While the glory of her voice propelled Whitney Houston into the pop stratosphere, her demons kept dragging her down, a powerful undertow of drugs and toxic relationships.
Scheduled to appear at the pre-Grammy Awards party given annually by her mentor, the music impresario Clive Davis, on February 11, Whitney Houston arrived in Los Angeles a week early, without fanfare, and checked into the Beverly Hilton with her small entourage under the pseudonym Elizabeth Collins. She was put in Room 434, which the hotel calls a “presidential junior,” consisting of a small sitting room, bedroom, and bath.
Whitney is not one to take serious care of her voice, unlike Celine Dion, who “wouldn’t speak for 24 hours before we were going to record,” says Foster, who produced many of both singers’ hits. “Whitney, even when she’d been filming all day, would come into the studio and—bang,” he says, “she’d rip her jacket off, and she’d be starting to sing. She was focused, and she was at the top of her vocal game.”
By the late 90s, however, her voice would begin to betray her, and she would have to lower the keys in live performances. The reason wasn’t just cigarettes and her age.
Whitney’s drug use escalated after the 1993 birth of her only child, Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown. She started lacing her joints with cocaine, as she later told Oprah Winfrey. She confessed that she would spend her days and nights getting high with Bobby, watching TV, not getting out of her pajamas for seven months, while Brown lost control—“he would smash things, break things … cutting my head off a picture.” In short, she began the degrading process of what Oprah would call “making herself smaller … so the man could be bigger.”
In 1994, Whitney showed up two hours late to a White House state dinner, where she was to perform for Nelson Mandela.
By the 1996 release of The Preacher’s Wife with Denzel Washington, she was doing drugs every day, she later admitted to Oprah. “I was losing myself,” she said.
In 1999 she canceled five concerts, and in 2000 she was caught with half an ounce of marijuana in the Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, airport. In March 2000 she was supposed to sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” at the Oscars, but at rehearsals she appeared disoriented and couldn’t remember the words. A reporter told Dateline, “Bobby Brown was sitting in the front row, drunk, with a coat over his head.”
In 2000 she showed up four hours late for a photo shoot for Jane magazine. In the interview that accompanied the photos, she was asked to compare hanging out with a president (she had met Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush at the White House) and with a junkie. She responded, “Just the same. The president gets off on the country, the junkie gets off on a couple of hits.”
At the celebration of Michael Jackson’s 30th anniversary as a solo artist, in September 2001, Houston arrived stick-thin, with the bones in her clavicle showing, a walking advertisement for the evils of drug abuse. Her publicist attributed the weight loss to stress over family matters. However, her hairdresser, Ellin LaVar, tells me, “I went into the bathroom with her that night and I said, ‘Look at you! You keep this up and you are going to die.’ I didn’t know what ‘this’ was, but she cried and said, ‘I know.’ The show went on, as always. Once again, Whitney was propped up by those who depended upon her to perform, no matter what. “That same night a stylist said, ‘Whitney, you look fabulous,’ ” says LaVar. “I said, ‘Why did you say that? Whitney doesn’t look good!’ ”
On September 10, 2001, after she canceled an appearance at another Michael Jackson event, reports surfaced that she was dead of a drug overdose.
At times when Whitney was down, she would turn to the Lord. Even during her final days, in Los Angeles, she spoke about God frequently, praying in a nightclub with recording artist El DeBarge, with whom she shared a struggle with addiction, and asking Reginald Dowdley, a makeup artist hired for only one day, “Sweetie, are you saved?”
Dixon, Whitney’s hairdresser for seven years, remembers how excited the singer was about her renewed career after the rehab .
This past winter, she was doing her best to quit smoking, not just cut back again. Intent on looking her best, she also decided to have a face-lift, but Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Marc Mani reportedly refused to do it after she failed the routine physical, which indicates the condition of a patient’s heart, liver, and lungs.
As she left Tru after an event, the night exploded with “a million paparazzi flashes,” says Lattimore. The photographers captured Whitney with scratches on her arm and blood on her legs as a crowd of people screamed her name and tried to get her attention. She returned to her hotel, where she asked Tiffanie Dixon to read the Bible with her. Dixon recalls, “Her glasses were broken, but she read by holding the little single lens. She had marked pages—Exodus, Mark, and Matthew.
The last thing I remember her saying was ‘I just want to love and be loved. I want to love like Jesus did. Unconditionally.’ ”
Great article
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