Every Little Step

by Bobby Brown

  Whitney and I hung out after the show. We still hadn’t slept together, but the sexual tension was crazy. She followed us back to the hotel. As I knew would happen, I had an argument with Kim about Whitney. I had previously told her I was in love with Janet; now Whitney Houston had popped into the picture.

  “Okay, I can’t take this!” she yelled. “I can’t believe you would just put it in my face like that.”

  “But I didn’t know she was coming,” I tried to explain.

  There really wasn’t much I could say. I had already told her that she and I couldn’t be together because I was in love with Janet. But because we had so much history, we had a baby together and she was still spending a lot of time with me, I could understand if she was hoping that things might change between us. Now, all of a sudden, into the scene sweeps the biggest pop star on the planet? And an incredibly beautiful one, at that? I could see why she was so angry.

  After things ended with Janet, they accelerated with Whitney. I knew the time had come for us to take it to the next level.

  It happened in London. That was the place where we got to know each other on the most intimate level. Whitney made another unannounced visit, calling me the day she got into town to let me know she was coming to my concert. After the show, I was pretty excited about what might happen that night. When I got back to my hotel, I found out that she had taken the entire suite on the top floor. I was in the suite right below her, but hers was bigger, fancier. Hey, this was Whitney Houston.

  When I walked into her suite, from the very first second everything was magical. We talked. We kissed. We played the piano together. We drank wine. It was heaven. It was wonderful.

  Sex with her was different. She caught me by surprise, because she initiated everything. That never happened with Janet or most of the other women I was with. She was the aggressor, but in a smooth, ladylike way. I was playing the shy guy at the time; I didn’t want to push up on her.

  As we played the piano together, our hands touched. Then we shared a long, soft kiss. It was like a scene straight out of Casablanca, some old romantic flick. I knew what was about to happen. My thoughts at the time? I’m embarrassed to say they were maybe not the most, uh, gracious.

  Damn! I’m about to fuck Whitney Houston!

  We found our way into her bed, where the passion was intense, incredible. From the very beginning, it was clear that our sexual chemistry was explosive. Obviously I had been with a lot of women up to that point, but this felt different, deeper, more intimate and hotter than it had been with any of the others—even Janet. From that moment on, at least in our minds, we were together.

  Whitney started telling me her private thoughts, letting me really get to know her. I started doing the same. She told me how Randall Cunningham, the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, was trying to get at her, but she said he was too much of a punk about it. She told me about a lot of the other dudes who were trying to get at her, but they didn’t know how to go about it. They didn’t know what to do or what to say. They assumed she would be interested in them because of who they were.

  I think Whitney was taken with me because I wasn’t what she expected. I was supposed to be this big wild and crazy guy. The bad boy. But that was my persona onstage. Offstage, I’m a totally different person. She was surprised by how humble I was. She expected raunchy but instead she got gentle, courteous, gracious, gentlemanly. Always that. I was taught that by my mother and father.

  I have always been truthful with every woman I’ve been with. If they can’t handle that, well, that’s another story. But I believe honesty is the best way to conduct a relationship. That’s why I had been able to tell Kim about Janet. I knew she’d eventually come around and would understand, even if she wasn’t happy about it.

  After that night in London, it seemed like Whitney and I were together all the time. She would even come out on the road with me on tour sometimes. Up to that point, Ralph Tresvant still didn’t believe I was dating Whitney.

  “Nah, I don’t believe you!” he said when I told him about our relationship.

  “You watch!” I said. “She’s coming by tonight.”

  He saw her when she came by my hotel room to surprise me and I didn’t answer the door because I was in the shower. Ralph came upon Whitney pounding angrily on the door. He sure believed it then.

  But Whitney still wasn’t eager to go public with our love affair. It wasn’t like we were sneaking around, but we would spend most of our time together alone in hotel suites, or in fancy restaurants where we could have some privacy. It can be difficult for celebrities to conduct a relationship if they don’t want everybody all up in their business.

  I think one of the reasons Whitney wasn’t too keen on going public was because she was still sort of stringing Eddie Murphy along. I remember him inviting me to the premiere of Harlem Nights and Whitney having to juggle both of us without Eddie knowing what was going on. We spent the early part of the night staring at each other across the room. I still remember what I was wearing that night—a maroon suit and a white fedora. Yeah, I was killing it. Finally Whitney and I saw an opening and we snuck away to a secluded corner for a little while to talk. Eddie was oblivious to everything. All these years later, I’ve still never had a conversation with him about those crazy days.

  A FEW WORDS FROM RALPH TRESVANT

  At first I didn’t believe him. Bobby and I were sitting around one day, just talking, and he started telling me he was dating Whitney Houston. I knew he had just stopped dating Janet. Now he was telling me, “I’m really seeing Whitney like that. We’re tight now.”

  “Get outta here, man!” I said.

  “For real!”

