During rehearsal, Whitney mounted the stage wearing a white cone-shaped “mask” over her nose. She sang with this contraption on her face. I was standing onstage next to the singers in front of a monitor while Rickey made corrections, addressing the musicians. Bobby was pacing the stage, exhibiting his usual overly energetic behavior. He came over to me, getting up in my face but saying nothing. “Hi, Bobby,” I said, and sat down on top of the monitor, just to get away from him, and he turned and walked away. He used to do the same thing to Whitney—walk up to her and get all up in her face, and then tilt his head to the side, staring at her. I never liked watching him do that to her. It looked aggressive and disrespectful.
I got up and now was standing in front of the stage, off to the side. Whitney was center stage holding the microphone, about to sing a solo, “Try It on My Own.” She had very little voice to begin with at that point, and even less trying to keep up with Bobby after both of them hollered through their duet performance. I couldn’t stop looking at her with that thing across her nose. What was it? I felt for her and wished we could have a moment where we could sit down and talk, just the two of us.
I must have been in a daze, but I snapped out of it when I heard her call my name: “Robyn! Stop looking at me like I’m crazy.” After the show, she invited Rickey and me to dinner at the Bellagio. At the restaurant, Whitney leaned in and looked over to where Bobbi Kristina was sitting and asked, “Are you tired? Do you want Mommy to send your food upstairs?” I felt bad for the kid.
Krissi shrugged, barely answering, but everybody was looking at her, so then she nodded and said, “Yes.”
Before I could stop myself, I said, “I think she wants you, Nip. She wants her mama.”
As the dinner ended, before getting up from the table, I said, “Nippy, I want to talk to you.”
“What do you want to talk to me about, Robyn?” she answered playfully.
“Nothing really, I just want to talk to you,” I repeated.
Everybody stood up and she said, “Let me out. Come on, girl, come talk to me.” We took three steps away, but before I could say anything significant, out came Bobby to sweep her away. “I’ll talk to you later,” she said over her shoulder.
In May of 2005, Lisa called saying she had something interesting to share with me. Esquire’s director of photography had told her about a job prospect at ESPN The Magazine. They were looking to hire someone with entertainment experience and connections in the music and film industries, plus a knowledge of sports. Familiar with my background, Lisa’s contact suggested to her friend, ESPN’s director of photography, that they interview me for the position.
It seemed almost too perfect. I hung up the phone with Lisa and drove home claiming that job. I’d come full circle, and sports was going to bring me the rebirth that I so desperately needed to be me again. Thankfully, I knew this world so well that I nailed the interview and got the job.
I was happy to be back working in the city. Lisa and I would rise at the Chelsea apartment, have breakfast, and depart together for our respective media jobs. I established a routine of walking briskly to and from the office each day, which helped get my body into great shape.
My job involved mixing pop culture personalities with athletes for ESPN’s magazine, website, and television. I traveled with the creative team on location, covering photo and video shoots with Shaun White, Misty May and Kerri Walsh, Dwyane Wade, and LeBron James, among others. I would find out which entertainers had a specific athlete they liked and then try to get them together for a photo and conversation. Sometimes the pair made the cover. Ever the advocate for women in sports, I pitched the idea of interviewing actresses who had been athletes for espnW, a new online magazine. The editor liked it, and I was able to conduct interviews with women including Gabrielle Union, Jessica Biel, and Kristen Bell.
The project I enjoyed working on most was GameNight, which was special because it appeared on all three platforms. They had been having some difficulty getting cooperation from the talent they were approaching. I pointed out that the problem likely was the amount of time they were asking of them—four hours, which to publicists and managers may as well have been a week. I suggested we reduce the ask to forty-five minutes. Some of my productions paired the creators and cast members of The Wire with the Baltimore Ravens, the cast of the movie Four Brothers with Brendan Shanahan from the Detroit Red Wings, and WNBA championship team the Seattle Storm with the creators of the basketball documentary The Heart of the Game. I stayed at ESPN until 2009.
