DoubleTake:Self-destructive women have always been with us, from Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin - these days, though, we get to see it all in graphic detail
I promise to abandon female masochism as a subject in future columns but I cannot stop just yet. For example, this week I learned that, on arriving in India, Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of the British Viceroy, sent down for some food for her pet dog. When a roast chicken duly arrived she retired to the bathroom and wolfed the chicken herself.
I read this in an online book review so I hope I am quoting the writer Alex von Tunzelmann, author of Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, correctly: "This incident has usually been omitted by biographers, perhaps because to modern eyes a story about an extremely thin woman who locks herself in a bathroom to eat looks uncomfortably like evidence of an eating disorder."
I find this incident fascinating. I find it a lot more fascinating than, for example, the question of who is going to become the leader of the Labour party. As respectable culture becomes duller by the minute, stagnating where we stand, is it any wonder that the great unwashed turn to more intriguing dramas? Don't ask us to give them up yet - they're the only prospect we have of witnessing change.
It is Amy Winehouse who memorably responds to suggestions of rehabilitation by singing "No! No! No!" And it is kind of hard to drag your eyes away from the horrors when they are being produced, band-box fresh, every single day.
The worthy may recoil, but there are many modern problems to be found in the story of Amy Winehouse's self-destruction: fame, anorexia, bulimia, self-harm, alcohol and drug abuse as practised by a very intelligent and talented young woman. I feel most sorry for that loyal and despised music fan, the pre-adolescent girl. The pre-adolescent girls are the ones who actually go out and buy the singles, who know all the words to Rihanna's Umbrella (as opposed to the three squeaks in the chorus, which is all the rest of us can remember of it), and who dream of growing up to become a great big star like . . . Amy Winehouse.
Their grandmothers got to watch Janis Joplin and, to a lesser extent, Dusty Springfield, slide and then roll downhill. Their great grandmothers got to watch Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf fall to bits. But the thing is, now the stars plummet so fast.
Even back in the 1980s, Boy George could go to America with Marilyn and come back a couple of months later explaining his weight loss by citing stress. We have a full catalogue on Amy Winehouse's drugged decline, right down to the bikini pictures, published last week, showing her poor old woman's body and the stretch marks that it bears. We're not going to talk about the other picture, which showed her blood-stained ballet slippers; the symbolism is too pornographically perfect.
Car-crash culture isn't new, even though in the last couple of weeks commentators have been trying to persuade us that it started with the late Princess of Wales - and not just because she died in a car crash. Of course there have always been the Jim Morrisons, the Kurt Cobains, the Pete Dohertys, not to mention just about every country and western star you have never heard of.
The problems experienced by Irish traditional musicians with alcohol are well known. It was interesting to note Liam Clancy's remark last week, made in a television programme commemorating Tommy Makem, that what really set Tommy Makem apart from the rest of the act was not the fact that Makem was not a Clancy Brother, but an even greater difference: Makem didn't drink.
But, even leaving aside other musical genres, and other industries where excess is the norm - law and journalism, say - the Amy Winehouse disaster, brought to us in living colour, is beginning to make it look as if girls and rock'n'roll don't mix.
Which is a pity, because they fund it.
What girls are really, really good at is revealing how systematic they are in punishing themselves, and that is new. Not because the pace got faster, or because there are a lot more outlets for the revelations, but because the concept of privacy itself is getting thinner and thinner. Privacy is heading for rehab.
When Amy Winehouse appeared on Never Mind The Buzzcocks, a lads' panel game where women never do well, she seemed to be under the influence of quite a lot of things. The programme's brilliant host Simon Amstell told her that this wasn't a chat show - it was "more an intervention".
The audience laughed heartily - I did too. We were all in on the joke, behind the bathroom door.
Edwina Mountbatten had servants who didn't sell their stories to the newspapers; she had a love life that would have set Heat! magazine aflame. Her problems were never made public in her lifetime. Even after Edwina's death, as Alex von Tunzelmann observes, her biographers deliberately kept what they thought were inappropriate details from the ordinary reader. From us!
Edwina Mountbatten was lucky; Amy Winehouse, poor girl, less so. We get to hope for some change in the story, to see Amy pull out of her death dive. And that is why celebrity stories are more interesting than politics.