  But I still didn’t believe him. I think my response was, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

  Whitney was a whole other level to me. I just couldn’t see it. It didn’t seem like Bobby Brown could pull that. But then again, I knew she was an East Orange girl. Still, I didn’t really know that side of her. In retrospect, maybe a part of me didn’t really want to believe it. I think that might be what was really going on.

  But I found out the truth one day when Bobby and I were staying at the Waldorf Astoria in New York with the rest of the guys. We were on tour together, Bobby Brown and New Edition. We were all staying on different floors. I was going to pick up B; we were planning to move around the city, shop, look around. I went to his floor to get him. As I turned the corner, walking toward his room, I noticed three people in the hall. One was sitting on the floor and one was standing nearby, kind of pacing up and down the hall.

  I thought they were maybe some fans or something.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “What’s the problem here? Y’all can’t be here in front of my man’s—”

  Before I could finish the sentence, the one who was pacing turned around to face me. I saw it was Whitney. Oh snap!

  “Yeah, I know that motherfucker is in there!” she said. She started banging on the door again.

  I’m thinking, Aww man, the same day I’m about to find out his relationship with her is real, he’s about to mess it all up. I thought he was about to lose her. But luckily when he finally opened the door, he wasn’t in there with anybody else. He had been in the shower. I was relieved. I really thought I was going to see the beginning of the relationship and the end at the same time. When he didn’t open the door, I was thinking, He must have known she was coming. But she had caught us all off guard. And that’s how I found out he was really dating her.

  When I saw how pissed she was, that told me a lot. It showed me she was scared. And that showed me the connection. And then he was pissed that she was pissed. I knew my girl wouldn’t get pissed at me for not opening the door unless she cared about me. I saw that what they had together had moved beyond casual dating.

  Their relationship was beautiful. We were really young guys in the entertainment business, but I think he saw it was time to settle down, time to start growing up.

  One night quite some
time later I was backstage at Philips Arena in Atlanta at a Beyoncé concert. We went backstage to see Bey, so we were sitting there talking to Jay Z, waiting for her after the show. Just then Whitney walked up. She had on a Kangol hat and a full-length chinchilla fur coat. This was when she and Bobby were going through some difficulties in their marriage, with a lot of crazy stuff being written about them.

  “I got your brother,” she said to me. “I got him.”

  I looked her in the eyes. She was dead serious. I put my hands up.

  “All right,” I said. “I’m gonna take it just like that, sis.”

  With all the stuff that was going on, she wanted me to know that she loved that man and she had his back.

  The world needs to understand that Bobby’s been victimized. He really took it on the chin. He has been Mr. Bad Boy; he basked in that for a second, walked in it for a second. But the real Bobby was totally the opposite of the guy they’d been talking about. That’s why when you see him with his kids, they love him. His kids are just crazy about their daddy. That’s the real character of a person, how your children feel about you. That’s who you really are. That’s why somebody like Whitney could fall in love with him.

  I attended one of her concerts and afterward she introduced me to her family. She just said, “This is Bobby Brown.” She didn’t call me “boyfriend” or give me any label, but I could tell the family knew what was going on. If she hadn’t told them already, they would have known just by the way she was smiling and acting. They were warm toward me, particularly her brothers, Michael and Gary, and her father, John Houston. I grew to be very close to her dad and talked to him regularly up until his death in February 2003. We would talk a lot about her business. I would assure him that I was watching her money closely. Even at the very end, after he had gotten sick, after all her albums, he was still asking me about it. I think the family members saw how well I treated her, how much I obviously loved her, so they were supportive of us.

  I was courting her in a big way by this time. I’ve always considered myself a romantic fellow, so I was constantly thinking of romantic gestures that I knew would please her. Whitney and I would compete to see who could buy the most extravagant gifts. She started it off by buying me this gorgeous watch. It was platinum and gold and made by Fred, an extremely exclusive jewelry and watchmaking company based in Paris founded by Fred Samuel. Fred’s watch prices easily exceeded $10,000. This watch was breathtaking.

  So I replied by having a fabulous bracelet made for her. I had a guy in LA we called “Joe the Jeweler” and he was the baddest jeweler in the country. As a matter of fact, I still use him to this day. He made amazing pieces for Whitney—they just blew her away.

  The early days of our romance were like a fairy tale. We both liked the same things, so it was so easy for us to have a great time together. We would meet up in different countries, since we were both constantly on the road. We were desperate for our privacy, so there were a lot of intimate dinners in the corners of fancy restaurants, a lot of days and nights in ritzy hotels. Of course, there was a lot of time spent together in bed, where we enjoyed our wonderful sexual chemistry. We would gamble, play cards. We would sit and play spades for hours, yelling at each other and talking a lot of shit, which all the best spades players know you have to do. Whitney was from Newark and East Orange—she always knew how to talk a gang of shit.

  When word did go public that we were dating, I tried to pay no attention to the gossip columns. I tried very hard. But I would look at the stuff in the rag mags, the horrible things they were saying about us. About me. The nastiness of that period is why I don’t read any of that stuff today. ’Cause the nastiness can hit your heart. Sometimes it takes a long time to come back from what people think and say about you.

