by Ian Halperin
One day, Cissy arrived at Franklin to drop something off and found a chaotic scene, with kids running around and yelling in the open classroom. When Whitney saw her, she’d later recall that this was the moment she “knew my ass was on the way to Catholic school.”
Cissy was still actively involved at New Hope Baptist Church and would bring the kids every Sunday. Whitney was often reluctant to go at first, but she gradually came to enjoy the church, where she eventually started singing in the choir when she turned eleven. Her mother believes she welcomed a place where, unlike school, nobody made fun of her clothes or her hair.
In later years, Whitney only occasionally talked about her religious faith, but her mother reveals that Nippy was “saved” at New Hope and that she later told Cissy that she had “accepted the Savior into her life and heart.”
When her grueling schedule permitted it, Cissy would act as choir director, and Whitney would later recall that watching her on Sundays was the catalyst that made her want to become a singer.
“When I used to watch my mother sing in church, that feeling, that soul, that thing—it’s like electricity rolling through you,” she said in 1993. “If you have ever been in a Baptist church, when the Holy Spirit starts to roll and people start to really feel what they’re doing, it’s incredible. That’s what I wanted.”
She soon abandoned any previous ambitions she had harbored. “I wanted to be a teacher,” she told Rolling Stone. “I love children, so I wanted to deal with children. Then I wanted to be a veterinarian. But by the age of 10 or 11 when I opened my mouth and said, ‘Oh God, what’s this?’ I kind of knew teaching and being a veterinarian were going to have to wait. What’s in your soul is in your soul.”
Growing up around some of the greatest singers of the generation clearly had a profound impact on the young girl. “Being around people like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick, all these greats, I was taught to listen and observe,” she later recalled. “It had a great impact on me as a singer, as a performer, as a musician. Growing up around it, you just can’t help it. I identified with it immediately. It was something that was so natural that when I started singing, it was almost like speaking.”
Cissy was not enamored of the idea of her daughter becoming a professional singer. She told her stories about the sleazy side of the business and encouraged her to do her singing in church. Privately, she had her doubts that a girl who was so easily bullied could withstand the harsh side of the music business.
But Nippy was determined and if she really wanted to learn to sing, Cissy was going to make her do it the way her father trained her, provided she followed her mother’s strict rules and routine. Daily rehearsals at home plus choir every Sunday soon started to pay off. Looking back, Cissy believes she was harder on Whitney than she would have been with someone else’s kid, always demanding she aim higher. Developing a rigorous routine, she drilled into her the importance of learning the melody and enunciation. She could be a harsh taskmaster, and Nippy was often frustrated. In her memoir, Cissy remembered Nippy complaining after enduring particularly harsh criticism from her mother. “Mommy, you make me feel like I want to go through the floor, like I’m never going to be good enough.”
When she was fourteen, Whitney was finally ready for her first solo, which took place one Sunday at New Hope with a recital of the hymn “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.” The response was electrifying. They recognized a gift from God when they heard one. “I was scared to death,” she later recalled. “I was aware of people staring at me. No one moved. They seemed almost in a trance. I just stared at the clock in the center of the church. When I finished, everyone clapped and started crying. From then on, I knew God had blessed me.”
* * *
Whitney hated her strict new school, with its rules and routine. She implored her parents to let her switch to the public middle school, and John was open to the idea, but Cissy was adamant. The discipline would do her good.
She hated the school so much that she rarely participated in extracurricular activities.
“She wasn’t even in the school chorus,” recalled her Saint Dominic classmate Maria Pane. “She would sing ditties during lunch hour and hum a bit. She had a very sweet, angelic voice.”
