by Ian Halperin
Later, Whitney was seen leaving the club with a cut on her wrist and blood running down her leg. Her hairdresser, Tiffanie Dixon, claims that when Whitney returned, she saw her reading the Bible in her hotel room. “Her glasses were broken, but she read by holding the little single lens. She had marked pages—Exodus, Mark, and Matthew,” she told Vanity Fair. “The last thing I remember her saying was ‘I just want to love and be loved. I want to love like Jesus did. Unconditionally.’ ” Whitney had told Oprah in 2009 that when she locked herself in her room for days at a time doing drugs, she spent much of the time reading the Bible.
The next day, she remained in her room all day until the evening, when she ventured with a group of friends down to the bar where she spent a long time drinking.
On Saturday morning, her cousin Dionne Warwick spoke to Whitney on the phone about seating arrangements for Davis’s gala that night and said she sounded fine.
At around three thirty that afternoon, her personal assistant, Mary Jones, decided to check on Whitney. After an hour, she became concerned and knocked on the door repeatedly, receiving no response. Entering, she let out a scream, which brought one of the bodyguards running. Hearing the screams, Pat Houston saw Whitney’s hairstylist on her knees in the hallway, saying, “Oh my God!” Numb, she made her way to the room, where she found Jones in hysterics. Entering, she found her brother, Ray, who worked as Whitney’s security guard, trying to revive the singer. As the paramedics arrived, Ray turned to Pat and said, somberly, “I tried.”
When she was found in the bath, Whitney’s face was under the water as though “she had slid down the back of the tub.” Her head was described as “facing west.” It’s interesting to note that the autopsy report would later reveal the temperature of the water was “extremely hot,” measured at 93.5 degrees Fahrenheit well after she was found. Investigators found a “plethora” of prescription medication bottles as well as a “small spoon with a white crystal like substance in it” and a mirror with a white powdery substance on its base.
While the bodyguard attempted CPR, somebody alerted a hotel security guard, who called 911 about a forty-eight-year-old woman who was “apparently not breathing,” though he was not sure if the unidentified woman “fell, or if she was in the bathroom with the water.” Paramedics arrived soon afterward and attempted to revive the singer, but Whitney was pronounced dead at 3:55 PM.
Meanwhile, her entourage had gathered outside the hotel room but were kept out by bodyguards. There is no indication that Nick Gordon was present at any time and it’s clear from both the police and autopsy reports that he did not administer CPR as his mother claimed to Dr. Phil. It appears that neither Bobbi nor Nick were even in the hotel at the time of the incident, because Bobbi was reported to have arrived a full two hours after her mother was found, demanding to be let in the room—where the body was being examined—and arguing loudly with police. Dionne Warwick also arrived some time after the body was discovered but was also denied access. Ray J was away in San Diego when Whitney died, although he would later arrive at the hotel while her body was still in the room.
At eleven PM, Bobbi was so distraught that she was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and sedated. A press release sent to ABC News that evening said she was “awake and alert.” She was released later that night. The next day, she was again brought to Cedars-Sinai where she was reported to be “hysterical, exhausted and inconsolable.” The Associated Press reported that night that she had been “treated and released for stress and anxiety.”
News of his ex-wife’s sudden death was reported to have also hit Bobby Brown hard. He had reunited with New Edition and was performing that night in Mississippi, where he was reported to have had “crying fits” upon learning the news. During the performance, he pointed to the sky and declared, “I love you, Whitney.” He later flew to LA to be with his daughter. In a media statement about his daughter’s condition, he said, “Obviously the death of her mother is affecting her, however, we will get through this tragedy as a family. Again, I ask for privacy during this time.”
The world was reeling from the news as tributes poured in far and wide from fans and celebrity friends wondering how it could have all gone so wrong.
