Whitney & Bobbi Kristina

by Ian Halperin

  Early in the new millennium, I had been commissioned by Canada’s largest TV network, CTV, to shoot a documentary about pilot season, following young Canadian actors trying to land their first roles in Hollywood.

  My connections in Tinseltown were limited, so a friend hooked me up with a man whose own ties to the entertainment industry were legendary.

  I first met Joe Franklin at his cluttered office near Times Square. According to Guinness World Records, Franklin was the world’s “most durable talk show host,” hosting the first ever TV talk show, which ran from 1950 to 1977 on WABC-TV and continued on radio for another three decades until his death in January 2015. In his nearly sixty years as a talk show host, Joe interviewed more than thirty-one thousand guests, including a virtual who’s who of Hollywood celebrities. In fact, he is credited with introducing a number of future superstars, including a young Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, and Michael Jackson, as well as the still obscure Elvis Presley before he ever appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  When I met him, his office was filled with a treasure trove of memorabilia from his incredible career. I sat for hours, listening to him spin tales about celebrities he had interviewed, including JFK, and advice about where I might begin my quest. By the end of my first of many sessions with Franklin, I was a little starstruck, especially when he shared a tidbit about Marilyn Monroe, with whom he claimed to have had an affair during the fifties. In fact, Franklin cowrote the first Monroe biography in 1953, The Marilyn Monroe Story, and he showed me all kinds of evidence demonstrating that the two did indeed have a brief fling.

  I happened to have known Ava Gardner quite well during the latter years of her life in London, where I met her walking her corgis in Hyde Park. It is the only credible celebrity connection of my own that I could summon to the conversation. I brought it up after he told me about his long acquaintance with her ex-husband Frank Sinatra, whom he interviewed a number of times on his show. Ava once showed me a scar that she said had been given to her courtesy of Sinatra, who struck her in a fit of jealousy. She never told me what prompted his rage, but I later read a story about how Ol’ Blue Eyes had allegedly walked in on her in bed with Lana Turner.

  When I brought this up with Franklin, he shared a surprising revelation.

  “Almost everybody in Hollywood is gay,” he said with a straight face. “The rest are half gay.” At the time, I dismissed his words as a joke or an exaggeration. But in a subsequent encounter, I brought up the claim and asked him to elaborate. He was all too willing to dish the dirt and share the names of a host of allegedly closeted celebs. I can’t remember if it was him or me who first brought up Whitney Houston, but he told me he had interviewed her and Cissy many times over the years. By then, it was common knowledge that Whitney was a purported lesbian, so I think the subject came up when I listed the handful of celebrities I had heard were in the closet. Among these was Tom Cruise, who to my surprise Franklin told me wasn’t actually gay, “just strange.” But when the subject of Whitney came up, he immediately said, “That’s an easy one,” and proceeded to tell me why her name always surfaces at the top of the list.

  “Why do you think that practically everybody in America has heard that Whitney likes women?” he asked. “It’s because for years she hardly bothered to hide it. She was living openly with this woman and they’d be all lovey dovey in public even. That was quite unsual for a celebrity back then and even now,” he says. “Then she finally dove into the closet and pretended it never happened but by then it was too late. Everybody knew.” At the time, he compared Whitney to Rosie O’Donnell, who he said was an open lesbian during her early career in New York before she “pretended to be straight for a while.”

  At the time of our conversation, Whitney was only one of the many celebrities whose name Franklin brought up, and the truth was that I was less interested in the stories about her than some of the movie stars he dished about. But partly as a result of these conversations, I ended up changing the direction of my documentary.

  Instead of a film about pilot season, I would eventually end up going undercover as a gay actor trying to make it in Hollywood. Franklin would soon supply me with a number of valuable contacts who would help pave the way for my project. Among these happened to be Whitney’s father, John Houston, whom Franklin had known for almost four decades, including during the period when he had acted as the head of Whitney’s company, Nippy Inc.

  Franklin would, in fact, later play a role when I inadvertently came close to collaborating on a book and/or documentary about Whitney Houston—a project that collapsed before it was finalized when John died of a heart attack in February 2003.

  I was first introduced to John by Joe Franklin when he called Joe, telling him he wanted to get his story out there. Joe told John he had an author/documentary filmmaker in his office and suggested to John that we collaborate. I spoke to John on the phone at length, and he seemed excited about the prospect of capturing his story on film. He told me the stories would make “world headlines” and that we’d both make a lot of money if it was done properly.

  The first time we talked, he had been estranged from his daughter for some time for reasons I never fully fathomed. He was also embroiled in a bizarre lawsuit that saw him suing Whitney for $100 million to compensate him for supposedly helping clear her of a marijuana charge and for negotiating a $100 million record deal. It turns out that he actually had very little to do with the lawsuit, which had been filed through his company, John Houston Entertainment, by a figure who claimed to be John’s business partner. At the time the action was filed, Whitney’s spokesperson claimed that John, in fact, had nothing to do with the lawsuit.

