by Ian Halperin
According to Marlene, “Danyela said to us, ‘I want to tell you what happened but I can’t tell you. It’s so messed up.’ She insinuated to us that she doesn’t think it was an accident.”
Danyela revealed that the police are looking at Lomas as a suspect because of his past, but she insists he “didn’t do anything but save [Bobbi Kristina].” She claimed that Nick was the last person to see Bobbi alive.
Marlene also suggested that there might have been a sixth person at the house that morning besides Bobbi, Nick, Max, Danyela, and the cable installer.
She also revealed that her daughter shared stories about Bobbi’s relationship with Nick. “Danyela heard Nick screaming and yelling. They fought constantly.”
Finally, her daughter confided, “Krissi does all the drugs that Whitney did and more, including heroin. She uses anything that is put in front of her.”
Marlene would not reveal where Danyela was staying since the incident but said that she remains “very upset.” And very suspicious.
“From the way she’s been talking, she believes Nick did something to [Bobbi Kristina] before she was found. I truly believe that she believes that Max is innocent, but we are worried that Danyela is trying to protect Max because she believes she is in love with him.”
Indeed, it would appear that Marlene was aware of the kind of company that Danyela kept before the incident and was already very concerned about her association with Max Lomas, who is six years older.
Just over two weeks before Bobbi was found in the bathtub, Roswell police were dispatched to room 239 at the InTown Suites—an extended-stay hotel on Hembree Road—on suspicion that Lomas was forcibly confining Danyela.
In the police report of the incident, dated January 14, Officer M. Matthews wrote, “I was advised by Sgt Desrosiers that family members were worried about Danyela Bradley being held against her will by Maxwell Lomas, who was possibl[y] drugging her so she would not run away.”
When police entered the apartment, they discovered Max, Danyela, and a friend, plus something in the air.
“When we approached the door I could smell a strong odor of fresh marijuana,” Matthews reported.
After a search, Max Lomas was arrested for possession of a firearm/knife, possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, and possession of the prescription drug Xanax. After Max was led away, another officer noticed a lump beneath the blanket on the bed.
“I moved the blanket back and revealed a Glock model 23 40-caliber handgun,” wrote Officer Rooker. “I checked the gun for safety and found it to be loaded with a round in the chamber.” Danyela informed him the gun belonged to Max. Rooker immediately called the precinct to obtain a search warrant for the premises.
Detectives Williams and Nagel arrived a little later with a signed warrant. They discovered “a large amount of marijuana under the bed and 1000s of Ziploc baggies commonly used to package marijuana. On the shelf of the nightstand was an electronic scale,” the police report states. They also found a pill bottle containing “10 Xanax bars.”
The other man found in the room with Max and Danyela was Duane Tyrone Hall, age twenty-four, who Danyela’s mother told Sharon Churcher had been in the town house with Max, Nick, and Danyela when Bobbi was discovered in the bathtub.
Two days later, as Bobbi lay in a coma, Roswell police pulled over a gray Toyota Camry for a lane violation. When they searched the car, they found marijuana residue in the center console, though no charges were filed. The occupants of the vehicle happened to be Nick Gordon and Duane Tyrone Hall.
Meanwhile, it was reported that the police were anxious to interview Max Lomas again but that he was insisting on an immunity deal before he talked.
CHAPTER FIVE
By age fifteen, Whitney was juggling school and fashion shoots with regular weekend appearances onstage with her mother and even the occasional recording session. She had already graduated from Click to the much more prestigious Wilhelmina Models agency, and she was getting regular shoots modeling the preppy fashions of the time.
The sudden attention may have been going to her head, and occasionally her mother had to take her down a notch, like the time when she kept her offstage for two weeks to punish her for being “boastful.”
Also when Whitney was fifteen, Cissy began a long artistic association with Luther Vandross, who would prove to be a significant influence on the young girl. Vandross was impressed by her unique voice and wanted to produce Whitney as a solo act, but Cissy thought it was too soon. “I wanted her to finish school first, because I knew if she got started in the business, there’d be no stopping her,” she later explained.
A year later, she brought Nippy along to do background vocals for Chaka Khan’s new album. Soon after, Whitney accompanied her mother to Tokyo, where she had been invited to participate in the Yamaha Popular Song Contest. It was an exciting life for a teenager. A little too exciting, Cissy thought.
Her sons were starting to get in trouble, and she blamed herself for not being around more. Gary had been hanging around with a bad crowd and had started using drugs, which would eventually derail a promising athletic career after he played a year in the NBA. Now, Michael was acting out, and as it turned out, he too had started dabbling in drugs.
Wanting her daughter to start living a normal life to keep her grounded, Cissy encouraged her to volunteer at the playground of a local community center, which soon led to a summer job as a camp counselor. And that’s where she met Robyn.
Robyn Crawford was eighteen when sixteen-year-old Whitney arrived to volunteer at the East Orange Community Center, where she was working a summer job. The teenager introduced herself as “Whitney Elizabeth Houston.” That’s when she knew Whitney was special, she later recalled. Not too many people introduced themselves with their middle names. “She had peachy colored skin and she didn’t look like anyone I’d ever met in East Orange, New Jersey,” Robyn remembered.
