by Ian Halperin
Three of the men followed them to their floor and insisted on an autograph. When Michael confronted them, one of the men punched him in the jaw, starting a brawl. One of the men reportedly called Whitney a “stuck-up nigger bitch,” prompting Michael to jump him.
As the man pinned Michael on the floor, Whitney allegedly jumped on his back and punched him in the jaw. One of the hotel guests who emerged from his room to watch the melee claims that Whitney shouted, “You’re going to die, you son of a bitch.” Eventually, police arrived and broke up the brawl.
Ammon claims he heard Whitney telling her publicist, “I kicked ass, baby. I wasn’t about to let those hillbilly motherfuckers hurt my brother.”
Days later, Whitney was charged with assault and “terroristic threatening.” The charges were eventually dropped, but the men filed a civil lawsuit against Whitney, prompting her to file a countersuit for defamation. She claimed they had demanded $425,000 to keep the story out of the press.
When the story hit the press, Whitney’s camp was forced to acknowledge that she had indeed been involved in a fistfight, setting off a predictable tabloid frenzy.
Whitney’s father, who was running his daughter’s management company at the time, issued a statement praising the dignity and professionalism displayed by his son Michael during the incident.
“I am equally proud of my daughter, Whitney, who would not let any career concerns prevent her from protecting her brother,” John Houston told Jet. “By exposing herself to potential physical harm, she risked career-threatening injuries.”
The tour resumed, but ticket sales remained dismal. Eventually, Whitney canceled the tour altogether, claiming she had damaged her vocal cords, but some observers were skeptical, given the ticket sales. A number of acts had fared poorly that year, but not nearly as badly as Whitney, given her status as a superstar at the peak of her career. By year’s end, it was revealed she had performed in the bottom ten of touring acts and had contributed to the $4 million in losses music promoters suffered that year.
Although publicity around the Kentucky melee revealed once again that Robyn and Whitney were still as close as ever, it would prove to mark the last year that the two women were inseparable.
By the time of the hotel incident, when it was revealed they shared a room on the road, they were still evidently making little effort to hide the nature of their relationship even as Whitney continued to publicly deny they were anything more than friends.
Observing them together backstage at an event, Vanity Fair’s Lynn Hirschberg would observe, “It’s easy to see why conclusions were drawn: Houston and Crawford have been best friends for 15 years and are virtually inseparable. Crawford counsels her on all aspects of her career—from what dress to wear at a photo shoot to how loud the vocal should sound on a particular track from The Bodyguard. They watch each other constantly. ‘Doesn’t Robyn look thin?’ Houston will ask as she sees Crawford’s reflection in the makeup mirror.”
But the prominent British gay rights and environmental activist Peter Tatchell based his own assessment on more than just their close working relationship. He remembers when Robyn accompanied Whitney to a 1991 HIV benefit, the Reach Out and Touch rally, in London’s Hyde Park.
“When I met them, it was obvious they were madly in love,” he later recalled after Whitney’s death.
“Their intimacy and affection was so sweet and romantic. They held hands in the back of the car like teenage sweethearts. Clearly more than just friends, they were a gorgeous couple and so happy together. To see their love was infectious and uplifting,” recalled the former Labour Party parliamentary candidate.
His description echoes that of Frank Giles, a prominent member of the Miami hospitality industry, who recalls serving Whitney on two occasions when he was a waiter at LA’s famed restaurant Chasen’s, in the early nineties.
“She came in with another woman,” Giles told me in March 2015. “They were in a good mood, smiling and showing lots of energy. When I brought their order, I was taken by surprise when I found them kissing. They were jamming on those kisses. I pretended as if I didn’t notice when I put their food down on the table. I’m sure they knew I saw them but it seemed as if they didn’t care. I had no idea who the woman with Whitney was. She was a pretty black woman.”
Many others have described to me similar encounters with Whitney and Robyn during the eighties and early nineties but chose not to talk on the record.
However, in late 1991, two significant milestones were about to change the nature of their relationship, at least in how they presented it to the public.
Although Whitney had allegedly been dating Bobby for months, perhaps more than a year, and they were supposedly gallivanting around the world on “romantic vacations,” they somehow managed to keep it a secret from the media. Paparazzi dogged Whitney whenever she appeared in public but the tabloids were still peddling the fiction about her liaisons with another celebrity.
“Whitney Houston Pregnant with Eddie Murphy’s baby,” blared the headline of one breathless exclusive. “Whitney Houston and Eddie Murphy are getting married this spring. And if that isn’t enough to quell the rumors of Houston’s sexual preference for women, Murphy is tying the knot with her because she’s pregnant with his child.”
A friend of Whitney’s later told her biographer Jeffery Bowman that she and her PR staff deliberately planted these stories to deflect the other rumors.
However, it wouldn’t be long before the media had some genuine news to report about her personal life.
“The first time he asked me to marry him,” Whitney later recalled, “I said, ‘Forget about it, no way. It’s just not in my plans.’ After a year or so, I fell in love with Bobby. And when he asked to marry me the second time, I said yes.”
