by Ian Halperin
Years later, he’d describe seeing Whitney sing for the first time to People.
“It was at a club called Sweetwater’s in 1983. She was doing back up singing for her brother and mother Cissy, and then did two solo songs that were essentially her ‘audition’ for me,” Davis recalled. “One of the solo songs? ‘The Greatest Love of All,’ which had previously been recorded by George Benson. To see this young 19-year-old find meaning in that song . . . she was bringing it to a whole other level that I had never heard before.”
He called signing her a no-brainer. “I said, ‘She will be for the next generation what Lena Horne was for her generation.’ ”
Arista wasn’t the only company present that night to offer her a contract. In fact, Elektra had come in with a higher advance than Davis was offering. But Cissy was impressed by the amount they had set aside for promotion. John wanted to take the higher offer but he knew how Cissy’s own career had stalled because of lack of promotion. In the end, neither Cissy nor John were the ones to decide with whom their daughter signed. Whitney was in charge of her own destiny and she just trusted Davis more than the others who had been courting her.
Years later, in a Rolling Stone interview, she recalled the events that led to her decision:
I did showcases and invited record-company people. People were interested in me from the time I was fifteen—it was kinda like they were just waiting for me to grow up. Everybody put their bids in. So I sat down with my managers and my parents, and I remember this long, drawn-out meeting. “What are you gonna do? Who are you going to go with?” I remember stopping the meeting and saying, “I gotta take a break.” I went into another room and sat in a chair, and my mother came in after me and said, “You know, this is very difficult, but I’m going to tell you the truth: You should go where you are going to get the best out of it. Meaning, let’s say a company offers you a contract, and they’re saying: ‘Whitney, you can choose the songs. You can produce the songs. You can do whatever the hell you want to do.’ As opposed to Arista, with Clive Davis saying: “We’ll give you this amount of money, and we’ll sit down, and as far as the songs you want to do, I will help you. I will say: ‘Whitney, this song has potential. This song doesn’t.’ So my mother was saying to me, ‘You’re eighteen years old. You need guidance.’ Clive was the person who guided me.”
Arista executive Ken Levy recalled that Davis was extremely excited about his new discovery. “He talked about Whitney the way he talked about Janis Joplin. He was from the world of great singers. He’s enchanted by powerful voices.”
When the day finally came to put her name on the contract, Whitney arrived at the office dressed in a Levi’s sweatshirt and jeans. Arista vice president Roy Lott recalled the occasion, describing her as a work in progress. “Just a regular kid,” he said. “Not squeaky-clean, but a regular kid.” Talent agent Ben Bernstein, who was tasked with arranging her promotional tour, told Rolling Stone that “Everyone would’ve been thrilled to sell a few hundred thousand albums.”
Not long after she signed with Arista—just two weeks shy of her twentieth birthday—Whitney made her national television debut on The Merv Griffin Show alongside Clive Davis, who gushed about her natural charm. “You’ve either got it or you don’t got it,” he told Griffin before bringing out his new protégée. “She’s got it.” The influential talk show host revealed that he had accompanied Davis to the initial Sweetwater’s showcase and had been equally bowled over by her talent.
Arista was determined to cultivate Whitney slowly rather than rush into the recording studio. Carefully nurturing her image, they arranged some television appearances including a spot singing with Jermaine Jackson on the soap opera As the World Turns and a cameo on the sitcom Give Me a Break with Nell Carter.
In 1984, Arista brought her into the studio to record a duet with Teddy Pendergrass on the song “Hold Me,” which climbed to number five on the R&B charts.
As Arista carefully cultivated her image, Cissy was there every step of the way and she didn’t hesitate to intervene if she didn’t approve. When a designer was brought in to create a revealing wardrobe for Whitney’s live appearances, her mother thought it made her look like a stripper.
“You can put all that crap back,” she barked. “She is not shaking no butt, showing no skin, nothing like that!”
Arista had assembled a stable of their best songwriters and producers to produce the material they believed Whitney would turn to gold.
But even before she stepped into the studio, Whitney’s onstage performances were beginning to generate media attention. “She is talented with tremendous potential,” wrote the New York Times. Billboard magazine agreed, opining, “Whitney has the pedigree and the style to be a major vocalist.” The Village Voice took notice of the growing buzz. “Sensational word-of-mouth has been going around about Whitney Houston. She has a big voice, the kind that makes you laugh and weep at the same time.”
It was clear Clive Davis knew what he had in Whitney but he wasn’t taking any chances. He had set aside an unprecedented $250,000 to produce her debut album, and he was determined to do it right.
Arista had recently signed Michael Jackson’s brother Jermaine to the label. None of the other brothers had been particularly successful as a solo act but when the Jacksons announced that they would be uniting for the 1984 Victory Tour, the label wanted a Jermaine Jackson album ready to capitalize on the hype the tour was certain to generate.
The album would contain two duets. One featuring Jermaine and Michael on “Tell Me I’m Not Dreaming” and a second featuring Jermaine and Whitney on “Take Good Care of My Heart.” When it was released in 1984, the album hit the top twenty, and Whitney had taken her first steps to conquering the charts.
