by Ian Halperin
Whitney then described how she would spend long periods of time with Bobby in the same house without talking, just freebasing cocaine.
“We weren’t buying twenty-dollar jumbos. We were paying money. We were buying kilos and ounces and ounces. We would have our stash,” she said, revealing that at one point she would spend seven months in her pajamas without going out while the two did drugs.
When Oprah asked her whether Tina’s National Enquirer account—claiming that Whitney had locked herself in her room for days to do drugs—was accurate, she confirmed it. She also revealed that when he was high, Bobby “would smash things, break things in the home. Glass. We had a big, big giant portrait of me and him and my child. He cut my head off the picture. Stuff like that.”
When Oprah asked whether he was violent, Whitney at first denies it. “Emotionally, he was abusive. Physically, no way. Because first of all, I was raised with two boys, and I will fight you back. I will fight you back with anything I can find.”
Does that mean he never touched her, Oprah asked.
“No.”
He never laid his hands on you,” she persisted.
“He slapped me once, but he got hit over the head three times,” Whitney replied. “Because I was, like, ‘Okay, you’re going too far.’ ”
Asked what the worst thing he ever said or did was, Whitney revealed that he once spit on her.
“And my daughter was coming down the stairs, and she saw it. That was pretty intense.” She tells the talk show host that the incident left a lasting impression on the young girl, which is one of the reasons Whitney finally decided to divorce him.
“It was enough. She saw enough. The spitting in the face was enough. She said, ‘Mom, did he spit in your face?’ And I looked in her eyes and she looked in mine and I said: ‘Yes. But it’s all right.’ And she said: ‘No, it’s not. No, it’s not. It’s not, Mom. It’s not all right.’ I said: ‘If you can do me a favor. Just do this for Mommy. I’m going to put my trust in God. You put your trust in me. You may not understand it now, but just trust me. I’m not letting you go. I will hold on to you with my dear life. Just trust me. And we will get up out of this. And we’ll be happier for it. And then as you get older, I’ll tell you little by little as to why things are happening and why Mommy has to go.’ ”
She revealed that when they moved to California, Bobbi was “very angry” and did not understand why she left her dad.
“She fought me. But I kept coming back with love. I kept holding her in my arms. I kept knocking on that door and I kept getting on my knees. I kept praying. Telling her I loved her.”
Asked how Bobbi was faring at that time, Whitney told Oprah she was fine.
“I don’t know how to describe her. She’s more and more like me every day.”
When Oprah noted that she was starting to look like her, Whitney agreed.
“She does. When she was a kid, she was looking so much like her father—her body frame, her face, her skin.”
Oprah asked if Whitney could see traces of herself in her daughter.
“Oh, all over her,” she replied. “She writes creatively all the time. She writes. And she sings. She’s really starting to sing really well now.”
Is she good? Oprah wanted to know.
“Yeah, she is. I want her to take her time. I don’t want anybody to touch her. I want to groom her.” Whitney told Oprah that she’d be okay if Bobbi decided to follow her into the business.
“But I will be there. Like my mom was there with me. When I was just getting in the business, and they came for me when I was fourteen and wanted to sign me, my mother said: ‘No way. Whitney’s got a lot more to learn.’ ”
Asked if she enjoyed being a mom, Whitney was unequivocal.
“I love it. I love being a mother and watching her become a woman. There are times where she’s going through that young womanhood where there’s the boys, and there are little things and you got her little feelings being hurt. I love her to come to me, and she trusts me. She trusts me and I can tell her the truth and say, ‘Listen. It’s going to happen, but we’re going to get through it. We’re going to make it.’ That kind of thing. I love that. She’s proud of me. And I’m proud of her. She got into bed with me this morning and she said: ‘Mama, can I just tell you how much I love you and how proud I am of you? Your record’s kicking tail all over the world. I’m just proud of you. We did it, Mom. We did it.’ ”
The revelations on the show about the drug-crazed hell that had once been her life made worldwide headlines, but they were tempered by the seeming assurance that those episodes were all in the past and that Whitney was getting ready to resume her once-enviable career.
