by Ian Halperin
And how did Clay Nation—which long professed they would love Clay whether he was gay or straight—react to the news? A few months later, People reported that his record label was dropping him because his recent album, On My Way Here, sold only 159,000 copies in the U.S. compared to his debut album, which had sold 2.78 million copies. A greatest hits album was released a month later and sold only a paltry three thousand copies in the U.S. in its first week.
And, although Clay went on to carve out a new niche as a Broadway performer and a gay rights activist, he has long been abandoned by his once-huge fan base.
Given his career trajectory, it is difficult to question why Whitney or any other huge star would risk the career-killing decision to come out to their fans. But even though the bigotry of his largely Christian fan base undeniably contributed to Aiken’s fall, homophobia alone might not be the only reason Whitney chose to remain in the closet. After all, she barely tried to disguise her relationship with Robyn during her initial rise to stardom, and her fan base was undeniably more diverse than Aiken’s had been.
But singing wasn’t Whitney’s only ambition. For years, she had harbored ambitions to act on the big screen. As far back as 1989, in fact, she had been lobbying for the role of Deena in Dreamgirls, but that fell through when Whitney’s people demanded she be allowed to sing more songs than had been contemplated for that role. Beyoncé was eventually tapped to play Deena, a performance that earned her a Golden Globe nomination. At one point, when Whitney heard a rumor that Diana Ross wanted to star in the film, she said of the then forty-four-year-old star, “Then they’d have to retitle it Dreamgrannies. How old is she anyways, fifty?”
She would eventually get her chance to be a film star and would make the most of it, being the highlight of her career. But the odds of landing a role as a romantic interest in a Hollywood film would have been undeniably nil, had she chosen to reveal herself as anything but a heterosexual woman that audiences could picture Kevin Costner falling for.
From a career standpoint, she likely made the right decision. On a personal level, it may have been a whole other matter.
And whether she was thinking of her fallen standing in the black community or a new career in Hollywood, Whitney’s life definitely changed forever on the night she was booed at the Soul Train Music Awards on April 13, 1989. That happened to be the night she met a man named Bobby Brown.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The credits had hardly rolled on the Dr. Phil show when the critics started to pile on. Kevin Fallon of The Daily Beast fired the first volley, calling the intervention “despicable and exploitative.”
“It is already clear that this episode of Dr. Phil may be the most despicable thing that has aired on television,” he wrote.
Already on the ground in Atlanta, I barely had time to process the show and gauge whether Gordon’s breakdown was simply playing for the cameras or legitimate evidence of a distraught young man’s sincere grieving for his girlfriend’s life-threatening condition.
I asked my Miami psychiatrist neighbor, Dr. Eva Ritvo, for her thoughts.
“It was difficult to watch the show. It is very uncomfortable to watch someone’s personal health crisis unfold on national TV. Nick had consented to be interviewed but it was immediately apparent that he was in no condition to be speaking rationally to anyone and certainly not to such a large audience. It was clear almost immediately that he was quite impaired. His slurred speech, rapidly shifting emotions, inability to sit still, and his rambling conversational style all indicate acute mental illness.
Nick’s use of alcohol combined with Xanax is clearly threatening his life. He mentioned wanting to die on many occasions to his mother and to viewers. I agree completely with Dr. Phil that inpatient detoxification followed by rehabilitation is the right treatment. I also agree that an involuntary hospitalization would have been warranted if Nick refused to enter treatment on his own.
Dr. Phil was very effective in engaging and using his mother. I liked his calm tone. I felt he was a bit too challenging and perhaps could have shortened his explanations after Nick agreed to enter treatment. Explaining anything to someone intoxicated is a not a good use of time or energy. Once Nick agreed, the right move was to end the conversation and begin the process of getting to treatment as quickly as possible.
Nick has many hurdles to overcome. Mixed substance abuse combined with the ongoing stress of Bobbi Kristina’s illness and the trauma of finding her in the bathtub. It seems he has not successfully grieved the loss of Whitney and is carrying a lot of guilt. He will need extensive therapy to resolve these issues once his brain has recovered from the effects of the drugs and alcohol. Long-term treatment will be key if he is to successfully recover. Family support is essential alongside the medical and psychological treatments. It seems there is a strong religious faith in the family that can also help in his recovery.
It appeared to me that Dr. Ritvo had been swayed just as effectively as the other lay viewers who came away sympathizing with Gordon rather than vilifying him. None appeared to pick up on his frequent admission that he feels “guilty” for what happened to her. Was I the only one who wondered whether this could be significant, rather than simply taking it at face value that his guilt concerned his inability to save her? It was obviously a smart move for his handlers to let him on the show, but it brought us no closer to the truth about what had happened that morning.
At the same time, some observers believed they had actually discovered damning evidence of Nick’s guilt in the broadcast.
Michelle Gordon’s revelation that Bobbi and Nick had argued after returning from a night of partying was an important clue, believes a website called Celebrity Dirty Laundry.
