by Ian Halperin
And, although this altercation stayed out of the press, it was an incident in the fall of 1994 that would prompt the first open questions about Whitney’s erratic behavior. In October, South African president Nelson Mandela was to be honored by President Clinton with a state dinner at the White House. Whitney, who was a lifelong opponent of apartheid, had been invited to perform for Mandela, whom she had described as one of her heroes. But as the dignitaries arrived to honor the ANC leader, there was no sign of Whitney. When nobody could reach her, protocol officials were scrambling to find a replacement, when Whitney finally appeared with Bobby a full two hours late.
“I just got off tour,” she explained. In fact, she had finished her most recent engagement at Radio City Music Hall four days earlier.
The diva-like behavior was starting to attract attention. A month earlier, in Las Vegas, she had dismissed fans’ anger at yet another lengthy delay by haughtily observing, “Stuff happens.”
At a concert in Anaheim at the height of the OJ trial, Whitney interrupted her performance to request a spotlight be turned onto Simpson’s two children who were in the audience. The following day, a newspaper critic described the request as “weird” and “mortifying.”
Her bodyguards kept fans at arm’s length and she frequently refused to sign autographs, though it seemed she had delighted in interacting with fans early in her career, at a time when she was often praised as refreshing and down-to-earth for her humble attitude. Now she was said to throw tantrums if she didn’t get what she wanted.
“Everyone was afraid to say no to her,” a member of her entourage would later tell People about this period. “For stars like Whitney, when it comes to getting their way, it’s almost like arrested development. They never emotionally mature past the age where they become famous. They’re like children, ranting and raving until they get what they want. It’s like, ‘I want my coke, and if you say no, you can find yourself another job.’ ”
Meanwhile, Bobby’s career had noticeably stalled. His follow-up to Don’t Be Cruel, the 1992 release Bobby, was a let down after the monster success of his groundbreaking album. Rolling Stone was not impressed by the effort, noting that the new album “lacks the one ingredient that made ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ so exciting: daring. Put bluntly, ‘Bobby’ hews so closely to the sound and structure of (the previous album) that you half expect there to be a II in the title.”
The LA Times called sales “sluggish” after the album debuted at number two but quickly dipped to number five and kept falling. Now, with his new superstar wife outselling him and hogging the spotlight, it appeared Bobby wasn’t handling the comedown very gracefully.
In December, People took note of Bobby’s conspicuous absence when Whitney was honored in New York for her achievements in music and film.
“In her speech accepting her award,” the magazine reported, “Houston didn’t mention his name once. Instead, addressing little Bobbi Kristina, who was sitting wide-eyed in the front row, the superstar said, as she choked back tears, ‘You are my reason to be.’ ”
Four months later, while Whitney was in Singapore, touring, Bobby was involved in the most serious incident yet of an increasingly troubling pattern. He and two bodyguards were arrested at a Disney World nightclub after Bobby got into an altercation with a tourist who interrupted him when he was flirting with a female patron.
Bobby and his handlers reportedly started to punch and kick the thirty-seven-year-old man as he lay on the floor. One of the trio also smashed him over the head with a bottle. The victim was rushed to the hospital, where he needed six surgical staples to close a gash in his head and eight stitches to reattach his ear.
According to police, they placed Bobby in the back of a squad car where he proceeded to bang his head repeatedly against the window.
Describing the incident, an Orlando police spokesman reported, “When the deputy came back a couple of minutes later, Bobby Brown had peed on the seat, on the floor, and all over the cage, which separates the good guys from bad guys. He’d also taken a pen and written on the seat: ‘Fuck.’ ”
The three men were charged with aggravated battery and disorderly conduct and eventually released on a $5,000 bond.
Suddenly, instead of describing Bobby as the “Bad Boy,” the media frequently made references to his bad behavior.
In August 1993, he was once again arrested for assault after he kicked a security guard who responded to a noise complaint at a West Hollywood hotel room where Bobby was hosting a private party.
