A Song for You

by Robyn Crawford

  We needed to call a doctor.

  The doctor diagnosed a torn vocal cord and gave Whitney a mask and inhaler to breathe into. He said there was no reason why the vocal cord wouldn’t heal, but she would have to allow her voice to recover. Whit needed to shut that voice down, and quick. This was her first-ever sign of vocal injury, and Whitney Houston was wounded.

  After the doctor’s visit, Nip returned to rehearsal and took her seat center stage. The band played as Whitney sat, listening. Then she turned and glanced over her shoulder at her singers and turned back, moving closer to the mic.

  Whitney’s first televised concert was scheduled to broadcast live on March 31, 1991, from an airplane hangar at the naval air station in Norfolk, Virginia. We traveled there by helicopter, and despite placing three or four Dramamine patches on my skin, I was still sick to my stomach. Nippy thought that was hilarious. She was in stitches when we were up in the military helicopter and I almost lost it. She laughed heartily, watching me cringe as we floated our way up and down, swaying left and right, until blessedly we landed on the USS Saratoga. When we landed on the carrier, it was windy and loud, but I couldn’t have been happier to be off that helicopter. Though I never quite got my sea legs on the carrier, I fell in love with the naval uniforms, so much so that not long after, I would design black flight suits for the I’m Your Baby Tonight World Tour.

  Since it was a performance for the troops, opening with “The Star-Spangled Banner” made sense. Wearing her new blue military flight suit, Whitney sang a cappella for over thirty seconds before the band joined in, delivering a rendition second only to her Super Bowl version.

  Whitney quickly shed the flight suit to perform “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” revealing the cute yellow long-sleeve tunic and shorts set she had on underneath.

  I don’t know why, but Nip had decided to include “A Song for You” in that night’s set list. It was the first time she performed it. In fact, it was the first time I heard her sing it. We’d listened to the song before; I remembered the nights Whitney and I often spent playing music, putting one album after another on the turntable, looking at the artwork, reading liner notes and discussing them. One night at our first apartment, we lay side by side on the floor, our heads propped on pillows, the only light coming from the stereo we faced. I selected the Temptations’ “A Song for You,” an album I treasured. We relaxed, silently enjoying the tracks that preceded “A Song for You,” the sixth song on the record. And then it started. The piano intro filled the darkness before Dennis Edwards’s soulful voice emerged:

  I’ve been so many places in my life and time.

  I’ve sung a lot of songs,

  I’ve made some bad rhymes.

  I’ve acted out my life on stages

  With ten thousand people watching.

  But we’re alone yeah,

  And I’m singing this song for you.

  The song ended, and we lay motionless until I spoke. “I’d love to hear you sing that song.”

  “It’s a great song,” she agreed, “but I haven’t lived enough to sing it.”

  Now she was twenty-seven, only seven years older than when she’d declared herself too young. Why had she decided to sing it now? What had happened? What had changed? I watched from the sound booth as she perched on a stool and belted the song, her own interpretation, which sounded to me like a plea. I never heard her sing it live again.

  It felt as though Whitney, Silvia, and I were always on a plane to somewhere, an endless circuit of planet Earth. But during a short break from our jet-setting in 1991, Mom and Bina told me they had taken a good look at Marty. He was thin, so thin, and they realized he was wearing two or three pairs of pants at a time. They told me they believed he was really sick. That maybe he had AIDS. My mother had done her research and had come to this conclusion. This can’t be happening, I thought. Marty had never said a word.

  We never knew for certain how Marty became infected with AIDS, but he told me it was from either a blood transfusion after his car accident (they weren’t testing blood then) or his “lifestyle.” My brother never told me he was gay, and I never saw him with a male partner, but of course I assumed. We all did.

  The news left me speechless.

  A few months before I found out he was sick, Marty had called saying he wanted to come over to my place. He had a hacking cough, so I gave him cough syrup, then set him up in my spare room. The next morning I asked about his cough, which I had heard throughout much of the night, and I noticed a raw wound on his face. “What’s that?” I asked. “Put some vitamin E on it.”