  Indeed, when I spoke with him, he seemed deeply hurt that the two were estranged, but it was clear that he had nothing but love for his daughter. Indeed, after John’s death it was revealed that his $1 million life insurance policy named Whitney as the beneficiary. I’m still a little hazy about the timeline, but I was unaware of most of the details of the lawsuit until after he died.

  He didn’t appear to have an ax to grind against Whitney. Instead, it appeared he wanted to paint a picture of himself as a person who was instrumental in his daughter’s success and felt slighted that he rarely received credit for her career. And yet he talked with nothing but affection for Whitney and even for Cissy. He confessed he had cheated on his wife and that he was the “bad guy,” but our collaboration never got far enough off the ground for me to acquire many of those details.

  In the one and only time I brought up Whitney’s purported lesbianism, he told me, “I don’t ask my daughter what goes on in her bedroom.” He said that he respected Robyn, who had worked with him on the business side of Whitney’s career and was very dedicated, but that they often clashed. He admitted that he lobbied very hard for his daughter to distance herself from her friend on a personal level.

  “There’s a reason this is called show business,” he told me. “That woman was bad for business and I was in charge of the business. Cissy hated her for all kinds of reasons. She was a churchgoer so that had a lot to do with it, but for me it was hurting Whitney’s image and sales that people believed they were together. It doesn’t matter whether they were sleeping together, I can’t tell you to this day, but everybody thought they were so that’s what counted as far as I was concerned.”

  He admitted that there was a lot of “pressure” for Whitney to stop spending time with Robyn. “From all sides, everybody wanted her gone,” he revealed, saying it may have also had to do with Robyn’s overbearing personality.

  At this time, Whitney was still married to Bobby Brown, and it was obvious that John despised his son-in-law, whom he seemed to blame for his daughter’s troubles.

  “She’d have been better off staying with Robyn,” he told me at one point.

  When I asked him if he thought Whitney took up with Bobby because of the pressure, John laughed.

  “You don’t know my daughter,” he said. “Nobody tells her what to
do.”

  Although the project never got off the ground, I had established some good contacts in Whitney’s camp as a result of our brief collaboration, some of which proved useful when I later embarked on a project about Michael Jackson, who often traveled in the same circles. By the time John was in the ground, however, I never expected that I would ever again delve into his daughter’s world.

  * * *

  By the time I changed the focus of my film, I had no intention of discussing Whitney Houston or her sexuality. My distributor had made it clear that for legal reasons, I had to steer clear of outing living celebrities. And yet time and again while shooting this project, I gained insight into the lengths that celebrities must go through to remain in the closet and the devastating emotional toll that comes with living a lie.

  My first immersion into this world came about as the result of a contact supplied by a publicist named Melanie when I embarked on my mission to transform into a closeted gay actor and land a movie role. She arranged for me to attend a session of a weekly poker game in the Hollywood Hills with a group of insiders who call themselves the “Queers of the Round Table,” who were apprised in advance of my mission. I was replacing a well-known former sitcom star—the only actor of the group—who couldn’t be there that week because of a work commitment.

  The first thing I tell them is that I don’t believe the actor I’m replacing, a reputed womanizer, is really gay.

  “Queer as a three-dollar bill,” comes the reply from Lenny, the host, who works as a location scout for TV and movies. “He’s an actor. What do you expect?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” I ask.

  “All actors are gay,” comes the response, echoing what Franklin had told me but which I dismissed at the time as a joke. “Actually, that’s not true, although a lot of people think they are. In reality, it’s probably closer to seventy-five percent.”

  I still find the statistic hard to believe.

  “Well, let me ask you this,” says Karl, a set designer. “What percentage of male hairdressers do you think are gay? And figure skaters, ballet dancers, interior decorators, flight attendants?”

  “Don’t forget librarians,” Lenny adds.

  I think about it and concede that most of the men in those professions are probably gay, likely even more than seventy-five percent. But acting isn’t the same thing, I tell them.

  “Honey, you are naive,” says Christopher, a script editor. “Acting is one of those trades where it just helps to be flamboyant, not to mention sensitive. Gay men are just drawn to it. Tell you what, go to any drama school in this country and talk to the boys. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single straight male. And what’s more, it’s obvious right away. Just about every student is a swishing queen.”

  “Here’s a good rule of thumb,” says Karl. “Take the résumé of just about any movie star and look where they started out. If they took drama in college, the odds are they’re queer. If they started in theater or did a stint on Broadway, especially musical theater, bingo they’re gay. And I’m not talking seventy-five percent, I’m talking ninety-five percent.”

  “Like who?” I ask somewhat skeptically.

  This was the wrong question—or maybe the right one. It’s like a verbal stampede, as all three of them start tossing out famous names, one after another, some of them A-list superstars. I’m not exaggerating when I say they went on for at least fifteen minutes.

  Karl finally puts a stop to it. “You know, this might go faster if we just listed the heterosexual stars.”

  Then they start tossing out those names, and indeed the list is noticeably shorter. “Sylvester Stallone, Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, Hugh Grant, Colin Farrell.” At the next name offered by Christopher, Lenny stops him.

  “No, you can definitely cross him off the list. I know for a fact that he is fucking [well-known Hollywood producer].”

