Whitney & Bobbi Kristina

by Ian Halperin

  “They’ve partied with a lot of the young, pretty things you see in here tonight,” he said. He told me he last spoke to Max in early February.

  “When I spoke to Max a couple days after the accident he seemed very worried. He said he was told not to say a word to anybody. I never heard his voice sound so weak. He was nervous, and he sounded like he was at the end himself. I told him I was worried about him, he said he’d be okay. The thing that struck me most is when he said it wasn’t him who committed a crime. He used the word crime; that concerned me. He said it wasn’t him but he insinuated it was someone else.”

  The friend asked me if I wanted to do a couple of lines with him. He seemed put off by my refusal.

  “Atlanta is Hollywood South, man. Loosen up, brother. Tonight’s a new night.”

  He told me he was going to go into a back room with one of the strippers and have “a few shots and do a couple lines.” When he hadn’t returned a half hour later, I left.

  So far, the only thing we know for sure about the incident is that shopkeepers in the Ellard mall and a nearby bank were asked by the police about a person or persons who had possibly been in the house the morning that Bobbi was found but may have left before authorities arrived. During Sharon Churcher’s interview with Danyela Bradley’s mother, Marlene, she suggested the fifth person was a man named Duane Tyrone Hall.

  Duane was the man who we know was in the car with Nick on February 2, two days after Bobbi was found, when police stopped them for a lane violation and found marijuana residue in the center console.

  I discover that Duane also happens to be the man who appears in one of the two Instagram photos posted by Bobbi on January 31. The photo shows a young man with his arm around her as she displays a fierce expression for the camera.

  The caption reads:

  YAYYYY :) finally my famBAM!!!

  and links to the page of an “Edwin DeMarco.”

  I can’t make any sense of the cryptic caption nor why Hall goes under the name Edwin DeMarco, so we decided to track him down, hoping to get some answers.

  When we arrived at the address listed on the police report of the traffic incident, his father, Delroy, answered. When we told him why we were there, he said his son wasn’t at home, that he was “at school.” Eyeing Sheila’s badge, he appeared concerned and refused to answer any questions. “You have to talk to my son about that,” he insisted. Nervously, he asked us what the police had told us.

  When we returned to the car across the street, we waited for a few minutes. Suddenly the garage door opened and a white car sped out. Sheila snapped a photo as it pulled away. We didn’t get a good glance at the driver, but Sheila thought it might be Duane’s sister. We phoned the next day, asking to speak to Duane. When Delroy answered, he angrily demanded to know why we followed his son, who he said was driving the white car. When we asked him why he lied to us, he hung up.

  More than one person told us we needed to talk to Mason Whitaker. A number of hangers-on described themselves as Bobbi’s BFF or best friend after the incident. Danyela Bradley, for example, had tweeted in February:

  “I don’t care about anything else, I just want my best friend back.”

  But we had been told that Danyela was actually just a “groupie” or “hanger-on” who knew Bobbi through her boyfriend, Max, but wasn’t very close to Bobbi. Her actual best friend was a man named Mason Whitaker, a twenty-four-year-old lacrosse coach and security guard who is almost certainly the person the jewelry store manager was referring to when she recalled that Nick and Bobbi were with a “young blond kid” that they referred to as her “bodyguard” when they brought their ring in to be repaired.

  On his Facebook page, Whitaker describes Nick as a “family member.” It was he who was with Nick in the BMW sedan that struck a curb while changing lanes and hit a fire hydrant, ending up upside down.

  After the accident, police had charged Nick with a DUI and driving with a suspended license. Both men were unhurt. But seven months earlier, Whitaker posted on Facebook about another incident involving Nick: “All I can say is thank you to the best man alive, Nick Gordon, for saving my life after I wrecked my car. Love you bro!”

  In another post, he describes Nick’s involvement after a friend expressed concern for his welfare:

  “Yeah I made it home, some nice guy pulled my car out of the ditch and towed it up the street then my brother Nick Gordon saved me, and I was only stranded for like 13 hours by myself.”

