By MARK SEAL, VANITY FAIR, June 2012 -- Her friends and family chose to concentrate on the positive. Whitney was a multifaceted woman, they said, who always loved the Lord. In her final days, she prayed and partied, confident that she was on the brink of another comeback. The handstands by the pool, they said, were not the antics of an addict but proof of her newfound stamina, her dedication to daily exercise, and a vow to quit smoking. She had a new movie, new music, and a new man. Also, she had reportedly worked again with Warren Boyd, her drug counselor over the years.
According to the producer Harvey Mason Jr., she was on time at the studio the Tuesday night before her death to record one side of a duet called “Celebrate” with the American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, and she played a CD of the song for Clive Davis at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “She was way more energetic than the young people, more excited to be in the studio, more passionate to make something outstanding,” said Mason. Everyone agreed that she was also clean and sober on the set of her upcoming movie, a remake of a 1976 film called Sparkle.
In the Beverly Hilton on February 11, a Houston aide told a VH1 crew waiting for an interview, “Whitney can’t make it She’s dead.” On the fourth floor, meanwhile, the R&B singer Brandy—Ray J’s older sister—who had starred with Houston in the 1997 TV movie Cinderella, was out in the hall, crying. Bobbi Kristina, Whitney’s 18-year-old daughter with the singer Bobby Brown, was attempting to gain access to her mother’s room. Dionne Warwick, Whitney’s cousin, remained calm. She shook Winter’s hand and said, “I know Mr. Winter will take good care of Whitney,” adding, “and thank you for taking such good care of Michael Jackson.”
By the time Winter went downstairs, the lobby was crawling with stars—Tom Hanks, Tony Bennett, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Neil Young—arriving for the party. Winter waited until 1:35 A.M. to remove the body from the hotel. “The family wanted to maybe spend a few minutes with her before we loaded her off,” he told me. But it didn’t happen, “because Bobbi Kristina wound up going to the hospital,” he said, after reportedly becoming “hysterical, exhausted, and inconsolable.” He added, “And Pat Houston [Whitney’s manager and sister-in-law] had kind of an anxiety attack.”
While Houston’s family would insist that they had seen no evidence of her recent drug use, members of Bobby Brown’s family went on television to tell a different story. Brown’s sister Leolah Brown, Whitney’s former assistant, said on the Dr. Drew TV program, “When I first heard she passed away, I said, My God, somebody gave her a bad bag.”
If Whitney had arrived in L.A. a diminished diva, she left it a fully restored icon, seizing headlines, mourned on talk shows, and memorialized at a three-and-a-half-hour, star-studded, nationally televised funeral. Pat Houston would later blame Whitney’s death not on drugs but on “lifestyle.” She told Oprah Winfrey, “The handwriting was kind of on the wall.” The cause of death clearly went deeper than toxicology. The last days of Whitney Houston began long before her arrival in Los Angeles.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Sunday, May 27th 2012 at 7:38PM
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