BY ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

On August 8, 2007, 23-year-old Amy Winehouse, who has the highest US chart debut for a British female singer in history and whose Shirley-Bassey-meets-Sid-Vicious second album, Back to Black, achieved five times platinum status in the UK with sales of one and a half million, was about to be branded on the collective consciousness. Dragged into University College London Hospital at 1am by her husband of two months, 24-year-old Blake Fielder-Civil, she was close to death. (Pete Doherty, who was with her when she began foaming at the mouth, fled for fear of bad publicity.) Winehouse had been on a three-day drug binge with her husband and Doherty, washing down quantities of horse tranquilizer ketamine, marijuana, Ecstasy, cocaine, and heroin with vodka and bourbon.

She hadn't slept for three days. Shots taken earlier that day show the previously full-bodied Winehouse with the papery, articulated body of an insect, in a reversed top, her staring eyes shielded by sunglasses, her hair a tar-black nest. Up until then, her instability had a kind of punk rock charm. Those TV appearances and live performances may rarely have been executed sober, but she could really be hilarious. “First person to get a bottle of tequila to the stage gets a sex act!” she roared to an audience last June.

Jolted into consciousness with the adrenaline shot glamorized by Tarantino's Pulp Fiction , the anorexic and bulimic Winehouse then had her stomach pumped. It was a zeitgeist moment; the public could not have been more voracious for coverage. In Britain , Winehouse would dominate the news for months. During her reign over 2007's front pages, a record number (40% up) of under-18s were enrolled in British alcohol treatment programs, the highest increase (62%) being among 12- to 14-year-olds, most of them girls. “I'm not in this to be a fucking role model,” Winehouse announced. But her cultural influence has been indisputable. Photographed with blood seeping through her pink ballet shoes after she had injected heroin between her toes, Winehouse presented a new model of young womanhood: public self-immolation as the new glamour.

Her need for intoxication became known in the US , where she had already pole-vaulted into the celebrity firmament. Caricaturists adored her, David Letterman brimmed with admiration for her indisputable genius, and YouTube wannabes in beehives were filmed chewing their way through the lyrics of Rehab , her anthem. Even Catherine Zeta-Jones had her hair styled into a beehive – which, before Winehouse, hadn't been seen atop a celebrity since 1969. And Danny DeVito crowed over her at the Coachella festival, where skeletal and glassy-eyed, she ignited global crack abuse rumors.

Voted Best British Female at the BRIT Awards, Winehouse imploded hours after her nomination for three MTV Video Music Awards (Best Video, Female Artist of the Year and Best Newcomer) and just as her album had catapulted into tenth position on the Billboard charts. She canceled her performance at the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony in Las Vegas (after her marriage to Fielder-Civil, Winehouse seemed to abandon any semblance of a schedule), was dumped as first choice to record the new James Bond theme, and nor did she support the Rolling Stones. “I fear [she] will die young,” Mick Jagger remarked. “Amy is a brilliant artist who makes fantastic music. She has class. But I'm worried she might die if she goes down the road that she has taken.”

Jagger is not alone in his concern. When Mitch Winehouse discovered that on the night of her collapse, his daughter had been “speedballing” (the simultaneous inhalation or injection of crack cocaine and heroin, and the cause of death of actor River Phoenix, comedians John Belushi and Chris Farley, Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, and Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott), he threatened to “crucify” his son-in-law. Winehouse sobbed that far from being a destructive parasite, her husband had “saved” her life.

Fielder-Civil, with whom Winehouse was involved two years prior to their £60 burger-and-chips wedding, left her the first time around for a another woman. Ironically, Back to Black documented the fallout; in the eponymous song, Winehouse refers to his love of “blow” (cocaine) and her love of “puff” (marijuana). Fielder-Civil returned when Winehouse became famous. Blog writers still highlight his alleged propensity to steal wallets and jackets. A friend observed: “Blake thought all his ships had come in when he got back with Amy. He likes to joke that the first time he met her - in a pub called the Good Mixer in Camden - it was the first and last time he ever had to buy the drinks.” Variously described as a part-time barman, sometime drug dealer, and fulltime addict, he listed his occupation as “rent boy” and interests as “getting into the most trouble around.”

He kept his promise. Since their no-prenup marriage, Fielder-Civil has not only seemingly never worked, but was arrested for allegedly plotting to fix his trial for GBH by bribing his victim with £200,000 (of, one imagines, Winehouse's money). Winehouse, who sobbed “ Baby, I love you! ” as he was handcuffed, will undoubtedly hire the finest legal counsel to defend him, losing further tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of pounds in the process. Fielder-Civil will, of course, feel in no way responsible. (Winehouse was recently arrested for suspected collusion and then released.) When she displayed the words she had carved into her flesh with a shard of mirror at a magazine shoot (“I wrote ‘I love Blake' on my tummy. It's just chicken scratch,”), he laughed.