  Marty came into the bathroom and was standing there while I brushed my teeth. “Maybe you have what I have,” he said sarcastically.

  His tone made me snap back, “I don’t have what you have.” I wasn’t reading between the lines then. Maybe he wanted me to, but I did not. I needed him to say, “Robyn, I have something to tell you,” but he never talked to me like that. I asked him to walk my dog, but Marty didn’t want to, which was unusual given that he was always happy to help. Why wasn’t I able to tell that he didn’t have the strength?

  Marty was still working for Whitney, looking after the house when we were away, and now we were finally coming home. Snow was falling heavily that night. Driving through the gates approaching our huge circular driveway, we were greeted by dozens of snow angels. There were too many to count, each one meticulously created with perfect spacing between them. They looked magical, shimmering as the headlights illuminated the scene.

  “Did Marty do all that?” Whitney asked.

  “Yep,” I said, smiling, knowing that was just like something Marty would do.

  We got out of the car, looked around, and saw nothing but angels.

  Fifteen

  I Will Always Love You

  For years, Kevin Costner had been phoning Whitney hoping to persuade her to take the starring role opposite him in The Bodyguard. The courtship went all the way back to our days living in our first apartment together. I was usually the person who answered our phone. So he’d gotten to know my voice, and whenever I picked up, he was polite, asked how I was, and engaged in sincere small talk. But each time I attempted to tell Nippy who it was, she waved her hand and said, “I know who it is.”

  Nippy would tell me softly but clearly, “I don’t want to be an actress. All I was looking for was a small part, and now he’s offering me a big role, and that’s not what I want to do. What makes them think I’d be good at it anyway? It’s going to be a lot of work, and I don’t really want to do it.” I totally understood her reticence. It was going to be a lot of work, she wouldn’t have control, and she already was tired.

  That didn’t mean she wasn’t getting asked to do other movie projects. Disappearing Acts, Dorothy Dandridge, and even A Star Is Born came her way, too. Whitney and I made trips to LA, meeting with writers and directors who would pitch various projects. I was reviewing scripts sent to my attention and now had my own assistant, Maria Padula, who helped juggle our meeting schedules, including with producers who wanted Whitney for the title role of a remake of Cinderella. I ran lines with Whitney before an audition for the role of Jodie Foster’s roommate in The Silence of the Lambs, but when we met with Jonathan Demme, he didn’t ask her to read anything. “You’re too nice,” he said.

  One day we were lounging at home in soft leather chairs, feet propped on ottomans, facing the Hudson River. The phone rang, and it was Kevin. Whitney told me to tell him that she’d call him back. I’d heard that before. Kevin understood that if he was ever going to get Nip to do the project, he would have to give her the space she needed to decide. But it was clear he wasn’t going to allow it to slip out of her mind, and he was perceptive, knowing just how persistently to pursue without pressuring her.

  Well, that day, Whitney really did call him back. I sat next to her as she spoke to Kevin on speakerphone, and I listened as he as
sured her that she could do it and that she would be good. He also gave her his word that he would be there to hold her hand and guide her through the process. Finally, Whitney agreed.

  Prior to beginning work on the film, Whitney decided to surprise Bobby by showing up at one of his concerts. As she, Silvia, and I were escorted backstage to his dressing room, he came out and met us in the hallway—followed immediately by the mother of his children. The woman was pissed, and as she exited the room, she pushed Bobby hard in the chest with both hands. And then it was on: bap, bap, bap—the two of them exchanging blows. “Whoa, she can fight!” Silvia exclaimed.

  Bobby’s brother Tommy broke them up, and Bobby said, “Get her out of here—take her back to the hotel.”

  “This isn’t right. You know this isn’t right, Tommy!” she shouted. Then, just as Tommy was escorting her away from us, she stopped, turned around, looked directly at Whit, and said, “I don’t care if you are Whitney Houston. If he would do this to me, he’ll do it to you,” and walked away with Tommy by her side. Throughout the entire bout, we hadn’t said a word or moved from our spot just outside the dressing room. We were frozen. I glanced over at Whitney, who stood there stock still, her eyes a bit wider than usual. I didn’t like it and suspected that baby mama was right.