Over those years, I made a conscious decision to focus on my own life and not get sucked back into Whitney World. Early on, Lisa had said I was so involved, so consumed, that I couldn’t focus on my own life, what we were doing and where we were going. Ever since my departure from Nippy Inc., every time Whitney walked to the corner, someone would call to tell me about it. So I unplugged. I stopped talking to Whitney’s people, including Silvia, and finally I put myself first. Only then was I able to focus on me.
Before dawn on April 9, 2006, I went through my voicemail, deleting old messages. Lisa and I were about to head off for a three-week vacation in Argentina, and I wasn’t taking my phone with me, so I was making room in the voice mailbox. I was standing at the window staring into the darkness when I heard her voice. I said, “Nippy?” But I accidentally pressed “7,” deleting the message, instead of “4,” which would have replayed it. So I didn’t hear what she said. I do remember that her tone was different, as if she had something important to say, but she didn’t call back, so there was nothing more to do.
It took me a long time to get my life back on track, to realize that I had to focus on me, to create something real with Lisa. I needed to save myself before I could save Whitney. But later, when she needed me and called, I missed it.
One of the life goals Lisa and I identified and shared on one of our weekend getaways was to create a family of our own. As a young New Yorker, Lisa hadn’t wanted children. But when Lisa was in her midthirties, her sister, Laura, gave birth to a daughter, Helena, and Lisa began to question that decision. She and Helena were close from the jump, and the depth of her love for her niece was so intense that she realized that she wanted a child of her own. When she told me she wanted to have a child, I was all for it. I was ready to have a family with her.
The decision to adopt came to us both simultaneously, and we did a boatload of research on the many options. Though many prospective parents prefer to go through a private adoption attorney, which is said to be a faster process, we didn’t feel up to having to vet potential birth mothers ourselves, so we opted to go the agency route. We chose Friends in Adoption, an agency in Vermont that supports open adoption of all kinds, including same-sex and single-parent, and once we had completed mountains of paperwork, a home study, fingerprinting, and reference letters, and created a profile carefully written and designed to showcase who we were to prospective birth mothers, we waited. Early on, I proclaimed, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had twins?” I pictured our imaginary family on road trips, me at the wheel, as usual, Lisa beside me navigating, and each of us able to turn her head and see a different child strapped in the backseat. Every few months I delightfully raised the prospect and each time, Lisa rolled her eyes and said, “Robyn, what are the odds of that happening?”
Then on Lisa’s birthday, January 23, 2009, our agency called with what they termed “a situation.” I was at my ESPN desk when Lisa, from her Esquire desk, conferenced me in with our caseworker, who detailed the specifics: The birth mother was due in early May; she and the birth father had met at the University of Georgia and lived in Athens; she had had prenatal care. And then she added, “There’s just one thing . . . there’s two of them.” I let out an elated yelp. Lisa was silent, maybe in shock.
We emailed and talked on the phone, and in mid-March flew to Athens to meet our birth parents. They were thoughtful, funny, and intelligent, and as we got
to know one another, they enumerated the many sound reasons they had opted for adoption and why they had chosen us to raise the children. They generously invited us to be there for the birth. But Jeremy and Gillian appeared on this earth March 31, five and a half weeks early, and our birth father called to say, “They’re doing everything that they should be doing. They’re perfect. They’re just small.” I had willed my dream to come true. We packed up the brand-new SportCombi Saab wagon we had selected for its size and safety, and headed to Georgia to meet our children.
The next year and a half was a blur of sleepless night shifts, countless diapers, measuring bottles for what felt like constant feeding intervals, grabbing finger foods when we could, and infrequent showers. But we were a family and it was beautiful.
February 11, 2012: It was a Saturday morning just like any other sleepy start of the weekend with Lisa and our three-year-old twins, Jeremy and Gillian. Our neighbor and close friend Andy stopped by to say hello and to see the kids, something he did often. He was standing in the doorway talking to Lisa, with his back to me, and I noticed he was wearing a red-and-black jacket from his high school wrestling team, the traditional high school letterman’s varsity jacket. I said, “I’ve never seen you wear that coat!” We’d known each other for a couple of years, and he’d never worn it.
