Whitney & Bobbi Kristina

by Ian Halperin

  One of her last tweets of the day followed an increasingly common theme for Bobbi, who was very much concerned with pursuing her longtime dream of stardom, so far with not much success:

  “Let’s start this career up && moving OUT to YOU ALLLL quick shall we!?”

  Although the third anniversary of her mother’s death was still two weeks away, it was clearly on her mind three days earlier when she directed a tweet to the generic hashtag #Anniversary:

  “Littlelady&your growing young man @Nickgordon miss you mommy..:’) SO much . . . loving you more every sec.”

  Her last tweet of the day—also her last tweet before the incident two days later—was posted to the hashtag #Can’tbelieveit. It was a retweet of a fan’s observation that Bobbi would be turning twenty-two in little more than a month:

  “I can’t wait for the music and much more.”

  But what did her cryptic tweet earlier in the day—“On My Own”—signify? Had she split up with Nick?

  The answer is hazy, but I obtained a copy of a 911 call made by a security guard on January 23, a week earlier, that may contain some clues:

  Identifying the exact address—9046 Riverbend Manor, where Bobbi lived with Nick—he identified himself as “Rick” from Ellard Security:

  “I’ve got a domestic dispute. I just had a neighbor call and report that there are people hitting each other, swinging, outside of their town house in Ellard Village.” The 911 dispatcher then advises the guard to tell the neighbors to phone 911.

  So far, during my travels in Atlanta, virtually everybody whom I’ve talked to who knew Bobbi and/or Nick told me they believed Bobbi likely attempted suicide or overdosed because she was distraught at the impending anniversary of her mother’s death. The eerily similar circumstances—found unconscious in a bathtub—only bolstered the theory.

  Now here were some clues, from the days leading up to the incident that indicated Bobbi was ruminating about the anniversary and that she may have broken up with her fiancé only two days earlier.

  Still, this was circumstantial at best and left a number of important unanswered questions.

  When I met up with a DJ who knew the couple from the club circuit, I asked him to describe their relationship. Did he think that a breakup could cause Bobbi to attempt suicide?

  “Nick is bad news, bad news brother,” he said. “He’s heavy into drinking, heavy into drugs. I know Nick for a few years. That brother got worse by the day. All that money Krissi came into went to buy drugs. They thought they were higher than life. So sad what happened to Krissi. I assure you it was Nick who took her down a dark path. He controlled her. He put her in very bad, very dangerous circles. And now look where they are—she’s in a hospital fighting for her life and he’s in some rehab center. So sad, but anyone who knew them knew that they were heading for trouble. I used to hang out in Atlanta’s meanest clubs with Nick. But the last couple years he ditched all his friends to be with Krissi. He didn’t remember where he came from, who his friends were when he was a nobody. All that money and celebrity shit got to his head, Nick has a huge ego; he’s very insecure especially when it comes to Krissi. He wants her all to himself. He usually doesn’t let her walk out of the house alone because he’s afraid to lose her, he’s afraid somebody might tell her what kind of a dude he really is, which might make her leave him.”

  He declined to answer my initial question because of what he called the “drug thing.” Their immersion in drugs, he explained, makes it difficult to analyze their state of mind or what he called their “volatile” relationship.

  “The last time I saw them was at Publix a couple months ago. I barely recognized Krissi; she looked like she became a junkie. Nick looked out of it, very stoned. I didn’t say anything to them but they looked like they needed help, both of them looked like they needed to enter rehab.”

  I also met a guy named Rasheed, who claims to have been friends with Nick until June 2014. He told me he was disturbed by what he observed of Nick’s relationship with Bobbi.

  “He used to be a homie,” Rasheed said. “But in the last year he acted like a total jackass. All the fame and money was getting to his head. He was living the life, living in a fancy house and driving pimped-out cars. He forgot where he came from. I didn’t like the way he treated his girl. He acted as if he owned Bobbi. He had her brainwashed. I know that for a fact because I was with them a few months ago and she mentioned she might move to LA for a bit to do some acting. She said she had offers. Nick interrupted right away and said the offers were too small for someone of Krissi’s stature and that unless the offers were serious and would put her in a big, starring role Krissi was going nowhere. He looked at her and she nodded her head like a puppet. For some reason it seemed she was afraid to go against him. I’ve heard them argue. Their voices would escalate. But Nick always got his way. She was afraid of him. She always backed down.”