“It seems rather odd that Nick’s mom would be spewing out such intimate details on national television,” observed the entertainment blog. “Whether she means to or not, Michelle Gordon is making her son look extremely guilty. When you consider the fact that Bobbi Kristina had bruises and a bloodied mouth when she was discovered, it certainly sounds like their verbal spat led to physical violence.”
Such was the nature of the quality and tone of the reporting on this case by mid-March. I was hoping my own investigation could add a loftier analysis and maybe even some salient facts to counter the increasingly absurd speculation and innuendo in this case, akin to that which had made the initial O. J. Simpson media frenzy worthy of a Pulitzer by comparison.
When I arrived in Atlanta at the beginning of March, my first goal was to get to the bottom of an enduring mystery that has all but gotten lost in the ongoing saga.
Was Nick Gordon actually married to Bobbi Kristina?
On July 10, 2013, Bobbi had posted on her Facebook page, “Yes, me and Nick are engaged.” A year earlier, they had also announced an engagement on their short-lived reality show but then apparently later called it off, on the grounds that her family “disapproved.” On January 9, 2014, Bobbi then tweeted,
“@nickgordon! #HappilyMarried.SO #Inlove. If you didn’t get it the first time that is.”
She posted a photo of her hand resting on his with their weddings bands on display. When Max Lomas called 911 on January 31 to report that Bobbi had been discovered in the bathtub, he reported that her “husband” was performing CPR.
For weeks, the media referred to Nick as Bobbi’s husband. If that was the case, I wondered, how could he be barred from the hospital? Under Georgia law, the spouse has a number of rights that would trump even the victim’s parent. Yet Bobby Brown has been by his daughter’s bedside for weeks, while Nick has been completely shut out.
But visitation isn’t the only issue impacted by whether the two are married. I expect that if Bobbi fails to pull through, there will be a ferocious legal battle over her estate as the sole beneficiary of Whitney Houston’s estimated $20 million fortune.
The fate of that money, in fact, may come down to whether Nick and Bobbi ever tied the knot, especially since common-law marriages have not been rec
ognized by the state of Georgia since 1997. Nick, therefore, will have to produce a piece of paper to establish any bona fide claim.
A quick trip to the Fulton County Probate Court failed to produce any record of a marriage between Nicholas Gordon and Bobbi Kristina Brown. Neither did a search of the State Office of Vital Records. It’s possible, of course, the two jetted over to Vegas for a quickie wedding—maybe even presided over by an Elvis impersonator—but all indications are that the two are not husband and wife.
That still leaves a potentially complex battle over who’s entitled to Whitney’s fortune and one that I intend to delve into later, but it looks like that fight will involve Bobby Brown and Whitney’s family, while Nick will be forced to watch from the sidelines.
Although my first investigation hardly required rocket science, I quickly realized that I would need someone who is familiar with Atlanta and could help get me answers in a hurry. I had already been in contact with a number of private investigators, most of whom sounded like they came out of a Dashiell Hammett novel or had read too much Philip Marlowe. They all promised to get to the bottom of the case fast for a rather hefty fee. But I had an unsettled feeling about all of them. I sensed this wasn’t a case that called for a heavy hand or intimidation of key witnesses. This was a case where I needed to locate friends and friends of friends of the key players. And I needed to locate them right away.
That’s when I was referred to a woman named Sheila McPhilamy of the Complete Investigations agency, who I was told specializes in searching for exactly that. Her credentials are definitely impressive, having collaborated on cases with the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The moment I heard her Southern accent and concise no-nonsense analysis of what needed to be done, I knew I had found my woman.
Of course, I wasn’t used to having other people do my sleuthing. I had established something of a reputation for undercover investigations over the years that saw me assuming the identity of a male model, a gay actor, a junkie, a male prostitute, a mental patient, and an array of other identities in my journalistic endeavors. It turned out that Sheila was happy to cooperate with helping me transform into yet another undercover persona—private investigator. I would accompany her as her “assistant” as we cruised Atlanta looking to establish what happened on the morning of January 31, 2015, that left Bobbi Kristina in a coma.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It’s difficult to remember, given subsequent events, but Bobby Brown—more often known in later years as Mr. Whitney Houston—was once a force to be reckoned with in the music industry and had made a name for himself as an artist and a commercial powerhouse before the world had ever heard of Whitney.
Bobby was a genuine man of the streets. He was born in the hardscrabble Orchard Park projects in Boston’s working-class Roxbury neighborhood, where prostitutes, gang members, and drug dealers circulated in the dense, low-rise housing development that was built as part of the failed well-intentioned housing experiments that came to destroy the fabric of many American inner cities. The area was known as “Beirut” because of the frequent murders and violence that had plagued the projects for years.
His parents—a substitute teacher and a construction worker—did their best to shelter their eight kids from the social turmoil around them. Music became the glue that kept them together.
His father, who looked a little like Chuck Berry, would pull out his guitar and lay down some Berry riffs or classic soul while the kids gathered around the living room.
At age four his mother took him to see James Brown at Boston’s Sugar Shack. During intermission, she plopped him onstage and he started entertaining the crowd with his James Brown impressions. They ate it up, and Bobby knew this was what he wanted to do.
“He was never shy,” his brother and manager, Tommy, later recalled. “Not Bobby.”
