by Ian Halperin
How is it that a recording artist can be voted Favorite New Female Artist by the readers of Rolling Stone, named Newcomer of the Year in music by Entertainment Tonight, Top New Artist by Billboard and not be considered a candidate for ‘Best New Artist?’ . . . It is a conspicuous injustice that Whitney will not be getting her shot. . . . When someone comes along and makes an impact such as Whitney has, it’ll come as a big surprise to quite a few people that, according to the rules of NARAS, sometimes new isn’t New.
Whatever the case, his high-profile campaign appeared to work, because sales began picking up significantly in advance of the 1986 Grammy ceremony. It also didn’t hurt when she won two American Music Awards in January 1986.
By the time Whitney stepped onto the stage to accept her only Grammy of the evening—for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance—on February 25, Whitney Houston had already sold two million copies and spawned three top-ten singles, including two number ones. Before her award was announced, she had delivered a live heartfelt rendition of one of those singles, “Saving All My Love for You.” The musical royalty present that night loved it.
When the big moment arrived a little later in the evening, it seemed fitting that the presenter happened to be Whitney’s cousin, Dionne Warwick, who did a little dance of excitement as she pulled the winner’s name out of the envelope while her co-presenter, Julian Lennon, looked on.
As Whitney took the stage in a poofy red gown, she looked out at the audience as if fighting back tears and exclaimed, “Can you believe this?”
With a crucifix around her neck and her mother in the audience, she delivered what appeared to be an off-the-cuff speech, as if she hadn’t been expecting the honor:
“First I must give thanks to God who makes it all possible for me. To my mommy and daddy, the two most important people in my life. My managers Gene, Seymour, and Steve. . . . To everybody at Arista. . . . Clive, you are the best. You are the best. Oh my goodness. I love you. God bless you. Thank you.”
Album of the Year that night went to Phil Collins for No Jacket Required. Whitney failed to win in the other category for which she was nominated, Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, but appeared thrilled when the winner was announced as her Auntie Ree, Aretha Franklin.
By the time the ceremony was over, it was clear that Whitney was destined for the top. Sure enough, two weeks later, the album vaulted into the number one spot on the Billboard charts, completing its improbable rise fifty weeks after it was released. Only Fleetwood Mac a decade earlier had taken longer to reach number one, at fifty-eight weeks. And the best was yet to come.
By Grammy time, the album had already garnered three top-ten hits, but there was one particular song that had inadvertently not been released as a single. Clive Davis had heard Whitney sing “The Greatest Love of All” that night at Sweetwater’s the first time he saw her. What struck him most about the performance was that he had originally commissioned the song for the soundtrack of the Muhammad Ali biopic, The Greatest. But for whatever reason, he argued against including the song on her debut album. It was, in fact, one of the few creative disagreements he had with Whitney during the recording process. Only after some persuasion by the song’s composer, Michael Masser, and Whitney herself, did he agree to include it.
When the initial reviews came in, many critics singled out the song as one of the bright lights in an otherwise mediocre array of material. Singling out the song in his New York Times review, Stephen Holden noted that “Houston sings it with a forceful directness that gives its message of self-worth an astounding resonance and conviction” and called the song “a compelling assertion of spiritual devotion, black pride, and family loyalty, all at once.” Rolling Stone also paid attention, writing that as the song builds, “Houston slowly pours on the soul, slips in some churchy phrasing, holds notes a little longer and shows off her glorious voice.”
Still, Davis deliberately excluded it from the list of singles Arista chose to release in 1985. Only in April 1986, after the album had hit number one, did he consent to releasing it, but only as the B-side to the single “You Give Good Love.” It was an auspicious decision. The song quickly became a radio staple, and it catapulted to number one on the Billboard charts, where it remained for three consecutive weeks. When Davis won accolades for his role in the creative process behind Whitney Houston, he never explained his reticence.
