by Ian Halperin
Leolah Brown
Later, she posted a follow-up in the same vein:
Nick Gordon is very disrespectful and inconsiderate! Especially to my family. Moreover, he has done things to my niece that I never thought he had it in him to do!
With the police still remaining tight-lipped about their investigation, Leolah’s revelation that Nick was being investigated for “attempted murder” appeared significant. As a supposed family insider, she would presumably know what was going on at a time when the public was still being completely left in the dark. Two weeks earlier, she had revealed to a local station that she “hoped” Nick would be charged. Now she was suggesting that such a charge could be imminent and that there was actual “evidence” of “foul play.”
But Bobby Brown’s wife, Alicia, told TMZ that if you “put a microphone in front of Leolah, she’ll talk about anything” and that “she has no facts at all about what’s going on with Bobbi Kristina.”
Moreover, it was revealed that Leolah had made the talk show rounds in 2012 claiming that Whitney was the victim of foul play. Jacky Jasper, of the blog Hollywood Street King, revealed a letter Leolah had sent him in 2012 when he asked for an interview:
Jacky, I have some information that will blow the roof off, but I need to get paid.
If Pat [Houston] and them can get paid from Star and Enquirer magazines, so should I. I can prove Whitney was murdered—I know what really happened.
I’m not going to do the interview with you, because I need to get some money for my story. Put me in contact with Star and Enquirer, they pay. That’s the only way I’m talking.
So much for the first significant clue that I thought would lead me in the direction of the truth. But it wasn’t long before I finally found one more reliable.
CHAPTER NINE
If her first album had been slow to catch on, her second rocketed to the top at a dizzying speed. Released in June 1987, Whitney debuted at number one, the first time in history that a female recording artist had achieved that feat and only the fourth artist in total after Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and Bruce Springsteen. And when it stayed there for eleven consecutive weeks, it was obvious that the success of the first album was no fluke.
As with her debut, the critics weren’t particularly bowled over. The New York Times complained that the songs were “formulaic,” writing, “Whitney plays everything safe. It uses three of the debut album’s producers. . . . There are bouncy, tinkly songs aimed at teen-agers, and slow tunes aimed at sentimental adults, as before. Even the album title fits in with an Arista Records custom of separating female singers—Dionne, Aretha, Carly—from their last names.” Rolling Stone also panned it, calling the album “smug, repressive and ridiculously safe. . . . The formula is more rigorously locked in than before, and the range so tightly circumscribed that Houston’s potential seems to have shrunk rather than expanded.” Again, most reviewers singled out Whitney’s voice.
But if the press were lukewarm, the public had no such reservations. Not only did the album fly off the shelves from the outset, but after she hit the road on a sold-out concert tour, an astonishing four singles hit number one as well. Although she was the first female recording artist ever to achieve this feat, Michael Jackson’s Bad had in fact scored five number ones. But when added to the streak from her debut, she had now achieved seven consecutive number ones. Neither Jackson nor the Beatles nor any other artist in music history had ever accomplished this milestone.
And suddenly Whitney was being mentioned in the same breath as those iconic artists, especially when Forbes revealed its list of the top-earning musicians of 1987. Whitney earned $44 million that year, just behind Madonna but ahead of her idol Michael Jackson, who earned a million less.
The media, however, wasn’t yet ready to equate commercial success with greatness. There were complaints that the success had in fact been “manufactured,” and once again Clive Davis was being given credit for the achievement.
Whitney, however, regularly bristled at such suggestions and was quick to set the record straight when it was suggested that her success was the result of a carefully cultivated image that Time credited to Arista’s “Svengali strategies.”
“They didn’t have to make me over,” she countered. “There would be no Whitney Houston without Whitney Houston.”