To this day, nobody except Bobby himself really knows what’s true about the timeline of their relationship, but by the time Whitney finalized negotiations to appear in Costner’s film, the first reports started to leak that she was dating the legendary bad boy.
Film production began in Miami in February 1992, and it wasn’t long before the publicity machine went into overdrive. For Arista and those handling Whitney’s business affairs, the upcoming film was a chance to both reignite her flagging music career and reinvent her as a movie star.
First up, her people and Costner’s production company entered into a deal to star Whitney in her first network TV special, an hour-long extravaganza on ABC featuring behind-the-scenes interviews with the stars of the upcoming film as well as live performances from her last album. And just when it looked like a fluff piece designed merely to hype a film, Whitney dropped a bombshell.
“I know what it’s like to be in love these days,” she tells the camera, displaying her ring finger. “This is my engagement ring to Bobby Brown. Bobby and I got engaged I think it was in August of last year.”
After a shot of her talking on the phone to her new fiancé, she turns to the camera. “Are we going to have children? Yes, definitely.”
The news of the engagement certainly took the world by surprise. But the most surprising aspect was how even the mainstream media questioned the optics of the engagement, especially given its proximity to Whitney’s movie debut in a romantic role.
The respected LA Times—a newspaper hardly given to tabloid gossip—immediately took note of the disbelief that greeted the couple’s engagement. The paper remarked that some observers were calling the union
Too good to be true, literally. Cynics suggested everything from a publicity ploy to a lifestyle convenience. For Brown, the marriage would soften the rebellious image that has grown out of the longstanding drug rumors and the admission that he has fathered three children out of wedlock. For Houston, 29, it would help combat tabloid stories questioning her lifestyle and asking whether the pin-up queen prefers the companionship of women to men.
The open skepticism, even from the mainstream press, was revealing. It brought to mind a conversation that I had had
years ago with a reporter who worked for the Hollywood trade papers. She told me that the entertainment media know for the most part who is gay and who is not but choose not to report on it because of an “unwritten code” and the knowledge that they would “lose access” if they revealed the names. She also took issue with Joe Franklin’s assertion that most actors are gay. She told me that the true figure is “closer to half.”
I wondered if somehow Whitney had broken this code by so openly flaunting her relationship with Robyn for so long. The only parallels I can think of are two other female stars, Jodie Foster and Lily Tomlin. Both lived openly with women for years and never bothered to hide their sexuality in public, but for many years neither formally came out. As with Whitney, the mainstream media frequently alluded to their sexuality as if they believed the stars had given tacit permission by failing to close the closet door behind their open relationships the way the vast majority of closeted celebrities very deliberately choose to do. And while Foster is still often coy about her sexuality, Tomlin was candid when she finally decided to open up almost a decade ago about her four-decade relationship with screenwriter Jane Wagner. In 2006, she explained her slow coming out to a Washington weekly:
I certainly never called a press conference or anything like that. [Back in the seventies] people didn’t write about it. Even if they knew, they would [refer to Jane as] “Lily’s collaborator,” things like that. Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In ’77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn’t write about your relationship. . . . In ’75 I was making the Modern Scream album, and Jane and I were in the studio. My publicist called me and said, “Time will give you the cover if you’ll come out.” I was more offended than anything that they thought we’d make a deal. But that was ’75—it would have been a hard thing to do at that time.
Two years later, Tomlin told Just Out magazine, “Everybody in the industry was certainly aware of my sexuality and of Jane . . . in interviews I always reference Jane and talk about Jane, but they don’t always write about it.”
As filming got under way on The Bodyguard, Whitney had suddenly announced to her family that she was pregnant. None of them even had an inkling that she was dating Bobby Brown. But in March, only a month into shooting, she had a miscarriage that she later said left her “desolate.”
Bobby revealed that he had asked Whitney to marry him in the back of a car a few months earlier.
“She came to pick me up at the airport,” he later recalled. “I asked her, ‘Do you wanna marry me?’ And she went crazy—‘Yes, yes, yes!’ She told the car to pull over.”
When she was thirteen, Whitney later recalled, she was not like the other girls who dreamed of marrying their Prince Charming one day. On the contrary, she had vowed to avoid that scenario.
“I just knew that whatever I wanted to do with my life, marriage wasn’t going to be a part of that for a long time,” she said.
Now that the news was out about the engagement, a date was set for July 1992. Whitney’s parents were said to be unhappy about whom she had chosen to marry. Cissy in particular was scandalized that Bobby had three children out of wedlock, though she confessed that she found Bobby “charming.”
Although Robyn was about to be officially supplanted as the most important person in Whitney’s life, her public statements revealed no resentment.
“Whitney is precious,” she told USA Today in May. “I think once she’s married she’ll feel a lot more complete. I think that’ll be a self phase where she’ll be doing something for her life, not just for her public image.”