Although he hadn’t let on, Davis had in fact initially been very anxious by the slow start of the album, on which to some extent he had staked his reputation. When it finally hit number one, it appeared that he had been vindicated.
By midyear, Whitney Houston had been certified as sextuple platinum, signifying sales of more than six million copies, and was the most successful debut album in music history. By that point—between March and June 1986—it had spent a total of fourteen nonconsecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard charts, only one week less than the record held by Carole King’s 1971 effort, Tapestry.
“Through all this, Whitney and I honestly couldn’t believe how well things were going,” Davis recalled in his 2013 memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life. “Whatever success I’d had before, nothing was comparable to this. Whenever we would see each other, she knew what was on my mind and she would volunteer, ‘I’m pinching myself!’ And I knew she meant it.”
As the album just kept on selling, Davis came to feel that they were simply “swept along by the momentum” and that the success of the album was just taking on a life of its own.
For her part, Whitney tried to heed Cissy’s lifelong admonition against being boastful.
“You know, it gets to the point where the first couple of million you go, ‘Oh, thank you, Jesus!,’ ” she told Rolling Stone about the album’s phenomenal success. “I mean, let’s face it, you make a record, you want people to buy your record—period. Anybody who tells you ‘I’m makin’ a record ’cause I want to be creative’ is a fucking liar. They want to sell records. As it went on—and it went on—I took a very humble attitude. I was not going to say, ‘Hey, I sold 13 million records—check that shit out.’ My mother always told me, ‘Before the fall goeth pride.’ ”
As the acclaim just kept pouring in and Whitney was heralded as a full-blown superstar, it was difficult not to let the success go to her head. She appeared riled that much of the positive media attention was focused on Davis’s role in her discovery and the creative process. When Rolling Stone asked her if it bothered her to read that Davis was her Svengali, she confessed:
“Sometimes it did when critics would say that Clive told me what to do and how to do it, because that’s all bullshit. I don’t like it when they see me as this little person who doesn’t know what to do with herself—like I have no idea what I want, like I’m just a puppet and Clive’s got the strings. That’s bullshit.
“That’s demeaning to me,” she continued, “because that ain’t how it is, and it never was. And never will be. I wouldn’t be with anybody who didn’t respect my opinion. Nobody makes me do anything I don’t want to do. You can’t make me sing something I don’t want to sing. That’s not what makes me and Clive click.”
Indeed, Davis was anxious to capitalize on her success and get her back into the studio to record a second album. In fact, he had been assembling material in consultation with Whitney before her debut album was released, but it stayed on the charts so long, they didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize its run.
When things finally calmed down in fall 1986, Whitney headed back into the studio to start recording the follow-up to her successful debut. Narada Michael Walden, who mixed many of the tracks on Whitney Houston, recalled preparing to start on the second album:
“After a first album, most acts have a sophomore jinx, and I said to her, ‘Are you nervous?’ She said, ‘No. If they loved me the first time, they’ll love me now.’ I was really taken aback by her confidence. But she was right.”
The touring and promotion had been grueling, but her family stayed close and made
sure she stayed grounded.
“I’m proud of the way she handles herself,” her father told People. “When she’s onstage she belongs to the audience . . . but 15 minutes after she’s off, she’s my kid again.”
Whitney herself insisted that she wasn’t letting the sudden fame change her. She credited Cissy for keeping her levelheaded and reminded people that this wasn’t her first experience with the show-business lifestyle:
“We got to ride in limousines, fly from one place to another, the California thing, but Mom made sure it was something we were grateful for—an opportunity we had that others didn’t,” she recalled. And although she was enjoying her success, she appeared annoyed at being the new poster child for young black women.
“I’m not wild about people looking at me as a role model,” Whitney said. “What I do have is a talent I got from God. I’m me. That’s all.”
Cissy never talked publicly about the troubles her two sons faced, but she expressed cautious optimism that Whitney would not succumb to the temptations of the celebrity lifestyle.