  I didn’t have much to say to Nip about Bobby, because she didn’t tell me much. All I had were the rumors—that he was dating Janet Jackson, had a bunch of children, and slept around here, and there, and way over there, too! There was no point mentioning the gossip to Nip; she also heard it. But over the course of a year, she moved on from Eddie and got wrapped up in Bobby. I noticed that Nip started using drugs a lot more when Bobby was around. She wasn’t putting on the brakes. I reminded her that drugs should be over now, and she said, “I know. I admire that you were able to stop, and I will put it down, but I’m not ready to just yet.”

  When we went out to start work on The Bodyguard, Kevin proved just as lovely in person as he had been on the phone: down-to-earth and easygoing, with an appealing sparkle in his eyes. Our first real interaction was when he pulled up on the Warner Bros. lot in a forest-green Nova and I was standing outside the room where a script reading was to take place. The car was probably a 1971 classic, and I was staring at it, waiting for him to get out. As soon as his cream-and-cognac cowboy boot hit the ground, I said, “Kevin, what I wouldn’t do to get the keys to that car.” His face lit up and he said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I had it restored.” I kept admiring the Nova as he spoke. “You really know your cars,” he said.

  Later, on the day they were shooting the love scene, Kevin walked up to Whitney’s trailer: “I want to talk to her a little. Is she decent?” I waited outside until he left. Nippy said, “Everything is cool. I told him, ‘Whatever you do, just don’t put your tongue in my mouth.’”

  Kevin did what he said he was going to do the day Whitney agreed to do the movie. He was a man of his word as a costar. He held her hand and gave her good advice, such as how to use her eyes in a scene. And he did not put his tongue in her mouth.

  One day, music supervisor Maureen Crowe, whom Whit and I dubbed “our Long Island sister,” came into the trailer and suggested “I Will Always Love You,” and played Linda Ronstadt’s version for Whitney and me. Kevin was not on board. Then one day, he showed up at the trailer with Dolly Parton’s 1974 original and said, “This is the song.” The forty-two-second a cappella opening lines were Kevin’s idea. There’s a lot of soul in that white boy who grew up Baptist. Over lunch, Kevin told us that he had once pushed a broom at a Hollywood studio. This explained part of why he and Whitney connected—they were both self-made church kids with dreams.

  Meanwhile, Whitney was feeling pressure from every angle. Clive was against her doing this movie, but once she’d decided to do it anyway, he was constantly phoning me on the set trying to talk to Whit about the music in the film—something the producers did not appreciate. “Clive, I have to work with these people,” she’d tell him. She was drained beyond any reasonable limit. There were times she wondered whether or not she’d be able to make it through the process. But she did. And on the day they said, “It’s a wrap,” no one was more relieved than Nip. It had been seven or eight months of flying between California, Maine, Florida, and New York, rising in the early hours of the morning, wrapping mostly after dark. It was finally over! The thing about Whitney was that whatever she decided to do, she always did her best. Making movies was not in her DNA. It felt foreign and therefore made her uncomfortable, uncertain of the outcome. As soon as we returned home, I received a call from John Houston and Sheldon Platt saying that Arista said they could not stand behind anything they had not heard. So on July 6, I went to Clive’s office and personally hand-delivered a DAT and CD of the six songs Whitney had recorded for the soundtrack. With The Bodyguard, her career skyrocketed.

  A year or so prior to filming, her relationship with Bobby had turned serious. Whitney, Silvia, and I were in Montreal, enjoying the view of Mont-Royal from Nip’s hotel suite, when Bobby phoned. Whitney took the call, and we listened as she said, “What? What? How could this happen? And don’t tell me it was a mistake.” After hanging up, she relayed the conversation in anger and tears: Bobby had gone to Boston, allegedly to tell the mother of his children that he and Whit were together, but instead wound up getting her pregnant again.

