Deadly Love: Bobby & Whitney (2024) Movie Script
One, two, three, four,
we dont want your stupid war.
Five, six, seven, eight...
- As midnight draws closer,
the anti-war protests grow,
countered by the president's supporters.
Saddam Hussein is a dangerous man.
If we do not take care of him now
and stop his aggression, we will have
to pay a very heavy price in the future.
If it does come to war, officials here
say, the president's inclined to order
an attack sooner rather than later.
He's said to be at peace with himself,
ready to make the tough
decisions that are necessary.
1991 was a memorable year
for the USA and its citizens.
At the time, America was in the Gulf War.
A lot of people had sons and daughters overseas.
It was a time of great patriotism.
And at the same time, you know, any
time you're at war, there's a deep insecurity and fear.
In the hours since we
suspended military operations
in the Kuwaiti theater of
war, considerable progress
has been made in moving towards
a ceasefire and postwar planning.
As our forces moved into Kuwait City, and
as the faces of these jubilant Kuwaiti citizens
have warmed our hearts,
the coalition leaders started
the arduous task of addressing the next stages
of the Persian Gulf situation.
The United States was at war in Iraq.
It was Operation Desert Storm.
And there was a lot of patriotism in the air.
It was still the first Bush administration.
And the U.S. hadn't been at war in a very long time.
So there was a lot of support for the war.
And Whitney Houston performed the
Star-Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl.
And it was just such an obviously phenomenal
performance that she released
it, and it became a chart hit.
The moment in time I remember, everyone remembers,
1991, Whitney's rendition
of Star-Spangled Banner, was
absolutely flawless, beautiful, and effortless.
She still looked so youthful.
And she rocked up, a little bow in
her hair, a tracksuit or a
jumpsuit, looking very girly.
And wow, who could have expected
what was going to come out of her mouth?
It was a difficult time for the United States.
The first Gulf War had just started.
I think it was about eight,
nine, ten days old at that point.
And she came in and she gave this
rendition of the American National Anthem, which is
generally recognized to be the finest rendition of
the Star-Spangled Banner that has
ever been performed by any artist.
And Whitney got up dressed in this tracksuit
in red, white, and blue, just the epitome
of youth and beauty, and opened her
mouth and sang, to this day I cry every
time I hear it, the most beautiful rendition
of the Star-Spangled Banner that
has ever been done before or since.
In fact, it was so popular that they
actually released it as a single, as a
single on the music charts, because
everybody wanted a copy of it.
It was the best-selling
Star-Spangled Banner of all time.
And Whitney donated all of the profits to
the Gulf Relief Fund and the Red Cross.
Never before had a National Anthem been released
and zoomed into the top five.
It was a huge achievement and no wonder.
And again, Americans just kept loving her more.
That was their song.
This was their girl.
And she was hugely patriotic.
I really don't care what anyone says.
I don't think anyone has ever sung
Star-Spangled Banner like Whitney did.
And I've always said that.
And, you know, she has owned that one rendition of that.
Every single other person that's come and sung
it, I don't remember except her one.
She completely nailed it.
Everyone was just like... This
was, and is now, still one of
the greatest moments in NFL history.
It was a defining moment in Whitney's career.
If she wasn't before the Star-Spangled Banner,
after she sang that, she was America's darling
for doing such an extraordinary job on such
a significant song at such an important time.
And that's what it was with Whitney.
Whenever she opened her mouth
and sang, you were transfixed.
Even if you had any prior reservations for
stories you read in the press or whatever
they tried to say about her or whatever
negative, when she sang, it was over.
You had nothing to say.
You just had to just say, speechless.
Life growing up for Whitney
Houston was kind of normal.
Her parents lived in a pretty middle-class
area, very respectfully involved with the church.
Her dad was an army serviceman.
It was happy.
And she was loved.
And their life really was all about the church.
Now, this means that they had a
huge extended family around them.
And she was in no two minds what was important.
And it was her mum, her dad, her family and religion.
Whitney Houston, from a musical point of view,
had the upbringing we can only dream about,
surrounded by some of the
greatest talents of our time.
Her mother, Sissy Houston, was a great vocalist
with the group The Sweet Inspirations, who had
a hit called Sweet Inspiration,
who backed Elvis Presley.
And as a backing singer, she backed Aretha
Franklin, most famously on a song called Ain't No Way.
If you just take time out to listen to
that and hear those high notes, you
will know where Whitney came from.
Oh, but how can I, how can I, how can I
Give ya all I can
If youre tyin both of my hands
Whoa-ho it aint no way
Several similarities, really,
between Bobby and Whitney was
he, too, began singing in church.
I mean, from a very, very small age.
And he, like her, was recognized
for his extraordinarily beautiful voice.
And he formed his first band called New
Edition when he was only 12 years old.
Candy girl, you are my world
You look so sweet, youre my special treat
In 1983, New Edition released
their first album called Candy Girl.
And the band became an overnight sensation.
It seemed that Bobby's extraordinary talent and the
way he'd been nurtured through church, right through
into starting his band as a
teenager, was bearing fruit.
Despite his success, Bobby
didn't feel he'd got the rewards.
When he left New Edition in 1986, he
famously said that all he'd made
out of the band was $500 in a VCR.
He felt, and these are his words, that
he'd been treated like a slave by the
record company, that he'd simply been exploited.
But, of course, he was used to success,
and it must have come as an enormous
shock and disappointment to him when his first
solo album sold very modestly and was nowhere
near as acclaimed as the first album
he'd done in 1983 with New Edition.
After the failure of his first solo album,
Bobby Brown went and worked with the R
&B producers Teddy Riley, L.A. Reid and Babyface.
And the result was an album which was
released to extraordinary critical acclaim.
It sold more than 7 million copies.
And his determination to overcome the failure of
his first album and his new beginnings with
these three producers seemed to have borne fruit
and he seemed to be on a trajectory of success.
Brown's high-powered,
sexually charged music and live
performances earned him
comparisons to his childhood hero
and idol, Michael Jackson.
This album spawned him five top ten hits
on the Billboard Hot 100,
including the single, My Prerogative.
This fight, sing
Everybodys talking all this stuff about me
Why dont they just let me live?
Tell me why
I dont need permission, make my own decisions
Thats my prerogative Its my prerogative
Its the way that I wanna
live Its my prerogative
But Bobby had his demons.
He was a hard drinker, and when he
was touring, his partying became legendary.
He began filling more new space for his
lifestyle, for his excessive
lifestyle, than he did for his music.
And of course, that was something that was
to become ever more prominent as a relationship
with Whitney Houston developed.
When Whitney Houston first appeared on the scene,
her voice captivated the world.
You know, someone has said before the invention
of auto-tune, there was Whitney Houston.
And if you think about how many artists
today are helped a bit in the studio
and go back to some of those clean,
pure vocals of Whitney's five
octave voice, it is just astounding.
Her gift was undeniable.
Whitney Houston was a pop producer's dream.
Now we're used to manufactured girls, boys coming
out who look perfect, and we kind of
know that they won't be able to sing
very well.
Whitney Houston had the face, the body, the
charm, that way where she was
so charismatic she filled the room.
So she looked like a supermodel.
She had the voice of an angel
that was massively versatile.
She had it all going on.
It was almost as if it was too good to be true.
I would like to think that what I
have, what has been God given to me,
would have gotten me into it anyway.
It's one thing having your mom and your
cousin being so successful in the business, but
it's something that you have to do on your own.
You have to establish your own abilities.
It's great to have them as my
family and it got me a lot of places,
but I'd like to think I could do it on my own.
As well as being a young singer,
Whitney became a model too.
In fact, she was the first black female
to grace the cover of Seventeen magazine in America.
This was huge.
And yes, she's known as The Voice,
but my goodness, she had the face too.
People forget just with how drugs and alcohol
took the toll on her, just how
beautiful she was as a young singer.
Back in, I believe it was 1983, she
was discovered, as much as you could be
discovered when you have that many connections, it
was the old-fashioned way.
Arista Records sent out an A&R
to see her perform at a nightclub and a
meeting was set up.
Then it led to her releasing her first
record and being on the Merv Griffin
show and it just took off from there.
Like yours, like, like mine
Like home
Home
Her voice was just more pop, but it didn't lose the soul.
She still had soul in it, but it was a pop voice.
And so she had this kind of ethereal,
pure sound with her voice
and it was very, very different.
It was very refreshing.
Early on, MTV was, for the most part,
playing specifically white rock bands.
Michael Jackson famously was unable
to get on MTV for a very long time.
How Will I Know, which was Whitney's third
US single, went to number one and was
really the first time that a young African
American woman was all over MTV.
That video was massively successful.
It was on constantly and it really cemented
Whitney's presence in mainstream America.
How will I know if he really loves me?
I say a prayer with every heartbeat
I fall in love whenever we meet
Im asking you cause you know about these things
How will I know? - How Will I Know was the voice
of any teen, 20-something girl who
was so enthusiastic about what was to come in life.
How will I know if he really loves me?
That's what we all want to know.
And Whitney was asking the question herself, too,
because she hadn't met her Mr. Right.
And many of her songs are autobiographical.
This one included the optimism of it.
You can see her now in that pop video, dancing around.
And I do think that it really captured
the innocent Whitney that we know who was
looking forward to life, finding Mr. Right and
all the successes she was about to enjoy.
I knew Bobby and we used to hang out in London.
This is just before he met Whitney.
You know, Bobby was sort of coming down
from prerogative and New Edition and all of
that was kind of going down a bit at that time.
But he was still very, very popular.
And we used to hang out in London and he was great.
And Bobby was the right character.
He was a nutter.
Contrary to all the stories you hear
about people, he's a really nice guy.
We had fun and he was very grounded.
And we took him around Brixton and stuff.
We wanted to hang with the
homies and we had fun, you know.
And then I remember when he came back
to London again, he had just met
Whitney and he was going on and on about
how amazing she is.
You know, he's really in love with her.
And he was really, really, he really fell for her hard.
When Whitney met Bobby
Brown, interestingly enough, they
met at like the Soul Train Awards.
This was a celebration of
blacks in the music industry.
