“Ready to get this shit over with and get people out of my ass.”
“Why isn’t Silvia going?” I asked.
“Donna and the lawyers told me it was best for her not to go.” Then she was interrupted and that was the end of our conversation. Before leaving for the airport, Whitney walked over to the studio and told Silvia, “I wish that I could take you with me, but I can’t. They say that I can’t trust you.”
“Who told you that?” asked Silvia.
“Everybody. The attorneys, my parents, Donna. It’s not me, it’s them.” She gave Silvia a hug, telling her to take care of herself and that she’d see her when she returned in a month.
Silvia had been demoted from being assistant to Whitney Houston to being the bag packer and studio cleaner. While Whitney was away, Silvia was sent to the main house to clean the cat litter boxes and do whatever else needed to be done. Humiliated, she told me she was sick and tired of it and wanted to quit. I reassured her that Whitney would be back soon and we’d figure something out. She just needed to hold on a little longer. But she was bored out of her mind. If no one came up to the studio, she still had to be there. The only good part was that she could bounce at five o’clock on the nose, which was never possible while she was on Whitney watch.
One morning after the tour ended, pulling into the driveway toward the studio, Silvia spotted Bobby dragging Whitney off the porch. She parked and jumped out of her car, running over to intervene. Managing to get between the two of them, she yelled to Whitney to run. Bobby grabbed and pushed Silvia, and she, too, began running across the lawn, past the tennis courts, toward the house, following Whit. The guardhouse was next to the entrance to the main house and Donna’s brother Darren, whom she had managed to get employed as a “guard,” saw what was going down but chose to look the other way.
Silvia directed Whitney to go inside, yelling to Aunt Bae, “Open the door for Whitney!” while simultaneously trying to distract Bobby until Whitney could make it inside the house. Bobby spotted Nip’s black Porsche parked in front of the garage and took his anger out on it, jumping on the roof until it was crushed.
The Porsche drama took place in the morning, and by early afternoon Whit finally had clarity. She told Bae to call the studio and tell Silvia to come to the house. Nip was lying on the sofa when she arrived and asked her to sit down. Instinctively, Silvia began to rub her feet. Nippy expressed how much she missed her and promised that she wasn’t going to leave her behind again. In the middle of the conversation, the phone rang. It was Donna calling to speak to Silvia. Aunt Bae must have phoned her to relay that Sil was back on the premises.
Silvia picked up the phone and said, “Whitney asked me to come over here.”
And just like that, Whitney rose from the sofa, grabbed the phone, and said, “I don’t give a damn what you or they say. She’s not going back. She’s staying with me. I pay the bills around here.” Returning to the sofa, Whitney eyed Silvia with a smile. “I know you love me.”
More and more, Whitney’s career was taking over her life, leaving the things that really mattered to her on the back burner. Whitney got busier and busier doing all the things that others said she should do instead of following her instincts.
The pressures of her career also kept her from spending much quality time with her daughter. All Kristina ever wanted was to have her mom’s attention one-on-one, and the majority of the time that just didn’t happen. She never really made friends of her own, had sleepovers, or got invited to birthday parties. She spent the majority of her time with adults. And when nieces, nephews, stepbrothers, and stepsisters came to her house, she had to share her mom with them. At the end of each week, she was typically packed up and sent to Donna’s or Aunt Bae’s for the weekend.
So it was primarily in the recording studio or during live performances that mother and daughter bonded. When Whitney called Krissi to the mic and gave her the cue, her daughter delivered every time. Like her mother, she wished to sing, and even at age four she had the confidence to do so.
Decades later, my therapist pointed out that I had to behave like a grown-up when I was only a child. I was very connected to my mother and feared for her safety—I remembered the time I had to come home from summer camp to make sure she wasn’t alone. I’d get all tangled up in my parents’ fights, trying to intervene and settle them. I wondered what Krissi witnessed in her own home, how much her parents’ volatile relationship affected her. By the age of five, she was regularly being told that her mother was tired or asleep. She must have recognized that that was abnormal.
