Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped

by Houston, Cissy

  Yet Nippy always had a sense of responsibility about it. No matter how tired she was, or how much her throat was bothering her, or how much she just wanted to stay at home with Bobby and little Krissi, she always came through for her fans. She gave her all, night after night after night.

  Because he’d come into the business as a child, Bobby had a different attitude about these things. He’d tell Nippy she didn’t have to go to work if she didn’t want to, even though she’d made a commitment—that she didn’t have to serve “the Man.” After he finished his “Humpin’ Around” tour, Bobby was taking it easy, and he told Nippy she should, too.

  Once, I was with Bobby and Nippy when she had been tired and complaining. He started urging her to renege on one of her commitments, and I let him know exactly what I thought about it.

  Nippy had been booked to sing several nights running in an Atlantic City casino after the release of The Bodyguard. But when the movie turned out to be such a huge success, Nippy did so much press and performing that the last thing she wanted was to go sing three nights in a row in a casino. She never liked those kinds of venues, and the money really wasn’t worth it.

  Atlantic City was just a two-hour drive from my house, so I went to see Nippy while she was there. We were all in the hotel together, and Nippy was complaining about having to do those shows. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I just wish I didn’t have to do them.” I was all for Nippy taking time off when she needed to, but once she’d made a commitment, she needed to honor it. And I told her that.

  When Nippy left the room for a minute, Bobby piped up. “She doesn’t have to do these shows. What are they gonna do, blackball her?” He puffed himself up and said, “They tried to blackball me, and I’m still here.”

  I just lowered my chin and looked straight at him. “Mmm-hmm,” I said. “And where are you working now?”

  Bobby didn’t like that too much, because he apparently complained to Nippy about it. She came up to me later that night, trying not to giggle, and said, “Ma! What did you say to Bobby? You hurt his feelings!” We both just burst out laughing. She loved him, but she knew when he was being ridiculous.

  In October 1994, Nippy got the tremendous honor of singing at the White House. That would have been amazing enough for anyone, but even better was that she was going to sing at a State Dinner for one of her personal heroes, Nelson Mandela.

  Nippy really cared about the struggles black people were facing in South Africa, and she had for some time. As I mentioned earlier, when she was modeling as a teenager, she wouldn’t work with companies that invested in the apartheid regime. She was also one of the first artists to commit to performing at Nelson Mandela’s seventieth-birthday concert in 1988, when he was still in prison. Not only did she perform there, but she actually canceled a concert date in Italy and flew specially to London to do it.

  Mandela, who had since been released from prison and elected president of South Africa, knew about Nippy’s dedication to his cause. As much as she was a fan of his, he was a fan of hers, too. So when she came to that State Dinner and sang “People,” “Love’s in Need of Love,” and “The Greatest Love,” Mandela gave Nippy a big hug, and then asked her if she would come to South Africa to perform. Nippy couldn’t say yes fast enough. She agreed to do three concerts in November 1994, which would make her the first major artist to perform in post-apartheid South Africa.

  The mini-tour of three shows was named “Whitney—The Concert for a New South Africa,” and Nippy pledged to donate all her proceeds from ticket sales to children’s charities there, including orphanages and a museum that was led by people who’d taught black children to read during the time when teaching them was against the law. And because the Welcome Home Heroes concert had been such a success, HBO wanted to film one of her concerts in South Africa for another special. Nippy agreed, and so plans were made for her second concert, held at Ellis Park in Johannesburg, to be televised live.

  Nippy asked me to come with her, but at first I didn’t want to do it. I’ve never liked airplane travel, and Africa was a long way away. But when I thought about it, I realized how important all of this was. Nippy was going to perform the first live show for an integrated audience in South Africa—that was a big deal, so I agreed to come over for the concert in Johannesburg.

  Before I arrived, Nippy was scheduled to do a press conference and a show in Durban. She had the chance to meet Nelson Mandela’s family there, including his daughter Zindzi. She and Nippy hit it off, and Zindzi took her to Soweto to show her the house she grew up in, where Nelson Mandela lived with his family before his arrest in 1962. It was a humble house, with cement floors and holes in the walls, and Zindzi showed her where the family used to sit and have dinner in the tiny dining room, such as it was. Nippy was so moved, she and Zindzi just held each other and wept.

  Nippy had never been to South Africa before this trip, but she felt a kinship with the land and its people that changed her. At a press conference she gave, announcing her donation to the children’s museum, she teared up again as she spoke. “When I was a little girl,” she told the crowd, “Africa was a place on a map for me. Now, it’s a place in my heart.”

  Even so, South Africa was still a troubled place, and before the first concert in Durban, there were rumors of death threats. Apparently, people weren’t unhappy with Nippy, but with how the concerts had been put together—who was investing and who was making money. There was some talk of delaying that first concert, but the security team convinced everyone they had things under control. Even so, when there weren’t enough tickets for everyone, crowds gathered outside the stadium and threatened to riot. Nippy just went out there and did her thing, as she always did. She would never let all those people down—not after how many decades they had waited for a show like hers.