And Whitney, who was probably a little bit
insecure about whether or not she was quote
unquote black enough for her peers, I think
she was a little insecure going into that.
Now, Bobby Brown at the time was really
at the top of all the R&B charts.
He was about as successful and popular as
any young African-American
artist could be at that time.
Everybody forgets that when Whitney met Bobby, he
was just about as successful as she was.
You know, he was very popular.
And he had all this confidence and swagger.
Whitney was almost immediately drawn to him.
She said, you know, men are intimidated by me.
Men are threatened by me.
But Bobby understood all I really wanted was love.
We had this dynamic where this very strong,
powerful woman meets a man who is
not afraid to put her in her place and
she finds it a turn on.
In some ways also, Bobby validated
Whitney's African -American roots.
You know, he made her more connected to
that community because of the fact that he
was so associated with the R&B charts.
At the same time, Whitney elevated him to
a huge degree, put him on an international
scale of fame by being associated with him.
One thing we all need as people is a witness.
We just want someone to see us,
not as who we pretend to be or who
they imagine us to be, but who we truly, really are.
And for artists, for people who live in
the public eye, that is
especially difficult because
everybody wants a piece of them.
Everybody wants them to be whatever they need
to be in order that they can feed
off the artist's fame, their
celebrity, their money, whatever.
But what Whitney saw in Bobby and I
think the connection was she
just felt she could just be herself.
She didn't have to pretend anymore.
She had to be something she wasn't.
She could simply be who she really
believed and knew herself to be.
Although on paper it doesn't work, Bobby Brown
and Whitney got on so well because
he treated her like a normal girl.
And she said that many guys were
just so scared of her and wanted to be
overly nice that she was massively attracted to
this guy who was gentlemanly
but had nothing to prove.
And she says that all he knew she needed was love.
There was chemistry, full stop.
Of course it shouldn't have worked, but how
many girls know they shouldn't have gone out
with a bad guy but can't help that
feeling, that gut feeling, that you're just for
some reason attracted to him,
that you want to be with him.
She was magnetized to him.
He was a total laughter.
He was funny.
He was really funny.
I brought him back to my house
to meet my mum and stuff like that.
My mum cooked him Jamaican food and the
bodyguards and we had a right laugh.
He was lovely.
There was no two ways about it.
They were good people and I thought it
was great that he was starting to date her.
I thought it was fine that you didn't
think it was a strange thing at all
outside of the media I'm talking.
To everyone else it was like, God, what's that about?
Why are they together?
But he's funny.
So I can imagine that Whitney, who's always
been around the gowns and all of that
life and stuff like that, he must
have been a right laugh for her.
She was like, oh yeah, I'm going to have fun now.
This is great.
Each of us has a deep need.
Every human being has a deep need to
live as authentically as we possibly can.
We want to be affirmed as who we are.
We want to be affirmed in the identity
that we believe is ours, our right to choose.
And we want to be seen for who we are.
And there's nothing more
destructive psychologically than the
cognitive dissonance that
comes when we are pretending
to be one person when we are really another.
And not only was that the case with
Whitney when it came to this angelic image
of her as some innocent, pure Christian girl
and that fed into her connection with Bobby,
who she felt allowed her to be her authentic self.
It also, perhaps at an even deeper level,
related to her relationship with her assistant, who
she'd met when she was 16, called Robin Crawford.
And Whitney entered into a
gay relationship with Robin.
And of course, the few things at
that time, it's only, what, 30 years ago?
At that time, there were deeply homophobic times.
And for a woman of Whitney's background to
be in a gay relationship would have been
deemed unacceptable by all those closest to her.
It was widely known in show business
that Whitney and Robin were together.
And this was not some kind of scandalous pickup.
They'd known each other from high school.
They were best friends all the way through
adolescence, and there were all kinds of rumors
about a relationship between Whitney and Robin.
In fact, Robin was actually
working for Whitney for a time.
She was like an assistant, and they were together.
Bobby alluded to this himself when he looked
back on the marriage, kind of implying that
one of the reasons Whitney married him was
to combat these lesbian rumors, because it wouldn't
do at that time for America's sweetheart to be gay.
Most of the rumors in Whitney Houston's case
have been confirmed by very close sources, such
as her bodyguard, family members.
I mean, as hard as it was for Whitney
Houston to be a black woman, you
know, taking American
mainstream by storm, imagine if
she was a black lesbian woman.
It certainly, at that time particularly, would have
been very difficult, if not impossible, to win
over, you know, the very reactionary Middle America.
So if you were saying, like Whitney did,
that I am a good girl, I'm an
honest girl, I'm an all-American girl, I
am who I say I am, I'm a
heterosexual girl, when
you're saying all those things
to the world, and the truth might be
slightly different, that
creates all kinds of problems,
particularly when you have
a religious upbringing like
she did, because what it means is she's
not just being dishonest to other people and
dishonest to herself, she's
also being dishonest to God.
Anyone in a loving relationship wants to spend
time with their partner,
and Whitney was no different.
She spent more and more time with Robin,
and friends and family grew more and more
concerned about the impact this would have on
her public image, and the tabloids began running
stories on it, because they felt there was
something in this, that the sweet, nice, natural,
pure Whitney Houston was not as nice, natural
and pure as people imagined, and the homophobia
behind that type of reporting
was very prevalent at the time.
And it became exacerbated when she flew into
London for an AIDS awareness event, and people
were thinking, well, why would she do that?
You know, why is Whitney getting involved, and
what's that got to do with Whitney?
Sadly, there is a stigma associated
with those afflicted with AIDS.
Even as we speak, it is sweeping away
our children, our families, our loved ones.
Our world must, we must continue through research
to work toward finding a cure.
But of course, she was part of the
LGBT community, and she was in a gay
relationship, and she wanted to stand as best
as she could in solidarity with those who
affirmed their identity, and to give support to
those who affirmed their identity in the way
in which she was trying to affirm hers,
and to provide support for them, really in
times of trouble, disease and death.
And you know, there have been theories about
Whitney's drug use, including some gay activists who
have said that if Whitney had been allowed
to live as a lesbian woman, she
wouldn't have had all these drug demons.
This was probably the most
positive relationship in her life.
Robin was like the guardian angel.
Whether she was gay or not is the secondary question.
Yes, I think they had a romantic life
together, but you know, there was a kind
of witch hunt, which is like, you know,
who has the right to harass somebody in that way?
And she had to put up with all that stuff.
I think it only makes what happened in
her death and her addiction and
her marriage that much more sad.
You've just got a picture of the psychological
landscape that Whitney was living in.
She knows who she really is.
She knows who she really loves.
And yet she can't be that person.
Crushed by rumors, isolated perhaps by family and
friends, berated by them for her lifestyle, her
relationship with Robin Crawford.
In 1992, she made the choice which perhaps
in some way she felt would give her
some social acceptability,
and she married Bobby Brown.
Whitney Houston and Bobby
Brown are officially married.
The pair wed last Saturday in front of
800 people at Houston's 5-acre,
$11 million New Jersey mansion.
Whitney and Bobby were married on July 18,
1992, and for her it must have felt
like gaining social acceptance or at least a
degree of social acceptance again
after a relationship with Robin Crawford.
But again, there were questions and criticisms of
Whitney for the choice she'd made because people
didn't see Bobby as an acceptable partner for
the innocent, lovely, you know, American sweetheart.
It's very hard to underestimate the scandal and
the shock that people had back in 1991
when you have this America's Darling singing the
Star-Spangled Banner
representing the best and brightest
of our country marrying somebody who was famous
for all these music videos with numerous nearly
naked women grinding up on him, had a
foul attitude, was intoxicated all over the place,
rumored to be doing drugs.
Really this kind of horrendous, it was like
two opposites attracting, and nobody liked the fact
that they felt Whitney was being brought down,
including her family, by the way, by
this guy who was in no way her equal
or a good influence.
This has to be part of the quest
for some sort of emotional
and psychological authenticity
because she felt that with a man like
Bobby she'd be seen for who she was
rather than who she was supposed to be.
So she went ahead and they got married
and she felt that she'd made her own
choice, she felt it affirmed something about her
to marry Bobby, but there was another secret
that she was carrying which would obviously come
to not just dominate her life, but ultimately
take her life, and that was her addiction to drugs.
Hes a lot of fun, hes a gentleman, professional.
I'm learning a lot, I'm taking tricks, you know?
Not long after Whitney and Bobby got married,
she was cast alongside as the lead, alongside
Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard.
The Bodyguard cemented Whitney's
role really as an iconic legend.
She'd already kind of been hailed as this
extraordinary voice in beauty, but
with The Bodyguard she was a movie star.
She was great in the movie.
She's not a natural actress, but she did
everything well enough,
she was intelligent enough to
read the lines in a believable way, she
had great chemistry with Kevin, who
really fought for Whitney in the role.
He said, in fact he said at her
funeral, a lot of guys could have played
my part, but only one person
could have been Rachel Marin.
What's really interesting about this is that there
was the controversy over
her interracial relationship on
screen with Kevin Costner, which in 1992 was
not as socially acceptable as it would be today.
There had been industry rumors that Kevin Costner
had to fight to have a black female
lead opposite him in The Bodyguard, but we
didn't know if it was true until
he said it in his own words at her
funeral, and he said that there was an
underlying racism, nobody
came out and said, Whitney's
black, she can't be the lead, but
they were kind of like, do you want to
think about this girl, that
girl, who happened to be white?
He said no, and then they found out
that Whitney was busy when they
were due to be filming The Bodyguard.
Kevin Costner said, no problem, we'll just wait
for Whitney Houston, and the
producers were kind of like, what?
But I guess they respected Kevin
Costner, who was, is, but was huge then.
Box office gold.
He wanted Whitney so badly, he got her,
and it paid off.
It's astonishing to think that even in some
of the marketing for The Bodyguard, it said
that Whitney's face was
slightly hidden because they
were trying to hide the fact there
was an interracial relationship.
My goodness, have we moved on since then?
It's not an issue, and thank God we've moved on.
But it's astonishing to think it was such
a perceived problem for these men who were
only interested in the money and playing safe.
And this is the thing that we couldn't
understand, was that this shy, beautiful, pop, black
singer was also a really good...