Kids know. Still, when you watch footage of the two of them onstage together, the love they shared is undeniable.
Months after the Pacific Rim Tour, we were staying in a Manhattan hotel. Though she had agreed to make an afternoon appearance with Clive the next day, Whitney stayed up all night partying with Michael. I knew Whitney wasn’t going to make it, and I felt bad for her. I figured there was no point in delaying the inevitable call and dialed Clive to cancel. It took three different tries to get him to accept the news: “She can’t do it.” “She’s not feeling well.” And then finally, “Clive—she can’t get dressed. She’s not in any shape to go.”
I immediately phoned John Houston and told him that I believed Clive knew that Whitney had a serious problem, sharing the conversation I’d just had with him. I checked out of the hotel and headed straight to the office, where Mr. Houston was waiting for me. I told him that something had to be done immediately or I didn’t know how long Whitney was going to last. Mr. Houston told me that he had spoken to Clive and that he’d suggested a rehab center, Silver Hill. He said that I would have to come to the consultation so I could tell the experts everything I knew and why I felt Whitney was a candidate for their facility. The hospital had an excellent reputation in treating addiction and was discreet in their handling of high-profile personalities. It was rumored that Michael Jackson had been there a few months earlier.
It was a beautiful sunny day when John and I made the trip up to Connecticut and met with the medical director, Dr. Richard Frances. After introducing ourselves, I sat down and told him everything I felt he needed to know, including that Nip told me she had first tried cocaine at age fourteen; that she and I had used the drug together; and that since getting married, her use had clearly escalated. Her behavior had changed: She had become increasingly isolated. She was thin and didn’t look well. We were having to cancel some commitments due to her condition.
On the way back from Connecticut, John assured me that I had done the right thing, and now all he had to do was get Whitney to agree to go to rehab. We returned to the office to find an angry Cissy there waiting for us. She was upset about the fact that I had gone with John to Silver Hill and she hadn’t come with us. “Why didn’t I know this was happening? That’s my daughter, too.” I could hear them arguing in his office as I walked away.
Later, John peeked into my office to say he was going to the house to speak to Nip. Bobby wasn’t there, which gave John the opportunity to talk to his daughter alone. That evening, when I didn’t hear from him, I called him at home. “She doesn’t want to go,” he said.
I had to be certain he actually did talk to Whitney, so I went up to the house myself. I can still see her face when she said, “Yes, my father spoke to me. I’m not ready to go to rehab. I don’t want to go.” I was so disappointed I had no response. Then she said, “I have the doctor’s card. My father gave it to me. I’ll call when I’m ready.” We’d had so many conversations around the use of cocaine. But now her using had turned into something much deeper and meaner than I had seen before. Whitney knew she was in trouble.
A week or so later, I drove Whitney to Clive’s Westchester home. Later that night, Clive called to tell me that Whitney had admitted to her drug use. “She likes it. She told me that she likes it,” he said. He offered his home in the Hamptons to Whitney, suggested she bring tw
o people she trusted along with her, and said that he would arrange for a private nurse to be there. The next day, Whitney considered going, but by the end of that day, Michael came up to the house, and he and his sister disappeared into the back room for two days. The Hamptons never came up again.
Twenty-One
My Love Is Your Love
Cindy Madnick, the bookkeeper at Nippy Inc., was a no-nonsense woman in her early sixties, with dark cherry-red hair. If you wanted to know what was going on with the company financially, Cindy was your gal. She hated all of us.
I don’t know if Cindy was like this with everyone, but with me, she’d vent. I’d walk in cheerfully greeting her and asking how she was doing. She’d take my receipts and talk: “This poor girl isn’t going to have a dime left when you people are finished with her. Bobby’s mother calls up here like we’re an ATM machine. ‘I need my cable, my electricity, my heat paid.’”