People love a story of redemption. And when the album was released in August 2009, it looked like she had finally put her troubles behind her as I Look to You shot to the top of the Billboard charts with the best first-week sales of her career.
Most critics welcomed the new Whitney, giving the album high marks. “Happily, it appears that ‘I Look to You,’ the pop diva’s first album in seven years, marks the end of her ‘crack is whack’ era,” heralded the Washington Times.
More credibly, Rolling Stone was impressed; lavishing the most praise they had ever delivered for one of her releases even if recognizing that her voice was no longer the four-octave wonder of two decades earlier. “Close your eyes, open your ears, and you’re back in 1992,” they declared. “At 46, Houston is not the singer she once was. Time and hard living have shaved some notes off that amazing range; the clear, bright voice that dominated radio has given way to a huskier tone—less powerful but more sultry.”
At the American Music Awards, she wowed the audience and received a standing ovation from the appreciative crowd. Awarding her performance an A-, the LA Times noted, “If her instrument isn’t what it once was, it can still silence a room.”
As the singer prepared to embark on a world tour to capitalize on the success of the album, it appeared her career had come full circle. It wasn’t long, however, before the same questions reared their ugly head when she canceled a series of European dates. When she did show up, the performances were often punctuated by long breaks midshow, and Whitney often rambled to the audience instead of singing. Reviewers noted large portions of the audience booing or walking out at nearly every show.
The Birmingham Sunday Mercury complained that her show “spiralled into shambolics.”
Nor were critics kind on the Australian leg of the tour.
“Her acoustic set of old favorites unfortunately could not hide the very obvious problems with her voice,” noted one Brisbane critic, describing streams of “disappointed, saddened and angry fans” heading for the doors in the middle of the show.
The Daily Telegraph critic was also put off by her antics, but impressed by her delivery.
“Some of her behavior here, it’s true, petered between the eccentric and the charmingly kooky,” wrote Cathy McCabe, who was gratified to hear that Whitney’s live version of many numbers sounded as good as the recorded versions. “She chattered ramblingly between songs, signed an autograph from the stage, started sentences and didn’t finish them—but the proof of her sanity was in her singing.”
Reports from Europe of canceled shows and bizarre onstage behavior had many wondering if Whitney had once again lapsed into her old habits.
In April 2010, People took note that speculation was growing about whether Whitney was once again “in a downward drug spiral.”
Whitney called such reports “ridiculous,” saying, “At this point, I just don’t respond. I don’t even read it.”
The tour ended on a sour note with a slew of new cancellations and furious Australian promoters bemoaning millions of dollars in losses. The much-heralded comeback was anything but a success, despite a successful album. And if 2010 ended on a sour note professionally, 2011 saw dark clouds on the home front.
While her mother toured the world, seventeen-year-old Bobbi was left to her
own devices in Atlanta, where she had taken up with a hard-partying crowd, including the boy who had moved into her house three years earlier, Nick Gordon. And while the media began once again openly speculating about Whitney’s drug use, it was Bobbi whose name was splashed across the headline when her ex-boyfriend Zach Jafarzadeh sold a photo to the National Enquirer of Bobbi snorting lines of cocaine at two separate parties. “Krissi is addicted to cocaine,” Zach told the paper. “I’ve tried to stop her, but all she said was, ‘I’m just like my mother!’ ”
Responding to the report on Twitter, Bobbi tweeted:
“It’s really not what it looks like.”
Whitney reportedly ordered her daughter to rehab and canceled plans for a lavish eighteenth birthday party planned at the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas in March.
In May, Whitney did another stint at rehab, this time with her troubled daughter, who was already showing signs of following in her parents’ footsteps.
Despite the troubles at home, Whitney was eager to move forward with her career. As a teenager growing up in the seventies, her favorite movie was Sparkle—the 1976 film set in Harlem about a girl group in the late fifties and early sixties loosely based on the Supremes. Cissy remembers her daughter going to see it over and over because she found the story inspirational.