As Whitney hit the road, the press couldn’t help notice the striking woman who was always at her side. Robyn had been put on the payroll as her executive assistant as far back as 1985 when she gave up a basketball scholarship at Monmouth University and dropped out to be with Whitney. In fact, the liner notes on Whitney Houston included her friend in the acknowledgments. “Robyn, what an assistant! I love you and I guess all you need to do is stay in my life, Nip.” On her new album, her name appears in the notes once again. “Robyn, you are my friend and you are also quite an assistant. Be strong, for you are a child of the almighty God and you walk in his love and in his light. I love you, Whitney.”
In his 1987 profile “The Prom Queen of Soul,” Richard Corliss of Time was the first reporter to take note of Robyn and the widely circulated rumors—what he calls the “tattle mill” that she and Whitney were more than just friends. Describing her as “tall, slim and severely handsome,” he notes that the two shared an apartment and quotes Whitney calling her “the sister I never had.”
Robyn dismissed the rumors, telling Corliss, “I tell my family, ‘You can hear anything on the streets, but if you don’t hear it from me, it’s not true.’ ”
For her part, Whitney appeared to issue a non-denial denial:
“My mother taught me that when you stand in the truth and someone tells a lie about you, don’t fight it,” she told Corliss. “I’m not with any man. I’m not in love. People see Robyn with me, and they draw their own conclusions. Anyway, whose business is it if you’re gay or like dogs? What others do shouldn’t matter. Let people talk. It doesn’t bother me because I know I’m not gay. I don’t care.”
The surprising mention of lesbian rumors in a magazine as prestigious as Time—not, after all, known as a gossip rag—appeared to signal to the mainstream media that it was okay to broach the subject of Whitney’s sexuality, although some reports suggested that the Arista publicity machine was anxious to give Whitney a chance to douse the rumors for fear they would hurt record sales and encouraged other publications to bring it up.
In a 1987 cover story, for example, Us magazine brought up the subject with Whitney and her mother. Whitney began by downplaying the glamour of her new success: “I really do ordinary things with my life,” she said. “I eat, sing, sleep, play tennis, play with my cats. Being alone is very important to me but when I’m with my friends I laugh, joke, fool around, act normal.”
When pressed about stories circulating about her personal life, she said, “Why should people know everything? There have to be surprises.”
Interviewed for the same article, Cissy was anxious to talk about the people who were out to “bruise” her daughter by spreading false stories about her.
“I tell her, ‘If you’re on a firm foundation, no one can destroy you whatever they say. She knows that and I think she’s learning that you cannot even give credence to those things that are not true by talking about them.”
She shared her belief that some of the talk still bothered her daughter but advised her not to “pay attention to that crap.”
Cissy then assured the reporter that “Whitney does want to get married and have babies. It’s just a matter of finding the right time and the right person. She’s got to find someone who loves her for herself, not for her money or anything.”
Whitney had never before publicly talked about dating men. Suddenly, after the Time article, she went out of her way to paint herself as a nice heterosexual girl.
“I’ve had boyfriends all my life—very good-looking and very fine young men,” she told Ebony. “And I’ve had great relationships. But I’ve never been one to have five relationships at the
same time. I get no enjoyment out of that. You know, I was raised as a Christian, and my mother was very strict with me as far as boys were concerned. She told me that the way to a man’s heart is not by opening your legs. You let him get to know you first.
“All that stuff has stayed with me, and it has worked for me, because it has allowed me to know that this is mine!” she said, pointing at her body. “It is better to preserve yourself because nobody likes anything that’s old and worn out.”
As the question of her relationship with Robyn became a regular staple of media interviews, she became adept at addressing the rumors with nonchalance.
“Robyn is my oldest and dearest friend,” she told Essence. “People used to say we were gay when we went in East Orange because when you saw Robyn you saw me, and when you saw me you saw Robyn. We were that tight, you know? So this thing has kind of followed us. And half the time we’d say, ‘Fuck it, if they think we’re gay, let ’em think we’re gay.’ ”
* * *
Eddie Murphy and Whitney Houston had something in common. Like Whitney, the gay rumors about Eddie had been circulating for years, ever since the former Saturday Night Live comic burst onto the Hollywood scene in the early eighties. It was whispered he had a penchant for transvestites, a rumor that later exploded into the public consciousness in 1997 when Murphy was pulled over by police on Santa Monica Boulevard with a transvestite prostitute. But in the late eighties it was still just gossip making its way around town and threatening to derail a successful career.