She’d go on. “I feel sorry for this girl. It’s a shame. She works so hard, and at this rate, she won’t have anything left for herself.” Then, after questioning the generous tips that I’d bestowed upon porters and doormen, she’d apologize for venting and hand me cash or a check.
The first time that I heard Whitney was out of money—meaning she had assets but no cash flow—was in 1987. We had toured the world for eleven months in a single year. We’d celebrated Thanksgiving in Australia and had just two weeks off for Christmas. I told Nip, “If you want to know where your money is going and who’s buying what or why, ask Cindy. You don’t even have to go to the office. You can go to her house. She lives about fifteen minutes from the office. Or just call her up.”
When she did get in touch with Cindy, she quickly learned that she was paying for a number of family members’ homes, car insurance, gas, and more. Nip even learned she was bankrolling one senior employee’s condo, car, and living expenses. She also learned that her father had set up a Nippy Inc. account at the Mobil station around the corner from the office, and a number of people were taking advantage of it. “My mother makes enough money! Why am I paying for all of her stuff?” Nip fumed.
She made the decision to have several credit cards taken away from Nippy employees and instructed Cindy to cease paying the Brown family’s expenses. She permitted Silvia to keep her corporate card. And yet, no matter how much money Whitney generated with her record-breaking album sales, sold-out tours, successful movies, national and international endorsements, and private engagements, she needed to make even more to continue sustaining everything and everybody.
A few months would go by and her father would say, “Whitney is out of money. Time to hit the road.” I tried to slow Whitney’s world down by controlling the flow of requests that came in and reminding her how much she was taking on. But still, too much came at her. It felt like a time back when we first met, when we were on one of the rides at a makeshift pop-up amusement park across the street from Nip’s church, and I was yelling repeatedly for the operator to make it stop, but he couldn’t hear me.
At Whitney’s house one afternoon, I was fixing myself something to eat and reached into a drawer for a spoon. I noticed that each had blue and black spots on it, as though it had been burned by a hot flame. I asked, “What’s this on the spoons?” In unison, the voices in the kitchen said, “Michael.” A light went off in my head. One evening a while before, Michael Houston had come to visit my apartment. I wasn’t expecting him but allowed him to come up. This was his first time visiting my place. I opened the door, and as he stepped out of the elevator, he said he was passing through and thought he’d stop by. He pulled out two joints, offering me one. “Sure. I’ll have a couple of hits,” I said. After taking a full pull and then a smaller one, I began to sweat, as if something was taking me over. I was slipping away, losing myself. A desperate taste filled my mouth, making me thirsty for more as an unpleasant scent hit me.
“What is this?” I asked. He called it a “woolie.” I’d never heard the term and began to panic, feeling chilly, vulnerable, and in trouble. Michael told me to relax, that he was there and I’d be okay. I knew I wasn’t okay but needed to ride it out. After some time, when I began to feel like myself again, I told him to leave. That night, I phoned Nip and told her that Michael had come by with some bad shit.
“What was it?” Nip asked.
“They look like joints but they’re not. One puff separated me from my soul.” I later learned that “woolies” are joints laced with crack cocaine.
Now, at Whitney’s, I was still examining the spoon in my hands when Silvia said, “Michael was heating something on the spoon and it stunk! Whitney asked if she could try some, and he told her, ‘No. You don’t want any of this shit. You won’t be able to handle it.’”
It always bothered me when Whit said, “Clive says it’s time for me to get back to work.” She had fallen into a pattern of going along with things that were not of her choosing. I sat in Clive’s office one day in fall 1998 while he played me potential tracks for Whitney’s fourth album. My Love Is Your Love came together quickly, in roughly seven weeks, including the creation of the artwork. Lisa’s friend Dana Lixenberg, an accomplished photographer, did the cover.