“As a young girl back in the 70s there was the black-exploitation movie thing,” she would recall. “This was a positive reinforcement for young African-American women. For anyone who wanted to pursue their dream and present their gifts. It just appealed to me.”
Following the success of The Bodyguard, Whitney had eyed a remake and had secured the rights from Warner Bros. in 1995. But the project had remained on hold, and it looked like it would never see the light of day. But when the African-American husband-and-wife production team Mara and Salim Akil approached her with a screenplay they had written, she jumped at the opportunity. Too old to play the lead role, Whitney agreed to play the mother of the three girls, while American Idol winner Jordin Sparks would star.
Apprehensive because of recent renewed speculation about whether she was back on drugs, everybody involved with the production was relieved that she appeared sober. There were no tantrums, no late arrivals, no diva demands. There was, however, a lot of praying. It appeared that Whitney’s recovery was helped by what those around her had described as a “religious revival” in recent years. Whitney, who grew up in a deeply religious household, had always talked in interviews about the power of God, but she had been receiving spiritual counseling, and it appeared to many as if she had had a genuine religious awakening.
The production’s makeup artist, Kym Lee, recalled that every three-hour makeup session with Whitney started with a prayer.
“She came in. She stakes a claim and she said, ‘Hey, this is how I start my day,’ ” Lee recalled to the Christian Broadcast Network. “And she put on Fred Hammond. And we started off with worship, and it was incredible, because she set the tone.”
And while onlookers bemoaned Sparks’s noticeable lack of acting talent, Whitney proved the consummate professional who had come a long way since her labored performance in The Bodyguard.
“I found Whitney Houston to be very professional on the set,” recalled producer T. D. Jakes. “She was an excellent actress. She was very, very effective, obviously as a singer.”
But if her drug use had been severely curtailed since her marriage ended, she couldn’t give up the habit entirely, as one of her former dealers told me when we met for drinks. The man, who gave up dealing in 2012, claims he sold Whitney “smoke and blow” whenever she was in LA, including during 2011 when she was filming Sparkle—and during post-production.
“We became friends, good friends,” said the man, who claimed he wasn’t her only dealer and that she likely had other sources when Sparkle was shooting on location in Detroit for part of that period. “She trusted me. I gave her the best quality of whatever she wanted.” He recalled that, unlike many celebrities he dealt to, Whitney had a “human element about her.”
“About six years ago I was in the hospital for a couple weeks,” he recalled. “I had a heart condition and had a stent procedure. Whitney sent me a card and flowers. She told me if I needed anything she was there for me. She really cared, there was nothing put on about her, she was real people.”
Cissy suspected something was wrong when her daughter canceled an invitation to join her in Detroit after shooting was completed. Her daughter-in-law Donna was the one who told her Whitney had decided to fly to Atlanta instead. A month later, Whitney showed up unexpectedly in New York with Bobbi and invited her mother and brother Michael to join them at her Manhattan hotel, where they spent the day together.
Cissy begged them to come to New Jersey—only thirty minutes away—for a visit, but Whitney declined. She promised to visit after Clive Davis’s annual pre-Grammy gala in February.
Cissy had been looking forward to the promised visit. But on Saturday, February 11, she received a call from Gary that would mark “the end of life as I had known it.”
Whitney had arrived in LA a few days before Davis’s party, at which she had been scheduled to perform. To avoid the paparazzi, she always used a pseudonym when she traveled. This time, she checked into a junior suite at the Beverly Hilton—room 434—under the name “Elizabeth Collins,” with an entourage that included Bobbi, a hairdresser, two bodyguards, and a stylist.
Bobbi had brought Nick along on the trip, although few knew they were already romantically involved.
A few months earlier, Whitney had granted an interview to a reporter from the entertainment website Global Grind when she was in Detroit shooting Sparkle. When the reporter asked her how she had been balancing her personal life while she was away from home, she talked about Bobbi and made the first and only reference ever to Nick Gordon, although she never mentioned him by name.