Were it not heightened by narcotics, Winehouse's addiction to Fielder-Civil could be dismissed as so much adolescent infatuation: the perpetual pawing and spooning and smooching and bickering and breaking up and making up, ad nauseam. The relationship model to which both subscribe is textbook 1950s, straight out of Grease , in which the overcoiffed, overzealous, overachieving girl longs for the sly, loose-limbed bad boy, and all the attendant drama (struggles against convention, crossing class boundaries, etc.).

“Look at me, I'm a mess,” she wept to a tabloid journalist. “I'm nothing special. In fact I'm nothing at all. I don't feel good. I don't have talent. I'm nothing without my husband. I love him so much sometimes it hurts. I owe him everything.”

It's a stylized mode of interaction, this socio-sexual choreography of frozen needs, and unrelated to deep emotional revelation. Winehouse may be a hardworking working class Jewish girl and Fielder-Civil an idle double-barreled Christian, but they meet in misery - both come from broken marriages, have poor relationships with their mothers, absent fathers, and use the other as a distraction from difficult feelings: grief and abandonment. Crippled by a fundamental conviction of unworthiness, Winehouse externalizes her pain - “I immediately saw he was someone who hadn't been treated right, so I practically put him in my bag and said, ‘ Right, you're coming with me! '” – and chose an equally dysfunctional partner onto whom she could project her own anguish. And by “wearing” her projected pain, Fielder-Civil temporarily relieves her of suffering.

“I know I need help,” Winehouse wept, “but Blake's the only one who can help me. I don't want to lose him. I won't lose him. I want to make him happy - like what he does to me. I feel disgusting and Blake's the only one who stops me feeling like this.”

Her disturbing masochism and the calculated debasement of her captivating Semitic beauty has its roots in a turbulent family background. Mitch and Janis divorced when Winehouse was nine, the same year she began self-harming. (Inebriated, she sometimes slaps herself for not conforming to an idea of beauty. “Not punching myself in the face,” she explained, “but slapping … I'm quite self-destructive when I'm drunk.”) Winehouse's father was not only absent but unfaithful, and his guilt resulted in a dramatic new involvement in her life, which he then analyzes in television interviews.

Curiously, Winehouse does not condemn infidelity. “[Casual sex is] like smoking a spliff,” she once shrugged. On another occasion, she mused: “David Beckham's a genius. So what if he fucks 20 other women? [ Victoria ] can never leave him 'cos no one would like her and she'd just be forgotten about.” Such comments suggest a conscious identification with her father despite the fact that the grief of being abandoned is the axis of her fame. It was only when her mother was interviewed that it all made sense.

“She's never been an easy child,” her mother concluded, never considering whether she had been an “easy” mother or whether she had provided her daughter with an “easy” childhood. Flatly self-referential, Janis Winehouse then discussed her daughter's suicidal impulses. Her recollection of withdrawing Winehouse from school at the principal's request remains chilling: “The same day, I had to take the family … cat to the vet [to put it down]. My joke is I should have had Amy put down and the cat moved on.”

When the disastrously hostile subtext of this anecdote is taken into account, it is easy to see why Winehouse is bereft of both self-esteem and the will to live. Winehouse strove for the attention of millions in place of her mother's. Her trademark incapacitation-by-substance is a subconscious means of infantilizing herself – stumbling, slurring, even losing a tooth – to attract maternal interest. Janis Winehouse's passive aggression – a quality shared by most mothers of suicides – is a toxic when directed at a child. And the cocaine, heroin, ketamine, marijuana, bourbon, whisky, vodka, and Fielder-Civil all help dull awareness of her mother's stifled rage and the anguish of being framed for it. “The only reason I have had to be this loud,” she wrote in her application to the Sylvia Young Theatre School at 13, “is because you have to scream to be heard in our family.”

Interviewed by US magazine Blender after Fielder-Civil's incarceration, Winehouse claimed that she had avoided drugs since the overdose. Scalp visible through her matted hair, she fell asleep three times during the interview, rambled, slurred, and dropped her lit cigarette. A 10-day stint at the London Clinic, a tony rehab, resulted in clarity – until Fielder-Civil overdosed on heroin and then required 50 stitches in his arms and legs for self-harming. Predictably, Winehouse was soon photographed with the usual razor slashes on her arms and new rumors of drug abuse surfaced.

If Winehouse survives her yen for oblivion, she could go on to eclipse every other jazz singer in history. If she survives.

*Originally published in Elle

NOTE: Amy Winehouse died on July 23, 2011, at the age of 27.