I mean, she was really good in it.
She can't be gorgeous, have a great voice,
and be a good actress.
What's that about?
The soundtrack itself was
just Whitney Houston's biggest
hit of her entire career, which was saying
something, because her first
album sold 13 million copies.
Now, I Will Always Love You is such
an interesting song because it was written by
Dolly Parton not as a love song,
as we know romantic or sexual love.
It was a farewell to her singing and
business partner, Porter Wagoner,
with whom she made her first hits.
Funnily enough, it nearly wasn't to be.
They had another song in mind which had
been released a few months earlier, so decided
to go with I Will Always Love You
because it hadn't been released for years.
It was number one for 20
consecutive weeks in America.
Dolly Parton says thank you, Whitney, for making
this a far more beautiful song
than I could ever have hoped to.
Darling, I love you
Ooh, Ill always, Ill always love
You
Having a baby, you know, I'm looking forward to that.
Raising a child, you know, hearing Mommy, you know.
That's what's foremost in my head right now, you know.
I can't... The movie's done, you know, the soundtrack's done.
Thinking about doing a gospel album, you know.
So, you know, I'm just kind of
like, you know, going with the flow.
A year into her marriage with Bobby, they
had a daughter, Bobby Christina, and to all
intents and purposes it seemed to have brought
them some, at least brought Whitney a degree
of contentment and gave her a different purpose,
direction in life, which she clearly
both needed and it seemed enjoyed.
For ordinary people, it's hard to imagine the
pressures that people who live in the public
eye, especially huge megastars like
Whitney Houston, have to go through.
And here she was, having to be a
mother to cope with her addiction, to cope
with her relationship with Bobby, to cope with
the complexities of her life and who she really was.
And really, as human beings, we have to
have enormous empathy for
that because people always
imagine that money and wealth gives people a
degree of freedom, and of course it does.
You know, they can pay their bills, they
can do what they want, they can
travel where they want to travel.
But as psychologists have known for decades, you
know, that once people's basic life needs are
fulfilled, particularly the
need for love and belonging,
money only adds complexity.
And certainly, money combined
with fame is extraordinarily
difficult to deal with.
So here was Whitney with her beloved child
Bobby and having to cope with what
she'd had to cope with up to that point,
now amplified, because she not only had to
protect herself, she also
had to protect her daughter.
But despite the film's success, Whitney didn't gain
the approval from everyone.
The issue with her new husband was the
fact that he was really beside himself with
jealousy and didn't approve at all of the
on-screen intimacy between
Whitney and Kevin Costner.
And that really gave her an idea, really,
of what was to come in their relationship
as her career would soar and Bobby's would decline.
But then I think it started to spiral out of control.
What started to happen was there started to
be too many stories about the marriage being wrong.
Now, remember, everyone had already thought that it
was a bad choice of partner for her
anyway, because they can't understand what she would
be doing with a guy like Bobby.
They could never understand that, because he was
the bad boy and she was the diva.
They couldn't understand it.
But the reason why I'm talking about that
is because the synergy of that would be... That's work.
Diva is work.
Outside of that, you're at home
and you want to be a home girl.
Because Bobby couldn't
handle the on-screen intimacy
between his wife and Kevin Costner,
he stormed out of the screening.
He didn't simply sit there and accept it
or sit there and think, well, it's just acting.
He took it as a personal affront
and stormed out of the screening.
And, of course, that was complicated by the
fact that their relationship
was already volatile and
she'd had a miscarriage.
During the filming of the
bodyguard, Whitney miscarried.
And so there's this combustible series
of events that really come together.
The extraordinary success of the film, the on
screen intimacy with Kevin
Costner, the volatility of
the relationship, the miscarriage.
All this combined, really, to create great conflict,
really, between Whitney and Bobby.
All of it driven by Bobby's jealousy and
Bobby's inability to deal with his wife's success.
Why are you trying to take pictures of me?
You're a famous star, man.
That's enough.
Okay. - Thanks.
Thanks.
You're filming me.
I don't like that. Can I have that?
Hey, whoa, hey, let go, man.
Let go!
Let go of the fucking camera.
The marriage started to take
up way too much of the headlines.
Every time you saw the two of them,
they looked smashed and, you know, the media
really went on a field day with it.
And then you had this going on for 14 years.
It got to the point where you were
actually used to hearing of disaster stories with
Bobby and Whitney and it exasperated the public.
People started to get tired of it, started
to go, for goodness sake, Whitney, Bobby, not again.
The bodyguard also exacerbated
the cognitive dissonance that
really was a... Perhaps all her life had been a feature
of Whitney's life, that she had to pretend
to be someone that she knew she was not.
And the bodyguard catapulted
her, stratospherically, really, into
a level of fame and a level of
celebrity which was beyond
what she'd achieved before
and that was in itself considerable.
But she had to hide herself.
When she was this innocent, you know, Miss
America, she had to hide her true nature.
When she was in a relationship, a gay
relationship with Robin Crawford,
she had to hide her true nature.
And now she had to hide something else.
And it became ever more difficult to hide
it and that was her drug addiction.
Behind all that success, tragedy was looming and
it was driven by a combination of the
psychological complexity of
Whitney's life, what was turning
into an abusive and
difficult relationship with her
husband, Bobby, and her inability, really, and the
complexity of having to deal with leading life
where she had to pretend to be someone
she wasn't, which made it increasingly difficult, as
time went on, for her to get the
love support that she needed to get to
a place where she could recover.
There are many reasons why
people can become addicted.
It can be to fill a void that
they feel they've got in their lives.
It can be to cover over a
psychological isolation that they feel.
There's many different
reasons why people spiral into
these self-destructive
lifestyles and as her relationship
with Bobby developed, her drug addiction grew more
intense and her inability to cover it up
had an increasingly devastating
psychological toll on Whitney,
and what's interesting was that Bobby is often
portrayed as rightly as the bad boy, and
there was no doubt that he mistreated Whitney.
What's interesting, though, is that his drug of
choice was alcohol and it was
Whitney who introduced him to cocaine.
So we have here, really, what could only
be described, I guess, on one aspect of
their relationship as a classic
co-dependent relationship,
where the boundaries between
them were getting blurred,
their dependency on each other became more intense,
and they fueled, each one fueled the most
destructive and helpless side of the other.
Of course, when that happens,
escape becomes extraordinarily difficult.
What was astonishing and
heartbreaking was to listen
to her voice because it had gone, in
part she sounded like she was really struggling
to speak, it was sore, and of course
we know now that it was because she
smoked crack cocaine.
Of all the drugs she could have taken,
of all the ways she could have taken
them, injecting, taking orally, she decided to do
the thing that would take away her voice, her gift.
The voice was the mechanism which put her
in front of the world and put this
person before the world who wasn't really the
person that the world thought they were looking at.
And so by destroying the voice,
she actually breaks that illusion.
That's, you know, well documented with people who
find themselves in the public eye as someone
or something, they can't actually reconcile with who
they really are, they want to sabotage
that and they want it all to end.
I think she was uncomfortable with having such
a huge gift that eclipsed him, and
this was her way of messing it all up,
taking it all away, so she could kind
of say to Bobby, to please his insecurities,
look, I'm just like you now.
I love the children.
They will do much for their kids.
Whitney loves and believes in children.
They do.
Hello, hello, hello.
In around 2009, any time Whitney Houston was
seen in public, it was unfortunately
a field day for the tabloids.
She would often look
disheveled, unnaturally thin, often
saying things that made
little sense, basically doing
nothing that didn't counter the idea of her
being too far gone into her addictions.
When she performed that particular song in 2009
American Music Awards, any time she was seen
in public, it was more often than not
fueled to the rumors of her demise being
not too far in the future.
If you cant feed your baby
Then dont have a baby
And dont think maybe
If you cant feed your baby
Youll be always tryin to
stop that child from cryin
Hustlin, stealin and lyin
Youve got to be tryin
So you wanna be startin somethin,
you got to be startin somethin
Gotta be So you wanna be startin somethin
Startin You got to be startin somethin
And people were shocked by her appearance, you know.
Absolutely shocked.
She was frail, gaunt, voice wasn't what it was.
People have a fascination, and a morbid fascination
really, with people who are self-destructive, and
the more that Whitney was destroying herself, the
more the media reported it.
It was no longer a secret now
that Whitney had problems.
Her friends knew, her colleagues
knew, the press knew, her fans knew.
Everybody knew.
And this is the thing about addiction, because
people who go into this spiral of self
destruction, they don't feel good about themselves.
They don't think, great, I'm just having a
drink, I'm just having some cocaine.
They feel ashamed, deeply,
profoundly ashamed, right to their bones.
And Whitney felt she had let her mother
down, she'd let her family down, she'd let
her daughter down, she'd let herself down.
But how do you cope?
How do people cope without support?
How do people cope with that
level of psychological pressure?
And the answer that she and many others
find is they take more drugs, because that
kills the pain, because drugs are perhaps initially
for people a means of gaining pleasure.
By the time addiction really takes a grip
of anyone, drugs are nothing more
than a way to ease the pain, to block it
out, to pretend it's not there.
And that's where she ended up.
This goes back to the same thing again of people...
Some people are saying that, you
know, was she trying to sabotage herself?
Was she trying to slowly kill herself?
And all of this... Look, let's just keep it real.
Bottom line is this.
She's a human being.
And what happens is she came from a
very normal upbringing,
middle-class family, as normal
as it could possibly imagine.
You know, Sissy was working with big stars
and was associated with stars and stuff like
that, but she had a very normal life.
And her mum's little thing was like, I
guess, was like, ooh, that's my
little view of what stardom is.
And it was exciting, but she was a normal kid.
She had a normal life.
You thrust that...
You go from that and thrust a
little 16, 17-year-old into this big, big
arena, fame, fortune and all of the above
that goes with being the biggest-selling
female of all time in your teens.
This will cause a psychosis.
One of the key things that happens when
people get into a spiral of addictive behaviour
is it becomes more and more destructive.
It doesn't lessen, it gets more and more extreme.