  Over the last year, Whitaker tweeted a number of selfies taken with Bobbi in various poses. One is captioned “Best sister and best friend.” In another, he refers to her as “little sis.”

  It is clear they are close. One photo of the two friends in particular stands out: a selfie with Bobbi in which Whitaker is holding a huge hunting knife. He also frequently posts photos of shotguns and hunting rifles. Bobbi and Nick appear to have shared his passion for guns.

  In a photo Bobbi posted last year, Nick is aiming a shotgun in a room filled with animal head trophies and gun racks. She captioned it: “We are gun collectors. We live in the south. We have the right to bare [sic] arms.”

  In February, at the height of Nick’s Twitter feud with Bobby Brown, Whitaker tweeted:

  “I personally know if it wasn’t for @nickgordon Krissi wouldn’t even have seen her Dad in the past 5 years. Show the same respect Bobby!”

  One person told us, “If anybody knows what happened to Bobbi, Mason knows. He knows where all the bodies are buried, so to speak.” Needless to say, we were anxious to talk to him.

  But we ran into the same roadblocks as we had with other key figures. His mother and grandmother abruptly hung up on us. When we finally located a former neighbor who knows him, he told us, “I think he’s laying low.”

  It is clear that Bobbi and Nick’s friends were circling the wagons. So far, my trip to Atlanta had been a waste of time. Although it had been fun posing as a private detective, I realized that I should probably keep my day job.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Although Robyn continued as Whitney’s assistant for some time after the marriage, she would spend noticeably less time with her old friend. Eventually, her official title changed from executive assistant to creative director at Nippy Inc., Whitney’s management company, where she would eventually found Whitney’s record label, Better Place Records—a venture that would occupy much of her time.

  Although the media focus had largely shifted from rumors about a lesbian relationship to stories about Bobby’s bad-boy reputation, the subject of Robyn would still occasionally surface, and Whitney was noticeably less patient when doubts continued to persist about her sexuality despite marrying Bobby.

  “Once someone gets to be a success, there are a number of things that are going to be said about you automatically,” she complained to Entertainment Weekly in 1993.

  One is that you’re gay. One is that you’ve got a drug problem [a rumor that has circulated about Brown and that he has denied]. The other one is that you have no idea what the hell you’re doing. At one point it hurt me to have to dignify what I wasn’t with an answer. It used to fuck me up, to be honest with you. I used to go to my mother and say, ‘Why, why, why is this happening? I can’t be friends with women?’ The [media has] to have some sort of tag on you, especially if you’re private. That’s the only thing I can come up with. You got any other theories?

  Cissy, who happened to be present during the interview, offered her own theory. “It’s because Whitney doesn’t wear clothes up to her behind with her tits out, excuse my French. Either you’re the biggest whore or you’re a lesbian.”

  Observing what she described as the “intensity” of the relationship between Whitney and Robyn, Vanity Fair’s Lynn Hirschberg had opined in a profile that “it’s difficult to imagine anything—even Houston’s marriage—coming between them.” But it was soon clear that something had.

  According to Kevin Ammons, Robyn was not as accepting of the marriage as she had
professed to be. Nor was John Houston pleased that Whitney’s old friend had been reassigned to work under him at the New Jersey management office, especially since she was allegedly still threatening to go public about her relationship with Whitney. Ammons also said Robyn purported to have secret information about a drug deal involving Bobby Brown.

  Ammons, still working as one of the singer’s bodyguards, claims that around this time, John offered him a large sum of money to contain this threat.

  “We’ve got to do something about that motherfucking bitch,” he claims John Houston told him. “She’s ruining my family and driving everybody nuts. She’s lost her grip on reality. I’ll pay you $6,000 if you put the fear of God in her.”

  Ammons claims that he refused the offer but that subsequently John warned the bodyguards to “keep an eye” on Robyn.

  For a newly married couple who professed their love for each other at every turn, Whitney and Bobby spent remarkably little time together during the initial stages of their marriage.

