snappers and shooters who followed him around constantly. The Australian press, not unlike those fifth graders who discover that they can get a rise out of you by flicking your ears on the school bus, simply grew more emboldened by Heath’s agitation. At the Sydney premiere of Brokeback Mountain, Heath stepped onto the red carpet only to be squirted with water pistols by several photographers. The incident left Heath in tears, according to his father, who said the actor called him that night to tell him he was selling his beachside Sydney home and relocating to Brooklyn—permanently.
Heath fostered equal enmity for those on the highest and lowest rungs of the showbiz ladder: the bigwigs who tried to polish his image and the bottom feeders who wanted to make a buck selling candid photos to tabloids. It’s rather appropriate that his anarchistic take on the Joker, in 2008’s The Dark Knight, was partially inspired by the former Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten, who was spitting vodka at record executives before Heath was born. It was during preparations for that role that the incurable insomnia that would lead to Heath’s demise began to overtake his life. Heath was averaging two hours’ sleep a night when he sequestered himself in a hotel room for a month, writing down what he imagined might be the deranged thoughts of his sociopathic character. He tried popping a few Ambien pills, but the effects of that drug scarcely lasted an hour before he’d wake up again to find his mind still racing.
The true extent of Heath’s drug use has been obscured behind conflicting reports by the people who knew him. Personal accounts of Heath’s behavior range from stories of the actor snorting piles of cocaine to testimonies from those who claim they’d never seen him with anything stronger than a cigarette. Regardless of which version is closer to reality, one thing is clear: Heath’s plunge into substance abuse was an act of desperation—a last-ditch coping mechanism by a tortured young man who needed relief from a brain that would not turn off. Whether it was a run-in with a paparazzo or throwing himself into a new role, the everyday stressors of movie-star life fueled his tendency to think too much. That tendency only worsened after he separated from his partner, the actress Michelle Williams, who later recalled how Heath’s overactive mind was always “turning, turning, turning.”
After his breakup in late 2007, Heath took up residence in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. It was only a few months later that he turned up dead at the age of twenty-eight. Whether posthumous kismet or plain old irony, his death came only a short time before major promotions were to begin for The Dark Knight, casting a fable-like shadow over the film’s release that helped make it the most successful picture of the year. In February 2009, Heath Ledger won an Oscar for his role as the Joker, beating out Phillip Seymour Hoffman (for Doubt) and becoming only the second actor in history to win the award posthumously. He didn’t have to appear in a single photo op to get it.
(1983–2011)
Abstract: Chasing Amy’s tail
Birth name: Amy Jade Winehouse
Birthplace: London, England
Masterwork: Back to Black
Demons: Addiction and violence
“I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head and need to get something good out of something bad.”
—Interview with Spin magazine, 2007
On June 14, 2007, Amy Winehouse graced the cover of Rolling Stone magazine for the first and only time during her brief career. The cover photo is a head-and-shoulders shot of the terminally troubled songstress donning all of the attributes we have come to associate with her: the cat-eye makeup, the pinup-girl tattoos, the pouty sneer. The magazine’s familiar logo is obscured by Amy’s towering hairdo, while the headline below promises a revealing exposé of “The Diva and Her Demons.” Among the apparent revelations in the story is that Amy was booted out of London’s Sylvia Young Theatre School for getting her nose pierced and displaying a generally combative attitude. At thirteen, the future queen of neo-soul was already a rebel, which is just the kind of colorful past we would expect from the singer whose drug-addled life made “Rehab” one of the most ironically titled songs in history.
The Rolling Stone article, like Amy herself, fulfilled a promise to a train-wreck-loving public who had come to view her foibles as just another form of home entertainment. Never mind that Sylvia Young later denied that Amy was expelled from her school. The story, true or not, fits too perfectly into Amy’s fractured image. When the singer became the latest member of the 27 Club on July 23, 2011, her untimely death confirmed her apparent determination to live out the Oliver Stone–directed version of her own life.