And, of course, when people's lives spiral out
of control and when they're
in codependent relationships,
as Bobby and Whitney were, then tragedy and
catastrophe is really inevitable.
And as their lives spiraled out of control,
as the addictions grew more and more
intense, they withdrew from the world.
They would disappear, really, for months at a
time, you know, living in isolation,
just Whitney, Bobby and crack cocaine.
After Bobby moved on to heroin, he almost
died from an overdose and he was permanently
disfigured with a crooked mouth as a result of that.
Apparently, he didn't take heroin
again, but the damage had been done.
And, of course, the damage with any drug,
with any addiction, is
never principally physical, it's
principally psychological.
And the damage wasn't just to
him, it was also to their relationship.
And, of course, because Whitney was so famous,
they were rich, they had money, they had
power, there's plenty of people who enable that.
Plenty of doctors, plenty of friends, plenty of
colleagues, plenty of people
who will enable it for a price.
And I think at a certain point, she
just wanted to stop, but her family and
this entourage who were living off her, you
know, apparently she was supporting over 50 people,
buying their cars, their houses, sending their kids
to school, paying their medical
bills, which in America is something.
So there was a massive pressure on her.
And so they were, on the one level,
had complete power over those around them, and
yet on another level were
completely powerless because
they were psychologically
powerless over the addiction that
got a hold of them.
If you look at the dynamic between Whitney
and Bobby over the years again and
again, you see a woman who is trying to
bring herself down to the level of someone
else so that he doesn't feel
threatened and he feels comfortable.
The best example of this is being Bobby Brown.
The reality show that Whitney
and Bobby starred in together.
Rather than ask what went wrong with the
marriage, when you saw them on TV and
the documentary following
Bobby Brown but Whitney's very
much involved, the question really
was, what's right with that marriage?
The executives at the channel would not even
consider the show unless Whitney agreed to appear.
Bobby was desperate to get some fame
on his own, apart from his wife, so he
persuaded her to be on the show.
When Whitney agreed to be
filmed, the show got the green light.
But it was one of the worst decisions she ever made.
For the rest of film history, we can
watch these scenes of a
deteriorating Whitney talking
about bowel movements,
talking about being drunk, clearly
under the influence of all kinds of drugs.
If I don't have it, I'm not the man.
You're frigging hallucinating.
I want things.
I like things.
I am things.
I don't want nothing.
I don't need money.
I don't need cars.
I have love.
You could see him trying to
drag his power back from Whitney.
Like when he said one day when she came
into the room, you know, Jack, be nimble.
Jack, be quick.
Bring that ass in here quick and I'm
going to show you what I'm going to
do with it.
And that's a man who's trying to sit
down and say, don't think she's the boss. I am.
It is train wreck television.
You would see Bobby Brown just, you know,
delusions of grandeur, ego out of control, drinking
during the day, and Whitney Houston during the same.
It broke me in two because I know
that something must have just gone wrong there
cos they weren't like that in the early 90s, OK?
When you saw the two of them
together and they were out, it was fun.
A man like Bobby Brown doesn't want to be Mr Houston.
He wants his wife to be Mrs Brown.
And because that could
never happen, the implications
for their marriage were severe and damaging.
So sometimes two energies come
together and they can destroy each other.
It's not about blame.
You can't blame anyone.
Sometimes two people are toxic together.
Sometimes that can happen.
And I think that's what happened there, and it's sad.
She did it for her husband, she
did it to help him, and it was very
typical of their relationship
that everything she did
to help him just brought her down.
And then in 2002, perhaps as a desperate
attempt really to rehabilitate
her image, Whitney did
a famous crack-his-whack
interview with Diane Sawyer.
The Diane Sawyer interview
was absolutely astonishing.
You had Whitney come in, sit down very
regally, as you'd expect, trying to keep herself
together, and you thought,
OK, maybe she's all right here.
When Diane Sawyer went for the jugular and
asked her the tricky questions, as a good
journalist should, did you take crack, she was,
you could tell, very angry
and trying to suppress that.
It's not just thin.
Don't listen.
Diane, tell me.
Do you know?
It's scary thin.
Whitney dying.
Crack rehab fails.
First of all, let's get one thing straight.
Crack is cheap.
I'd make too much money to ever smoke crack.
Let's get that straight, OK?
We don't do crack.
We don't do that.
Crack is whack.
And she came across as very disjointed, jumpy.
If she hadn't taken anything, any drugs then,
then she certainly had quite recently before, as
later came to be the truth.
But she was very emotional and fragile, and
it's hard to watch, because now we
know just how much of a lie she was
living.
For the most part, Whitney stayed
away from L.A. She spent a lot of time
in Atlanta, where she lived in a big house.
Didn't really do much, didn't
really work, just kind of hung around.
Coming out to L.A. for the Grammys was a big deal for her.
The last song that Whitney
publicly sang was Jesus Loves Me.
It was an impromptu performance for her friend,
the singer Kelly Price, who the next day
was going to be receiving a Grammy Award.
And it was heartbreaking, because
that was going to be the final song.
Then how poignant that she's talking to Jesus,
that religion means so much to her, and
she wasn't to know that the next day she'd be gone.
So
I love you so much.
And whether Im wrong
Lord tells me, good
So
On the last day of her life, February 11th,
2012, Whitney Houston didn't leave her hotel room.
She spoke on the phone to her cousin, Dionne Warwick.
She tried to call her pastor, but he didn't pick up.
And perhaps that was symptomatic maybe of what
she was going through, this constant pull between
light and dark, between
addiction and sobriety, between
life and death, this half-life that so
many people who get deeply addicted live, where
on the one hand they're spiraling downwards, even
as they stretch maybe a hand or finger
just upwards to try to grip onto
something solid to give them hope.
And that was the battle she was
fighting on the last day of her life.
At 3.45 in the afternoon, one of
Whitney Houston's assistants turned up in her hotel
room and found her unresponsive in the bath.
She was dead.
There was champagne, bottles of beer, and of
course, rather than to try and memorialize Whitney
Houston at this point, of course, plenty of
people did, but much of the press
simply sensationalized her death.
Here was the voice which Oprah
Winfrey had described as the voice of God.
The voice had gone, now the life had
gone, and what took her life was her
addiction.
I had literally just got off stage,
and I got a text message from the BBC,
please urgent call.
So I rang back.
He said, Misha, this is Stan from the BBC.
Whitney Houston has just, we've
just found out that she's died.
And I was like, I mean, I let out this scream.
I just couldn't believe it.
I was like, what are you talking about?
It's just, no, it's a mistake.
It can't be right.
But then I thought, well, for him
to be calling me at 12 o'clock at
night, you know, it must be real.
How she died, well, it was the combination
of the drugs in her system,
alcohol, the steam from the bath.
She'd lost consciousness, and she drowned.
It's fitting that Whitney's funeral was held at
the New World Baptist Church in New Jersey,
which is the very place where she
began singing when she was a child.
And this time, you know, she was being laid to rest.
The most iconic artists of the era, Elton
John, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Beyonc,
they all turned up to her funeral.
It's really to bear witness
to her extraordinary talent.
And, of course, Bobby turned up.
Bobby Brown turned up and left very suddenly.
Bobby Brown's behavior at the funeral was nothing
short of odd and disrespectful in many ways.
Many would say that they wouldn't
have expected him even to be invited.
It is no secret that Whitney's family despises
him and to a great degree blame a
lot of Whitney's problems with substance abuse on
her marriage and her relationship to Bobby.
However, Whitney's family went on the record and
said, no, he is invited to the funeral,
and Bobby was invited to
bring two guests along with him.
Now, on the day of the funeral, here
comes Bobby Brown with an entourage of nine
because they'd been asked to move, not Bobby,
but some of the people he'd brought.
He became irate.
He became very angry.
Al Sharpton, who was at the funeral, actually
tweeted, I'm trying to calm down Bobby Brown.
Today is not about him.
Today is about Whitney.
No matter how he was feeling,
that day was not about him.
That whole thing was just like a media
circus, you know, trying to interpret what it
might have meant that Bobby Brown left early.
Is it because he cared too much?
Is it because he doesn't care enough?
Whitney Houston died in 2012.
Just three years later, in July 2015, her
daughter, Bobby Christina, died in
remarkably similar circumstances.
Died of a drug overdose and drowning.
And one can only speculate
because it's psychologically
true that patterns in dysfunctional
families can sometimes
repeat themselves.
An addicted mother or an addicted father can
find that their children
will have similar behavioral
issues and will suffer similar
consequences for those behaviors.
And tragically, Bobby
Christina died in a remarkably
similar way to Whitney Houston, and
in this case, at the tender age of 22.
There'll never be another Whitney.
There's only one Whitney Houston, you know, and
there'll never be another one.
I think she was a real, kind of a real survivor.
And I think when you see the number
of movies and albums and tours that she
did over such a short space of time,
I just don't know how she, she must
have had no time to herself at all.
And I think at a certain point, she just wanted to stop.
For me, it's sad because she didn't get
that personal fulfillment, it
seems, in her personal life.
Whitney Houston's death really
did reverberate around the world.
You know, sometimes I think you don't realize
what an iconic figure someone is until they're gone.
Well, I think one of the really fascinating
but infuriating things about Whitney is that I
don't think she ever knew who she was.
She was always struggling to find herself.
There's two great lines from Whitney.
One, she said, I am my own worst enemy.
And in one of her most famous and
moving songs, really, which is I Have Nothing,
she said, I can't hide from myself.
I can't run from myself.
The only time I feel that she ever
felt comfortable, the only time she ever felt
sure of who she was was when she
was on stage and she was singing.
And those moments are, you know, the real her.
We'll just remember the genius
that took her to the top of the world.
And in posterity, we'll make sure she stays there.
I think the thing with Bobby, the
sense I get of him from the footage of
him over the years is that he's
someone who's always putting on a front.
You know, he had this tough guy image,
but actually, I think he was not ever a tough guy.
He was kind of a bit pathetic.
He's a kind of closed person in some ways.
You know, I don't think he's reached the
stage of his life where he's ready to
open up and to talk openly about this.
Maybe he never will reach that stage.
Sometimes people not answering and seeing how they
don't answer a question is almost more revealing
than actually having them say something.