  Johannesburg was next, and that was where I joined Nippy. I wasn’t even over jet lag yet when she and I, along with our friends and family traveling with us, were invited to meet with Nelson Mandela at his office.

  I’ll tell you something, Nelson Mandela is an impressive man. I could see why everybody loved him—he was a flirt, telling Nippy and me how beautiful we were and just laughing and smiling all the time. He told us about what it was like in prison, and how he survived it, and I told him how much my ex-husband John had always admired him.

  “John couldn’t come on this trip because he’s been sick,” I told Mandela. “He was so disappointed, because you have always been one of his heroes.”

  “Really?” Mandela asked. “What’s his number?” And as we sat right there in his office, he picked up the phone and made the call. When John answered, he said, “Hello, John. It’s Nelson Mandela here.”

  We couldn’t see or hear John, of course, but I have no doubt that he just about fell out when he heard Mandela’s voice. “I’m so sorry you couldn’t be here with us!” Mandela said, then corrected himself. “Well, I’m a little bit sorry, but not really sorry. Because this way, I have both of these beautiful women all to myself!”

  Mandela talked to John for about five minutes, kidding him about Nippy and me and going on and on about Nippy’s smile. That call must have made John’s day—how many people get a call from Nelson Mandela while they’re having their morning cup of coffee?

  President Mandela was as warm and welcoming as he could be, and he treated us like old friends. But I have to say, I was just as impressed with Winnie Mandela, whom we met separately because they were no longer together. Winnie and I got along like a house on fire, and when someone asked me later what she was like, I said, “Like me.” Winnie was tough. She didn’t take no mess, and that’s what I really liked about her.

  At one event, I was standing nearby when a man asked Winnie about the kinds of things she’d done during the struggle for South Africa’s independence. And Winnie looked right at him and said, “If I thought my mother had betrayed the people, and she came through that door
right now, I would do all I could to destroy her.” She was a fighter through and through, and you didn’t have to spend very long with Winnie to understand what she was willing to do for her cause. I had to respect that.

  The final concert was in Cape Town, and Bobby made a surprise visit. He hadn’t been able to come for the first two concerts because of his own work commitments, but in the middle of that third show he walked out onstage—and Nippy looked stunned. Bobby and Nippy sat down on the stage steps and sang together, and it was a lovely moment between them. He stayed to the end of the trip, and of all the times I saw them together, this was one of the happiest I can remember—because soon, happy times like these were harder to come by.

  CHAPTER 13

  “I Know Him So Well”

  After The Bodyguard, people in Hollywood weren’t worried anymore about whether Whitney Houston could act. So when the writer Terry McMillan was making her novel Waiting to Exhale into a movie, she got in touch with Nippy to ask her to be in it.

  At first, Terry wanted Nippy to be Bernadine Harris, a woman whose husband was leaving her for another woman, but when Nippy read the script, she decided she wanted to play Savannah Jackson, a TV producer who was in a relationship with a married man. The producers had already offered that role to Angela Bassett, but Nippy felt she was more suited to play the role of Savannah than Bernadine, so she got down to business trying to make that happen.

  Nippy sent Terry a dozen roses—her favorites, Sterling Silver roses with a touch of purple. She included a note that simply said, “I’m Savannah.” When Terry got back to her, she agreed: “Okay, Whitney, you can be anybody you want, if you’ll just be in my movie!”

  The production budget for Waiting to Exhale was small, just about $16 million. After The Bodyguard, Nippy could have commanded more than half that amount just for herself, but she really wanted this movie to get made, so she agreed to take very little money up front. She was excited to get the chance to work with Angela Bassett, and with Forest Whitaker, who was directing.

  Of course, Nippy also wanted to do the soundtrack. Clive Davis wanted her to record the entire album herself, but Nippy had other ideas. She told Clive she’d do one side, but she wanted some other artists, including young up-and-coming singers, to contribute songs to the other side. She figured that if the whole movie was about women being empowered, why shouldn’t the soundtrack reflect that, too?

  It was here that Nippy brought in her business smarts. A few years earlier, she and Robyn Crawford, who’d been around all this time—first as Nippy’s executive assistant and now as her business partner—had founded a record label called Better Place Records. They had some bright young artists, with one in particular whom they wanted to highlight, and so they proposed having her do a song for the soundtrack. In the end, that record had a whole roster of great singers, mixing lesser-known artists with voices like Aretha, Mary J. Blige, Toni Braxton, Brandy, and Patti LaBelle. No matter what the movie did, Arista had to know that soundtrack was going to sell.

  As it turned out, the movie didn’t need any help. It opened at number one in December 1995, and it made money so fast that Nippy started getting residuals on the back end even before the film was out of theaters. It opened during the holiday season, and women all over the country were lining up to take their mothers, daughters, sisters, and girlfriends to see it. And the soundtrack album, released in January, did even better.

  The biggest single off that record was Nippy’s “Exhale (Shoop Shoop),” which came about in a funny way. Babyface was writing most of the songs for the movie, but for this one, he wrote the music and just the first few lines. He gave it to Nippy and asked her to add some more lyrics, but when he checked in again a week later, she still didn’t have anything. So when they started going over it, she just started singing, “Shoop, shoop,” in place of where the lyrics would go. And everybody liked it so much, Babyface wrote the rest of the song around that phrase.