Rumors had already been circulating of trouble in the couple’s year-old marriage after Bobby was frequently seen partying at nightclubs without his wife. But Whitney denied any problems and insisted her marriage was strong.
“Marriage is a beautiful institution,” she told Ebony.
People don’t know Bobby because there hasn’t been much on Bobby except that Bobby is this sexy man who does all this bumping and grinding. But Bobby is a family man. Bobby loves his mother, loves his family. He goes out when he wants to hear music, when he wants to know what’s happening. He comes home. I know where my husband is; I know what my husband does. There are certain things that I don’t go for, and Bobby knows that. And there’s stuff that he doesn’t go for. That’s why we can be together, because we both have the same standards.
To Essence magazine she again denied that her marriage was simply designed to burnish her public image. “This ain’t about publicity,” she said.
I wouldn’t do it if it were about publicity. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with somebody I thought was just gonna give me publicity. I’ve got enough of that on my own. And so does he. You don’t have a baby based on that madness. People don’t live like that. Especially Black people who were raised in families with morals and standards and integrity. But the press isn’t gonna sell a paper if they’re saying ‘Well, Whitney and Bobby are doing great!’
Finally, in September, the couple was forced to acknowledge their domestic troubles when they issued a press release announcing that they were separating because of “marital difficulties.” Three months later, Whitney acknowledged the separation in an interview with the Chicago Tribune but insisted, “I am still married.”
During this period, Bobby’s street-thug image was bolstered when his sister’s fiancé—his occasional bodyguard—was shot and killed in a hail of bullets after driving away from a Roxbury bar with Bobby in a $295,0000 Bentley registered to Whitney. As he watched the man be gunned down, Bobby was reported to have shouted, “They shot my boy!”
When a twenty-two-year-old Boston woman named Lacresha Robinson saw news reports of the shooting, she immediately contacted authorities to have Bobby hauled in for a paternity suit he had been avoiding for months because his lawyers said he was in Atlanta and unavailable. Robinson claimed she had an affair with the singer shortly before he married Whitney in 1992—and that he was the father of her daughter, Zipporah.
Shortly afterward, Bobby quietly checked into the Betty Ford clinic to treat “alcohol abuse.” The stint in rehab appeared to be a precondition for Whitney to take him back because soon after he checked out in December, they were once again together, much to the chagrin of her fans and the media, who appeared to blame Bobby for Whitney’s own increasingly diva-like and erratic behavior.
The cover of the December 18 edition of People, in fact, posed the question many were asking, “So why is she back with bad boy Bobby Brown?” That same week, Whitney poured out her growing frustration at the increasing media scrutiny of her private life.
“We all have our problems and troubles,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “All I want to do is to be able to work them out in private. They say he cheats on me. I haven’t caught him yet. If I had, I’d break his fucking neck. I got projects coming up for kids that are incredible, for child abuse and things of that nature, and all these people want to write about is who we’re fucking and who we ain’t fucking and all this other bullshit and I’m tired of it
. I know who he comes home to.”
She was especially upset when she discovered that People had once again alluded to her relationship with Robyn. EW describes her as nearly in tears as she peruses the article: “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I am not a lesbian, I wish they’d stop saying it. I have a daughter, for God’s sake. What do they mean by this? They write this shit and one day I’m gonna have to talk to my daughter. Please, I’m so pissed off right now. Excuse me.”
By 1995, it was common for Whitney to bring up the subject of Bobbi, now almost three years old, whenever the media brought up information that she perceived was damaging to her heavily crafted public image.
In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, she explained that she had a “hands off” rule when it came to the press.
“I find that I am now more defensive because I’m very very protective of her and I will fight you and I will tear your house down brick by brick about her.” In the same interview, she once again raised the old canard about Eddie Murphy after the interviewer asked her to describe her worst date. She recalled an incident where she had cooked dinner for Murphy and he never showed up.
