Whitney & Bobbi Kristina

by Ian Halperin

  The album, which was lauded by most reviewers, spent six weeks at the top of the Billboard charts and ended up as the best-selling album of 1989. It produced five top-ten singles, including the number one hit, “My Prerogative,” which would become Bobby’s signature song. It ended up selling more than eight million copies and turned him into a superstar. The choreography and dance moves that he had perfected during the New Edition days soon became an important part of his stage persona, and his live shows became a phenomenon.

  Newsday called him “the most electrifying performer of his day.” The LA Times called the album “a trailblazing collection that mixed traditional R&B with hip-hop energy: a brash, exciting, young urban sound.” Michael Jackson, with whom Bobby was frequently compared, was so blown away that he hired the production team to work on his upcoming Dangerous album.

  With the money from his MCA advance, he had finally moved his mother out of the projects—a feat he claims was one of his proudest accomplishments.

  With the success of the album came the first reports of a hard-partying lifestyle that started to earn him the nickname the “Bad Boy” of R&B.

  In concert, his performances became known for their racy content. At a 1989 performance in Columbus, Georgia, Bobby was arrested for violation of the municipal “lewd” act—prohibiting acts of “simulated sexual intercourse”—when he brought a female fan onstage to dance with him. It was the same offense a young Elvis the Pelvis was charged with decades earlier when he gyrated his hips a little too suggestively in Georgia.

  Bobby later claimed he was dancing five feet away from the eighteen-year-old girl.

  “I didn’t even touch her,” he protested.

  But the officer who hauled him away during the break accused him of “hunching.”

  Calling it a “brush with ignorance,” Bobby explained, “I’m a crowd-pleaser. I invite a fan onstage at all my shows. I just did a couple of pumps with my hips. There’s nothing wrong or nasty about it. It’s just a dance.” He was released after posting $652 for bail. Such reports helped to fuel the subsequent Bad Boy image, and although Bobby later claimed the term itself was never used until later, he never really disowned it.

  “The term to me doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to rip your head off or do something illegal,” he would tell his biographer, Derrick Handspike, about the moniker that would follow him for much of his career. “It does set the tone not to look at me as a pushover. I’m definitely going to stand my ground. I’ve always been a fighter in that sense. I’m a fighter by nature because I was raised in the projects where you had to fight for your life. . . . That doesn’t mean that I go out looking for trouble or looking to be the aggressor. At the same time, I’m no punk. If trouble comes my way, I deal with it.”

  There were also reports of heavy drug use—one of the factors that had allegedly prompted the members of New Edition to vote him out of the band. He claims they were influenced by management who told them he was dealing and using drugs—an allegation he has denied. But in the biography on which he collaborated with Derrick Handspike, he acknowledges that he was often in a state of intoxication, though he would later claim he mostly smoked pot.

  “There were nights when I’d get high out of my mind, and ghosts in the form of naked white women would come down from the ceiling and have sex with me,” he recalled.

  By most accounts, he liked to have sex—a lot of it, and although that hardly makes him unique in the music world, it was unusual to see a teenage boy being described as a “womanizer.” At one point, he became known as the “Black Tom Jones,” because frenzied female fans took to throwing their underwear onstage when he performed, a phenomenon that began in the New Edition days.

  “There were little girls chasing us around,” he later recalled. “Little panties onstage. Some of the girls were fast and it broke a lot of us down.”

  When he was seventeen, he had his first child, a son named Landon, with his teenage girlfriend Melika Williams. Like Whitney, there were also reports of bisexuality over the years, and a musician once told me that Bobby liked men, but I’ve never found any solid evidence to support that—and not for lack of trying, after I wondered whether his relationship with Whitney was merely one of convenience for both parties. Bobby, however, was unequivocal about his preferences.

  “I think women are God’s gift to this earth,” he told Vanity Fair. “I love women.”