  One of the people I was told who would be better able to tell me about the state of their relationship is Bobbi’s ex-boyfriend Zach Jafarzadeh, who also knew Nick. Zach happens to be the same person who leaked photos of Bobbi snorting cocaine to the National Enquirer in 2011—the first indication that she might be following the same disturbing path as her mother.

  When I tried to track Zach down, I discovered that he was lying low and making plans to move to San Francisco. But two weeks after Bobbi was found, he talked to the London Daily Mail in which he posited his own theory about what had happened. Zach claimed that Bobbi had long since given up coke, explaining it was just a “small phase” of her life. He says that she smoked cigarettes but not marijuana, because she didn’t like the way it made her feel.

  In fact, he claimed that Bobbi did a fair amount of drugs before Whitney’s death, but when she saw what happened to her mom, she “wanted to learn from that.”

  Since 2012, he claimed, she had limited her drug use to Xanax, which she took every morning and often more than she was prescribed. He believes the Xanax may have played a role in her near drowning. He revealed that the relationship between Bobbi and Nick had been on the rocks.

  “I know they got into a fight a few days before and she was really depressed about that, and probably took a few Xanax and bathed and fell asleep.” Taking more than two or three with alcohol, he explained, is a “deadly combo.”

  After putting this theory foward, he came up with another.

  “Some of it makes me feel like it could be a possible suicide,” he told the British tabloid. “Not even just a mistake. Something symbolic like: ‘This is the way my mom died, this is the way I want to kill myself too.’ It’s eerie how similar that is. It sent chills down my spine and it made me sick to my stomach when I heard about it.”

  Like the DJ I met with, he admitted that the couple’s relationship was volatile. “Nick has a short temper,” he reveals. “And Bobbi can be difficult. It was a tug of war, because they are both very stubborn people. Bobbi is very sweet, giving and caring, but she wants all of you, everything. And Nick likes space, that’s where a lot of the tension between them came from. Nick was getting a little wild. He was getting into car accidents. He’s been in about three or four accidents over the last couple of years. He’s got a need for speed.”

  Despite what he knows about Nick’s temper, however, Zach was quick to rule out foul play.

  “Everybody’s trying to make it all ‘Nick Gordon beat her up’ but I don’t believe that. I don’t believe he beat her up and threw her in the bathtub. That’s kind of stupid. Why would you put her in a bath if her mom just died in a bathtub?”

  His theories about a Xanax-related blackout or suicide attempt are plausible and although he is far from the first to raise the possibility, they bear a little more weight, coming from an insider who knew the couple well. However, after reading his “exclusive account,” I can’t help but wonder whether Zach really knows as much as he claims. Why would Bobbi have anything to do with the man who betrayed her years earlier by selling damaging photos to the En
quirer? I’m especially suspicious that he chose to tell his story to the Daily Mail, another publication known to pay its sources. Having freelanced for the paper for years, I’m especially well versed in how they operate.

  Moreover, as I met friends of Bobbi who definitely knew her in the more recent past, I discover that Zach’s downplaying of her drug use doesn’t match the hard-partying girl they knew.

  Alas, Zach’s revelations likely bring us no closer to the truth about what happened on the morning of January 31.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Describing the controversies swirling around Whitney in a profile of the singer, Us Weekly delivered a surprising revelation in their June 2000 issue.

  And now she’s a woman without a trusted advisor. In May, Crawford resigned from Houston’s New Jersey–based company, Nippy Inc., and moved to Los Angeles. Houston watchers, who know that Crawford and Brown were often at loggerheads, were stunned by this once unimaginable fissure. ‘It’s hard to imagine [Whitney] functioning without her,’ says a former associate.”