And I think this is one of those cases.
we dont want your stupid war.
Five, six, seven, eight...
- As midnight draws closer,
the anti-war protests grow,
countered by the president's supporters.
Saddam Hussein is a dangerous man.
If we do not take care of him now
and stop his aggression, we will have
to pay a very heavy price in the future.
If it does come to war, officials here
say, the president's inclined to order
an attack sooner rather than later.
He's said to be at peace with himself,
ready to make the tough
decisions that are necessary.
1991 was a memorable year
for the USA and its citizens.
At the time, America was in the Gulf War.
A lot of people had sons and daughters overseas.
It was a time of great patriotism.
And at the same time, you know, any
time you're at war, there's a deep insecurity and fear.
In the hours since we
suspended military operations
in the Kuwaiti theater of
war, considerable progress
has been made in moving towards
a ceasefire and postwar planning.
As our forces moved into Kuwait City, and
as the faces of these jubilant Kuwaiti citizens
have warmed our hearts,
the coalition leaders started
the arduous task of addressing the next stages
of the Persian Gulf situation.
The United States was at war in Iraq.
It was Operation Desert Storm.
And there was a lot of patriotism in the air.
It was still the first Bush administration.
And the U.S. hadn't been at war in a very long time.
So there was a lot of support for the war.
And Whitney Houston performed the
Star-Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl.
And it was just such an obviously phenomenal
performance that she released
it, and it became a chart hit.
The moment in time I remember, everyone remembers,
1991, Whitney's rendition
of Star-Spangled Banner, was
absolutely flawless, beautiful, and effortless.
She still looked so youthful.
And she rocked up, a little bow in
her hair, a tracksuit or a
jumpsuit, looking very girly.
And wow, who could have expected
what was going to come out of her mouth?
It was a difficult time for the United States.
The first Gulf War had just started.
I think it was about eight,
nine, ten days old at that point.
And she came in and she gave this
rendition of the American National Anthem, which is
generally recognized to be the finest rendition of
the Star-Spangled Banner that has
ever been performed by any artist.
And Whitney got up dressed in this tracksuit
in red, white, and blue, just the epitome
of youth and beauty, and opened her
mouth and sang, to this day I cry every
time I hear it, the most beautiful rendition
of the Star-Spangled Banner that
has ever been done before or since.
In fact, it was so popular that they
actually released it as a single, as a
single on the music charts, because
everybody wanted a copy of it.
It was the best-selling
Star-Spangled Banner of all time.
And Whitney donated all of the profits to
the Gulf Relief Fund and the Red Cross.
Never before had a National Anthem been released
and zoomed into the top five.
It was a huge achievement and no wonder.
And again, Americans just kept loving her more.
That was their song.
This was their girl.
And she was hugely patriotic.
I really don't care what anyone says.
I don't think anyone has ever sung
Star-Spangled Banner like Whitney did.
And I've always said that.
And, you know, she has owned that one rendition of that.
Every single other person that's come and sung
it, I don't remember except her one.
She completely nailed it.
Everyone was just like... This
was, and is now, still one of
the greatest moments in NFL history.
It was a defining moment in Whitney's career.
If she wasn't before the Star-Spangled Banner,
after she sang that, she was America's darling
for doing such an extraordinary job on such
a significant song at such an important time.
And that's what it was with Whitney.
Whenever she opened her mouth
and sang, you were transfixed.
Even if you had any prior reservations for
stories you read in the press or whatever
they tried to say about her or whatever
negative, when she sang, it was over.
You had nothing to say.
You just had to just say, speechless.
Life growing up for Whitney
Houston was kind of normal.
Her parents lived in a pretty middle-class
area, very respectfully involved with the church.
Her dad was an army serviceman.
It was happy.
And she was loved.
And their life really was all about the church.
Now, this means that they had a
huge extended family around them.
And she was in no two minds what was important.
And it was her mum, her dad, her family and religion.
Whitney Houston, from a musical point of view,
had the upbringing we can only dream about,
surrounded by some of the
greatest talents of our time.
Her mother, Sissy Houston, was a great vocalist
with the group The Sweet Inspirations, who had
a hit called Sweet Inspiration,
who backed Elvis Presley.
And as a backing singer, she backed Aretha
Franklin, most famously on a song called Ain't No Way.
If you just take time out to listen to
that and hear those high notes, you
will know where Whitney came from.
Oh, but how can I, how can I, how can I
Give ya all I can
If youre tyin both of my hands
Whoa-ho it aint no way
Several similarities, really,
between Bobby and Whitney was
he, too, began singing in church.
I mean, from a very, very small age.
And he, like her, was recognized
for his extraordinarily beautiful voice.
And he formed his first band called New
Edition when he was only 12 years old.
Candy girl, you are my world
You look so sweet, youre my special treat
In 1983, New Edition released
their first album called Candy Girl.
And the band became an overnight sensation.
It seemed that Bobby's extraordinary talent and the
way he'd been nurtured through church, right through
into starting his band as a
teenager, was bearing fruit.
Despite his success, Bobby
didn't feel he'd got the rewards.
When he left New Edition in 1986, he
famously said that all he'd made
out of the band was $500 in a VCR.
He felt, and these are his words, that
he'd been treated like a slave by the
record company, that he'd simply been exploited.
But, of course, he was used to success,
and it must have come as an enormous
shock and disappointment to him when his first
solo album sold very modestly and was nowhere
near as acclaimed as the first album
he'd done in 1983 with New Edition.
After the failure of his first solo album,
Bobby Brown went and worked with the R
&B producers Teddy Riley, L.A. Reid and Babyface.
And the result was an album which was
released to extraordinary critical acclaim.
It sold more than 7 million copies.
And his determination to overcome the failure of
his first album and his new beginnings with
these three producers seemed to have borne fruit
and he seemed to be on a trajectory of success.
Brown's high-powered,
sexually charged music and live
performances earned him
comparisons to his childhood hero
and idol, Michael Jackson.
This album spawned him five top ten hits
on the Billboard Hot 100,
including the single, My Prerogative.
This fight, sing
Everybodys talking all this stuff about me
Why dont they just let me live?
Tell me why
I dont need permission, make my own decisions
Thats my prerogative Its my prerogative
Its the way that I wanna
live Its my prerogative
But Bobby had his demons.
He was a hard drinker, and when he
was touring, his partying became legendary.
He began filling more new space for his
lifestyle, for his excessive
lifestyle, than he did for his music.
And of course, that was something that was
to become ever more prominent as a relationship
with Whitney Houston developed.
When Whitney Houston first appeared on the scene,
her voice captivated the world.
You know, someone has said before the invention
of auto-tune, there was Whitney Houston.
And if you think about how many artists
today are helped a bit in the studio
and go back to some of those clean,
pure vocals of Whitney's five
octave voice, it is just astounding.
Her gift was undeniable.
Whitney Houston was a pop producer's dream.
Now we're used to manufactured girls, boys coming
out who look perfect, and we kind of
know that they won't be able to sing
very well.
Whitney Houston had the face, the body, the
charm, that way where she was
so charismatic she filled the room.
So she looked like a supermodel.
She had the voice of an angel
that was massively versatile.
She had it all going on.
It was almost as if it was too good to be true.
I would like to think that what I
have, what has been God given to me,
would have gotten me into it anyway.
It's one thing having your mom and your
cousin being so successful in the business, but
it's something that you have to do on your own.
You have to establish your own abilities.
It's great to have them as my
family and it got me a lot of places,
but I'd like to think I could do it on my own.
As well as being a young singer,
Whitney became a model too.
In fact, she was the first black female
to grace the cover of Seventeen magazine in America.
This was huge.
And yes, she's known as The Voice,
but my goodness, she had the face too.
People forget just with how drugs and alcohol
took the toll on her, just how
beautiful she was as a young singer.
Back in, I believe it was 1983, she
was discovered, as much as you could be
discovered when you have that many connections, it
was the old-fashioned way.
Arista Records sent out an A&R
to see her perform at a nightclub and a
meeting was set up.
Then it led to her releasing her first
record and being on the Merv Griffin
show and it just took off from there.
Like yours, like, like mine
Like home
Home
Her voice was just more pop, but it didn't lose the soul.
She still had soul in it, but it was a pop voice.
And so she had this kind of ethereal,
pure sound with her voice
and it was very, very different.
It was very refreshing.
Early on, MTV was, for the most part,
playing specifically white rock bands.
Michael Jackson famously was unable
to get on MTV for a very long time.
How Will I Know, which was Whitney's third
US single, went to number one and was
really the first time that a young African
American woman was all over MTV.
That video was massively successful.
It was on constantly and it really cemented
Whitney's presence in mainstream America.
How will I know if he really loves me?
I say a prayer with every heartbeat
I fall in love whenever we meet
Im asking you cause you know about these things
How will I know? - How Will I Know was the voice
of any teen, 20-something girl who
was so enthusiastic about what was to come in life.
How will I know if he really loves me?
That's what we all want to know.
And Whitney was asking the question herself, too,
because she hadn't met her Mr. Right.
And many of her songs are autobiographical.
This one included the optimism of it.
You can see her now in that pop video, dancing around.
And I do think that it really captured
the innocent Whitney that we know who was
looking forward to life, finding Mr. Right and
all the successes she was about to enjoy.
I knew Bobby and we used to hang out in London.
This is just before he met Whitney.
You know, Bobby was sort of coming down
from prerogative and New Edition and all of
that was kind of going down a bit at that time.
But he was still very, very popular.
And we used to hang out in London and he was great.
And Bobby was the right character.
He was a nutter.
Contrary to all the stories you hear
about people, he's a really nice guy.
We had fun and he was very grounded.
And we took him around Brixton and stuff.
We wanted to hang with the
homies and we had fun, you know.
And then I remember when he came back
to London again, he had just met
Whitney and he was going on and on about
how amazing she is.
You know, he's really in love with her.
And he was really, really, he really fell for her hard.
When Whitney met Bobby
Brown, interestingly enough, they
met at like the Soul Train Awards.
This was a celebration of
blacks in the music industry.
And Whitney, who was probably a little bit
insecure about whether or not she was quote
unquote black enough for her peers, I think
she was a little insecure going into that.