  Whitney was mad as hell. Bobby called back that night to say that he needed to see her in person to explain. “He’s only telling you now because she’s pregnant,” I said. I fully expected her to give him his walking papers, so I was shocked when she chose to forgive him. There were so many forewarnings in her and Bobby’s relationship, but she chose to ignore them all.

  A few months earlier, Whitney and I had spent some time together at the house. By this point, we weren’t often alone. But when it did happen, it was just like old times, before fame came along and she started allowing others to shape her behavior. When it was just us, she talked differently, looked at me differently, acted differently. In those rare moments, she was real, her honest-to-God self—vulnerable but still determined.

  I was in my old room lying on the bed, and she came in and lay down next to me.

  She said, “Bobby asked me to marry him, and I think I’m going to do it.”

  I said, “You’re ready for that, huh?”

  “Yes,” she said with a sparkle in her eyes.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. He loves and cares for his children, he’s a good father.” I looked at her, unsure what to say, and then she asked, “Do you think he loves me?”

  I didn’t expect that! How would I know? I hadn’t spent any significant time with him or spoken with him about anything of consequence. I knew there had been rough patches, like the time Whitney and Bobby were tossed out of the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta for disturbing guests with their loud altercations. I didn’t like what I saw or heard, and I was worried by Whitney’s behavior. That said, all I could do was be there for her, and I was.

  “I honestly feel like I don’t know him at all, Nippy . . . ,” I began. “But he should love you. I sure hope he loves you.” We looked at each other and I said, “I think he does.”

  She said, “Thank you,” and we just lay there quietly.

  A few minutes later, Silvia walked in and joined us. Whitney told us both that she loved us and then tapped me on the shoulder and said, “My maid of honor, remember that I love you immensely.”

  “I know,” I replied.

  The next time we were at the Hotel Bel-Air, Bobby showed up with his brother and manager, Tommy. At the time, Bobby was signed to MCA, and I learned that he was supposed to be going into the studio to record his next project. There was a lot of back-and-forth talk about money—he’d already exhausted his entire advance—but I never saw Bobby go into the studio or do any recording. It was rumored that he’d spent some of his advan
ce on an engagement ring. When the insurance appraiser later came to our house to value Whitney’s jewelry, we found out that the ring Eddie had given her was more valuable than her engagement ring from Bobby. Whitney shrugged and had Eddie’s ring made into earrings.

  Weeks later, Whitney had a recording to do in Atlanta, and she told Silvia and me that we’d be stopping by Bobby’s house. As we pulled into the paved driveway, the first thing I noticed, right out front, was a Jaguar with a visibly flat tire; it looked as if it hadn’t been moved in some time. The house had a forgotten quality about it. It clearly wasn’t a home where attention was paid to fluffing up pillows or returning items to their proper places.

  Whitney, Silvia, and I casually strolled around the main floor, checking things out. We headed toward the back of the house, where a great room overlooked the backyard and pool outside. On the way, we passed the laundry room. Clothes were piled nearly to the ceiling and spread across the floor. Silvia reflexively attempted to create order as she commented on the sight and scent of mildew. Whitney said, “What the hell are you doing? We’re not staying here!” Silvia froze with an undershirt in her hand. I guess she felt bad for Whitney, taking up with a man who couldn’t keep his house in order. Or maybe she felt bad for herself, or for all of us, and her instinct was to try to make it better.

  I excused myself to use the bathroom. Now, my mother always told me that you can tell a lot about a person from the way he keeps his bathroom. Upon entering, the first thing I spotted was a bowl half filled with milk and soggy cereal on the edge of the sink, and a sock soaking in the milk, the dry half draped onto the porcelain. As I squatted, now eye level with the bowl, I tried to determine if the sock belonged to a child or an adult. I washed my hands and noticed there was nothing to dry them with. I headed through the dining room and into the kitchen in hope of finding paper towels, and to my surprise, there stood a nice-looking young man, around my age, wearing a chef’s jacket and working at the stove. He looked up at me with a smile, as if he’d been expecting someone. “Hi. I’m Ian. You must be Robyn. Nice to meet you! So, how you like the house?” he asked with a smirk.