Many were quick to assign blame, and most believed they knew exactly who had caused the singer’s downfall, as Bobby Brown was vilified in all quarters of the globe. But it is interesting to note those who knew her best went out of their way to stress that Bobby was not to blame for Whitney’s problems, perhaps because they knew that it wasn’t Bobby who introduced her to drugs, as many still suspected.
Her mentor, Clive Davis, was one of the first to rise to Bobby’s defense, even though he did not have much of a personal or professional relationship with him.
“I don’t believe it was Bobby Brown,” he would say. “I think they did have a co-dependent, unhealthy relationship with each other. But I would never point to him. I have no idea who her enabler was.”
Even her family believed that Bobby had been unfairly blamed. Not long after Whitney’s death, Pat Houston told Oprah Winfrey, “Bobby and I had a good relationship. She [Whitney] would say, ‘You’re always trying to protect him.’ I said, ‘No, I’m protecting truth. I can’t do it any other way.’ Their reality was everyone else’s, and it’s very difficult if you’ve got family members that are demanding certain things from you, then the world demanding certain things from you. In all of that congestion, how can you make it work?”
Even Cissy would exonerate Bobby when she went on the Today show and insisted that her daughter was responsible for her own problems. “I don’t blame Bobby Brown,” Cissy said. “I know he didn’t help her . . . But everybody’s responsible for their own actions up to a point.”
The British activist and parliamentary candidate Peter Tatchell, who had known Whitney and Robyn from the 1991 Reach Out and Touch UK HIV/AIDS Vigil, and had seen them holding hands in the back of their car “like teenage sweethearts,” claimed he believed he knew what caused Whitney’s tragic demise and was one of the first to publicly link her downward spiral to her decision to remain in the closet.
“Whitney was happiest and at the peak of her career when she was with Robyn,” Tatchell wrote in the London Mail on Sunday soon after her death. “Sadly, she suffered family and church pressure to end her greatest love of all. She was fearful of the effects that lesbian rumors might have on her family, reputation and career. Eventually she succumbed. The result? A surprise marriage to Bobby Brown.”
Whitney’s life, he argued, started to go downhill soon afterward—evidence of what he called “a troubled personal life and much unhappiness.”
“It seems likely that the split with Robyn contributed to her substance abuse and decline,” he argued. “There is a known correlation between denial of one’s sexuality and a propensity to self-destructive behavior. Homophobia undoubtedly added to the pressures on Whitney and hastened her demise.”
Roseanne star Sandra Bernhard—who had been one of the first Hollywood personalities to come out—echoed these sentiments on The Rosie Show soon afterward when she said that Whitney’s downfall stemmed from her “inability to accept her sexuality.”
This theory has been hotly debated in the three years since Whitney’s passing, but for me it has a particularly unique resonance.
When I first heard the news on the radio on that Saturday afternoon in February 2012, I immediately had a chilling sense of déjà vu. Less than three years earlier, I had published a book about the last days of Michael Jackson in which I had infiltrated his camp to discover the behind-the-scenes life of the King of Pop. I became so intimately acquainted with his deterioration during those final years that I gave an interview publicly predicting in December 2008 that MJ would be dead within six months. When he died six months later to the day, my prediction got some attention.
However, the book was not a salacious account of Jackson’s life, nor an exposé. Instead, I focused largely on the most damaging chapte
r of Jackson’s life and one which virtually destroyed his career—the child molestation accusations leveled by two different boys.
In my book, I meticulously tore apart the so-called evidence in both cases and proved almost beyond any doubt that Jackson was innocent of the heinous allegations that had inexorably destroyed his legacy. Instead, I argued that both families were ruthlessly exploiting their children to obtain money from the singer and that there was no credible proof he ever molested children. In other words, my book may have singlehandedly redeemed his severely tarnished reputation.
However, during the course of my research, I also discovered evidence that, although Jackson wasn’t a pedophile, he was in fact gay. I encountered two separate adult males who showed me evidence that they had engaged in affairs with the singer.