  With the success of Don’t Be Cruel came a lot of money, and Bobby’s penchant for spending it was legendary. He claims he would often spend $100,000 partying or a million on a “shopping spree.” If he made $250,000 during a show, he noted, $50,000 would be set aside for expenses and the balance would be his “spending money.” There were luxury cars and expensive gadgets and at least one practical purchase—a $2 million mansion in North Atlanta that he acquired from a man known as the “Porn King.” The house came with an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis courts, and a theater. He also bought a studio that he named “Bosstown.”

  But on the night Brown met Whitney in April 1989, all that was still ahead of him. He was still on top of the music world that night, having been nominated for three awards for his monster album of the year before. The twenty-year-old was also a featured performer, singing his best-known song, “My Prerogative.” Whitney would later recall watching from the audience.

  “He was kicking Don’t Be Cruel—he was hot, he was on fire,” she told Rolling Stone. “I and some friends of mine were sitting behind him. I was hugging them, we were laughing, and I kept hitting Bobby in the back of the head. Robyn said, ‘Whitney, you keep hittin’ Bobby, he’s goin’ to be mad at you.” I leaned over and said, ‘Bobby, I’m so sorry.’ And he turned around and looked at me like ‘Yeah, well just don’t let it happen again.’ And I was like ‘Oooooh, this guy doesn’t like me.’ ” Her friend the singer Cherrelle later claimed that Whitney told her the moment she saw him that night, “That is going to be my husband.”

  She claimed that she had always been curious when somebody didn’t like her, so she decided to invite him to a party. When he accepted the invitation, she was surprised.

  “He was the first male I met in the business that I could talk to and be real with,” she recalled. “He was so down and so cool, I was like ‘I like him.’ ”

  Four months later, she saw Bobby again at a gospel show featuring her close friends BeBe and CeCe Winans. After the show, she went out to dinner with Bobby and the Winans.

  “At the end of the dinner,” she recalled, “Bobby walked up to me and said, ‘If I asked you to go out with me, would you?’ At the time I was dating someone, but it was kind of ehhhh. So I said, ‘Yeah, I would.’ And he said, ‘You really would?’—he’s so cool—‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow at eight.’ ”

  While they were simply friends for a time after that, she claims that Bobby persisted in his romantic intentions.

  For his part, Bobby claimed it was love at first sight. “All of a sudden, I felt someone poking me in the back of my head,” he recalled in his memoir. “Startled, I turned around like, ‘Who in fuck? What the fuck?’ It was Whitney Houston. She said, ‘Excuse me, was I hitting you?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you were hitting me, but it’s ok as long as it was you.’ At that moment, I thought, ‘She’s flirting with me.’ I knew it was my chance to move in, so I went for the jugular. I said to her, ‘If I asked you to go on a date, would you say yes?’ She was like, ‘Yea!’ ”

  He claims that not long afterward they went shopping together on Rodeo Drive and had a great time. She was nothing like her “prim and proper conservative” TV persona, he recalled. Instead, he found her “down-to-earth.”

  Before long, he claims, they were dating. They’d meet between shows when one of them was on tour. They jetted off on “romantic vacations” on islands around the world or on private yachts.

  And while many wondered what they had in common, he claims that he knows the secret. “I’ve always been known to be a pretty good love
r,” he tells Handspike. “The word on the street is that I’m well-endowed.”

  Over the years there have been many contradictory stories about when in fact their relationship turned romantic, including slightly differing accounts by both Bobby and Whitney. What is most striking is that he ended up purchasing his Atlanta mansion in 1990, more than a year after he first met Whitney.

  This soon became known as Atlanta’s version of the Playboy mansion, with parties held night and day featuring celebrities and VIPs cavorting with bikini models, though Bobby would later claim he stayed in the mansion only because he was afraid to go out, terrified that people would ask him when the next album would be released.

  Partly because of the shenanigans during these parties, Bobby became known around town as quite the womanizer, and it was during this period—when he was supposedly dating Whitney—that he had two more children with a woman named Kim Ward. In 1990, his first daughter, LaPrincia was born. Another son, Bobby, came along in 1992. It is just one of the many anomalies in the story of their fairy-tale romance that would cause even the most mainstream media to express genuine surprise when the two eventually announced their engagement.