Now, Bobby Brown at the time was really
at the top of all the R&B charts.
He was about as successful and popular as
any young African-American
artist could be at that time.
Everybody forgets that when Whitney met Bobby, he
was just about as successful as she was.
You know, he was very popular.
And he had all this confidence and swagger.
Whitney was almost immediately drawn to him.
She said, you know, men are intimidated by me.
Men are threatened by me.
But Bobby understood all I really wanted was love.
We had this dynamic where this very strong,
powerful woman meets a man who is
not afraid to put her in her place and
she finds it a turn on.
In some ways also, Bobby validated
Whitney's African -American roots.
You know, he made her more connected to
that community because of the fact that he
was so associated with the R&B charts.
At the same time, Whitney elevated him to
a huge degree, put him on an international
scale of fame by being associated with him.
One thing we all need as people is a witness.
We just want someone to see us,
not as who we pretend to be or who
they imagine us to be, but who we truly, really are.
And for artists, for people who live in
the public eye, that is
especially difficult because
everybody wants a piece of them.
Everybody wants them to be whatever they need
to be in order that they can feed
off the artist's fame, their
celebrity, their money, whatever.
But what Whitney saw in Bobby and I
think the connection was she
just felt she could just be herself.
She didn't have to pretend anymore.
She had to be something she wasn't.
She could simply be who she really
believed and knew herself to be.
Although on paper it doesn't work, Bobby Brown
and Whitney got on so well because
he treated her like a normal girl.
And she said that many guys were
just so scared of her and wanted to be
overly nice that she was massively attracted to
this guy who was gentlemanly
but had nothing to prove.
And she says that all he knew she needed was love.
There was chemistry, full stop.
Of course it shouldn't have worked, but how
many girls know they shouldn't have gone out
with a bad guy but can't help that
feeling, that gut feeling, that you're just for
some reason attracted to him,
that you want to be with him.
She was magnetized to him.
He was a total laughter.
He was funny.
He was really funny.
I brought him back to my house
to meet my mum and stuff like that.
My mum cooked him Jamaican food and the
bodyguards and we had a right laugh.
He was lovely.
There was no two ways about it.
They were good people and I thought it
was great that he was starting to date her.
I thought it was fine that you didn't
think it was a strange thing at all
outside of the media I'm talking.
To everyone else it was like, God, what's that about?
Why are they together?
But he's funny.
So I can imagine that Whitney, who's always
been around the gowns and all of that
life and stuff like that, he must
have been a right laugh for her.
She was like, oh yeah, I'm going to have fun now.
This is great.
Each of us has a deep need.
Every human being has a deep need to
live as authentically as we possibly can.
We want to be affirmed as who we are.
We want to be affirmed in the identity
that we believe is ours, our right to choose.
And we want to be seen for who we are.
And there's nothing more
destructive psychologically than the
cognitive dissonance that
comes when we are pretending
to be one person when we are really another.
And not only was that the case with
Whitney when it came to this angelic image
of her as some innocent, pure Christian girl
and that fed into her connection with Bobby,
who she felt allowed her to be her authentic self.
It also, perhaps at an even deeper level,
related to her relationship with her assistant, who
she'd met when she was 16, called Robin Crawford.
And Whitney entered into a
gay relationship with Robin.
And of course, the few things at
that time, it's only, what, 30 years ago?
At that time, there were deeply homophobic times.
And for a woman of Whitney's background to
be in a gay relationship would have been
deemed unacceptable by all those closest to her.
It was widely known in show business
that Whitney and Robin were together.
And this was not some kind of scandalous pickup.
They'd known each other from high school.
They were best friends all the way through
adolescence, and there were all kinds of rumors
about a relationship between Whitney and Robin.
In fact, Robin was actually
working for Whitney for a time.
She was like an assistant, and they were together.
Bobby alluded to this himself when he looked
back on the marriage, kind of implying that
one of the reasons Whitney married him was
to combat these lesbian rumors, because it wouldn't
do at that time for America's sweetheart to be gay.
Most of the rumors in Whitney Houston's case
have been confirmed by very close sources, such
as her bodyguard, family members.
I mean, as hard as it was for Whitney
Houston to be a black woman, you
know, taking American
mainstream by storm, imagine if
she was a black lesbian woman.
It certainly, at that time particularly, would have
been very difficult, if not impossible, to win
over, you know, the very reactionary Middle America.
So if you were saying, like Whitney did,
that I am a good girl, I'm an
honest girl, I'm an all-American girl, I
am who I say I am, I'm a
heterosexual girl, when
you're saying all those things
to the world, and the truth might be
slightly different, that
creates all kinds of problems,
particularly when you have
a religious upbringing like
she did, because what it means is she's
not just being dishonest to other people and
dishonest to herself, she's
also being dishonest to God.
Anyone in a loving relationship wants to spend
time with their partner,
and Whitney was no different.
She spent more and more time with Robin,
and friends and family grew more and more
concerned about the impact this would have on
her public image, and the tabloids began running
stories on it, because they felt there was
something in this, that the sweet, nice, natural,
pure Whitney Houston was not as nice, natural
and pure as people imagined, and the homophobia
behind that type of reporting
was very prevalent at the time.
And it became exacerbated when she flew into
London for an AIDS awareness event, and people
were thinking, well, why would she do that?
You know, why is Whitney getting involved, and
what's that got to do with Whitney?
Sadly, there is a stigma associated
with those afflicted with AIDS.
Even as we speak, it is sweeping away
our children, our families, our loved ones.
Our world must, we must continue through research
to work toward finding a cure.
But of course, she was part of the
LGBT community, and she was in a gay
relationship, and she wanted to stand as best
as she could in solidarity with those who
affirmed their identity, and to give support to
those who affirmed their identity in the way
in which she was trying to affirm hers,
and to provide support for them, really in
times of trouble, disease and death.
And you know, there have been theories about
Whitney's drug use, including some gay activists who
have said that if Whitney had been allowed
to live as a lesbian woman, she
wouldn't have had all these drug demons.
This was probably the most
positive relationship in her life.
Robin was like the guardian angel.
Whether she was gay or not is the secondary question.
Yes, I think they had a romantic life
together, but you know, there was a kind
of witch hunt, which is like, you know,
who has the right to harass somebody in that way?
And she had to put up with all that stuff.
I think it only makes what happened in
her death and her addiction and
her marriage that much more sad.
You've just got a picture of the psychological
landscape that Whitney was living in.
She knows who she really is.
She knows who she really loves.
And yet she can't be that person.
Crushed by rumors, isolated perhaps by family and
friends, berated by them for her lifestyle, her
relationship with Robin Crawford.
In 1992, she made the choice which perhaps
in some way she felt would give her
some social acceptability,
and she married Bobby Brown.
Whitney Houston and Bobby
Brown are officially married.
The pair wed last Saturday in front of
800 people at Houston's 5-acre,
$11 million New Jersey mansion.
Whitney and Bobby were married on July 18,
1992, and for her it must have felt
like gaining social acceptance or at least a
degree of social acceptance again
after a relationship with Robin Crawford.
But again, there were questions and criticisms of
Whitney for the choice she'd made because people
didn't see Bobby as an acceptable partner for
the innocent, lovely, you know, American sweetheart.
It's very hard to underestimate the scandal and
the shock that people had back in 1991
when you have this America's Darling singing the
Star-Spangled Banner
representing the best and brightest
of our country marrying somebody who was famous
for all these music videos with numerous nearly
naked women grinding up on him, had a
foul attitude, was intoxicated all over the place,
rumored to be doing drugs.
Really this kind of horrendous, it was like
two opposites attracting, and nobody liked the fact
that they felt Whitney was being brought down,
including her family, by the way, by
this guy who was in no way her equal
or a good influence.
This has to be part of the quest
for some sort of emotional
and psychological authenticity
because she felt that with a man like
Bobby she'd be seen for who she was
rather than who she was supposed to be.
So she went ahead and they got married
and she felt that she'd made her own
choice, she felt it affirmed something about her
to marry Bobby, but there was another secret
that she was carrying which would obviously come
to not just dominate her life, but ultimately
take her life, and that was her addiction to drugs.
Hes a lot of fun, hes a gentleman, professional.
I'm learning a lot, I'm taking tricks, you know?
Not long after Whitney and Bobby got married,
she was cast alongside as the lead, alongside
Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard.
The Bodyguard cemented Whitney's
role really as an iconic legend.
She'd already kind of been hailed as this
extraordinary voice in beauty, but
with The Bodyguard she was a movie star.
She was great in the movie.
She's not a natural actress, but she did
everything well enough,
she was intelligent enough to
read the lines in a believable way, she
had great chemistry with Kevin, who
really fought for Whitney in the role.
He said, in fact he said at her
funeral, a lot of guys could have played
my part, but only one person
could have been Rachel Marin.
What's really interesting about this is that there
was the controversy over
her interracial relationship on
screen with Kevin Costner, which in 1992 was
not as socially acceptable as it would be today.
There had been industry rumors that Kevin Costner
had to fight to have a black female
lead opposite him in The Bodyguard, but we
didn't know if it was true until
he said it in his own words at her
funeral, and he said that there was an
underlying racism, nobody
came out and said, Whitney's
black, she can't be the lead, but
they were kind of like, do you want to
think about this girl, that
girl, who happened to be white?
He said no, and then they found out
that Whitney was busy when they
were due to be filming The Bodyguard.
Kevin Costner said, no problem, we'll just wait
for Whitney Houston, and the
producers were kind of like, what?
But I guess they respected Kevin
Costner, who was, is, but was huge then.
Box office gold.
He wanted Whitney so badly, he got her,
and it paid off.
It's astonishing to think that even in some
of the marketing for The Bodyguard, it said
that Whitney's face was
slightly hidden because they
were trying to hide the fact there
was an interracial relationship.
My goodness, have we moved on since then?
It's not an issue, and thank God we've moved on.
But it's astonishing to think it was such
a perceived problem for these men who were
only interested in the money and playing safe.
And this is the thing that we couldn't
understand, was that this shy, beautiful, pop, black
singer was also a really good...