When she was thirteen, the family had a scare when John had a heart attack at home after he’d returned from driving Cissy to a gig at a Manhattan jazz club. He pulled through, but things weren’t the same after that. Something in his personality changed. Cissy put it down to a combination of a midlife crisis and the frustration of a black man trying to make it in a white man’s world. “Like so many black men, he was angry at the world, bitter about being denied,” she wrote. Soon, he was taking his anger out on her, even though their marriage had been a happy one until that point. Much of the tension, she believed, stemmed from his fervent desire to push her into a solo career. He could have made her a star if only she had wanted it and stopped being so stubborn. Instead, Cissy was largely content with being known as the best backup singer in the business.
Both Cissy and John lamented the racism of the business that kept black acts largely confined to rhythm and blues and out of what she would describe as an “exclusive white club where only the Sinatras and the Streisands were allowed to enter.” She cited the black music divisions of most record labels as a prime example of how black acts were kept down. After the heart attack, John seemed to blame her for his own lack of success. What was once a happy home became a frequent scene of loud arguments, fights, and recriminations. The two were sleeping in separate bedrooms and barely talking. Eventually, John would move out. Cissy later believed that the domestic breakdown had a devastating effect on her children. Whitney had always been a daddy’s girl, and she had come to appreciate how much her household differed from that of her friends. For all intents and purposes, John had been the house husband for most of Nippy’s young life and Cissy the breadwinner. After her rise to fame, Whitney would frequently cite John’s unique role in her upbringing.
“My Dad is the backbone of our family,” she told Jet in 1986. “Any problem that I’ve ever had he’s always been there for me. . . . If my mother had a recording session, he would stay home, dress me and do my hair. He would put a beautiful dress on me with tube socks, like sweat socks. And my hair would look kind of crooked but it was cute. He was a very affectionate and loving dad.”
The children witnessed almost daily fights between their parents and the acrimony took its toll before John finally moved out. “For a while they stayed together for our sake,” Whitney recalled. “Finally they realized that the only way for them to stay friends was to split. It was strange not to have my father there but he lived just ten minutes away. Besides, even if you’re not together physically the love never dies.”
For Whitney, music and church became a refuge from the household tension. Cissy was stricter than ever at choir practice, prompting Nippy to storm out on more than one occasion, announcing that she was quitting. When she was fourteen, John gave her permission to enter a local teen singing competition. Whitney sang Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen” and placed second. The first-place winner won with the song “The Greatest Love of All,” which would ironically become Whitney’s signature tune a decade later.
Not long afterward, Cissy was scheduled for a backup session on a single that Michael Zager was recording for a new album. Zager later told Fox News how he encountered Whitney:
I was producing an album with Cissy and the night before one of the background singers canceled. So I asked Cissy who she wanted to get and she said I’m going to bring my daughter Nippy. She was fourteen years old. I said, ‘Are you sure you want to bring in a fourteen-year-old?’ She said ‘Don’t worry about it.’ So Nippy showed up to the studio in her school uniform and she was very, very quiet. She got up and I couldn’t believe my ears when she opened her mouth. It was beyond belief.
The resulting single, “Life’s a Party,” would mark Whitney’s professional debut. Impr
essed by her poise and professionalism, Cissy began bringing her daughter along to sing backup at the Manhattan jazz clubs like Sweetwater’s and Mikell’s, where she would often appear on weekends. One night, Cissy lost her voice and was going to have to cancel a Mikell’s gig. She asked Whitney to go on in her place. Terrified, Nippy demurred, but her mother knew she was ready. This was the moment that Whitney had been waiting for, and she was determined to make the most of it. The crowd responded with a tremendous ovation.
“I was pretty nervous,” she recalled. “I was scared to death. It was fun. I just fell in love with it.”
From that point on, Whitney would often accompany her mother to gigs, usually singing background, but every once in a while, Cissy would step aside and give her a solo. One thing Cissy and John agreed on, however, was that Nippy was not going to embark on a professional music career under any circumstances until she finished school.