  Following her daughter’s birth, Whitney had professed no hurry to return to professional pursuits. Asked what her immediate plans were, she was adamant that her new domestic life came first.

  “Really, it has nothing to do with business whatsoever,” she told Rolling Stone. “It’s my family. To raise children, to raise decent human beings. To keep my husband happy. To keep him strong. Things of that nature. They are very simple things. There’s nothing I want to do individually at the moment that I can think of. I’m a mother, and that’s my concern for the most part right now. . . . Right now that little girl is my focus, and that’s it.”

  She even hinted not long after Bobbi Kristina was born that they were already thinking of adding another to the brood.

  “Bobby and I were talking the other day,” she told a reporter. “He cracks me up. He goes: ‘You think you’re so fine now’—because I dropped the weight—‘but you know what? Bam, I’m gonna pop you again.’ I said: ‘What! You got to be kidding, I just dropped a baby!’ He said, ‘Nah, we’re gonna have some more kids, honey.’ We were joking about it—we were talking about having more children.”

  In reality, she and Arista were already making plans to capitalize on the monster success of The Bodyguard soundtrack, which was still tearing up the charts. Less than four months after giving birth, she embarked on what would be known as the “Bodyguard World Tour,” which spanned almost two years. Meanwhile, Bobby was on a yearlong tour of his own.

  For Whitney, however, being a new mother and a megastar were not incompatible in the least. Bobbi would simply come on the road with her while nannies and friends cared for the baby during concerts and rehearsals. Still, there is no question that she doted on the little girl. Asked shortly into the tour whether she wanted more children, she was all too eager to share her joy at being a mother.

  “Oh, yeah. Definitely,” she told a reporter. “Having Bobbi Kristina . . . I could never do anything that could top that. There’s been nothing more incredible in my life than having her. God knows, I have been in front of millions and millions of people, and that has been incredible, to feel that give-take thing. But, man, when I gave birth to her and when they put her in my arms, I thought: ‘This has got to be it. This is the ultimate.’ I haven’t experienced anything greater.”

  Cissy recalls how there was a constant entourage looking after the baby on tour.

  “Oh, how we loved that baby girl,” she wrote in her memoir. “Everybody, from Nippy’s friends to family to people who worked for her, just couldn’t get enough of that child. She was so pretty, and such a sweet baby, laughing and smiling all the time, that people always wanted to see her and hold her.”

  Occasionally when their schedules permitted, Bobby would join Whitney on the road, or vice versa. But it wasn’t long before stories began to circulate about his erratic behavior on tour, which included reports of excessive drinking, drugs, and womanizing.

  Pamela Howell, a journalist for an Atlanta magazine, revealed that when she tried to interview Bobby after a local music awards show, the encounter was disturbing. “He started hugging and kissing me,” she reported. “He had me in a headlock at one point. He never answered one of my questions. He just wanted to grope me. He acted like a thug.”

  MCA Records executive Ernie Singleton was forced to deny rumors of drug use. “I have heard stuff like this over the years on numerous occasions, but I can tell you, I have never had an experience with Bobby that painted a drug picture to me and I think I am pretty streetwise. You don’t have to be around me when you do it. I can tell when you are whacked. I’ve also confronted Bobby . . . and he said no.”

  Bobby’s longtime friend Jamie Foster Brown, publisher of Sister 2 Sister magazine, later revealed that “There were bets being made at the wedding as to how long this would last.” Now the media were wondering the same thing aloud.

  People took particular note of a habit that Whitney had developed whenever Bobby infrequently joined her on tour, where she would bring him onstage and leap into his arms while wrapping her legs around his waist and shouting, “I’m a woman in love and the man I’m in love with is very much in love with me.”

  The reporter described this over-the-top display of affection as “weird” and noticed that Bobby didn’t seem too pleased to be used as a prop.

  “Bobby having served his purpose, would then walk off silently, and sullenly, into the wings,” the magazine reported.

