By MARK SEAL, VANITY FAIR, June 2012 -- Every time 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?”
In 2000, Clive Davis left Arista to launch his own label, and Whitney remained behind. “I was shut down,” she told Essence magazine later, “literally shut down because I was in transition from Clive, making all these changes, and I felt like I was dangling from a string and going, ‘Hey, somebody save me.’ Clive was my man for all those years. Where was I going? It frightened me.”
During this period, while Bobby was serving one of several jail sentences for violating his probation—he had been convicted in 1996 of drunk driving—friends urged Whitney to go to rehab, if only for the sake of her daughter. If she did, they said, perhaps Bobby would, too, when he got out. She didn’t deny her drug use. She would merely listen and say, “It’s not as serious as you’re making it out to be. And I’m just not ready.”
“Then,” she later said in an interview, “God woke me up.”
The call came from Perri Reid, an evangelical minister, who had been reborn after a singing career as the R&B artist Pebbles. During her marriage to producer L. A. Reid, she had managed the Grammy Award-winning group TLC. When Whitney recorded with L. A. Reid in his Atlanta mansion, Pebbles met her, and they became as close as sisters. Pebbles was a bridesmaid at Whitney’s wedding. After TLC declared bankruptcy and dismissed Reid in 1995, her career seemed to collapse.
Whitney invited her to stay with her in New Jersey. “Whitney was filming The Preacher’s Wifewith Denzel Washington at the time,” Reid tells me. “She knew all of us women loved him, and she said, ‘You want to come to the set today and meet Denzel?’ I said no, so she knew something was wrong for real. She came home one day, burst into the guest room where I was lying in my pajamas, eating my Hot Tamales candies, not wanting to talk to anybody. She snatched the covers off of me and said, ‘Come into the kitchen.’ ”
Whitney had staged an “ambush” to confront Reid with a group of women, including Cissy. “You’re going to have to fight!,” Whitney admonished her. “Don’t let all the lies and what people are trying to create about you for their own selfish gains destroy you.”
“She was in a rage about it,” says Reid. “She went to war for me.”
About seven years later Whitney called Reid, known by then as Sister Perri, whose Tuesday-night healing services in an Atlanta warehouse brought salvation and many reported miracles to her followers. “We had this bond as sisters that was so strong we could sense when something was wrong,” says Reid. Whitney called her in 2002, she tells me, to say she sensed Reid was in trouble, but it was actually Whitney who was distressed, though she didn’t say so. “Hey, you came up in my heart” was all she said.
“This was a good soul, misunderstood,” Reid says. “This girl got on a plane and brought everybody—Bobby and Bobbi Kris, and Doogie, her dog. I thought they were going to be there a couple of days. She got to Atlanta and stayed.”
“She took me under her wing,” Houston later said. “I stayed in one room, and she took me through a transition of deliverance and prayer You need somebody to give you tough love, people to remind you that you are a child of God and you don’t belong to the devil.”
Testimony posted by a fellow congregant chronicled Whitney’s presence at one service, where she “couldn’t sit still … and paced.” Reid, “recognizing Whitney’s anxiety, asked her friend if she would bless the congregation with a song For the life of me, I can’t recall the song she sang that night, but what I so vividly remember are my tears that wouldn’t stop flowing,” wrote the congregant. “At that moment, in this intimate space, I was able to clearly see Whitney Houston’s gift. No music, no background singers, just Whitney effortlessly having a conversation with God.”
The Lord had led her to Atlanta, but the Devil rode beside her, and that’s where her real problems began.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Wednesday, May 30th 2012 at 7:34PM
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