  Meanwhile, Whitney’s career was at something of a crossroads. In 1990, she finally headed back into the studio to record her third album, I’m Your Baby Tonight. It featured many of the same writers and producers as her first two efforts, along with some of the personnel, including Babyface and L.A. Reid, who had helped craft Bobby’s album into a masterpiece. Perhaps stung by the criticism that she had been sounding “too white,” Whitney seemed intent on adding a little bit more edge and more of a distinctive R&B sound than on Whitney.

  The results appeared to pay off when the first reviews came in. Rolling Stone said the album displayed a “slick R&B edge.” The Baltimore Sun wasn’t impressed by the material but took note of Whitney’s “sultry moans, note-bending asides and window-rattling shouts.”

  But aside from increased R&B credibility this time around, sales were abysmal, especially by the standards of her first two efforts. Despite the fact that the world had been waiting in eager anticipation for her next effort for more than three years, the album debuted at a disappointing twenty-two on the Billboard charts. It would eventually rise as high as number three—although it did hit number one on the R&B charts—and spent ten weeks in the top ten, but considering her previous monster success, it was considered something of a failure, at least in the United States. Steady international sales helped make up for its slow pace, but it was clear that Whitney had lost some of her luster.

  The poor sales reignited media speculation of a backlash against the suddenly waning superstar. And while many believed the rumors about her sexuality were a contributing factor, Whitney chose to inexplicably blame Arista for failing to properly promote the album.

  “I know a lot of folks who would like to sell as many records as Baby Tonight sold,” she told TV Guide somewhat defensively. “What disappointed me was that my record company did not do what they should have done to make [the record] more of a success. They bungled.”

  Still, despite the slow start, she had been asked to perform “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl in January shortly after the album’s release—providing a massive platform and worldwide exposure.

  By the time the big game came on January 27, events had conspired in her favor thanks to Saddam Hussein. Ten days earlier, the United States had launched Operation Desert Storm to repel Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. What better opportunity to capitalize on Americans’ wartime fervor than delivering the most patriotic song of all. Whitney took full advantage of the opportunity. When NFL officials first heard the jazzy version she intended to sing, they were beside themselves and demanded a more mainstream rendering. They argued that her version was “too flamboyant for wartime.”

  Whitney’s father told the league in no uncertain terms that his daughter would sing the song the way she wanted, causing considerable consternation among the conservative suits that ran the league.

  They had no reason to worry. Wearing a white tracksuit, she stepped out on the field that afternoon in Tampa and delivered a stirring rendition surrounded by American flags scattered all over the field and various military personnel in uniform whom the cameras frequently focused on as she sang. It had the crowd in a frenzy and the TV audience of 115 million choked up.

  “Every so often, a singer comes along and reclaims ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ ” gushed Entertainment Weekly. “Now, with her stirring Super Bowl rendition, it’s Whitney Houston’s turn.”

  Within hours of the performance, the Arista phone lines were flooded with callers requesting a copy of her rendition. The company scrambled to rush out a single, which sold 750,000 copies in a week, the company’s fastest-selling single of all time. Later, Clive Davis admitted they had intended all along to capitalize on the wartime patriotism and had planned the release in advance of the day, anticipating the reaction. All proceeds were donated to the American Red Cross Gulf Crisis Fund. Whitney was hot again, though she and Arista were forced on the defensive a month later when NFL official Bob Best revealed that the single had actually been taped in a recording studio the week before the game took place. Cissy would later claim the recording was necessary because a fighter-jet flyover above the stadium was planned and they needed to time the flyover to coincide with a particular point in the song. It turned out that Whitney had in fact sung into a dead microphone while the pretaped version was played, although her publicist unconvincingly told the media that Whitney had no knowledge of the plan and believed she was singing into a live mike. “This isn’t lip-synch gate,” she said.