Suddenly, around 1988, Whitney was being photographed with Murphy at a number of events and gave interviews where she suggested they were together. In one profile for Ebony, she showed off a 5.5 karat diamond ring that she claimed had been given to her by Murphy.
Explaining that Arsenio Hall had introduced her to the actor three years earlier, she revealed, “We’ve been dating ever since.”
“I can recall going to a party years ago at Bubble Hill, which was Eddie’s estate in New Jersey and Whitney was there as his date, girlfriend, whatever,” recalls talk show host Wendy Williams in a documentary about Whitney, scrunching up her nose in sarcasm. “I just don’t think that was a real relationship.”
“Bear in mind we’re not talking about 2012 where gay marriages are becoming legal pretty much around the world. This was not a time when you could be out and proud in Hollywood and have much of a career,” explains NBC entertainment correspondent Ashley Pearson in the documentary.
In 2014, Murphy finally came clean. “I was never dating Whitney,” he revealed. “She was a friend of mine. I may have gone to dinner with her a few times, but it was never like we were dating—we were never boyfriend and girlfriend. We were very friendly acquaintances. She was a beautiful person. I hear a lot of people talking about her sense of humor, and she really did have a great sense of humor. She was a funny girl.”
And the Arista publicity machine was working overtime to ensure that reporters knew that she was hanging out with Murphy. Although the tabloids still trumpeted the lesbian rumors, there was a distinct change in tone in the mainstream celebrity press. Eddie Murphy was frequently mentioned in the celebrity profiles during this period, which sometimes saw Whitney on the cover of three magazines in the same month. And when the public appeared to have a hard time swallowing the reports of Whitney and Eddie together, suddenly she was linked to the football star Randall Cunningham and hanging around his NFL team the Philadelphia Eagles. Before long, hundreds of media accounts reported that the two were dating. Others suggested that Cunningham and Murphy were just a few of her many suitors but that she had in fact previously been engaged to Jermaine Jackson, who worked with her on her debut album. After Whitney’s death, a New York Post entertainment reporter revealed that Whitney once told him she was dating “the brother of a big star,” obviously referring to Michael Jackson and, by implication, Jermaine. And yet when Whitney walked the red carpet at the whirlwind of awards ceremonies and events where she was constantly photographed, she never brought a date. Instead, she would usually arrive on the arm of her father, her brother Michael, or Clive Davis.
Still, the rumors about Robyn had for a time been successfully supplanted by articles with such headlines as “Whitney and the Men in Her Life.”
New York talent-management consultant Michelle Callahan describes the way image consultants handle such matters.
“I can imagine that if she were going to consult anybody about that if it were true, that they would advise her you don’t have to say anything about it which again would be another thing to have to hold inside. We’re trying to sell records not you, not the real you, the image of you,” she says.
Whitney herself was often outspoken on how her image was distorted.
“It’s really strange,” she told Rolling Stone. “Michael Jackson said it best: You become this personality instead of a person. That’s what’s strange about this image business—the more popular you become, the weirder they want to make you. I read some stuff about myself in the last year—it’s like ‘Who the fuck are they talking about?’ . . . But the media always distorts shit. It’s never, never what I said; it’s never how I said it; it’s never how I thought that person perceived me. It’s always some other crazy shit—which is why I don’t like doing interviews. Because they lie. They just outright lie.”
Like it or not, however, Whitney went along with the time-tested if distasteful process that plays an integral part in the molding of any celebrity, let alone one who was rapidly catapulting into the ranks of megastardom.