If her personal life was something of a mess during this period, her professional career was still strong. With the success of The Bodyguard, Whitney was now a hot commodity in Hollywood.
As the scripts poured in, the one that jumped out at Whitney was an adaptation of the 1992 best-selling novel Waiting to Exhale, about four black women looking for love in Phoenix, Arizona. Although she could likely have had her pick of roles after the box office success of her first film, she was attracted to the character of Savannah Jackson, a successful television producer who falls for a married man. Joining a stellar all-black cast that included Oscar-nominated actress Angela Bassett, she reported for filming in the spring of 1995. Forest Whitaker had signed on to direct.
Like her previous effort, the film received decidedly mixed reviews but once again Whitney proved to be box office gold, with the film debuting at number one when it was released in December 1995. And critics noted that her acting had noticeably improved since her big-screen debut three years earlier. Still, this film wouldn’t come close to the success of the blockbuster that had made her a movie star.
Back home in Mendham Township, Whitney was a familiar figure to the townspeople who had watched her arrival in their sleepy community with trepidation but were pleasantly surprised by her attitude, never experiencing the diva-like behavior that would be described in later years.
“The experience we all had was very positive,” her next-door neighbor Claire Kaplan recalled. “There were lots of workmen renovating her house for close to a year after she moved in. To thank us for putting up with that, she sent us all red roses.”
The townspeople often saw her on walks or out and about in town. According to Bobby Spiropolous, the owner of her favorite diner, she liked to order Greek salads with grilled chicken. At the Black Horse Tavern and Pub, where she would come with Bobbi, she would order the pot pie. The manager, Michael Horty, said Whitney “had a beautiful air about herself” and recalled that “One time she was humming a tune and I had to stop by and say, ‘Oh, that sounds so beautiful.’ The same song was playing on the Muzak system.” But her favorite local eatery, as she later told a radio interviewer, was the China Gourmet.
Former police chief Steven Crawford said he once stopped her for a moving violation.
“She jumped out of the car,” he recalled. “Obviously, I recognized her from music videos. She was very down-to-earth and genuine, especially considering her stature with regard to fame.”
He was surprised by her short stature and the fact that she had no chauffeur.
“For a woman who had number one hits, she was, first, driving herself around,” he said. “Second, she was extremely personable and a pleasure to deal with.”
He let it slide.
According to local councilman Rich Krieg, Bobbi attended the local Montessori school when she was little. “Bobby and Whitney were very clear that they wanted their daughter to be mainstreamed and not singled out,” he recalled. “Their daughter showed up the next day in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce.”
She was also a generous contributor to local causes, according to the local county freeholder Jim O’Brien, whose daughter Deirdre was murdered by a serial killer—inspiring the creation of Deirdre’s House, for children who are victims of abuse or neglect.
“We were running low on money and didn’t have enough to establish a medical room where doctors would give treatment to victims,” recalled O’Brien. “Word got around and we got a call from Houston, who said she’d like to donate $60,000 for the room.”
Denzel Washington had for more than a year been been talking to Whitney’s people about his planned remake of the 1947 Cary Grant film The Bishop’s Wife, about an angel who comes to the aid of a bishop. The remake would take the original premise and involve the clergyman of a struggling Baptist church in the inner cities of New York at Christmas. The role of Julia had been written with Whitney in mind to play the preacher’s neglected wife. A former nightclub singer, the character is the mainstay of the church choir, providing an opportunity for some rousing musical numbers. The role would give Whitney a chance to return to her gospel roots. Penny Marshall had signed on to direct but Whitney was slow to commit. Only when the producers came back with an offer she couldn’t refuse—$10 million—did she finally sign on. Less than two weeks after Waiting to Exhale premiered in December, she reported to her new set.