For her part, Whitney remembers that when she befriended Robyn, the bullying she had endured from other girls came to an abrupt end.
“I didn’t like to fight,” she told Ebony. “I was not outspoken and really outgoing. Robyn was. They always wanted to whip me for no reason. So once Robyn became my big sister, all that ended.”
If Whitney and Robyn hit it off from the moment they met, Cissy was not happy about their friendship and was not afraid to show it. “I had a bad feeling about that child from the first time I saw her,” she later wrote. Cissy found Robyn an abrasive young woman who didn’t hesitate to share what was on her mind. She was certainly a startling contrast to her sweet churchgoing daughter. “As I would later learn, she was also gay, although that had nothing to do [with] why I didn’t like her,” Cissy later revealed. Years later, Oprah Winfrey asked Cissy why she didn’t like her daughter’s friend. “She just spoke too disrespectful sometimes like she had something over Nippy, you know? I didn’t like that at all,” she told the talk show queen.
Robyn had just graduated from Clifford J. Scott High School, where she was an all-state basketball player. Before long, she would be offered a basketball scholarship to Monmouth University.
As Cissy watched her daughter’s friendship with Robyn intensify, she fretted. “I didn’t want her to lead my daughter to places that I didn’t think were good for her,” she recalled. In no uncertain terms, she told Robyn that she didn’t want her around her daughter. “There wasn’t much I could do though,” she conceded. “Kids have a mind of their own. When they get older, they want to experiment with all kinds of things.” Whether or not Cissy detected the possibility of a sexual relationship at that point, the other kids appeared to.
“It just seemed odd, these two girls always together,” a community center regular told Whitney’s biographer Jeffery Bowman. “They even started to look alike. It got to the point where you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. They would walk arm-in-arm in public. It all seemed somewhat odd. When they were together, they’d act as if no one else w
as even in the room. They had their own world. People didn’t understand it.”
Eventually, the nature of the girls’ relationship began to spark gossip among the girls who had once bullied Whitney.
“I remember one particularly nasty fight,” a friend of Whitney from East Orange told Bowman. She continued:
Someone accused Whitney of being a “dyke.” [The person said] she knew for a fact that she and Robyn were lovers. Whitney’s eyes flashed with anger. “Oh you do, do you,” she shot back. The next thing I knew, Whitney had this girl pinned up against the wall. She was all up in her face. “If I ever hear you spreading gossip about me, it’ll be the last time you ever do,” Whitney warned her. After word of that got around, it was just understood that you didn’t mess with Whitney Houston.
The friend said Robyn was equally tough.
“There were counselors who would quickly walk the other way when Robyn came into a room just because they were afraid they would accidentally say the wrong thing, or imply the wrong thing. Basically, it got to the point where you just let Whitney and Robyn alone.”
And whether or not Whitney was a lesbian, there is no question that Robyn was. At the time, according to Bowman, she had evidently reached a breaking point when she perceived that Whitney was trying to dodge the rumors. A friend told him that there was a showdown where Robyn confronted her friend. “Look, Whitney,” she said, “if you can’t handle the fact that people think we’re lesbians, if that’s so goddamned offensive to you, then fine, we just won’t be friends anymore. See you round. It’s been fun. Later.”
Their brief separation broke Whitney’s heart, recalled the friend. Eventually, she apologized to Robyn and promised that they would be friends no matter what anybody said.
Cissy believed that Whitney was drawn to Robyn’s independence and her disregard for what other people thought. Did she have an inkling that the two might be more than just friends? “Nippy never shared details of her personal life with me about things like that,” she reveals. “But I do know that Nippy and Robyn cared a lot about each other.”
During those years, Cissy always rationalized Whitney’s lack of interest in boys by the fact that she and John had strict rules governing their daughter.
“She didn’t date young. I didn’t allow it. Period.” Cissy explained. “But she did go through a rebellious teenage phase, mostly small stuff. . . . She was lazy, stubborn and opinionated. When she was 16, I told her she wasn’t going to make it to 17 because I was going to kill her.”
It wasn’t long after Whitney started hanging around Robyn that things reached a boiling point at home between John and Cissy. One day, as they were having a shouting match, Cissy recalled in her memoir, John threatened to walk right out the door. Watching the scene that had become a regular occurrence around the house, Whitney finally snapped. “Daddy, if you’re going to leave then just do it!” she shouted in tears. “Just stop arguing and leave.”
Soon after that, John finally moved out. A little while later, Whitney did the same. After graduating from St. Dominic’s in 1981, she simply announced one day to her family that she was leaving. It wasn’t so much the idea of her youngest child cutting the apron strings that upset Cissy, she later wrote. Instead, it was her decision to move in with Robyn.
“She knew how I felt about Robyn, but she was determined to live with her anyway,” Cissy wrote. Resigned to Nippy’s decision, she was determined not to lose her daughter completely. There was at least one thing about Robyn that she could respect. “We had our love for Nippy in common and though we rarely agreed, we were at least able to keep things from being too uncomfortable when we were all together.” And even though they now lived only twenty minutes apart, Cissy was not welcome to visit Nippy at her new apartment. “She kept me at arm’s length with regard to her personal life. I could feel her pulling away.” They would still talk on the phone and see each other at gigs, but she missed Nippy terribly. Years later, Whitney would reveal that she missed her mother, too, and longed to pick up the phone and tell her.