I mean, she was really good in it.
She can't be gorgeous, have a great voice,
and be a good actress.
What's that about?
The soundtrack itself was
just Whitney Houston's biggest
hit of her entire career, which was saying
something, because her first
album sold 13 million copies.
Now, I Will Always Love You is such
an interesting song because it was written by
Dolly Parton not as a love song,
as we know romantic or sexual love.
It was a farewell to her singing and
business partner, Porter Wagoner,
with whom she made her first hits.
Funnily enough, it nearly wasn't to be.
They had another song in mind which had
been released a few months earlier, so decided
to go with I Will Always Love You
because it hadn't been released for years.
It was number one for 20
consecutive weeks in America.
Dolly Parton says thank you, Whitney, for making
this a far more beautiful song
than I could ever have hoped to.
Darling, I love you
Ooh, Ill always, Ill always love
You
Having a baby, you know, I'm looking forward to that.
Raising a child, you know, hearing Mommy, you know.
That's what's foremost in my head right now, you know.
I can't... The movie's done, you know, the soundtrack's done.
Thinking about doing a gospel album, you know.
So, you know, I'm just kind of
like, you know, going with the flow.
A year into her marriage with Bobby, they
had a daughter, Bobby Christina, and to all
intents and purposes it seemed to have brought
them some, at least brought Whitney a degree
of contentment and gave her a different purpose,
direction in life, which she clearly
both needed and it seemed enjoyed.
For ordinary people, it's hard to imagine the
pressures that people who live in the public
eye, especially huge megastars like
Whitney Houston, have to go through.
And here she was, having to be a
mother to cope with her addiction, to cope
with her relationship with Bobby, to cope with
the complexities of her life and who she really was.
And really, as human beings, we have to
have enormous empathy for
that because people always
imagine that money and wealth gives people a
degree of freedom, and of course it does.
You know, they can pay their bills, they
can do what they want, they can
travel where they want to travel.
But as psychologists have known for decades, you
know, that once people's basic life needs are
fulfilled, particularly the
need for love and belonging,
money only adds complexity.
And certainly, money combined
with fame is extraordinarily
difficult to deal with.
So here was Whitney with her beloved child
Bobby and having to cope with what
she'd had to cope with up to that point,
now amplified, because she not only had to
protect herself, she also
had to protect her daughter.
But despite the film's success, Whitney didn't gain
the approval from everyone.
The issue with her new husband was the
fact that he was really beside himself with
jealousy and didn't approve at all of the
on-screen intimacy between
Whitney and Kevin Costner.
And that really gave her an idea, really,
of what was to come in their relationship
as her career would soar and Bobby's would decline.
But then I think it started to spiral out of control.
What started to happen was there started to
be too many stories about the marriage being wrong.
Now, remember, everyone had already thought that it
was a bad choice of partner for her
anyway, because they can't understand what she would
be doing with a guy like Bobby.
They could never understand that, because he was
the bad boy and she was the diva.
They couldn't understand it.
But the reason why I'm talking about that
is because the synergy of that would be... That's work.
Diva is work.
Outside of that, you're at home
and you want to be a home girl.
Because Bobby couldn't
handle the on-screen intimacy
between his wife and Kevin Costner,
he stormed out of the screening.
He didn't simply sit there and accept it
or sit there and think, well, it's just acting.
He took it as a personal affront
and stormed out of the screening.
And, of course, that was complicated by the
fact that their relationship
was already volatile and
she'd had a miscarriage.
During the filming of the
bodyguard, Whitney miscarried.
And so there's this combustible series
of events that really come together.
The extraordinary success of the film, the on
screen intimacy with Kevin
Costner, the volatility of
the relationship, the miscarriage.
All this combined, really, to create great conflict,
really, between Whitney and Bobby.
All of it driven by Bobby's jealousy and
Bobby's inability to deal with his wife's success.
Why are you trying to take pictures of me?
You're a famous star, man.
That's enough.
Okay. - Thanks.
Thanks.
You're filming me.
I don't like that. Can I have that?
Hey, whoa, hey, let go, man.
Let go!
Let go of the fucking camera.
The marriage started to take
up way too much of the headlines.
Every time you saw the two of them,
they looked smashed and, you know, the media
really went on a field day with it.
And then you had this going on for 14 years.
It got to the point where you were
actually used to hearing of disaster stories with
Bobby and Whitney and it exasperated the public.
People started to get tired of it, started
to go, for goodness sake, Whitney, Bobby, not again.
The bodyguard also exacerbated
the cognitive dissonance that
really was a... Perhaps all her life had been a feature
of Whitney's life, that she had to pretend
to be someone that she knew she was not.
And the bodyguard catapulted
her, stratospherically, really, into
a level of fame and a level of
celebrity which was beyond
what she'd achieved before
and that was in itself considerable.
But she had to hide herself.
When she was this innocent, you know, Miss
America, she had to hide her true nature.
When she was in a relationship, a gay
relationship with Robin Crawford,
she had to hide her true nature.
And now she had to hide something else.
And it became ever more difficult to hide
it and that was her drug addiction.
Behind all that success, tragedy was looming and
it was driven by a combination of the
psychological complexity of
Whitney's life, what was turning
into an abusive and
difficult relationship with her
husband, Bobby, and her inability, really, and the
complexity of having to deal with leading life
where she had to pretend to be someone
she wasn't, which made it increasingly difficult, as
time went on, for her to get the
love support that she needed to get to
a place where she could recover.
There are many reasons why
people can become addicted.
It can be to fill a void that
they feel they've got in their lives.
It can be to cover over a
psychological isolation that they feel.
There's many different
reasons why people spiral into
these self-destructive
lifestyles and as her relationship
with Bobby developed, her drug addiction grew more
intense and her inability to cover it up
had an increasingly devastating
psychological toll on Whitney,
and what's interesting was that Bobby is often
portrayed as rightly as the bad boy, and
there was no doubt that he mistreated Whitney.
What's interesting, though, is that his drug of
choice was alcohol and it was
Whitney who introduced him to cocaine.
So we have here, really, what could only
be described, I guess, on one aspect of
their relationship as a classic
co-dependent relationship,
where the boundaries between
them were getting blurred,
their dependency on each other became more intense,
and they fueled, each one fueled the most
destructive and helpless side of the other.
Of course, when that happens,
escape becomes extraordinarily difficult.
What was astonishing and
heartbreaking was to listen
to her voice because it had gone, in
part she sounded like she was really struggling
to speak, it was sore, and of course
we know now that it was because she
smoked crack cocaine.
Of all the drugs she could have taken,
of all the ways she could have taken
them, injecting, taking orally, she decided to do
the thing that would take away her voice, her gift.
The voice was the mechanism which put her
in front of the world and put this
person before the world who wasn't really the
person that the world thought they were looking at.
And so by destroying the voice,
she actually breaks that illusion.
That's, you know, well documented with people who
find themselves in the public eye as someone
or something, they can't actually reconcile with who
they really are, they want to sabotage
that and they want it all to end.
I think she was uncomfortable with having such
a huge gift that eclipsed him, and
this was her way of messing it all up,
taking it all away, so she could kind
of say to Bobby, to please his insecurities,
look, I'm just like you now.
I love the children.
They will do much for their kids.
Whitney loves and believes in children.
They do.
Hello, hello, hello.
In around 2009, any time Whitney Houston was
seen in public, it was unfortunately
a field day for the tabloids.
She would often look
disheveled, unnaturally thin, often
saying things that made
little sense, basically doing
nothing that didn't counter the idea of her
being too far gone into her addictions.
When she performed that particular song in 2009
American Music Awards, any time she was seen
in public, it was more often than not
fueled to the rumors of her demise being
not too far in the future.
If you cant feed your baby
Then dont have a baby
And dont think maybe
If you cant feed your baby
Youll be always tryin to
stop that child from cryin
Hustlin, stealin and lyin
Youve got to be tryin
So you wanna be startin somethin,
you got to be startin somethin
Gotta be So you wanna be startin somethin
Startin You got to be startin somethin
And people were shocked by her appearance, you know.
Absolutely shocked.
She was frail, gaunt, voice wasn't what it was.
People have a fascination, and a morbid fascination
really, with people who are self-destructive, and
the more that Whitney was destroying herself, the
more the media reported it.
It was no longer a secret now
that Whitney had problems.
Her friends knew, her colleagues
knew, the press knew, her fans knew.
Everybody knew.
And this is the thing about addiction, because
people who go into this spiral of self
destruction, they don't feel good about themselves.
They don't think, great, I'm just having a
drink, I'm just having some cocaine.
They feel ashamed, deeply,
profoundly ashamed, right to their bones.
And Whitney felt she had let her mother
down, she'd let her family down, she'd let
her daughter down, she'd let herself down.
But how do you cope?
How do people cope without support?
How do people cope with that
level of psychological pressure?
And the answer that she and many others
find is they take more drugs, because that
kills the pain, because drugs are perhaps initially
for people a means of gaining pleasure.
By the time addiction really takes a grip
of anyone, drugs are nothing more
than a way to ease the pain, to block it
out, to pretend it's not there.
And that's where she ended up.
This goes back to the same thing again of people...
Some people are saying that, you
know, was she trying to sabotage herself?
Was she trying to slowly kill herself?
And all of this... Look, let's just keep it real.
Bottom line is this.
She's a human being.
And what happens is she came from a
very normal upbringing,
middle-class family, as normal
as it could possibly imagine.
You know, Sissy was working with big stars
and was associated with stars and stuff like
that, but she had a very normal life.
And her mum's little thing was like, I
guess, was like, ooh, that's my
little view of what stardom is.
And it was exciting, but she was a normal kid.
She had a normal life.
You thrust that...
You go from that and thrust a
little 16, 17-year-old into this big, big
arena, fame, fortune and all of the above
that goes with being the biggest-selling
female of all time in your teens.
This will cause a psychosis.
One of the key things that happens when
people get into a spiral of addictive behaviour
is it becomes more and more destructive.
It doesn't lessen, it gets more and more extreme.
And, of course, when people's lives spiral out
of control and when they're
in codependent relationships,
as Bobby and Whitney were, then tragedy and
catastrophe is really inevitable.