But she was far from content to sing on other people’s albums. Whitney was growing impatient to record one of her own. Arista, however, had its own plans for their new find, and they were sticking to the strategy they had carved out from the beginning.
Whitney’s manager, Gene Harvey, later recalled how he and Davis were determined to cultivate their plan carefully.
“It was a matter of searching for the right material and producers,” Harvey told the Los Angeles Times. “It was Clive’s philosophy and ours that we not push this girl out there right away. We decided to wait and do the best job that we could, and if it took a little longer, so be it. It was a matter of searching for the right material and producers.”
It proved to be a smart strategy. While for decades black artists had been pigeonholed into R&B and soul, since 1981, there had been an important breakthrough led by artists such as Michael Jackson, Prince, Tina Turner, Lionel Richie, and other black musicians who had been dominating the Billboard charts and finally proving to executives and radio programmers that “black music” was an outdated concept.
“It worked out great,” Harvey recalled, “because pop radio became more accepting of black music. As Whitney debuted, all the circumstances were there.”
Whitney had come along just at the right time and Davis appeared to know what he was doing. They appeared to click from the beginning. Even Cissy was astounded at how much freedom the veteran executive gave her daughter to help choose the songs that were right for her. But Whitney was also impressed at how well she collaborated with this white Jewish guy in a suit.
“It’s uncanny how much Clive and I think alike,” she noted. “If he likes a song, it’s almost 100 percent sure that I will too.”
During the course of 1984, she worked on the album that Arista had scheduled to hit stores in 1985. In preparation for its release, they scheduled a promotional tour that saw Whitney flying all over the country to generate advance buzz. It was the longest she had ever been away from her family and she was desperately lonely.
But she was also excited at what lay ahead.
CHAPTER SIX
I had more than a little experience investigating the mysterious circumstances surrounding the fall of celebrities. For whatever
it was worth, I had gained a reputation shedding light on the death of grunge icon Kurt Cobain and the downfall and eventual death of Michael Jackson. But in those cases, I had spent years establishing contacts, sifting through the minutiae of evidence, and piecing together the pieces of the puzzle that culminated in their final days and eventual demise. Now, time wasn’t on my side.
I was determined to discover if possible what happened to Bobbi Kristina Brown before she woke up or passed away. I knew from experience that police were often hamstrung by the desire of their superiors to protect local celebrities. Sometimes they are starstruck—from frequently associating with the star in question at local functions—while other times they are simply determined not to let the image of their city be tarnished by having it associated with the sleaze and sordid circumstances that often surround the lifestyle of said celebrity. Years after I accused Seattle police of a rush to judgment in declaring Cobain’s death an “open and shut case of suicide,” the retired police chief, Norm Stamper, acknowledged that they had indeed failed to investigate other possibilities and said that if he was still chief, he would reopen the case.
Although I once had extensive contacts in Whitney Houston’s camp—stemming from a brief collaboration with her father more than a decade ago—many of them had long since departed the scene, some following Whitney’s death in 2012, most years before. Few could shed any light whatsoever on Bobbi Kristina, whom they had known only as a child. As I prepared for a trip to Atlanta, I alternated between mining my old contacts and establishing new ones in Georgia who could smooth the way for my investigation on the ground. I had an indirect tie to the Atlanta police—someone who first alerted me to the fact that the circumstances of the drowning were suspicious—and I had managed to glean some secondhand information about the state of the investigation in Roswell, but everything was still very sketchy.
Based in Miami, I have been fortunate in that this is the city where a number of Whitney’s old camp have chosen to spend their winters. One of these figures is a British bodyguard who calls himself “Mugs,” who had arranged security for a number of Whitney’s appearances over the years. When we met for lunch in South Beach, he revealed that he was introduced to Whitney for the first time not in England but in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where she was staying. They hit it off, and she eventually hired him to do security for a number of events, concerts, and private parties.
He claims that he met Nick Gordon only twice, once in Miami and once in Atlanta, but had no idea at the time who he was or what his association with Whitney was.
“He was weird, socially awkward,” Mugs recalled. “He wore very expensive clothes but he seemed shy. He always had some food in his hand that he was munching on. I really didn’t know what to make of him. I thought he was just there as a hanger-on. He was weird.”
The burly bodyguard expressed regret that he didn’t know Whitney during her golden years. When he encountered her for the first time, she was already “a wreck.”
“Unfortunately she refused to get the right help,” he said. “She had many demons that were going to destroy her life. I saw through that right away.”
She was at her worst, he claimed, when he did security for three of her London concerts in spring 2010:
It was a comeback tour that turned out to be a career killer. She was in no shape to get onstage. I couldn’t believe they let her onstage. It was so sad. I saw her backstage, I saw her at the hotel, I saw her at the arena rehearsing. It was sad. Whitney was drugged up. She didn’t seem to know where she was. Michael Jackson had died a year earlier and I got to see him rehearsing during his final months in London at the same venue. To me, he truly seemed to be in better shape than Whitney. I didn’t see it coming. After seeing her in that condition a year later, I felt sad, I knew Whitney didn’t have much time left, she was going to join Michael soon. It was just so sad.