When my book, Unmasked, was published shortly after Jackson’s June 2009 death, the reaction was not at all what I expected. Although it was well received and spent two weeks on top of the New York Times bestseller list, the reaction from Jackson’s legions of worldwide fans was nothing short of vicious. Rather than celebrate the fact that I had exonerated their idol from the unspeakable accusations against him, I was attacked with the fury of a thousand suns. Fan clubs all over the world called for a boycott of my book; I was accused of defaming and smearing Michael’s reputation and declared public enemy number one. I even received two death threats and countless threats of physical violence.
“If I ever meet you face to face, I’ll cut your balls off,” wrote a Jackson fan from Holland. My crime? Daring to suggest that MJ was gay. The threats against me from many Jackson fans, in fact, were far worse than those against the families that accused him of molestation. In their eyes, it appeared, accusing somebody of being homosexual is even worse than accusing him of being a pedophile.
Soon after my book appeared, a man named Jason Pfeiffer—the office manager for Jackson’s longtime doctor, Arnie Klein—came forward and claimed he had a two-month affair with the singer at the end of his life. He described how their relationship began.
“We were just sitting there and we both started to cry and I got up and went over to him and said it’s going to be okay, Michael. . . . We hugged,” he told Women’s Day magazine.
“It was kind of then that the hug was a little bit more . . . It wasn’t until a few months later that it was obvious that Michael had feelings for me as well. I just assumed that he was probably bisexual. I know we loved each other. I know he told me all the time. I believe he was probably my soul mate.”
When Pfeiffer’s story and credibility were questioned, Klein publicly told both Extra and TMZ that the affair had taken place, revealing that he had once walked in on the two men, both shirtless.
“When you see two people looking at each other you know what’s happening. I was just very happy for both of them,” he said.
It is a revelation that Klein said had sparked a number of death threats against him. Two years later, just before April Fool’s Day, a letter purporting to be from Klein briefly appeared on his Facebook page for about an hour claiming that Pfeiffer’s allegations were fabricated by a ghostwriter, but the letter disappeared almost immediately, and, if true, there was no explanation of why Klein had supplied an eyewitness account of the affair to Extra.
Considering the unleashed scorn that Klein and I faced for simply telling the truth about Michael, I can certainly understand why Whitney chose to remain in the closet and hide her own bisexuality.
Shortly after Michael died in 2009, Whitney told Oprah that seeing Michael at his 2001 tribute concert had made her take stock of her own life.
“I was getting scared,” she said. “I was looking at myself going, ‘No, I don’t want this to be like this. This can’t happen. Not both of us.’ ”
After she eventually suffered the same fate as her onetime idol, I couldn’t help examine some of the parallels between the two that Whitney herself must have been well aware of.
They were both raised by deeply religious and homophobic mothers. La Toya Jackson once revealed that Katherine Jackson—a devout Jehovah’s Witness—had referred to her son as a “damn faggot.” When Oprah asked Cissy Houston in 2013 “Would it have bothered you if your daughter Whitney was gay?” Cissy’s response was unequivocal. “Absolutely,” she replied.
“You would not have liked that?” asked the talk show host.
“Not at all,” Whitney’s mother confessed.
Apart from the homophobia of their parents, both singers were acutely aware that large segments of their fan base would have been deeply offended by the truth, in part because of the widespread belief that public figures are role models and their “immoral” actions might “influence” children. It is probably safe to say that neither Whitney nor Michael would have attained iconic status had they been honest about their sexuality, notwithstanding their phenomenal talent.
And, of course, as both singers spent their careers in the closet, they developed devastating drug habits that would eventually contribute to their demise. Does that prove Tatchell’s theory—that denying one’s sexuality leads to self-destructive behavior? Did living in the vinyl closet kill two of the greatest superstars of the twentieth century?
For me, the jury is still out. It is a little simplistic to simply give a pat answer about what led to their tragic fates. Certainly there are some convincing parallels. But there are a number of heterosexual superstars who also suffered a similar fate. Elvis and Marilyn Monroe immediately come to mind. Still, it is certainly worth asking whether the price of fame is worth living a lie.
