Every Little Step

by Bobby Brown

  Stories in the media said that Fulton County police officers came to our home at eight-thirty p.m. in response to the call. Whitney didn’t identify herself on the phone call. When police arrived, Whitney calmly told them that we had been arguing and it escalated into a physical confrontation that ended with me hitting her on the left side of her face with an open hand. The officer claimed that Whitney had a bruise on her cheek and a cut on the inside of her upper lip.

  The news stories made it look like I hopped on a flight to escape arrest, when I had actually left for the trip that Tommy and I had planned weeks before.

  In the end, as you saw if you watched our reality show, Being Bobby Brown, after Whitney refused to press charges, the matter was reduced down to a misdemeanor and a $2,000 fine. But the damage was already done; in the public’s mind I was Bobby Brown, Wife Beater.

  When I watched the interview Whitney later did with Oprah Winfrey, I was horrified. I felt like she threw me so far under the bus that I would never get out from under. She said I hit her and spit at her in front of Krissi, but that never happened. I never spit at her and my daughter was upstairs sleeping during the fight. But I sometimes wonder if the things that later happened to Krissi, the domestic abuse that she may have later suffered, perhaps was the universe in some way coming back to destroy me for raising my hand to her mother.

  That drunk-driving arrest from 1996 continued to haunt me over the course of the next decade, as I kept getting thrown into jail because the system decided again and again that I hadn’t abided by the terms of my probation. In 2004 I was sent to jail in DeKalb County, Georgia. I was especially hot over this one because I didn’t understand why I was still paying for a DUI from nearly ten years ago.

  My lawyer this time was a black woman named Phaedra Parks, who went on to become a reality television star on The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Her later television stardom didn’t surprise me because she always seemed like she was craving attention and publicity. Every time I stepped into the courtroom when she was my lawyer, there would always be a host of television cameras. It was as if she had her own traveling media contingent. I even complained to her about it, telling her I didn’t like having the press there every time I approached the courthouse. But it didn’t seem to deter her.

  I won’t cast aspersions on her lawyering skills, but I will say that when she was my lawyer, I usually wound up going to jail. I haven’t had much luck with my legal representation over the years.

  When it was determined that I had to spend thirty days in a Georgia prison for yet another probation violation, I was so damn frustrated. I did not think I deserved to be there. I thought I might get some help or at least a little leniency from the Fulton County district attorney, Paul Howard, considering that Whitney and I threw a campaign fund-raiser for him at our house that raised more than a million dollars—with more than a half million coming from my own bank account. But Howard refused to pardon me or take any kind of special interest in my case whatsoever. So much for the legal system tilting in favor of the rich and famous.

  From the second I walked into the prison in Decatur, the experience was different from Florida because I knew so many of the guys locked away. These were guys I had run into in clubs and bars around the city of Atlanta over the years. There were more black guys in the Georgia prison—no Aryans to worry about there. I was also treated better by the COs in Georgia—at least by the black COs. They would do little things to help me out, like sneaking me a cigarette now and then and letting me smoke, even though there wasn’t supposed to be smoking in the prison. The white COs were quite different; they had the attitude like the last thing in the world they would ever do is treat me better because I was Bobby Brown.

  Over the month I spent there, I had a job that allowed me to go outside as part of a small crew and sweep. I relished this outside time and felt fortunate that I had been assigned to the crew. When I was inside, we spent a lot of time playing spades. We played just as loudly and aggressively as we did back home, talking a whole bunch of smack. I also played a considerable amount of basketball, putting me in the best shape I had been in years.

  Whitney came to visit about three or four times over the month. As opposed to Florida, we were able to touch each other, though it couldn’t go any further than hugs, kisses and caresses because there was a CO standing over us the whole time. The visits took place in the warden’s conference room, which afforded us some privacy. I know the other inmates didn’t get to visit with family in the warden’s conference room, but it was much more for Whitney than me. They wanted to keep her away from the prying eyes of the other visitors.

  The food was the same nasty crap that I got in Florida, this time with no special deliveries on Friday. But we did get pizza on Friday, which wasn’t bad. Wednesdays it was chicken cacciatore—I still have the schedule committed to memory all these years later. Because I had plenty of money in my commissary, I was able to gather the ingredients to make a special jail soup that I learned to love. You needed Slim Jims, cheese sticks, Cup-a-Soup, Doritos and some hot water. You would bite the Slim Jims and the cheese sticks into little pieces and put them inside the Cup-a-Soup. Then you’d crush up the Doritos and put them in the cup, along with some hot water. You put a book on top of the cup and let it sit for ten to fifteen minutes. Once it was done, it was this delicious mix of cheesy, crunchy pepperoni soup. I got so addicted to it that after I got out I continued to make it for about two weeks. Then one day in the middle of preparing my jail soup, I stopped.

  “What the fuck am I doing?” I said out loud. There was no reason for me to eat jail soup, and I hoped I’d never have to again.