  Whitney was really good at turning the other cheek, but not me. If they were saying something about me that was a lie—and it almost always was—then I’d want to fight. I’d want to bust somebody’s ass. I’d want to find out who wrote it, find out where they got their information from. That’s just me. I have to have truth around me. I don’t like dishonesty. If you’re going to say something about me, please say it to my face—so I can straighten you out. That’s the Orchard Park projects right there.

  At first the media were mainly focused on how old Whitney was and how young I was. And that I was the bad boy and she was this goody two-shoes. That one was so wrong because we were definitely compatible in every way. We were two young, rich kids who found each other and were falling in love. But I guess the world couldn’t accept that.

  Whitney was acutely aware of her image because that’s how she made her money. She was always neat about everything she did—the way she dressed, her hair, her skin. Whenever she got ready for anything she always had to look picture-perfect. I was the same way—I always wanted to look my best. We would have designers make clothes for us that sort of matched, so that when we walked in the room everyone would know we were a unit.

  During the first year or so of our courtship, we started talking about marriage, but in a general way—not necessarily getting married to each other. We acknowledged how hard it was in our industry to find someone you would want to be with for the rest of your life. We loved Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis and what they represented, having stayed together and apparently in love for decades, despite being in an industry that chewed up married couples and spit them out. We would get a thrill out of seeing them together in movies and then together in real life, how they carried themselves, how they treated each other. We really admired them. That’s how we looked at ourselves. We had a chance to meet them several times and they would also tell us they loved how we were together. The admiration was mutual.

  As I thought about our bond and my love for her, I decided that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her by my side. It was time to ask her to marry me. When I decided to propose, I went and had a conversation with her father. I wanted to do it old-school, like a perfect gentleman. I met with him in New York City and I told him my plans.

  What he said at first kind of threw me.

  “You sure she wants to marry you?” he asked me, looking a little surprised.

  I was thinking, Damn, why wouldn’t she—what the fuck is the matter with me?

  He looked at me closely. “I don’t trust you,” he said. “How much money you making?”

  I happened to have a bank stub with me showing my account balance that day. That particular account had several million dollars in it. He looked down at the stub and nodded his head. “All right. You can be with my daughter because you don’t need nothing from her,” he said.

  Then he kind of shrugged and said, “All right, if she wants to marry you. If y’all in love.”

  Then he paused and added one more thing.

  “Just treat my baby right,” he said.

  I nodded my head and told him I would.

  I didn’t plan anything elaborate for the proposal—but I did have one trick up my sleeve. I went to my jeweler and told him I was about to propose to Whitney Houston, so we had to come up with something special. He had these twenty-carat diamonds that were two of the cleanest cut stones in the world. One had a little yellow to it; the other was incredibly clean. I bought both of them for $250,000 each. I had him make the clean one into a beautiful ring. I put the other one in a safe. Then I got the idea to also get another ring, one that was still very nice but not nearly as impressive. It was just six carats. I think he actually gave it to me for free, after I had already spent a half mil on the other two.

  Whitney was in Miami, so I flew there to meet her. She picked me up at the airport; we were riding together in the backseat of the limo, snuggling close, glad to see each other. It was the middle of the day in April, so it was bright and sunny outside.

  I pulled the box out of my pocket and handed it to her. I saw her eyes starting to widen. As I said, we had been giving each other incredibly extravagant gifts for years, so this wasn’t the first time I had handed
her a jewelry box. But it was the first time I mouthed these words:

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes!” she said. She started crying as she opened the box. It was the smaller, six-carat ring. She held it and admired it as she sobbed.

  I had the twenty-carat monster on my finger.

  “Are you sure?” I said. I presented her with the real ring and she went nuts. It looked like a big lovely crystal ball on her finger, like you could look into that thing and see the future.

  “No, you didn’t!” she said, hitting me. “Why would you fuck with me like that!”

  It would have been even funnier if the first ring had been a puny little thing, but I couldn’t do that to her. That would have been too mean.

  I was excited as hell about the idea of spending my life with this lovely, incredibly talented goddess. Of course I knew there would be a lot of backlash. We had already gotten a significant taste of that. But I think I still believed that most people, when they saw how in love we were, how good we were for each other, how much fun we had together, would come around and support our union in the end. We wanted to be together. So we dated, we fell in love and now we were to get married. What could be wrong with that? After all, that was the proper order of things, right?

  Oh my God, wrong. Dead fucking wrong. From the moment we announced to the world that we were going to get married, we became the target of a media and public campaign that had the single goal of tearing us apart. Were we really the only ones in the world who wanted our marriage to succeed? Sometimes that’s exactly how it felt. But we decided that we weren’t going to let the negativity get to us. We wouldn’t give the outside world the satisfaction. They didn’t know anything about us, how close we were, how perfect we were together.