  Nippy told me that she was having dinner with Forest Whitaker and the other girls from the movie—Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, and Lela Rochon—at the Ivy restaurant in Los Angeles, when she suddenly decided she wanted to play them the song. The only CD player they had was in Forest’s car, so they all just crowded in to listen. He turned the music up loud, and the five of them sat in the car listening, just like at the end of the movie. Nippy had a great time with those girls.

  In fact, she had a good time during that whole shoot. The movie was filmed in Phoenix, and she was there with Krissi, with Aunt Bae living there, too, to manage the house. I got to come visit—that’s where we did the Ebony cover shoot with Krissi. And John and Bobby came and spent some time, too, although they both tried to avoid the set on days when Nippy was filming love scenes. Neither one of them could take too much of that.

  Those months in Phoenix really were good ones for Nippy. She was in a good place in her life, and suddenly the issues between career and family, which only a few months earlier had been weighing down on her, didn’t feel as overwhelming. She wasn’t recording a new album every year anymore, and she seemed to have found a balance she’d been searching for between acting, singing, being the head of her own multimillion-dollar corporation, being a wife, and of course raising Krissi. She was doing projects that she was passionate about, and acting allowed for a different kind of schedule than touring and recording.

  Unfortunately, all that good feeling didn’t last, and it was shortly after she finished work on Waiting to Exhale that things started to get messy.

  With two big movies, Nippy was now in demand as an actress as much as a singer. After Waiting to Exhale, she was asked to star in The Preacher’s Wife, a Christmas movie about an angel who comes to earth to save a church and a marriage. The film was actually a remake of a movie called The Bishop’s Wife, which had starred Loretta Young, Cary Grant, and David Niven, and this new version was going to have a little bit of everything, including gospel music, a love story, a great director in Penny Marshall—and Denzel Washington, of course.

  Nippy really wanted to do the movie, but Bobby didn’t want her to. All during negotiations with the producers, he kept nagging at her not to do it, even though they were offering her $10 million, which would make her one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood. The producers were desperate, offering her whatever she wanted in hopes of getting that signature on their agreement.

  At one point, Nippy’s agent even came over to talk to Nippy and Bobby together, to explain what a great opportunity this was and try to get him on board. Now, ordinarily, Bobby didn’t dictate what projects she would do. Nippy would often ask him his opinion about her projects, but he rarely stood in her way. But for some reason, he was really vocal about not wanting her to do The Preacher’s Wife; it was one of the only times I can remember when they seemed seriously at odds over one of her career decisions.

  Nobody could figure out what Bobby’s problem was. Who would turn down a payday like that, for a holiday movie with a big star like Denzel? It just didn’t make any sense—unless in Bobby’s mind, Denzel was actually the problem. During one screening of The Bodyguard, Bobby had actually left the theater during scenes where Nippy’s and Kevin Costner’s characters were kissing. He just couldn’t take it—he was too jealous. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Bobby was jealous of Denzel, too, and maybe intimidated by him. Denzel was handsome, accomplished, and one of the most beloved actors around. And Bobby, like many men, might have been too insecure to want his wife to be around that.

  But after weeks of back-and-forth, Bobby finally gave in. Nippy signed on to do the movie, and I was offered a small role, too, as the choir director Mrs. Havergal. Even though we didn’t have much screen time together, I was excited to be in a movie with my daughter, especially with all that gospel music and a church theme. I thought it would be fun—and most of it was. But as I found out later, Nippy was apparently struggling with drugs the whole time during that movie.


  Even now, I don’t really know what went on during the filming of that movie, or what Nippy was on. What I’ve been told by people who were there is that she had begun using drugs more frequently. Yet while it was apparently bad, it never interfered to the point of causing her to miss a shoot or be unprofessional—which would have been the only way that I could have found out about it. Whatever Nippy was doing, she certainly kept it out of my sight. Because not only did I not see any drugs, I also never saw any evidence of them in her behavior.

  We had a lot of early-morning call times, and it was hard and tiring—you’d have to get up at two in the morning, get ready, and then they might not call you to shoot until five. Nippy had never been a morning person in her whole life, and she didn’t start now. I knew she was sometimes late, and that she missed a few call times, but I really didn’t think anything of it—those call times were one aspect of moviemaking that she always hated, and on each of her movies, there were moments during filming when she was late to the set. But that didn’t seem so unusual. You know, I didn’t particularly like getting up at 2 a.m., either, and it wasn’t because I was doing any kind of drug.

  Doing The Preacher’s Wife was very emotional for me, because the music was dear to my heart. Nippy sang all the songs beautifully—and they were songs I loved to hear her sing. And I got to do one, too: “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” with the Hezekiah Walker Choir. For me, that whole period is one I remember happily. I had no idea how bad it already was with her, or how much worse it was about to become.

  The Preacher’s Wife came out in December 1996, and for one reason or another, I didn’t see Nippy for a while after that. She shot the TV movie Cinderella in the spring, but it was an incident afterward, in the summer of 1997, that I believe changed things for her.