“There’s so much mess out there—drugs and all that kind of business,” she said. “But Whitney is very levelheaded, and I hope and pray . . .”
With the success of the album came money. A lot of it.
With her new wealth, Whitney decided to buy a house—a massive five-bedroom mansion in Mendham Township, about thirty miles west of New York City.
At $2.7 million, the new estate required at least three household staff to maintain. At first, Cissy was thrilled with the purchase. Her daughter was still living with Robyn at the apartment in Woodbridge, and the two were still inseparable when Whitney’s schedule permitted, though Whitney was cagey when the media asked about her private life. In a 1986 People profile, she appears to have deliberately misled the reporter about her living arrangements.
“Her ‘lavender apartment,’ as she describes it, is just half an hour from her childhood home in East Orange, and her only roommate there is Misty Blue, a Turkish Angora cat. ‘He’s the only man in my life at the moment,’ Houston says. ‘I don’t have the kind of time it takes to nurture a relationship the way I’d like to right now, and I’d never attempt to jump into one unless I had that time. Besides, I’d always be worried about what he was thinking when I was gone.’ ”
Cissy believed the new house would finally give her an excuse to move away from the human roommate that she knew had in fact been living with her daughter for more than four years. In fact, she thought the new house would be a place she could finally settle down and one day start a family. To her dismay, Nippy immediately invited Robyn to move in with her in Mendham Township, which was even farther away from East Orange than the Woodbridge apartment had been—a residence that Cissy had never visited.
It helped soothe her feelings when her daughter bought her a luxury condo at the same time.
Cissy admitted she didn’t like Robyn—who nicknamed her “Cuda,” short for Barracuda—any more than she had before but was resigned to letting her daughter make her own choices.
“Besides,” she wrote, “I didn’t hate Robyn; I was just concerned about what I perceived to be her influence on Nippy.”
With Whitney’s newly minted fame came newfound scrutiny from the public and the media. Arista publicist Kenneth Reynolds remembers the first time Robyn’s relationship with Whitney came on the radar.
“Robyn was very much a protector, Whitney’s guardian,” Reynolds told Vanity Fair. “Whitney had gone on a promotional tour without Robyn in 1985. When she came back, we were going to the National Association of Black-Owned Broadcasters Convention, in Washington, D.C. [Whitney’s manager] Eugene Harvey went to Arista and said the company should buy Crawford an airline ticket to the convention. ‘Because Whitney missed her,’ ” Harvey told him.
“I got up and closed my door and I said, ‘Gene, the airline ticket costs $79 for Robyn to fly to D.C. and stay in the room with Whitney. Don’t make a big fuss about it at the company. All you need is a bunch of straight, macho radio jocks finding out that Whitney wants Robyn on the trip.’
“Anyway, pretty soon the whole building was buzzing about it.” When Whitney arrived at the convention, he said, disc jockeys and program directors from across America were all buzzing about it, too. “And that was the big weekend when rumors about Whitney’s sexuality started.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The circus was coming to town. After the initial frenzy following Bobbi’s hospitalization on January 31, most of the media had packed up and left rather than enduring a seemingly endless waiting game with virtually no news filtering out of the hospital or police headquarters.
So when TMZ reported that the Brown family was filming a reality show, there weren’t a lot of reporters around to verify the bizarre turn of events. A correspondent for the site’s syndicated daily TV show announced on March 3 that some of Bobby Brown’s family—though not Bobby himself—have been shooting a reality show. The show had allegedly been in the works before Bobbi’s near drowning but with the family descending on Atlanta to visit her in the hospital, several members of the family had been talking about the ongoing tragedy on camera as it unfolded. While Brown continued his daily bedside vigil by his daughter’s side, he was reported to have been unaware that his siblings Tina, Leolah, Tommy, and their kids were “setting up shots” to talk about what was going on with Bobbi. The show noted that Bobby’s wife, Alicia Etheredge, was “livid” at the news.