  Whitney’s former bodyguard Kevin Ammons later reported another controversy around the time of her Super Bowl appearance. He claims there was an altercation between Whitney and Robyn at an event that started when MC Hammer flirted with her backstage.

  After Hammer departed, Ammons claims, Robyn grabbed Whitney’s arm and started screaming, “Don’t ever disrespect me like that.” Whitney jerked her arm away and told her assistant to “go to hell.” Watching Robyn slap Whitney, Cissy allegedly yelled, “Don’t you ever put your hands on my daughter,” then started punching her and kicking her, yelling, “I’ll kill you, you stupid bitch!”

  * * *

  Whitney had not given up her ambitions to appear on the big screen and had let her management team know that this was one of her top priorities as the new decade got under way. The stories about how she came to appear in The Bodyguard have nearly as many versions as the origin of her romance with Bobby Brown.

  One story has it that Kevin Costner had first approached Whitney about appearing in his film as far back as 1989 but that she was initially reluctant.

  It’s the version she would tell Entertainment Weekly in 1993.

  “I kept saying to him, ‘What makes you think I can do this?’ And he used to say to me—she launches into a playful imitation of Costner’s flat Southern California drone—‘Whitney, listen. Every once in a blue moon you get this person who just comes around and has this quaaality. When you thought about a movie that had music in it, you used to think about Barbra or Diana. But now it’s you.’ And I’m like, “That’s what I want. I want it to be meeee!’ ”

  To another interviewer, she claimed that Costner began wooing her for the part in early 1990, and when her agent confirmed she was up for the part, she was flabbergasted. “My God,” she would tell her biographer Jeffery Bowman. “Can you imagine this! Kevin Costner calls me up out of the clear blue sky and asks me to be in a movie with him. Who would believe this?”

  The idea for the film itself was making the rounds in Hollywood as far back as the seventies, when it was first envisioned as a starring vehicle for Diana Ross and Steve McQueen. But it reportedly fell through at the time when McQueen was unhappy that he would be overshadowed by Ross. A few years later, the idea was resurrected but with Ryan O’Neal as the lead male character and Ross as his love inter
est.

  The writer, Lawrence Kasdan, had shopped his screenplay around Hollywood for a decade with no success before he finally interested Costner, who saw himself in the lead role as a white bodyguard who fell for his black protectee.

  Meanwhile, poor record sales for Whitney’s third album weren’t the only signs of a career lull. Whitney had kicked off her 1991 tour with a concert to capitalize on the patriotic frenzy sparked by the Gulf War. It was originally scheduled as an HBO special, with Whitney singing for the troops on Easter Sunday. But by the time of the scheduled concert, the war was over and instead it was billed as a “Welcome Home, Heroes” concert, with Whitney performing in a Virginia naval hangar to welcome home military personnel returning from Iraq.

  In August 1991, the New York Times reported that she was playing to less than capacity crowds on her US tour. And, although the recession may have played a part in the poor sales, critics had noted that her performances left a lot to be desired.

  “Onstage, Ms. Houston was actually shallow and bland with no trace of emotional depth,” wrote the reviewer for the Dallas News about the Texas leg of the tour.

  Apart from the rumors of her sexuality, to this point Whitney had always been portrayed as the good girl. It was all the more surprising, then, when headlines screamed in April 1991 that she had been arrested and charged with assault and threatening to kill a man in a Lexington Kentucky hotel lounge.

  She and Robyn were still inseparable, sharing a room on the tour. On the night in question, Robyn, Whitney, and her brother Michael—surrounded by bodyguards—arrived at the Radisson hotel lounge around midnight to watch the Evander Holyfield bout with George Foreman following an evening watching horse racing at The Red Mile racetrack.

  While they settled in, a group of drunken men started making loud racist and “sexual” comments, allegedly because bodyguards had stopped them when they approached Whitney for an autograph earlier. Finally, the three decided to leave the bar and watch the fight in their rooms on the seventeenth floor.