“That’s a good question,” said Whitney. “I have priorities. Maintaining my daughter is my first. She also has it in her blood too. She’s doing her acting classes and her vocal coaching. I keep her busy with that and she’s very happy with that. She’s 18 now. She’s going to be a young woman, going to be a woman, Lord have mercy. But I also have my godson; he is going to be 22, a well-balanced young man.”
Whitney had been seen at various events with the singer Ray J, the younger brother of her Cinderella costar Brandy, whom she had known since he was ten. Ray J, in fact, had quite a reputation as a womanizer and had starred in the infamous 2007 sex tape with Kim Kardashian that helped put her on the map. Whitney had been seen having dinner with him on a number of occasions since the divorce, but there’s no evidence that the two ever dated, and he has always denied it. “That’s my friend, I’ve been knowing her for years and years . . . she’s a friend of the family,” he told a reporter. Although there was speculation that he and Whitney were romantically linked, friends of the singer later claimed he was using Whitney to pitch a reality show. Ray J was best known for two previous TV shows, the dating show For the Love of Ray J, and the 2010 reality show with Brandy and their parents, Brandy and Ray J: A Family Business.
“He was just using her like many people did, to get a deal,” a friend of his told The Daily Beast in 2012. Indeed, he had been following her around with a TV crew and had pitched the show to a number of producers in early 2012.
While she was in LA, Whitney rarely ventured out of the hotel, although Bobbi and Nick were frequently seen around town. On Thursday morning, Whitney ventured down to the hotel ballroom, where singers Brandy and Monica were rehearsing for their scheduled performances at Davis’s gala.
LA Times music critic Gerrick Kennedy happened to be present when she popped her head in to offer coaching to the young singers. When he saw her, he knew something was amiss.
“Though Houston greeted people with a warm smile,” Kennedy recalled, “she appeared disheveled in mismatched clothes and hair that was dripping wet with either sweat or water.” Describing her appearan
ce as “visibly bloated,” he claims that Whitney “displayed erratic behavior throughout the afternoon—flailing her hands frenetically as she spoke to Brandy and Monica, skipping around the ballroom in a child-like fashion and wandering aimlessly about the lobby.” Hotel security later received reports that she had been doing handstands by the pool.
Later, Kennedy was present when she returned to the ballroom in the afternoon with Bobbi to watch Davis give TV interviews to promote the show. As Davis was being interviewed by E!, Whitney stood just out of camera range, dancing and trying to make her mentor laugh. Turning to Brandy and Monica, she started talking about what she was going to wear to the gala.
“I don’t wear no blue,” she ranted. “I don’t want no goddamn blue.” Watching her mother’s antics, Bobbi finally led her out of the ballroom.
Later the same evening, Whitney showed up to a party at LA’s trendy nightclub Tru Hollywood, where she performed a duet of gospel hymns with Kelly Price. According to onlookers, her voice was shaky, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind as they watched in awe and broke out in applause. Although Ray J was in LA the week she was there, he did not stay with her at the Hilton. Whitney was in the VIP section of the club with former X Factor contestant Stacy Francis, who was with her boyfriend, when Ray J arrived. She and Francis, who had both performed at a tribute to the late Etta James, had been getting along well and were chatting cordially earlier. When Ray J arrived, he spotted Francis and started chatting. By that time, Whitney was visibly drunk—having guzzled significant quantities of tequila and champagne, according to onlookers.
Francis later claimed that while she was talking to Ray J, Whitney suddenly came over and demanded of him, “Who’s the bitch?”
“She was out of control,” Francis recalled. “She put her hand in my face. She was screaming at me and called me a bitch. She just went crazy—like Jekyll and Hyde. I turned to look at her and she pushed my forehead and turned my face away. I grabbed her hand and said, ‘Please don’t do this. You’re everything to me. You’re my idol, you’re a legend.’ ”