On a number of occasions, I asked him about Bobbi Kristina, but each time, he looked like he was fighting back tears. The truth is, I was a bit taken aback to see someone who looked like him on the verge of crying. Finally, he composed himself and described her as the “sweetest kid I ever met.”
After Whitney died, he claimed Bobbi had no guidance and just lost control. He said the Bobbi of the last couple years had nothing to do with the sweet girl he first met when she was six. I tried to determine if he was basing this on recent media reports or if he has had contact with Bobbi since 2012, but he broke down and said he couldn’t talk about her anymore.
Having also worked for Amy Winehouse, he said he finds it difficult to deal with the celebrity “madhouse.”
“You get attached to them and they go off the deep end and you lose them. I can’t deal with it anymore. It’s too sad,” he lamented.
* * *
One of my tennis partners told me he knows a club promoter, Jeffy T., who knew both Whitney and her daughter. We met for drinks.
Jeffy recalls meeting both Bobbi and Nick for the first time in Manhattan a few years ago at a downtown hip-hop event:
They were young, very shy. I thought they were brother and sister. Someone pointed Bobbi Kristina out to me and I said, “Damn, too cool.” I was a big Bobby Brown fan growing up. He was my idol. I went over to them and started talking, you know, about small things, and about how big a fan I was of both her parents. They were really nice, down-to-earth but very shy. The next time I met them was during Grammy week [in 2014]. I noticed them walking down Melrose doing some shopping. I went up to them and said hi. Gordon looked different; he looked like a grown man, but rougher than the first time I saw him. I was worried when I saw Bobbi Kristina. She looked too thin. She didn’t look happy. We exchanged pleasantries, and Nick told me things were good and that they were headed to Miami soon. I gave them my number and told them I’d hook them up there. I never heard from them again.
Neither meeting provided much insight, nor was I getting very far digging into the events that led to Bobbi Kristina’s near drowning. But at least both these contacts had some association, however minute, with Whitney and her family. That’s more than can be said for my neighbor, Eva Ritvo.
Eva is one of Miami’s leading psychiatrists and a well-known author who is frequently featured on the Today show and even in the New York Times for her insights into “difficult” people. She has also treated a number of prominent celebrities. When I mentioned in passing what I was working on, she offered to provide a professional opinion that might give me some guidance in making sense of the events. I was a little skeptical, thinking that her analysis of someone she has never met might be akin to a séance or the predictions of a tarot reader, but I was open to hear what she had to say. One thing I had to admit when she issued her verdict days later was that she had clearly done her homework.
“When thinking about Bobbi Kristina it would seem that many factors contributed to her tragic accident,” Ritvo began.
First, there is the uncanny coincidence of her drowning in the bathtub just days before the three-year anniversary of her mother’s death in the same way. More than one hundred years ago Freud coined the phrase repetition compulsion, a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats a traumatic event or its circumstances over and over again. Next, there is the question of substance abuse. We know that a tendency to abuse drugs and alcohol is inherited and Bobbi Kristina had two parents with drug and alcohol problems. Moreover, she was exposed to their drug use during her childhood, also leading to an increased likelihood of her having similar difficulties.
Bobbi Kristina also had to cope with the tremendous stress of growing up in the limelight. The pressure of constantly being watched and criticized by others is difficult on adults but even harder on children who tend to be more sensitive to the comments of others. [Her mother’s] divorce is another stress this young woman endured at age thirteen. Adolescence is a difficult time for most children, and parents who are divorcing are often caught up in their own psychological turmoil and their parenting skills may decrease.<
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Next, we have the depression from which she most likely suffered. Her depression probably was increasing as the anniversary of Whitney’s death was approaching. Mental health experts have shown that the impact of losing a mother has long-lasting implications. The earlier the loss, the more significant the impact. Depression is the most likely outcome and it is clear that Bobbi Kristina was depressed.
And lastly, she had been involved in a car accident four days before the near drowning. She may have suffered a head injury leading to a delayed concussion or bleed that contributed to her unresponsiveness. In 2013 she had a seizure followed by a loss of consciousness that might also be the cause of this tragic event. Bobbi Kristina had tremendous loss in her life: the early divorce, estrangement from her father, and the untimely death of her mother. Nick Gordon filled many roles for her. After Whitney’s death, their relationship took on a new form and they became boyfriend and girlfriend and not surprisingly this created friction within Bobbi Kristina’s extended family.
In addition to the family challenges and loss, Bobbie Kristina has lost multiple friends. Her best friend died of a heroin overdose in March 2014 and another friend died in August 2014 of a brain bleed following a car accident. These major losses undoubtedly impacted her and may have contributed to her having a death wish and a conscious or unconscious desire to join them. Her accident follows many losses from her inner circle.
Nick Gordon is reported to be a controlling figure in Bobbi Kristina’s life. Both her father and grandmother expressed concern over Bobbi Kristina’s choice to consider him as her husband.
I was especially interested in hearing her take on Bobbi’s relationship with Nick. “What do you make of their apparent engagement so soon after Whitney’s death?” I asked.