  The same week, People confirmed the story:

  The office manager at Nippy Inc., the New Jersey management company owned by Whitney Houston, has quit. Robyn Crawford, 35, who was also the dulcet diva’s best friend and confidante since they were teenagers, has reportedly relocated to California. Houston’s spokeswoman would not comment on the reason for Crawford’s departure.”

  The writing appeared to be on the wall as early as April, when Whitney appeared for her first public performance since the no-shows at the Oscars and the Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Clive Davis was due to be ousted from the company he founded, and his stable of stars were gathering for a televised tribute to his legacy to commemorate Arista’s twenty-fifth anniversary at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium.

  Whitney’s performance was anticipated as the evening’s highlight, although there was much public speculation beforehand about whether she would even show after her previous high-profile cancellations.

  When she did strut onstage, the audience rose to their feet in excitement. But almost from the first note, it was clear something was wrong. As the New York Times later described the performance, “Ms. Houston began on a troubled note: she had difficulty focusing, tripped on the stage and forgot the lyrics to her hit, ‘How Will I Know.’ ”

  There were certainly flashes of brilliance during her twenty-minute appearance that reminded the star-studded audience why she was once considered music royalty, but it wasn’t long before the whispers began anew. There was no longer denying that there was a serious problem.

  A few days before the appearance, Newsweek had revealed that there was growing concern among her friends and family about Whitney’s behavior. An executive revealed that Clive Davis had recently approached the singer’s family to do an “intervention.”

  Backstage after the Arista show, a reporter from MTV asked Whitney’s cousin Dionne Warwick whether there was any truth to the report. But the singer denied there was a problem. “I read it like you did; I don’t know where that came from,” she said. “There’s no need for intervention.”

  In her 2013 memoir, however, Cissy admits that Davis had suggested an intervention months earlier and had recommended a rehab center in Connecticut where Whitney could be treated. Cissy reveals that John, who had recently retired from Nippy Inc. for health reasons, actually traveled to Connecticut with Robyn to check out the facility recommended by Davis. Cissy claims she was “livid” that Robyn had taken such action without “the courtesy to let me know.”

  Whitney, she revealed, didn’t end up going to rehab at that point, but her film agent, Nicole David, later asked Cissy to fly to LA to stage an intervention along with Robyn, Whitney’s close friend CeCe Winans, and Michael’s wife, Donna Houston.

  “We’re here to get you the help you need, baby,” Cissy told her daughter, who started crying and pleaded not to be sent to rehab.

  “Mommy, please don’t let them do this to me,” she reports Whitney as pleading. “I can take care of it.” Instead, Whitney asked Cissy to move in with her for a few weeks to look after her. She promised to quit doing drugs, but her mother was skeptical now that she knew the extent of her daughter’s problem.

  Around the same time, a media report quoted a source close to the Houston family who revealed that Robyn had yelled at Whitney, “I can’t just sit by and watch you kill yourself.”

  In April, Out magazine—America’s preeminent gay publication—revealed that Whitney would be the subject of a cover story in their May issue. Rumors circulated that the diva was finally going to come out. Why else would she agree to an interview with the magazine after she had always gone to such great lengths to distance herself from the rumors? But anybody expecting such a bold move was to be disappointed. Instead, Whitney took the opportunity to issue her most vehement denial to date.

  “I ain’t ‘ho’-in. I ain’t suckin’ no dick,” she told the magazine. “I ain’t getting on my knees. Something must be wrong: I can’t just really sing. I can’t just be a really talented, gifted person. She’s gotta be gay. Listen, I took a lot of grief for shit that wasn’t me, OK, ’cause I had friends, ’cause I was close to people. But that ain’t me. I know what I am. I’m a mother. I’m a woman. I’m heterosexual. Period.”

  Whether it was because of her friend’s dishonesty or Whitney’s failure to get the help she needed or some other reason, Robyn tendered her resignation that same month. The relationship that had begun on a New Jersey playground twenty-one years earlier—one that Whitney had described as “unbreakable”—had now come to an end.