But as it turned out, music wasn’t the only professional career that beckoned. In 1979, Whitney backed up Cissy at a benefit for the United Negro College Fund at Carnegie Hall and attracted considerable attention when her mother brought her out to sing a chorus of “Tomorrow” from Annie. The next day, they were walking along Seventh Avenue when a Vogue photographer approached sixteen-year-old Whitney and asked her if she was interested in modeling. He had been at the Carnegie Hall gig the night before and was captivated by her look and poise. He mentioned a new modeling agency called Click that was looking for teen models.
Cissy gave her okay, and they headed to the address the photographer had given them. Two hours later, Whitney was offered a modeling contract.
A whirlwind schedule of photo shoots soon followed, landing her in the pages of Vogue, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and Mademoiselle. In 1981, she would land on the cover of Seventeen magazine—one of the first black women to ever achieve this feat.
“From the beginning, the camera and I were great friends,” she later recalled of her modeling career. “It loves me, and I love it.”
Despite her success as a model, however, she still had not given up her original dream.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was clear that there had been no change in Bobbi Kristina’s condition, despite the occasional unreliable report from one family camp or another that she had opened her eyes or that she was making “progress.” She had already been moved from the North Fulton Hospital in Roswell to the ICU of Emory University Hospital in downtown Atlanta that housed state-of-the-art equipment, but her prognosis appeared bleak.
On the other side were wild media reports revealing that Bobbi had been declared “brain dead” and that the family had decided to take her off life support on February 11, the anniversary of her mother’s death.
This was the last straw for Bobby Brown, who issued a terse statement through his attorney:
The false reports that continue to appear in print and on the Internet are egregious, false and will be dealt with at an appropriate time. In particular, the false reporting of TMZ, The National Enquirer, The Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Daily Mail (UK) citing police sources, family sources and Bobby Brown himself, will receive my attention. The desire to be ‘first’ has clouded the judgment of many reporters as they forgo accuracy. This is a criminal investigation and the integrity of that process requires silence.
One report that was most decidedly not a rumor concerned Brown’s own family, who had assembled to throw him a party for his forty-sixth birthday on February 5 at the W hotel in midtown Atlanta.
The clan, some of whom lived in Atlanta, had been keeping Bobby company all week as he kept vigil at his daughter’s bedside. Evidently, they were looking to unwind as they gathered at the upscale hotel. Exhausted from his ordeal, Bobby left the festivities around midnight. An hour later, 911 received a call that a brawl had broken out. “There is a group that’s fighting at the bar and they won’t leave,” reported the caller. The caller said there were no weapons involved but that a member of the crowd had “used a glass at the bar as a weapon and cut somebody in the face.” He said the fight involved eight to ten people. When police arrived, they discovered that Bobby’s sister Tina Brown had hit her son Shayne over the head with a bottle. The dispute apparently started over a valet parking ticket. According to the police report, “Mr. Brown stated that while arguing with his mother, she spit in his face and hit him on his head with a glass bottle.” Onlookers reported that Tina took a swing at her son when he called her a “crackhead.” After declining to press charges, he drove himself to the emergency room, where he was treated for lacerations and given five stitches.
Ten years earlier, Shayne had been involved in another incident in Atlanta, when he and his cousin were stabbed during a fight at a bar around one thirty in the morning. Bobby Brown had reportedly been present when the incident occurred but was not involved in the altercation. These incidents, it turned out, were just the tip of the iceberg in the never-ending saga of the Brown family.
Two days after she assaulted her son, Tina was rushed to a hospital emergency room, complaining of numbness in her right side. She was diagnosed with a vascular blockage and irregular heartbeat.
“She’s just overwhelmed by the stress of Bobbi’s medical crisis,” a family rep explained.