Andy laughed and said, “I know. You can wear it whenever you want.” I told him it was okay because I already had one of my own. I decided to get mine out and maybe start wearing it again. It was the only one I hadn’t put into storage and lost before I moved in: the red-and-black one I’d designed for Whitney’s first world tour. But I couldn’t find it.
I wondered if I’d accidentally gotten rid of it. The previous summer, I had decided that it wasn’t healthy for me to live with my past literally over my head. So, I cleaned out the attic, where I uncovered many certified gold and platinum mounted records and discs to commemorate Whitney’s record-breaking accomplishments, presented to me by Arista Records. I decided to donate them to the Whitney E. Houston Academy in East Orange, the grammar school that Whitney had attended as a little girl, which eventually was named after her. Did the jacket get mixed up in the donation?
That evening, Lisa and I had dinner plans with a couple we’d recently met at a Philadelphia Family Pride event. We were all taking our time, going over the menu and sipping Pinot Noir as we talked. My phone started to ring. Lisa had it on the table near her in case the babysitter called, so she looked at the screen and said it was an old friend and teammate of mine, Paulette. She and I talked often, so I told Lisa I’d call her back.
Two seconds later, it rang again—another friend calling. Then our friend’s phone started to ring. She glanced down for a moment and then looked back at the menu. I noticed Lisa picking up my phone, and then she said, “It’s Paulette calling again. Oh! Now someone else is calling.”
Then our friend looked apologetically across the table and said, “Is it okay with you if I answer this call? It’s my sister, and she’s called me a few times now. I’d like to see if everything’s okay.” She called back, and I glanced over at her after a minute. Just as our eyes met, she let out a gasp. I asked if everything was all right, and she immediately held up her index finger to say, “Wait a minute.” As soon as she hung up the phone, we were all looking at her, wondering what had just happened. The expression on her face didn’t indicate anything bad or good, and then she said it: “My sister is a huge Whitney Houston fan, and they’re saying she passed.”
I felt my insides shattering. I turned to Lisa, who was still holding my phone and staring at it as yet another call came in. She looked at me and said, “It’s Dawanna.” Dawanna was the lawyer for Sunday. I grabbed my phone, got up, and walked over to the foyer near the front door of the restaurant.
I answered the phone and quietly asked, “Dawanna—is it true?”
She said, “Unfortunately, I believe so, Robyn. Hold on, I think her publicist is speaking now.” I went numb.
When I got back to the table, Lisa said, “We’re going home.”
I gathered my things, walked outside, and got behind the wheel of the car, but knowing how shaken I was, Lisa insisted that she drive. Thoughts of how my day had started with the red-and-black jacket were playing in my head. It was Whitney—a sign that she was leaving, forever. It was over. Everything was over and gone. I’d thought we had time. And she had, too. Same as the jacket, gone.
Whitney’s death made me angry. The details and images of her leaving a party in Los Angeles surrounded by handlers a few nights before the fateful day haunted me. The fact that she had several hotel rooms full of people with her on this trip and yet no one was around on a day when her schedule was packed made me even angrier. The assistant said she had gone out for cupcakes for Nip.
Every time someone opened their mouth with alleged details, I didn’t believe a word they said. They contradicted themselves over and over. The one thing that I was 100 percent sure of was that the information given by the Whitney team made it seem as if no one came prepared to work, and they were not tending to her needs.
I didn’t hear from anyone about the funeral, not a word from the Whitney camp. Eventually, her agent called to ask how many tickets I needed, as if we were going to a concert. I told her that I needed five: me, Lisa, Bina, Silvia, and Silvia’s daughter, Vanessa. Then I got a message that Silvia was not welcome at the funeral. “Really?” I asked. “That’s mean, and I know that’s not the way Whitney would have wanted it.”