And as their lives spiraled out of control,
as the addictions grew more and more
intense, they withdrew from the world.
They would disappear, really, for months at a
time, you know, living in isolation,
just Whitney, Bobby and crack cocaine.
After Bobby moved on to heroin, he almost
died from an overdose and he was permanently
disfigured with a crooked mouth as a result of that.
Apparently, he didn't take heroin
again, but the damage had been done.
And, of course, the damage with any drug,
with any addiction, is
never principally physical, it's
principally psychological.
And the damage wasn't just to
him, it was also to their relationship.
And, of course, because Whitney was so famous,
they were rich, they had money, they had
power, there's plenty of people who enable that.
Plenty of doctors, plenty of friends, plenty of
colleagues, plenty of people
who will enable it for a price.
And I think at a certain point, she
just wanted to stop, but her family and
this entourage who were living off her, you
know, apparently she was supporting over 50 people,
buying their cars, their houses, sending their kids
to school, paying their medical
bills, which in America is something.
So there was a massive pressure on her.
And so they were, on the one level,
had complete power over those around them, and
yet on another level were
completely powerless because
they were psychologically
powerless over the addiction that
got a hold of them.
If you look at the dynamic between Whitney
and Bobby over the years again and
again, you see a woman who is trying to
bring herself down to the level of someone
else so that he doesn't feel
threatened and he feels comfortable.
The best example of this is being Bobby Brown.
The reality show that Whitney
and Bobby starred in together.
Rather than ask what went wrong with the
marriage, when you saw them on TV and
the documentary following
Bobby Brown but Whitney's very
much involved, the question really
was, what's right with that marriage?
The executives at the channel would not even
consider the show unless Whitney agreed to appear.
Bobby was desperate to get some fame
on his own, apart from his wife, so he
persuaded her to be on the show.
When Whitney agreed to be
filmed, the show got the green light.
But it was one of the worst decisions she ever made.
For the rest of film history, we can
watch these scenes of a
deteriorating Whitney talking
about bowel movements,
talking about being drunk, clearly
under the influence of all kinds of drugs.
If I don't have it, I'm not the man.
You're frigging hallucinating.
I want things.
I like things.
I am things.
I don't want nothing.
I don't need money.
I don't need cars.
I have love.
You could see him trying to
drag his power back from Whitney.
Like when he said one day when she came
into the room, you know, Jack, be nimble.
Jack, be quick.
Bring that ass in here quick and I'm
going to show you what I'm going to
do with it.
And that's a man who's trying to sit
down and say, don't think she's the boss. I am.
It is train wreck television.
You would see Bobby Brown just, you know,
delusions of grandeur, ego out of control, drinking
during the day, and Whitney Houston during the same.
It broke me in two because I know
that something must have just gone wrong there
cos they weren't like that in the early 90s, OK?
When you saw the two of them
together and they were out, it was fun.
A man like Bobby Brown doesn't want to be Mr Houston.
He wants his wife to be Mrs Brown.
And because that could
never happen, the implications
for their marriage were severe and damaging.
So sometimes two energies come
together and they can destroy each other.
It's not about blame.
You can't blame anyone.
Sometimes two people are toxic together.
Sometimes that can happen.
And I think that's what happened there, and it's sad.
She did it for her husband, she
did it to help him, and it was very
typical of their relationship
that everything she did
to help him just brought her down.
And then in 2002, perhaps as a desperate
attempt really to rehabilitate
her image, Whitney did
a famous crack-his-whack
interview with Diane Sawyer.
The Diane Sawyer interview
was absolutely astonishing.
You had Whitney come in, sit down very
regally, as you'd expect, trying to keep herself
together, and you thought,
OK, maybe she's all right here.
When Diane Sawyer went for the jugular and
asked her the tricky questions, as a good
journalist should, did you take crack, she was,
you could tell, very angry
and trying to suppress that.
It's not just thin.
Don't listen.
Diane, tell me.
Do you know?
It's scary thin.
Whitney dying.
Crack rehab fails.
First of all, let's get one thing straight.
Crack is cheap.
I'd make too much money to ever smoke crack.
Let's get that straight, OK?
We don't do crack.
We don't do that.
Crack is whack.
And she came across as very disjointed, jumpy.
If she hadn't taken anything, any drugs then,
then she certainly had quite recently before, as
later came to be the truth.
But she was very emotional and fragile, and
it's hard to watch, because now we
know just how much of a lie she was
living.
For the most part, Whitney stayed
away from L.A. She spent a lot of time
in Atlanta, where she lived in a big house.
Didn't really do much, didn't
really work, just kind of hung around.
Coming out to L.A. for the Grammys was a big deal for her.
The last song that Whitney
publicly sang was Jesus Loves Me.
It was an impromptu performance for her friend,
the singer Kelly Price, who the next day
was going to be receiving a Grammy Award.
And it was heartbreaking, because
that was going to be the final song.
Then how poignant that she's talking to Jesus,
that religion means so much to her, and
she wasn't to know that the next day she'd be gone.
So
I love you so much.
And whether Im wrong
Lord tells me, good
So
On the last day of her life, February 11th,
2012, Whitney Houston didn't leave her hotel room.
She spoke on the phone to her cousin, Dionne Warwick.
She tried to call her pastor, but he didn't pick up.
And perhaps that was symptomatic maybe of what
she was going through, this constant pull between
light and dark, between
addiction and sobriety, between
life and death, this half-life that so
many people who get deeply addicted live, where
on the one hand they're spiraling downwards, even
as they stretch maybe a hand or finger
just upwards to try to grip onto
something solid to give them hope.
And that was the battle she was
fighting on the last day of her life.
At 3.45 in the afternoon, one of
Whitney Houston's assistants turned up in her hotel
room and found her unresponsive in the bath.
She was dead.
There was champagne, bottles of beer, and of
course, rather than to try and memorialize Whitney
Houston at this point, of course, plenty of
people did, but much of the press
simply sensationalized her death.
Here was the voice which Oprah
Winfrey had described as the voice of God.
The voice had gone, now the life had
gone, and what took her life was her
addiction.
I had literally just got off stage,
and I got a text message from the BBC,
please urgent call.
So I rang back.
He said, Misha, this is Stan from the BBC.
Whitney Houston has just, we've
just found out that she's died.
And I was like, I mean, I let out this scream.
I just couldn't believe it.
I was like, what are you talking about?
It's just, no, it's a mistake.
It can't be right.
But then I thought, well, for him
to be calling me at 12 o'clock at
night, you know, it must be real.
How she died, well, it was the combination
of the drugs in her system,
alcohol, the steam from the bath.
She'd lost consciousness, and she drowned.
It's fitting that Whitney's funeral was held at
the New World Baptist Church in New Jersey,
which is the very place where she
began singing when she was a child.
And this time, you know, she was being laid to rest.
The most iconic artists of the era, Elton
John, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Beyonc,
they all turned up to her funeral.
It's really to bear witness
to her extraordinary talent.
And, of course, Bobby turned up.
Bobby Brown turned up and left very suddenly.
Bobby Brown's behavior at the funeral was nothing
short of odd and disrespectful in many ways.
Many would say that they wouldn't
have expected him even to be invited.
It is no secret that Whitney's family despises
him and to a great degree blame a
lot of Whitney's problems with substance abuse on
her marriage and her relationship to Bobby.
However, Whitney's family went on the record and
said, no, he is invited to the funeral,
and Bobby was invited to
bring two guests along with him.
Now, on the day of the funeral, here
comes Bobby Brown with an entourage of nine
because they'd been asked to move, not Bobby,
but some of the people he'd brought.
He became irate.
He became very angry.
Al Sharpton, who was at the funeral, actually
tweeted, I'm trying to calm down Bobby Brown.
Today is not about him.
Today is about Whitney.
No matter how he was feeling,
that day was not about him.
That whole thing was just like a media
circus, you know, trying to interpret what it
might have meant that Bobby Brown left early.
Is it because he cared too much?
Is it because he doesn't care enough?
Whitney Houston died in 2012.
Just three years later, in July 2015, her
daughter, Bobby Christina, died in
remarkably similar circumstances.
Died of a drug overdose and drowning.
And one can only speculate
because it's psychologically
true that patterns in dysfunctional
families can sometimes
repeat themselves.
An addicted mother or an addicted father can
find that their children
will have similar behavioral
issues and will suffer similar
consequences for those behaviors.
And tragically, Bobby
Christina died in a remarkably
similar way to Whitney Houston, and
in this case, at the tender age of 22.
There'll never be another Whitney.
There's only one Whitney Houston, you know, and
there'll never be another one.
I think she was a real, kind of a real survivor.
And I think when you see the number
of movies and albums and tours that she
did over such a short space of time,
I just don't know how she, she must
have had no time to herself at all.
And I think at a certain point, she just wanted to stop.
For me, it's sad because she didn't get
that personal fulfillment, it
seems, in her personal life.
Whitney Houston's death really
did reverberate around the world.
You know, sometimes I think you don't realize
what an iconic figure someone is until they're gone.
Well, I think one of the really fascinating
but infuriating things about Whitney is that I
don't think she ever knew who she was.
She was always struggling to find herself.
There's two great lines from Whitney.
One, she said, I am my own worst enemy.
And in one of her most famous and
moving songs, really, which is I Have Nothing,
she said, I can't hide from myself.
I can't run from myself.
The only time I feel that she ever
felt comfortable, the only time she ever felt
sure of who she was was when she
was on stage and she was singing.
And those moments are, you know, the real her.
We'll just remember the genius
that took her to the top of the world.
And in posterity, we'll make sure she stays there.
I think the thing with Bobby, the
sense I get of him from the footage of
him over the years is that he's
someone who's always putting on a front.
You know, he had this tough guy image,
but actually, I think he was not ever a tough guy.
He was kind of a bit pathetic.
He's a kind of closed person in some ways.
You know, I don't think he's reached the
stage of his life where he's ready to
open up and to talk openly about this.
Maybe he never will reach that stage.
Sometimes people not answering and seeing how they
don't answer a question is almost more revealing
than actually having them say something.
And I think this is one of those cases.