  After I got out, strangely I didn’t want anything to do with human contact. It’s odd because at the same time I craved sex and intimacy, just like the stereotype of the just-released felon. But the dichotomy is that while you want sex, you don’t want anybody to touch you. In jail, nobody touches each other; you don’t even shake hands. You come out in a weird state, both repelled by and drawn to touch. I would take long drives in the car with the sunroof open and all of the windows rolled down, staring at the trees and feeling the strong breeze on my face. I just wanted fresh air.

  Starting the Reality Show Wave: Being Bobby Brown

  When I was about to get out of prison, my family members started urging me to do a reality show. My kids had seen Flavor Flav’s show, so they thought it would be fun for me to do my own. My brother, Tommy, also thought it would be a great way for me to show the public what I’m really like. When he first proposed the idea to me, while I was still behind bars in Georgia, I was reluctant. Why would I want to let the world into my private life when we had spent so many years trying to keep the world out? It didn’t sound right to me. But then I started thinking about my desire to clear my name, to show the public that they were wrong about me.

  I was also thinking about my future. I was clean and free, pleased to be moving forward with the rest of my life, with fresh eyes. I was happy to be going home, happy to be with my beautiful wife again, happy to be with my kids.

  “Why don’t we just film it?” Tommy said. “You’re being real about everything in your life. Let the public see the real you.”

  We hooked up with Tracey Baker-Simmons, who became an executive producer, and we started filming. Eventually we sold the show to Bravo, who quickly jumped on it. My thinking was, let’s just film everything, so that nothing could be misconstrued or taken out of context. I wanted to be out in the open about everything.

  I had read so many articles that made me look like this beast, this asshole, this person who didn’t respect anyone or anything. I had even seen people calling me a pimp. I thought it was outrageous, crazy. I was just a loving husband and loving father. My life wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t perfect, but I wanted the public to see who I really was.

  Originally my wife was not even supposed to be a part of the show. I know she told Oprah that she appeared on the show because I asked her, but that wasn�
��t true. When we first started planning it, the cameras were just going to follow me around. But after I got out of jail, Whitney didn’t want to leave my side. Every time I planned to film, she wanted to be there. So even though it wasn’t planned as an examination of our marriage, that’s what the show became. When we went out to dinner together, or traveled to the Bahamas or London, it became a show about our zany relationship.

  Though a lot of the television critics blasted the show, the ratings were huge when it first aired in the summer of 2005. Whitney and I had been public figures for a long time and our marriage, thirteen years old at this point, had become a permanent fixture in American pop culture—but for all the wrong reasons. It was clear that the public was eager to see what it looked like on the inside, since for so many years the view they got of us was provided by gossip columnists and tabloid magazines. One of Whitney’s favorite expressions, “Hell to the no,” even entered the public consciousness and became a permanent part of American pop culture.

  People wondered whether we were embarrassed by our depiction on the show, but we laughed our ass off throughout the whole thing. Not only was it fun to do, it was therapy for us. We had a chance to see how we acted around each other, how we responded to situations, the mistakes we made. But all along, we were just being ourselves. If people thought Whitney was something different, they got a clear glimpse of who my ex-wife was through that show. She was a down-ass, horny chick. She was the woman I loved; I was the man she loved. That’s what the show was about—not drugs or anything else. We basically loved, lusted after and adored each other for real, in so many ways. We enjoyed each other’s company tremendously. We laughed, we talked, we screwed, we did everything together. And it was beautiful. Everybody else tried to make it into something strange or laughable or ridiculous, but it wasn’t. Whitney later told Oprah Winfrey that I was her drug. And I can honestly say the same was true of me—she was my drug. When you watch the show closely, you see that at its base the show is about how difficult it can be to be in love and be famous.

  As far as how the show affected her “image,” I don’t really think Whitney saw her image of being America’s sweetheart as something different from her true self. If anybody knew her, they knew Whitney was for real, straight up and to the point with anything she talked about, anything she had to say. There was no biting her tongue for anybody. That’s who she was. She wasn’t going to pretend to be something different or put on any airs. The way she thought was, As long as I’m sharp, as long as I look good when I walk out of this motherfuckin’ room, then we’re good. That’s how we both felt—as long as we took care of our business, nothing else mattered.

  In one telling sequence, she revealed her thoughts about what the public was watching:

  “He’s a nut,” she said to viewers during the show after I did something silly. “But nobody knew that she was, so it’s exciting to see.”

  It was never my plan for the show to make people think I’m a better person than I really am. No, the goal was just to show who I am.

  A FEW WORDS FROM TOMMY BROWN

  In the years leading up to the taping of the show, my relationship with Bobby changed considerably from what it had been when we were younger. He was married and focusing his energies on Whitney and his family. He didn’t need me as a manager anymore because I didn’t have anything to manage. He just stopped working. I thought it was a mistake at the time, but I couldn’t fault him for wanting to take care of his family. He saw the way Whitney’s affairs were being mishandled, how people were taking advantage of her, and he wanted to fix all of that. She was his wife—how can you argue with that? I thought he could have continued working on some of his own stuff too, but I respected his choices.

