Up All Night With Amy Winehouse

"All right, Remi, it's over," says Winehouse bluntly.

"No, but how did anyone know about you and Alex and Kristian?" Nicole asks her, referring to alleged extramarital dalliances by Winehouse reported in the press.

"They're, like, all these Chinese whispers," says Winehouse sadly.

"You need to get rid of the cunts around you who whisper," says Nicole, and after a pause, "What's the point of him taking pictures of you with a crack pipe?" referring to Fielder-Civil.

"It wasn't like that, babe," says Winehouse sweetly as she scours the floor in a stupor for a head scarf. "It's important that you know that. You know a lot of things are more casual to me than they are to you."

"Yeah, like smoking crack," Nicole says under her breath.

"It's just incidental," says Winehouse. "He's taking pictures of me because we were on our honeymoon, and he thought I looked pretty." She finds a red scarf with white polka dots, à la Minnie Mouse, and carefully fastens it around her head, tying it in a jaunty bow. Winehouse lifts her black wife-beater and stares at her chest — the tattoo of her husband's name thundering across her heart, barely encased by a gray polka-dot push-up bra. "Should I wear my Spanish top?" she asks no one in particular. Downstairs, a growing pack of paparazzi has gathered in a frenzy, inches from her door, with cameras at the ready, anticipating Winehouse's response.

For the last hour, Winehouse has been getting ready to meet the paparazzi; she's been carefully drawing the dark, thick Cleopatra swoops around her eyes, over smudges of makeup past, her long, manicured red fingernails masking a black resin lining, her lip gloss glittering pink, foundation covering little scabs that raid her face. "What are you going to say, Amy?" I ask her from the couch where I've been slumped over, scratching notes for the past few hours. At 4 a.m. — after I'd spent half the night outside her apartment, hoping for an interview — Winehouse had, much to my surprise, opened the door and invited me in for beer. Since then, Winehouse has been puttering around her house in varying states of consciousness, disappearing every half an hour or so upstairs to her bedroom and returning to talk to me a little about her music, a little about her drugs and a lot about her imprisoned husband. Through it all, she's an attentive and open hostess, boiling me tea and giving me extra slips of paper to take notes. Now, thinking about the waiting paparazzi outside, she keeps her eyes fastened on her image in the mirror.