But no sooner had filming wrapped up on her latest movie in the spring than Bobby got himself into trouble again. Only four months after he checked out of Betty Ford, he was pulled over with an unidentified woman at three in the morning after an officer saw him speeding and swerving in his Mercedes. So intoxicated that he couldn’t recite the alphabet as a sobriety test, he refused to take a Breathalyzer and was hauled into the station where he was booked and released on $1,260 bail.
In August, he was arrested once again in Hollywood, Florida, when he lost control of a Porsche registered to Whitney and crashed it into a condominium complex. His blood alcohol level was almost three times the state’s legal limit, but his urine test also tested positive for cocaine and marijuana—the first confirmation that the singer’s problems went beyond alcohol. He suffered four broken ribs in the accident.
So far, none of Bobby’s public scrapes had involved his wife. Although each incident had received more than its share of publicity, they tended to feed the existing public perception of musicians as wild and immature. And because Bobby was already perceived as the Bad Boy, they served more than anything to give Whitney some added street cred with segments of the public that may have found her a little too saccharine in the past.
That all changed in June 1997, when reports emerged that Bobby slapped Whitney in a Honolulu parking lot. Whitney had performed at the city’s Aloha Stadium the night before and the couple had arrived to do some Sunday morning shopping at the Kahala Mall.
Witnesses said they saw Whitney exit her limo, followed by Bobby in an agitated state. Holding a beer in one hand, he used the other to slap her across the face.
“It looked like somebody—probably her—was trying to get out of the limousine and she was either pulled back or yanked back,” one witness told USA Today. “There was a lot more noise and perhaps 10 minutes later they left.”
When security guards came out to investigate the altercation, the couple said they had it “under control.” Whitney’s publicist later insisted it had been a case of “mistaken identity.”
It was the first public report of domestic violence during their tumultuous marriage but it wouldn’t be the last. It also helped fuel rumors that had been swirling since the spring that the couple had become habitual drug users. The first whispers began after Whitney failed to show up to the televised Essence Awards ceremony at Madison Square Garden in April, where she was scheduled to receive the Triumphant Spirit Award at a star-studde
d gala that also included the Living Legend Award for Muhammad Ali. But when Whitney’s name was called out, she was nowhere to be found and Cissy had to accept the award on her daughter’s behalf. “They said she was in Florida but they couldn’t find her,” a production source later revealed to People. “It was terribly weird and devastating.”
In July, the couple was vacationing in the Mediterranean on a 120-foot yacht with her brother Michael and his wife, when Whitney was brought to Capri’s Capilupi Hospital with a two-inch gash on her left cheek. Police were called in when the hospital reported that there were conflicting accounts of how she received her wound. Whitney told doctors she was injured when she hit a rock while swimming. But a member of the yacht’s crew reported that she got the cut aboard the yacht.
Before police had a chance to investigate further, Whitney and her party departed the island by helicopter.
Needless to say, the tabloids had a field day. Forced on the defensive, Whitney would repeatedly deny that Bobby ever hit her.
“Contrary to belief, I do the hitting; he doesn’t,” she told Redbook. “He has never put his hands on me. He is not a woman-beater. We are crazy for one another. I mean crazy in love, love, love, love, love. When we’re fighting, it’s like that’s love for us. We’re fighting for our love.”
The Preacher’s Wife was released in December 1996, and although it wasn’t a blockbuster at the box office like her previous two efforts, it garnered generally positive reviews, including a number of critics who, for the first time, singled out Whitney’s acting as well as her singing. “Whitney Houston is rather angelic herself, displaying a divine talent for being virtuous and flirtatious at the same time,” the San Francisco Chronicle praised. Her thespian efforts, in fact, would garner her her first and only acting trophy when she won the NAACP’s Image Award for Best Actress. The soundtrack, though hardly comparable in sales to The Bodyguard, would become the highest-selling gospel soundtrack of all time. Sadly, the positive publicity around the film and its accompanying album would be the last glory for an artist who was about to begin a tragic descent.