  And if her business affairs were going to be fixed, he was the right person to do it. One thing I always felt Bobby didn’t get any credit for was his business smarts. He might not have graduated from high school, but from the beginning Bobby was always extremely shrewd and visionary when it came to his business affairs. He’s brilliant. There are a lot of things he’s influenced in this industry that people just aren’t aware of—like moving to Atlanta more than twenty years ago and starting a label and a studio in the South because he saw that’s where the growth in the industry was going to take place.

  In the beginning I didn’t see the shrewdness. He would tell me to go and ask for this and this and this when I was negotiating for him, and I wouldn’t always do it because I thought he was asking for too much. And then I would look back a year or two later and see that I should have done what he told me to do. He’d say, “Man, didn’t I tell you to ask for this?” So I learned to carry out his wishes because he might be seeing something that no one else could see yet. As he would always say, “You’re not going to get it if you don’t ask.”

  The purpose of the show was to reveal another side of my brother, so I didn’t go into it thinking about how it was going to make Whitney look because I didn’t even think she was going to be involved. Of course they’re a married couple so I knew she would be some kind of presence in the show, but I thought it would be very limited. I never expected her to be in almost every scene. When she kept showing up during the taping and not always presenting herself in the best light, I called her people and asked them if they perhaps wanted to become more involved. I was thinking, Who’s in charge of her side of the fence—can you give me a little help?

  Anybody who knew Whitney was aware of the fact that you weren’t going to control her. I couldn’t tell her what to do. But when I called her agent about what was going on, there wasn’t much of a change. They asked for right of refusal for the editing of the show, which we gave them. So what you saw on that show had been approved by Whitney’s team. They signed off on everything that was aired. In the few instances where we had a disagreement, it was usually about something that we thought should stay in because it presented Whitney in a more positive light.

  When it was clear that Whitney’s side wasn’t going to get very involved, we took it upon ourselves to make sure her makeup looked right and to try to make her look as good as we could. There were things we edited out ourselves to try to make her look better. But if her people were really concerned about her and her image, it seems like they would have had somebody there on set representing their client. We didn’t do anything sneaky or exploitative. We were just rolling the camera. I’ve heard people say the show ruined her career. While I don’t agree with that, I will say her management made no effort to stop it or to help her. And one thing everyone took away from the show was the love between Bobby and Whitney. People saw genuine love, even if many of them wound up picking a side and saying, “Wow, she needs more help than he does.”

  I think what happened was Whitney was yearning to express her natural self to the world. That’s why she was so eager to be a part of Being Bobby Brown. She was itching for the world to know she wasn’t fitting inside the body that they had molded for her. It was like her declaration—“I’m tired of Miss Prissy. That’s not who I really am.” She no longer wanted to be trapped by her image.

  A FEW WORDS FROM LAPRINCIA BROWN

  I hated Being Bobby Brown. Everybody said it was so good, so funny. To me, it was so embarrassing. I was only on two episodes because a lot of it was filmed during the school year and I couldn’t miss that time from school. But the show didn’t give the best impression of my siblings either; it didn’t tell people who they really were. It also came at a bad time for me to have my family on a TV show—I was fourteen when it started filming, but I was almost sixteen by the time the show finally aired.

  That’s when I started getting more snappy with my father. We had always been so close; I could tell him something and he would listen to me. Even when I was really young, when the bill would come and my dad would pay for everybody—he always pays for everything for everybody—I would say, “All of these are adults. How come they can’t pay for themselves?” I would say this out loud, to a table filled with fa
mily members and friends, when I was about eleven or so. I just feel like everyone leeched off him for so long. He’s your little brother—he shouldn’t have to be taking care of you and all your children. That’s a lot of pressure to be under when you’re dealing with your own stuff.

  I think I was the only one who would say stuff like that to him. Nobody else would tell him these things. I was very protective of him. And when I said them, nobody would tell me, “Hey, you’re a child. You shouldn’t be saying that—stay in your lane.” I guess you could say I was a brat, but I feel like it was in the best way possible. I’ve learned to filter it now that I’m older; I know I can’t go around saying things like that out loud. But at the same time I feel like too many people are walking on eggshells around my dad. I feel like over time, if you become this really famous person when you’re fourteen and you’re supporting everyone and paying everyone’s bills, they rely on you for all of that. So they’re not going to be honest with you all the time. He needed more honesty in his life. You don’t need somebody sitting there and just saying, “Yeah, Bobby!” You need somebody saying, “No!” That’s how we end up in bad situations.

  At a summer camp before I was about to go into fifth grade was the first time I heard anyone say anything about my dad and drugs. Some kid called me a “crack baby.” I was nine, so I had no idea what he was talking about. I remember thinking, What’s a crack baby? I figured it out later on when I started reading the tabloids and going on the Internet. When I saw all the stuff about my dad and Whitney doing drugs, I remembered what that kid had called me. Ooohhh, that’s what he was talking about.

  When I was about eleven, we went to Disney World in Florida and I got a taste of how funny and crazy my dad and Whitney could be together. One of the rides we went on was called Tower of Terror. After we got off the ride and were walking through the park, Whitney pointed to this guy who was on a different ride and said he was making a demon face. Later that day I was talking to them and said something about the Tower of Terror ride we had gone on.