  The same month, Arista released a two-disc CD of Whitney’s greatest hits that reached number five on the Billboard charts, another disappointing performance. Unusual for a greatest hits album, the release also garnered some scathing reviews because of the decision to include remixes of some of her best-known songs instead of the original versions. The Entertainment Weekly review was especially harsh: “To listen to the two discs is to hear the sound of a gift being squandered,” it complained. “Continually pursuing mega record sales at the expense of invention, Houston needs to exhale—to loosen up and put more shoop-shoop R&B into her creative life.”

  To add to the growing litany of troubles plaguing the couple, May 2000 also saw another arrest for Bobby when the couple returned from a Bahamas vacation, to be greeted by customs agents in New Jersey who handcuffed him and transported him to Florida on an outstanding warrant for a probation violation after the Florida DUI four years earlier when he failed to submit to a mandatory drug test before the deadline. Ruling him a “flight risk,” the judge denied him bail and Bobby ended up spending sixty-five days of a seventy-five-day sentence in a jail cell.

  In August 2001, Arista announced that they had signed Whitney to a staggering $100 million six-album deal to remain with the label. Although she was Arista’s best-selling artist ever, with almost 140 million records sold, her career was on a downward trajectory, and observers wondered aloud how the label could ever recoup that kind of advance. With Davis no longer around—having founded his own label, J Records, after his ouster the year before—it was speculated that the new parent company, BMG, couldn’t afford to lose its signature artist. Still, her life was melting down before everybody’s eyes and her career wasn’t faring much better.

  By the time Whitney appeared at Michael Jackson’s thirtieth anniversary celebration at Madison Square Garden on September 7, 2001, her deterioration was evident to everybody around her and had been openly speculated about in the press for more than a year as reports of erratic and diva-like behavior circulated widely.

  Whitney and Michael weren’t all that close, but they both talked in admiring tones about the other whenever asked. Whitney would later profess to be his “close friend,” but there is no indication that the two saw each other outside the many events and awards ceremonies at which they both appeared. Michael, whose favorite pet was famously Bubbles the Chimp, had given Whitn
ey a monkey for her twenty-sixth birthday—a present that she found bizarre and promptly donated to a zoo. By the time she appeared for his anniversary concert, rumors had been circulating about MJ’s own drug abuse for years—stories later confirmed after his death. Whitney had spoken publicly in his defense after he was accused of molesting a thirteen-year-old boy in 1993, and had long described MJ as her “idol.” Now, the King of Pop was looking nearly as frail as she was.

  No sooner had she appeared onstage that night than it was immediately evident to the millions who tuned in and to the audience of eighteen thousand who packed the arena that the icon was in a bad state. ABC News would later describe Whitney’s appearance as “scarily skinny.” Others described her as “gaunt” or “emaciated.” Nearly everybody came to the conclusion that only drugs could have caused this state.

  Nobody was more concerned than her longtime friend and mentor Clive Davis, who would reveal in his memoir that he sent a letter to Whitney with a personal plea following the concert:

  Dearest Whitney,

  When I saw you Friday night at the Michael Jackson concert I gasped. When I got home, I cried. My dear, dear Whitney, the time has come. Of course I know you don’t want to hear this. Of course I know that you’re saying that Clive is being foolishly dramatic. Of course I know that your power of denial is in overdrive dismissing everything I and everyone else is saying to you. . . . I will stand by you with love and caring to see you through it to new found peace and happiness in every way as a woman, as a mother, as a role model to inspire the rest of the world.

  Love,

  Clive

  But still Whitney denied she had a problem. On September 10, she performed at a second Jackson tribute concert, which once again had the crowd whispering about her appearance. The day after the show, her publicist, Nancy Seltzer, issued a statement denying that her skeletal appearance was related to drug abuse.

  “Whitney has been under stress due to family matters, and when she is under stress, she doesn’t eat,” she told the New York Post. A day later, Seltzer was forced to issue another statement when a number of radio stations reported that Whitney had died of a drug overdose. It didn’t get a lot of attention at the time, because the nation was reeling from the attack on the Twin Towers two days earlier.