“Once in a blue moon, a new artist emerges who simply takes over, in utterly decisive and undeniable fashion,” trumpeted Billboard, to explain the phenomenon that Whitney had become.
For her industry handlers, there were hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. For her family, there were new houses, cars, trips on private planes, red carpet events, and the glamour and excitement that come with traveling in the court of music royalty.
It was a lot of pressure for a twenty-three-year-old to handle, and it was taking an enormous toll.
As she catapulted to superstardom, Whitney liked to profess that she wasn’t succumbing to the celebrity lifestyle or letting fame get to her.
“It hasn’t changed my life,” she insisted to one reporter. “I’m just busier than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m basically the same. I still think the same as I did before ‘Whitney Houston’ came about. I think the same and I still have the same values.”
She made it a point to let it be known that she had no intention of moving to Los Angeles or Manhattan to live the glamorous life associated with celebrity. Instead, she was intent to stay close to home in New Jersey and experience a “normal” life. This, she explained, would help keep her grounded.
“I’m able to go out,” she told USA Today about her decision to resist a move to LA. “I can go to the mall. People don’t bombard me. It’s important to me to be human. Everybody thinks I’m a superstar, but I know the real deal.”
She was fond of stressing how her upbringing and Christian values helped her resist “temptations.” In later years, when Whitney’s drug use became common knowledge, pundits and fans liked to believe it was Bobby Brown who led her astray. But there is a mountain of evidence that shows that with fame and success also came her first foray into drugs long before she met Brown.
Cissy had long known that her sons Michael and Gary had a drug problem. But she refused to believe that Whitney could ever fall into that trap even after she read an interview in which her daughter talked about her “partying.” So she claims it came as a shock when none other than Robyn Crawford came to her one day and expressed concern that Whitney was using drugs. Robyn admitted that they often used together but that “Nippy likes it a little too much.” Soon after, Cissy recalls in her memoir, she approached Whitney to ask about her drug use. Her daughter’s response? “Oh Mommy. You don’t need to worry about that,” she said, claiming that Robyn was “overreacting.�
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She reveals that John later told her that he, too, was worried about his daughter during this time. And even though he knew about his sons’ problems, he told a family friend that it was Whitney he was most worried about.
Years later, Michael Houston admitted that it was he who first introduced Whitney to cocaine. “I think probably the first time we ever, she ever did it was probably, you know—but you gotta understand, at the time, the eighties, it was acceptable,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 2013. “In the entertainment industry it was just like, available. It wasn’t like a bad word like it is now. You know what I’m saying? We didn’t know. We just didn’t know.”
And yet there’s no indication that her drug use ever rose to the level of abuse during this period. Nor is there any evidence that her professions about leading a normal life were simply a disingenuous attempt to mold a wholesome image for public consumption.
In the thousands of articles and profiles written about her during her rise to fame, there is a surprisingly distinct dearth of references to the word diva—a word that would frequently be leveled at her a decade later.
My first and only encounter with Whitney Houston came in the summer of 1988, when I was living in London. At the time, I was a musician and frequently collaborated with a South African man named Robert Sithole, who was living in political exile in the UK. Sithole had the distinction of being one of the world’s greatest pennywhistle players. Whitney was in town to perform at Nelson Mandela’s seventieth birthday party concert at Wembley Stadium. That week, Whitney showed up at a party hosted by an antiapartheid group where Robert and I were performing. After our set, Whitney came over to tell Robert how she was blown away by his playing. She had never before seen a pennywhistle, and he gave her a quick lesson, letting her try it out. She said something about how she loved the sound, and it was too bad it wouldn’t fit in with her music. I didn’t have much interaction with her other than small talk, but I was struck at how gracious she was to everybody present that evening. I remember thinking she was a class act. If I didn’t know who she was, I would never have guessed she was one of the world’s most famous celebrities, then at the peak of her success. She was with a small entourage, but I have no idea if Robyn was with her that night, because I had no clue who she was at the time.