The day after the hotel brawl, Cissy arrived in Atlanta for the first time. For a week, members of the Houston and Brown family had visited Bobbi’s ICU unit in groups of two or three, while Bobby stayed by her bedside much of the time. “He’s so upset, he can barely put one foot in front of the other,” reported one visitor who observed Bobby grieving at his daughter’s bedside. But Cissy’s arrival necessitated a new arrangement since there was no love lost between her and her former son-in-law whom she reportedly held at least partially responsible for her daughter’s death even though she publicly denied it. A visitation schedule was now reportedly worked out that would ensure the two adversaries never had to cross paths.
It soon became apparent, however, that there was at least one thing Bobby and Cissy agreed on. Whether or not he had anything to do with Bobbi Kristina’s state, Nick Gordon was bad news. The Houston and Brown families agreed to make common cause. The first order of business was to remove Gordon from the town house where he had lived the high life with Bobbi since 2013. Pat immediately made provisions to have the locks changed and notify security that Nick was to be barred from the complex. If he was spotted on or near the premises, they were to call police immediately.
As Bobbi lay comatose, doctors performed neurological scans three times a day, searching for signs of recovery—testing for brain activity, response to painful stimuli, or dilation of pupils. After the doctors debriefed Bobby, he shared the news with family members gathered in an outer room, but so far, there has been no good news to report.
So far, the Atlanta police had been tight-lipped about the results of their own investigation, but bits of information were beginning to leak out. TMZ reported that law enforcement officials believed drugs were involved in whatever circumstances led to Bobbi lying facedown in a bathtub. But during an initial search of the town house, they failed to find any drugs on the scene. That’s because they were only looking for items that “were out in the open,” the entertainment site reported. But during a second and more thorough search of the premises, police allegedly told the family they found illegal substances and seized a number of items.
Indeed, reports were starting to filter out that Bobbi and Nick had a long history of drug use so it wasn’t a difficult stretch to assume that narcotics were involved.
As these kinds of reports came fast and furious, I was preparing to fly to Atlanta to start my own investigation, but first I needed to get the lay of the land and separate facts from rumors. My connections in the Houston camp were telling me that the hospital was nearly a fortress and that the family was keeping information very close to their vests. The most they could share at this point were unconfirmed rumors.
I was referred to a former Atlanta homicide de
tective who I was told could steer me in the right direction. When I made contact, he told me he would do some digging and get back to me. Forty-eight hours later, he shared his thoughts.
“This is an unusual situation,” he explained, “because the victim is lying there unconscious in a hospital bed, which makes it very difficult for police to get what they need.” He said the medical staff would have done a basic blood test when Bobbi arrived which would have determined whether there were drugs in her system and what kind. But there are limitations.
“What worries me is that the longer she lies there, it means her wounds are healing. If she eventually dies, it will be much more difficult for an autopsy to reveal what happened and to get to the bottom of the case.”
He believes that if police are looking at a suspect and already have strong evidence, they or the district attorney may be waiting to see whether Bobbi dies to determine the charges.
“If she dies, they may be able to make homicide depending on the circumstances, but if she pulls through, the most they might have is a drug charge. It really makes a difference in a case like this.”
Next, I made contact with a British reporter named Sharon Churcher, whom I’ve worked with before. She had been in Atlanta, covering the story since shortly after Bobbi was found. In this case, she’s working for the National Enquirer, which may not have the best reputation in journalistic circles but, like the British tabloids, it has deep pockets and is willing to pay its sources when necessary.
Sure enough, Sharon managed to land an interview with the mother of Danyela Bradley, who was present at the house when Bobbi was found.
Holed up in an Atlanta hotel, Marlene Bradley told Churcher that she had been in touch with Danyela, who revealed some of what happened in the house that morning. Danyela was dating Max Lomas and had been staying at the house with Bobbi while Max and Nick were out all night partying. She claims Danyela told her that it was Max who dragged the body out of the bathtub. She told her mother, “It makes no sense. [Bobbi Kristina] was completely naked. She was in a tub of ice water. I can tell you she didn’t put herself in the tub. No woman would take a bath in a tub of cold water. She would be dead if it were not for us. Max and I gave her CPR.”