But behind the scenes, Robyn was said to be apoplectic at the thought of the marriage, even though she had already agreed to act as Whitney’s maid of honor at the ceremony. Things came to a head one day a few weeks before the planned nuptials when Bobby sent Whitney four hundred roses. When Robyn next saw him, according to Whitney’s former bodyguard Kevin Ammons, she allegedly got into a violent confrontation with him.
Again, reports of the feud reached the mainstream press, putting Whitney on the defensive. “I read that Bobby and Robyn got into this fight in front of a hotel,” she told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “First of all, if that were true, Robyn would have been knocked out, but my husband is a gentleman who would never fight a woman.”
She told the reporter that Robyn was her best friend and knew her better than any other woman.
“But by the time I met Bobby,” she explained, “Robyn and I had had enough time together and our relationship had changed from friendship to more of an employer-employee arrangement.”
She revealed that Robyn no longer lived with her “but in her own place, which is about 30 minutes from me.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The logical first stop when I embarked on a quest for the truth with my PI was a trip to the Roswell town house where Bobbi Kristina was found on January 31. It is here that the first wave of media had descended after the incident. Within days, however, almost everybody had packed up and left when they hit a brick wall in getting past the imposing security gate that protects the upscale residents from the riffraff. It is something you see all over Atlanta’s suburbs even though the city is actually remarkably safe and ranks only thirty-first in the nation for violent crime. In fact, Atlanta’s crime rate is lower than Salt Lake City’s, best known for its Mormons and Donny and Marie. But unlike Salt Lake City and Tacoma, Washington—which also boasts a higher crime rate—a majority of Atlanta’s population is African American.
There is a whiff of racism in seeing how the affluent residents of this city choose to protect themselves from the supposed menace of black crime. What’s even more interesting is that many of the people who live in these gated communities are black themselves.
Whitney Houston, then, wasn’t an anomaly when she chose to live here, although her celebrity status arguably warranted more protection than your average wealthy Atlantan.
When I meet Sheila for the first time and take in her petite frame, it’s hard to believe she is a private investigator until I spot the exposed handgun tucked in her holster. She explained that she doesn’t take any chances, especially after a mother and daughter PI team were killed during an investigation. Sheila told me she was once held at gunpoint.
As we pull up to the security gate at the Ellard Village complex, Sheila flashes a badge and identifies herself to the security guard as a private investigator looking into the circumstances of the Bobbi Kristina case. “You’re going to have to get clearance from the Roswell police, ma’am,” the guard informs her politely. We were expecting as much.
A U-turn brings us almost immediately into a strip mall adjacent to the property. But this isn’t like any strip mall I’ve visited before. Instead, the stores are tucked into an elegant brick façade of shops and cafés.
This is where the police headed first when they began their own investigation into Bobbi’s near drowning. In early February, E! reported that Roswell detectives were investigating reports that another person or persons had been present on the morning that Bobbi was found but had fled the scene, allegedly over the wall behind her house, before police and paramedics showed up.
Each of the storeowners in this mall as well as at a nearby bank were asked to turn over footage from their surveillance cameras, but so far, the police were staying mum on their findings.
Our first stop is the Quest Women’s Spa and Fitness Center, an upscale facility in the center of the mall. A woman named Mojgan Shamar greets us and identifies herself as the VP of Operations. She tells us that Bobbi occasionally came in to do “beginner yoga” and once came in for a pedicure.
“There was a woman who used to look after her like a mommy, Deb
bie Brooks. She brought her here twice. [Brooks] comes in here frequently for yoga so she was trying to help Krissi when she was going through stuff,” she recalled. “The last time I saw her was a few months ago walking around the parking lot with Nick. She looked like she was on drugs; she looked very thin, very weak. They both looked out of it.”
“How did they interact with each other?” I asked. That’s when she reveals something neither of us were expecting from a routine question.
“To tell you the truth,” she says, “I was working part-time in Kay Jewelers last year during the holidays and they came and they bought the ring. He purchased the ring for her, the engagement ring. It was a Princess cut from the collection; I forget what it’s called. They spent something like eight thousand. He came back another time and he bought her a charm with an open heart with a diamond. They seemed very happy like they were pretty much in love. I saw them always together and there didn’t seem to be any tension,” she said. “I didn’t see anything strange. But things happen. It’s very sad; she’s so young. And now she’s going through the same thing her mom had. I hope she gets a second chance.”
She gives us the location of the jewelry store. As we’re about to leave, her husband tells us that he witnessed the aftermath of an accident when Nick flipped his SUV nearby the previous summer and was arrested for DUI.
“I got there when the car was upside down. One of the ladies who does yoga here knows them well and said it wasn’t the first time and that Nick had several car mishaps. This particular car flip occurred at the corner of Barnwell and Holcomb Bridge Road. Nick was known to drive at very high speeds recklessly in the neighborhood.”
Next, we made our way to the nearby Starbucks, where we were determined to find acquaintances of the couple. On our way in, we quickly found a patron of the spa complex named Jessie, who said she took yoga with Bobbi.