The song “If I Told You That” was submitted as a duet with Michael Jackson. When it came time to make the ask of the King of Pop, Whitney was told to make the call.
After Nip placed the call to Michael, it took nearly a week before she heard anything back, and she felt slighted, and rightfully so. Not only had she presented him with the World Music Award at Neverland nearly ten years before, but she’d also accompanied Michael to an event for the United Negro College Fund.
Michael never did phone. Instead, he communicated through someone else that he didn’t want to do the song.
Whitney’s feelings were hurt by the fact that she didn’t hear back from Michael himself, even if he didn’t want to do it. When she was disappointed about something, Nip didn’t talk about it much. In most cases, she internalized her feelings and moved on. So, after Michael declined, Whitney simply said, “I’ll sing the song myself.”
“If I Told You That” had Michael’s flavor all over it. On the day she went into the studio to record the track solo, Michael’s absence was evident. Nip walked into the vocal room wearing dark sunglasses, put on a pair of professional headphones, and vocally rode that track like she was seated in the saddle of that beautiful beast of a horse galloping over the hills of Neverland. I knew we were going to be in for a real treat after Nip determined she was going to go it alone. I loved watching her record and then perform it live. She had fun performing that song in her shows.
Soon after My Love Is Your Love was released, John Houston called a meeting in the conference room to discuss details for a world tour. As we got further into the specifics of the shows, I noticed that some of them were back to back. I also noted that every single one had already sold out. And because of how quickly the tickets had moved, there was an understanding that more shows would be added. Mr. Houston was beaming with pride; his baby girl had been able to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars per show, numbers unheard of at that time. But before finalizing everything, he needed to get the boss on the phone. John dialed Whitney’s number and put her on speaker. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her much over the last few weeks, and I had no idea what kind of mental or physical condition to expect. But as soon as she answered the phone, I knew. Her voice was raspy and subdued.
“Hello,” she said, finally. And in a beat, “Bobby is also on the line.” Mr. Houston started going over the dates, the number of potential additional shows, the amount each show would generate, and the total purse that would be brought home. When finished, he said, “So what do you think, baby?” Whitney was about to say something but then demurred.
“What do you think, Bobby?”
“It’s not enough money. Needs to be more money.”
After some more back-and-forth,
the conference call ended and the meeting continued. As I listened to Mr. Houston read the contractual requirements of the shows we were considering adding, how many there would be and where, I started thinking about what the show might look like and the wear and tear it would inflict upon Nip. This new project included some of the funkiest track-laying producers dominating the charts, so whatever the plan was, I knew that Whitney had to look and feel fresh. I raised the issue of Whitney’s wardrobe and was shocked when John responded that she’d have to wear old gear from past tours, as there was no money to purchase anything new.
The need to resuscitate old attire was the last thing I wanted to bring to Whit’s attention. I needed to come up with a solution, stat. Instead of making her feel even worse by telling her there was no money for wardrobe, I said, “You’ve always paid for your own clothing whenever we’ve toured. How about this time we find a designer who’ll agree to outfit you, the dancers, and the band? What do you say?”
Her reply: “Go for it!” On the spot, I asked her to name a few designers that she liked, and she gave me three: Versace, Yves Saint Laurent, and Dolce & Gabbana. There was no time to waste, so with Whitney’s blessing, I was off and running. After making some calls, I made the decision to begin with Dolce & Gabbana, and fortunately, they responded immediately.
The agreement we worked out was straightforward: The team would design and supply a wardrobe for the tour, outfitting Whitney as well as the dancers and the band. In exchange, they asked Whitney to make an appearance during fashion week in Milan, attend the after-party for their show, and wear their clothing exclusively onstage and for all promotional events. I was also assured by the duo that all the clothing they designed for Whitney would be custom-made and would never be advertised or sold. Bobby was going to be traveling with Whitney, so the designers agreed to make clothing for him as well, to complement Whitney at the events that she was required to attend.
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