Bobby’s lawyer immediately issued a statement appearing to deny the report:
“There is no Brown family reality show that is in production which chronicles Bobby Brown, Bobbi Kristina or the medical emergency she presently faces at Emory Hospital,” stated Chris Brown. But when asked whether other family members might be involved in such a production, he failed to close the door, simply noting that “extended family members are not my clients.”
News that Bobby’s brother and former manager, Tommy, was involved was particularly intriguing, because he was instrumental in the catastrophic reality show Being Bobby Brown that aired on Bravo in 2005 and inflicted significant damage to the public image of both Bobby and Whitney.
Meanwhile, it appeared that Nick Gordon was slowly going off the deep end. Still banned from Bobbi’s bedside, he had launched a full-fledged rant against her father on February 23. Nick tweeted:
“I have to remain strong for me and REALbkBrown.”
“Bobby seen his daughter 4 times in the last 5 yrs. Now him and his family want Whitneys $$$ which belongs to Krissi or Cissy.”
He also accused the Browns of “death threats” against him.
Appearing to realize that his Twitter attacks against Bobbi’s father were getting him nowhere, he finally softened his tone for the first time on March 2 and tried a different tactic. He tweeted:
“I forgive you @KingBobbyBrown much love I wish we could get together and deal with this as fam.”
Then on March 3, the day before Bobbi Kristina’s twenty-second birthday, he posted a tweet that caused considerable alarm:
“I’m so hurt I wanna do myself in. I know I have to [stay] strong.”
Some observers interpreted his tone as a bid for sympathy; others posited that he sounded suicidal. He had appeared calm by the next day, when he posted a tweet marking Bobbi’s twenty-second:
“Happy Birthday baby I wish I was there with you to hold you and be by your side.”
But by then, Dr. Phil was already riding to the rescue. The day after Nick’s emotional tweet, it was reported that his family had reached out to the pop psychologist Phil McGraw, who had made a name for himself with regular appearances on Oprah during the nineties. McGraw had come to Oprah’s attention in 1995, when her show hired his legal consulting firm to prepare for the infamous Amarillo Texas Beef trial, in which she and her production company were sued by the beef industry because of disparaging comments she and a guest had made about beef during a mad cow scare.
His subsequent appe
arances on her show made him such a fixture that he was given his own TV show in 2002 in which he specializes in using his folksy pop psychology to discuss and address the problems of his guests, including celebrities.
In one of the most infamous and widely criticized events of his career, McGraw notoriously visited Britney Spears in her hospital room during one of her mental breakdowns, prompting her parents to accuse him of exploitation and a “betrayal” of their trust.
Now it was reported that the TV personality would be arriving in Atlanta to sit down with Nick and his mother to address his problems. Although the show had been known to pay for appearances, and many assumed the apparent stunt was a cash grab by Nick, a family “insider” explained that “Nick is under intense pressure and not being allowed to visit Bobbi in the hospital is just horrible. Dr. Phil will be conducting an interview with Nick, and he won’t be paying for it.”
Instead, McGraw was said to be “arranging ongoing mental health services for Nick” paid for by the show.
Almost immediately after hearing news of the bizarre turn of events, Bobby’s sister Leolah condemned the idea and publicly urged Dr. Phil to reverse his decision. In an open letter posted on her Facebook page, she wrote:
Dr. Phil,
With all due respect,
Nick Gordon is under investigation for the attempted murder of my niece Bobbi Kristina Brown.
We have strong evidence of foul play. Until this investigation is completed by law enforcement, I would ask that you or anyone else not provide this individual a platform to spin this situation to his benefit.
If Nick Gordon does not have the courage to speak with my brother Bobby Brown and/or law enforcement about what happened the day my niece’s body was found in a bathtub, he does not deserve to have a platform to speak to anyone of your caliber until this investigation is concluded.
Respectfully,