  Meanwhile, the tabloids had lately changed their focus from alleged lesbian trysts to stories about Bobby’s behavior. “Whitney catches hubby with sexy beauty in hotel room,” blared one headline. Scores of others hinted at marital discord.

  “I know that [the media] are trying to make my husband out to be this man who has no respect for his wife and family, who has no respect for his marriage, who has no respect for much of anything—but they’re very wrong,” she insisted in Ebony.

  For his part, Bobby assured reporters the relationship was sound and that the new baby was helping them bond as a couple.

  “Bobbi Kris is the cement that holds our relationship together,” he told one reporter. “When we’re going through changes, when we’re arguing or whatever, all it takes is for Bobbi Kristina to go waaaahhhhhhhh. And we crack up.”

  Whitney repeatedly talked of her domestic bliss, painting Bobby as a “protective and respectful” husband who is “very very romantic,” often sending her flowers and cards just to say he missed her.

  “I love him more than I thought I could ever love anyone in my life,” she told a reporter after downplaying any rumors of conflict.

  Still, many had noticed a change in her demeanor. Known as the “once-perfect Prom Queen of Soul,” as one profile described her, Whitney was for the first time in her career being called a “diva” with regularity and many wondered if it was her marriage that had changed her.

  The first signs of trouble emerged almost immediately as she kicked off a national tour at Miami’s Knight Center in July 1993. First, fans were locked out of the concert hall until ten minutes before the show was scheduled to begin, forcing thousands to wilt in the blistering heat. Once inside, they had to endure a seventy-minute delay due to technical issues. Then, after two warm-up acts, there was another forty-five-minute delay before Whitney finally took the stage with no apology.

  When a fan approached the stage after the opening medley with an autograph pad, security quickly whisked her away as Whitney hissed, “I do believe your ticket says seat.” That prompted the first of a smattering of boos throughout the evening from the unimpressed crowd.

  In his review the next day, Miami Herald writer Leonard Pitts complained that “Houston took the stage with an attitude that smelled like rotting fish.” The Orlando Sun-Sentinel pop critic was even harsher, addressing an open letter to Whitney about her demeanor:

  Whitney, your attitude is indicative of the perennial blame-passing and so much of what else is wrong with the entertainment business. Now that y
ou’re a movie star and your pop career is back on track, you’ve never been more famous. From a person of your stature, fans have a right to expect a little class. I can only wonder how many of them will be silly enough to line up for albums and tickets next time. I wouldn’t.

  It was an inauspicious start to the tour and just an omen of things to come. In June, the New York Post reported that Whitney had overdosed on diet pills, the first time her name was ever publicly associated with drugs. When she threatened to sue, the paper retracted the story, but Barbara Walters would twice reference the purported overdose in an interview later that year, and Whitney remained silent.

  Still, as awards season dawned, it was clear that Whitney was back on top. The success of The Bodyguard and her marriage to Bobby had clearly reestablished her credibility in the black community: She won the award for Outstanding Female Artist at the NAACP Image Awards and Best R&B/Soul song at the Soul Train Music Awards for “I Will Always Love You.” At the American Music Awards she swept all eight categories for which she was nominated and then took three more awards home at the most prestigious music event of the year, the Grammys.

  It was an incident that took place while she was in Los Angeles for the Grammys, in fact, which appeared to indicate that Robyn had not made her peace with Whitney’s marriage after all.

  Shortly after midnight, security guards were summoned to Whitney’s room about an altercation at the Peninsula Hotel where Robyn was staying along with Whitney, Bobby, and the entourage.

  According to Jeffery Bowman, one of the security guards reported:

  When we arrived at the hotel room, Robyn Crawford answered the door. She had a scratch on her hand and red marks on her arms and neck. Although she played down any incident that may have happened, something was clearly wrong. We asked Ms. Houston if she would like us to stay until the police—who had also been summoned—arrived. But she said she could handle the situation from here. We noticed by his behavior that Mr. Brown had apparently been drinking. It seemed that Brown, Houston, and Crawford had all been involved in some sort of physical altercation.