And yet Amy’s transformation from a promising soul singer to the tabloid cartoon who tumbled out of bars, punched fans in the face, and toked on mysterious pipes would scarcely be a biopic in the making had she not also produced one of the defining albums of the aimless aughts. Back to Black, Amy’s 2006 smash hit, was a rarified pop-culture phenomenon in the à-la-carte age of iTunes. A spirited throwback to sixties soul, it was fitted with the heart of a modern-day tigress and seasoned with just enough minstrelsy flare to qualify as an homage without coming off as racist.
Back to Black came into being as the direct result of Amy’s violent relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, the lanky video-production assistant who is often blamed for introducing her to heroin, crack, and other assorted substances.
In 2005, Amy was still coasting on the U.K. success of her first album, Frank, which, if nothing else, lived up to its title. Released in 2003, Frank was a solid okay—elevator music by way of a porn soundtrack, topped off by Amy’s buttery voice and snarky ruminations. But two years after the album’s release, the singer had shown little interest in writing a follow-up. As one A&R (“artist and repertoire”) rep for Island Records said of the twenty-one-year-old Amy, “She just didn’t have the subject matter to write about. She needed to live it first.” As if following that advice to the letter, Amy “lived it” through her relationship with Blake, a destructive, on-again-off-again freak show made all too combustible by the forces of media attention. Ostensibly, Amy and Blake’s coupling was a familiar trope: the rock-star rebel and the groupie who latched on for a slice of the glamour—Sid and Nancy in reverse, as it were. Amy had his name tattooed over her left breast and once carved the words “I Love Blake” on her abdomen with a shard of mirror, apparently hoping to shock a journalist. British tabloids vilified Blake, placing responsibility for Amy’s downward spiral almost solely in his boney lap. But Amy stood by her man. Consider the night they were both discovered at London’s swanky Sanderson Hotel, bruised and bloody, as if they had just beaten each other to a pulp. Amy later claimed that she harmed herself. Blake, she said, would never lay a finger on her.
Whichever version you believe, there is no mistaking that the brutal energy infusing their relationship was the very thing that made Back to Black the force it became. Written during a period when the two had broken up, the songs are an account of scorned love and subsequent self-pity. (The title track recounts how Amy drowned herself in mind-altering chemicals after Blake refused to leave his other girlfriend.) Back to Black was released in October 2006. By mid-2007, “Rehab” was shooting up the Billboard charts and Amy and Blake were on again. The couple married in May of that year. “Here is a song I wrote when he left me a couple years ago,” she said, introducing the ubiquitous hit during a Los Angeles radio performance. “I wrote the whole album about it, really. We went on our little separate ways, and then realized that we loved each other. Life’s too short.”
That last line, of course, became far more poignant once the singer was found dead, but her life with Blake would be shorter than she realized. After attacking a London club owner, Blake was sent to prison in 2008, and although the couple divorced in 2009, Amy never seemed to fully give him up. Just months before her death, she was reportedly firing off alcohol-induced texts to her ex, whose new fiancée publicly complained of the spaced-out messages in which Amy signed off as “your wife.”
Meanwhile, rehab clinics throughout the London area had all but installed revolving doors to accommodate her comings and goings, and when she tried to stay clean enough to perform, she would often slur through a set just long enough to be booed off stage. Her worst moments always seemed to be captured for posterity by smart phone–wielding spectators who were determined to turn Amy into the first tortured artist whose downfall was documented real-time via YouTube.
The novelty factor for modern rock rebels is, admittedly, difficult to sustain. The music world has seen more of its share of Amy Winehouses over the last half century. And given the brevity of her pop reign, her legacy will most certainly face challenges as less destructive, Gaga-style rabble-rousers take her place. Hanging in the balance are both Amy’s artistry and her circus act: Is she a Gen-Y Kurt Cobain or a female Andy Kaufman? Only hindsight will allow a verdict. But for anyone who just started paying attention after they carried her body out of that London flat, yes, she really meant all that “no, no, no” stuff.