  I suspect they’re abusing my naiveté—or perhaps their list is merely wishful thinking—so I finally interrupt the litany. “First of all, half the people you mentioned are married.” This prompts shrieks of laughter from my new friends.

  “He’s a babe in the woods,” says Karl.

  The three of them then decide to give me a tutorial on the way things work for a gay actor in Hollywood. “Like we said,” Christopher recaps, “drama schools are almost all populated by gays, at least the men. That much is easy to prove because at that point in an actor’s career there’s no reason for him to hide it. In fact, at that stage, it’s almost an advantage to be gay because a straight guy is in the minority. And, by the way, that’s why the sexuality of most stars is common knowledge. At some time they were openly hanging out in gay bars or cruising online, and their ‘secret’ is common knowledge in a large segment of the gay community wherever [their hometown is]. By the time they head back into the closet after hitting it big in Hollywood, it’s too late.”

  He then asks me to list the male Hollywood stars that are out of the closet. I can list them on one hand, with fingers to spare.

  “Now, how is it possible that thousands of drama students—the overwhelming majority, in fact, and most Broadway actors are demonstrably gay, yet virtually every movie star is a raging heterosexual? The answer is, it’s not.”

  Then they start with a history lesson. I expect they will begin with the obvious—Rock Hudson—but instead they use the example of James Dean, the ultimate male Hollywood sex symbol of the fifties who I didn’t even know was gay. “Not only was he gay,” explains Lenny, “but his sexuality, which he supposedly didn’t even bother to hide, was causing shit fits at the studio. They’d had plenty of experience handling gay actors before, but here they had this incredibly bankable star, worth millions, and he was cavorting around town with every fag you could think of, including another one of their biggest stars, Montgomery Clift. They were terrified the news would get out and his box office potential would go down the crapper. So they pretty well forced him to start dating starlets while their publicity department went to work portraying Dean as a great cocksman.”

  “The stakes were huge,” he continues, “and there was enormous pressure from the studio for Dean to get married. Their preference was Natalie Wood, who was perfectly willing to act as Dean’s beard,” but he explains that both Wood and Dean were apparently reluctant to go along with the phony nuptials.

  It’s here that I interject. Do they really think America was so homophobic that people would stop going to his movies just because they thought he was gay?

  “Well, at that time yes, definitely. But that wasn’t the real point with Dean,” Lenny replies. “The fact is that part of his huge box office appeal was that American girls were so in love with him that they would go to his pictures over and over again. Ironically, gay men did the same thing, but that’s just an interesting side fact.”

  Lenny then named a contemporary A-list actor and drew a parallel to Dean. “Look at [one of the top box office stars in the world]. At the beginning of his career, he had a lot of quirky roles and was never really seen as a leading man, so he didn’t really bother trying to hide his gayness very much. But all of a sudden he starred in [hugely popular film] and almost overnight he became a sex symbol superstar. The studio surveys showed that fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls were going to the movie over and over again, some as many as twenty or thirty times. And why? Because they liked to fantasize that they were his leading lady and that he was seducing them. If they knew he was gay in real life, that was all threatened. So, the next thing you know, he’s dating supermodels and going to strip joints, while his publicist makes sure the news is plastered in every newspaper in the world. Funny, you never heard of him having a girlfriend during the first ten years of his career.”

  Christopher explains that it is not necessarily homophobia per se that keeps actors closeted today, but rather this phenomenon of both men and women attending movies to fantasize about bedding the star. “Look what happened to Anne Heche
after she came out as Ellen DeGeneres’s girlfriend. She had already been signed to star opposite Harrison Ford as his love interest in Six Days Seven Nights. When the film came out, it completely tanked. Not because it was terrible, but because men could no longer go to her movies and picture themselves boffing her. And not long after that, look what happened. Heche broke up with Ellen and, surprise, she’s straight again.”

  Lenny interrupts him. “Well, it’s not entirely true that homophobia has nothing to do with it. Look at all the black fags.” He names a black comedian. “He’s not really a sex symbol, he’s a comedian, so technically he could come out, but if he does, he can say good-bye to his black fan base forever. Kaput!”

  At this stage, I point out that the star is married. I can understand why he got married. He needed a beard. But what’s in it for the woman, I ask.

  “Ah, that’s the sixty-four thousand–dollar question,” says Lenny. “We spend a lot of time debating that very point and nobody can agree on the answer. In some cases, we know for sure that the women do it for career reasons. They are basically promised that if they marry a particular actor, they are guaranteed their own acting career will take off and they will be offered juicy roles because their new husband has so much clout with the studios. That much makes sense. What we don’t know is how many of these women are actually lesbians.”

  Lenny explains that while the overwhelming majority of male actors are gay, the same is not necessarily true for females. “Hollywood is not like the women’s golf or tennis tour,” he jokes. “If seven to ten percent of women in regular society are dykes, then that’s probably the percentage in Hollywood as well.

  (Since this encounter, I came across a University of Maryland study that found that the Queers may be better informed about gay men in Hollywood than gay women. Despite its claims that only gay men are represented disproportionately, the study found that lesbians and bisexual women are actually eight times more likely to enter theater and film than their straight counterparts.)