Whenever his parents had guests over, he’d put on the costume he’d constructed for his new persona, “Flash B,” and entertain any chance he got. When he was eleven, his friend Jimbo Flint was killed by gang violence, which left him itching to escape the projects and never return.
“That was the turning point in my life,” he later recalled. “That’s when I realized that running the streets can’t last forever. You don’t always have good luck.”
When he was twelve, he had his own near miss, when he was shot in his right knee.
“I had been at a party dancing with some guy’s girlfriend,” he later recalled in his memoir, “when all of a sudden she said, ‘You better run! That’s my boyfriend.’ I was like, ‘It’s too late.’ ”
Brown had discovered a knack for choreography when he was only seven years old, orchestrating complicated break-dancing moves to the music that permeated the projects night and day.
When he was nine, he put together his first group, Bobby and the Angels. Three years later he put together the group with his friends Michael Bivins and Ricky Bell—along with Travis Pettus and Corey Rackley a little while later—that would help launch him to stardom. Soon, they added another kid from the projects, Ralph Tresvant, and called themselves the Intruders.
Bobby started as the lead singer but soon ceded the microphone to Ralph, whose tenor voice was reminiscent of a young Michael Jackson, and instead focused on the dancing and choreography that he would soon be famous for.
In 1982, the four boys performed at a show at Boston’s Strand Theatre, Hollywood Talent Night, put on by producer Maurice Starr, for a prize of $500 and a record contract. Although the boys failed to win, Starr was so impressed that he offered them a deal on his independent label, Streetwise Records. Soon after, they added a fifth member, and New Edition was born—so named by Starr because he believed they were like a new version of the Jackson Five.
Before long, he brought them into the studio to record an album comprised of material they had written—including a Bobby Brown composition, “Jealous Girl,” and a song written by Starr, “Candy Girl,” which would be released as a single and top both the American R&B charts and the UK singles chart. It would also be the name of their first album.
As they hit the road on a nationwide tour, the quintet and their music soon established them in a new niche that would transform the industry during the eighties—the era of the boy band. The boys were on top of the world at the excitement of touring and dreams of stardom. But when they returned to Orchard Park, they were stunned to receive a check for $1.87 as compensation for their efforts.
Starr explained the vagaries of the business and the expenses of touring, but the streetwise teenage musicians weren’t buying it. They believed they were being ripped off and hired lawyers to get out of their contract with Starr in 1984.
But having perfected the boy band formula with New Edition, he wasted no time assembling another group of boys that he would transform into a phenomenon known as New Kids on the Block.
Bobby was only fifteen when New Edition signed to MCA Records to record their second album, New Edition, which would go on to sell two million records and vault the boys to stardom.
Despite their success, not all was rosy within the group, which had no natural leader. As the lead singer, Ralph got much of the attention but the other members fought hard for their share of the limelight. None more so than Bobby, whose dance moves had gained him a steady following, especially among the older women who came out to the shows to join the young girls whose piercing screams could be heard throughout the performances.
“While Ralph had the teenyboppers, I had their mothers,” Bobby recalled.
Bobby’s penchant for partying and his growing ego were causing considerable animosity among his bandmates. Bickering and backstage arguments caused significant tension. Bobby would claim the others resented that he would constantly question management about their meager paychecks—$120 a week on the road—while they played in sold-out venues.
“It was almost like we were whores getting pimped,” Bobby recalled in his memoir. “Coming off the road, the tour bus would drop u
s back in the projects and we were back to our reality—poor, struggling project kids. I had a serious problem with this, but the other guys didn’t see it.”
Meanwhile, MCA—recognizing a maturity in his voice and style that belied his age and the boy band sound—had quietly offered Bobby his own deal, estimated at $250,000, to record a solo album.
Between tours with New Edition, he was already laying down tracks for the new album. On the road, he was increasingly belligerent toward the other members, to the point where he threw a microphone that struck Bivins one night, then stormed off to his dressing room and changed into a robe. Returning to the stage, he delivered a number that he claimed blew the roof off and had the crowd on their feet.
“Bobby was a purist,” MCA executive Ernie Singleton later recalled. “There was a tremendous amount of friction between Bobby and the rest of the guys.”
In late 1985, his showboating antics had finally become too much for the other members, who took a vote and decided to throw Bobby out of the band. He claims he didn’t actually learn of their decision until two years later, when he saw a piece on VH1. He claims he believed he had already left the band on his own to embark on a new career now that his solo album was finished and on the verge of release. By the time he left, he later claimed, “All I got out of New Edition was $500 and a VCR.”
Regardless, his first solo album, King of Stage—released in 1986—went gold, and its single, “Girlfriend,” hit number one on the R&B charts. It was considered something of a success. Still, many observers wondered if he had made a mistake leaving the group that had launched him from a life on the streets. Few predicted what would come next.
When Don’t Be Cruel was released in June 1988, it exploded onto the charts almost immediately with a riveting style that almost overnight became the best-known example of the new jack swing sound, combining soul and hip-hop—pioneered by producers such as Babyface and Jimmy Jam—that would transform R&B during the late eighties.