Now that Whitney had graduated high school, she was finally free to pursue her passion. Now that John had moved out, he and Cissy got along much better and he would still drive her into Manhattan for gigs. John was especially excited about Whitney’s potential and he was determined to see her make it big. Cissy was not so sure. She wanted her daughter to have a college education. “But her talent was not to be denied,” she recalls. Together, they made the decision to hire a management company to ready her for stardom.
Tara Productions had been managing the career of Dionne Warwick, who asked them to take a look at her talented young cousin. Before long, Tara’s head, Danny Gittelman, was bowled over by Whitney’s four-octave voice and was determined to help guide her career path. He arranged acting and elocution lessons and shopping trips as far away as Boston and Providence for clothes that would sharpen her image.
When she was nineteen, Tara arranged for her first lead vocal on an album by the group Material, led by bassist Bill Laswell. She contributed a song called “Memories,” which the Village Voice would call “one of the most gorgeous ballads you’ve ever heard.”
A year later, she sang in a TV commercial for Canada Dry ginger ale dressed as a waitress. She was still modeling but she was beginning to hate it.
“Modeling was really degrading,” she later recalled. “They were always on me, picking at my appearance. It was not a life that I wanted to live.”
Believing she was finally ready for the spotlight, Tara arranged for Whitney to perform in a series of industry showcases. Gerry Griffith, an A&R rep for Arista Records, had been impressed by Whitney’s voice for some time:
I went to see one of our own artists that was performing at the Bottom Line in New York. And the head of promotions at my label, Richard Smith, and I were sitting at the same table and had no idea that Cissy Houston was being backed up by her son and daughter—her daughter obviously being Whitney. Three or four songs into the show, Whitney stepped out and she sang about two or three songs. Afterwards Richard said to me, “Man, you should really sign this girl!” and I was like, “She’s really special, but she’s awfully young and I just don’t think she’s ready.”
So one and a half years went by and I heard through the grapevine that she was being signed to Elektra. A friend of mine who is not even in the music industry called me and asked if I knew who Whitney Houston was, and I said, “Yeah . . . why?” He said, “Well, she’s signing with Elektra,” and I said, “Oh no!” So I called Whitney’s manager, Gene Harvey, and Gene said, “Well, we’re talking to them but we haven’t signed yet, so why don’t you come down and see her at Seventh Avenue South this weekend?” That’s a club in New York. So that was the second time I saw her perform. And I already knew the family, I knew Cissy before then because I would always see her at her manager’s office.
She knew me and I knew her so it was an easy introduction. And I was like, “Look, I really want to present Whitney to Clive so let’s see what happens,” and she said, “Fine.” So the next day I went into Clive’s office and said, “I’m going to showcase a great, beautiful female artist for you and I need a budget.” He had no idea who she was. He said, “Fine, what do you need?” and I told him and I put the showcase together. We rehearsed for roughly a week, and showcased her for Clive and that’s the way the whole thing came about and that’s why I say I didn’t actually discover her, but that I saw her in a club and the rest is history.
* * *
In 1983, Clive Davis was already a legend in the business with a reputation for spotting talent. As head of Columbia Records in the late sixties and early seventies, he had discovered Janis Joplin, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Aerosmith, along with a host of other major acts.
In 1973, he was suddenly fired—reportedly because he charged his son’s bar mitzvah to his expense account. He maintained that the alleged infraction was the fault of the label’s head of artist relations, who had been in “cahoots with a mo
bster” to doctor invoices and generate kickbacks.
One of his earliest tasks as an executive at Columbia had him incurring the wrath of Bob Dylan when he had to inform the icon that he would have to remove the song “Talking John Birch Society Blues” from his new album because it contained a potentially libelous line about John Birchers holding “Hitler views.” Dylan went ballistic.
He had better luck with another of the label’s acts, Janis Joplin, when he was preparing to offer her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, its first record label. She was so grateful that she offered to sleep with him. Her manager, Albert Grossman, delivered the news when he arrived to sign the deal. “You know what Janis would really like to do?” announced Grossman. “She thinks it would be only fitting and proper that she ball you to cement the deal. That would be her way of showing this is a more meaningful relationship.” Davis politely declined.
Once Joplin exploded onto the charts, Davis had the idea of playing one of her songs for Broadway legend Richard Rodgers, composer of Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music. When he played Rodgers Joplin’s cover of “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess, the veteran composer was singularly unimpressed. “If this means I have to change my writing, or that the only way to write a Broadway musical is to write rock songs, then my career is over,” he lamented.
Now, with his rock and roll days behind him, Davis had turned his sights to forging or reinventing the careers of artists like Dionne Warwick, Carly Simon, and Aretha Franklin.
He readily agreed to check out this new act; Griffith had assured him Whitney could hold her own with the assemblage of female talent that had become his forte. It didn’t hurt that she came from an impressive musical pedigree.