I have no doubt that I will be accused of smearing Whitney’s reputation, as happened when I told the truth about Michael. Many will undoubtedly argue that there is no evidence to even prove Whitney was bisexual and that unless Robyn Crawford confirms the two had a sexual relationship, we must accept Whitney’s many vehement denials.
After Robyn moved on, she eventually entered into a long relationship with Esquire magazine editor Lisa Hintelmann, with whom she lives today in New Jersey with their adopted twins. Robyn, who would later go to work at ESPN, has never spoken publicly about whether she and Whitney were ever a couple, but she did pen a poignant tribute in Esquire the day after Whitney’s death.
In the piece, she recalled how she and Whitney first met at an East Orange community center. She writes that shortly after they met, her new friend told her, “Stick with me, and I’ll take you around the world.” Sure enough, they traveled everywhere together and always first-class. Robyn appears to allude to her despair about the fact that they never again spoke after her departure.
“She could not pick up the phone, and that meant it was too painful,” she wrote. But if people expected Robyn to finally come clean about the nature of their relationship, they would be disappointed.
“I have never spoken about her until now,” she explained, “and she knew I wouldn’t. She was a loyal friend, and she knew I was never going to be disloyal to her. I was never going to betray her.”
But if Robyn wasn’t going to spill any secrets, the same couldn’t be said about Bobby Brown, who had already revealed in his 2008 memoir, Bobby Brown: The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But . . . , that Whitney may have married him as a smoke screen to deflect the lesbian rumors.
I think we got married for all the wrong reasons. Now, I realize Whitney had a different agenda than I did when we got married. . . . I believe her agenda was to clean up her image, while mine was to be loved and have children. The media was accusing her of having a bisexual relationship with her assistant, Robyn Crawford. Since she was the American Sweetheart and all, that didn’t go too well with her image. . . . In Whitney’s situation, the only solution was to get married and have kids. That would kill all speculation, whether it was true or not.
When the funeral took place on February 18 at the New Hope Baptist Church, where Whitney had developed her talents singing in the choir, both Bobby and Robyn were in attendance. But while Robyn sat quietly
in the back and didn’t draw attention to herself, Bobby ended up immersed in a controversy that invoked memories of the couple’s stormy marriage.
Tellingly, among the performers at the funeral was the “ex-gay” pastor, Donnie McClurkin, who in 2002 claimed God had delivered him from “the curse of homosexuality” and likes to compare homosexuality to pedophilia because he was raped by an uncle when he was eight. Also in the lineup that day were the duo Debbie and Angie Winans, whose notorious 1997 song “Not Natural” is an anti-gay anthem written in response to the famous coming-out episode of Ellen DeGeneres’s sitcom, Ellen. Debbie Winans had told Jet magazine, “It was written that day after [DeGeneres came out]. The Lord inspired the song . . . because you can’t turn on the TV without something being pushed down your throat that’s contrary to God.” She explained that the song reflects a “holy anger because if your kids see that, they’re going to mimic that.”
The media would later report that Bobby stormed out of the funeral service when security refused to let his entourage sit with him. In fact, he arrived with his three children, but when security told him they couldn’t sit with him in the church, he was infuriated and ended up leaving the service. Onlookers reported that he appeared emotionally distraught and on the verge of tears as he walked up the aisle.
Before he departed, however, he approached the casket and kissed it before leaving with his children. He would later claim that security also barred him from attempting to see Bobbi, who was sitting in the front row with the family. Despite media reports, however, he never caused a scene.
For many attendees, the highlight of the memorial service was the eulogy delivered by Whitney’s Bodyguard costar, Kevin Costner:
“The Whitney I knew, despite her success and worldwide fame, still wondered, am I good enough? Am I pretty enough? Will they like me? It was the burden that made her great, and the part that caused her to stumble in the end,” he said.