It didn’t matter. Silvia, who remained steadfast and loyal for fourteen years, who saw Nip at her very worst, who regularly rubbed her feet into the wee hours of the morning to help her relax, who knew her so well and who loved her unconditionally, was not allowed to see her off.
When we arrived at Newark’s New Hope Baptist Church, the place was packed. Celebrities and other high-profile personalities were on the right side of the church, and family, friends, and employees were on the left side. Though Lisa, Bina, and I arrived early, there were already no available seats. Rickey’s wife was on the celebrity side and invited me to sit with her, but I needed three seats. On the family side, seven rows had been marked with white tape, and from the eighth row back, the church was full. Sitting in the eighth row was what remained of the Nippy Inc. staff, and I spotted some old colleagues, but no one said a word.
Finally, I just removed the tape and directed Lisa and Robina to sit down. Then a man came over and told us that we had to move. I pointed out that there was no other place to sit. As things escalated, a publicist working the room came over and told me, “These seats are for the family.”
I said, “I’m not family, but I know where Whitney would want me to sit.” Then Lisa spotted another publicist, whom she knew and who is a beautiful person. It was she who got them to let us stay there.
A few minutes later, Bobby and his folks came in and experienced the same thing we’d just gone through. They were directly in front of us in row six and we watched it unfold. But this time, a security guard came over to tell them that the seats were reserved for family. Bobby was with nine people and I recognized all of them. I started to tell him to just stay there, but my days of making sure everything was going the way Whitney wanted were over.
Surprisingly, Bobby didn’t put up much of a fight. All he had to do was sit down and let them try to remove him and his people. But next thing I knew, they filed out as asked. A few minutes later, I had to use the bathroom and got up to go to the back of the house. When I came out, I saw Bobby standing in the back, talking to a few people by the door. Again, I thought about saying something to him about what happened to us and telling him that Whitney would want him to stay and celebrate her life, but I didn’t.
Then I turned my head and saw a producer, Mervyn Warren, sitting alone. This man had produced Whitney’s only gospel recordings and even he didn’t have a proper seat, and no one cared about that but me. I as
ked Mervyn if he wanted to come sit with us, near the front, and he said, “That’s okay. I’m fine right here.”
Whitney had told me and Sil that she wanted music but no flowers at her funeral. “You know I can’t breathe,” she instructed. “Celebrate my life with music.” The New Hope Baptist choir; BeBe, CeCe, and Carvin Winans; Alicia Keys; and Stevie Wonder sang their hearts out that day. It really was quite a show. My friend was honored, and I was grateful for that.
As the long service neared its close, there was silence. And then, echoing through the impeccable acoustics of that church, we heard Whitney singing the forty-three-second a cappella intro to “I Will Always Love You” as the gold casket, covered in a mass of white flowers and Sterling Silver roses, Nip’s favorite, was lifted by the pallbearers and walked down the aisle.
We proceeded to the Newark Club for the repast. I saw Cissy seated at the family table having dinner and made my way over. I kneeled to her right so she could hear me. I didn’t want to voice any of the clichés, so I simply said, “I thought we had time.” She looked at me and replied, “She did, too.”
Soon after, my godson, Gary Michael, Michael and Donna Houston’s son, grabbed me by my arm and pulled me through the main room to a quiet hallway. “Goddie, Goddie, I gotta tell you. It was like she knew. I was on the road with her for the Nothing but Love Tour doing what my father used to do. I was in the hotel room with her. She was washing her face and I was sitting in the bathroom waiting so I could get her bags and take them out. She said, ‘I don’t care what they say. Robyn is my nigga.’”
After the service, I realized that I hadn’t seen Michael Baker, Whit’s music director after Rickey stepped down. I called to find out why he wasn’t at the funeral and also what the heck had gone on out there on the final tour. He told me that he’d never received a call from anyone about Whitney’s passing. “I probably found out just like you did.” He also said that Whitney did not want to do that final tour.
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