THE DEVILS IN THE DIVA: Whitney Houston and the Long Sad Road to Room 434: An Investigative Report (PART 6)

By MARK SEAL, VANITY FAIR, June 2012 -- She’d never been 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.”

The pop diva was reverting to the New Jersey street kid. “People think I’m Miss Prissy Pooh-Pooh,” she told Time magazine. “But I’m not. I can get down, really freakin’ dirty, with you.” She told Rolling Stone, “I can get raunchy I’ve learned to be freer from Bobby.” She said in a later interview, “I started in the hood.” And she admitted, “Yeah, man, I’m what you call a functioning junkie.”



In his 1996 book, Good Girl, Bad Girl: An Insider’s Biography of Whitney Houston, Kevin Ammons, a former boyfriend of Houston’s publicist Regina Brown, portrays Bobby Brown as the brazen interloper who steals the princess from her selfish court. The book’s 221 scathing, expletive-laden pages are packed with acts of greed and betrayal by “the Royal Family,” which, Ammons says, was Whitney’s term for the people who worked for her. Everyone wants a piece of the action of the increasingly stressed and distant diva. When their golden goose is abducted by Bobby, the Royal Family resorts to manipulation, fistfights, and threats of violence to protect their interests and remain on the gravy train. “As soon as Whitney heard I was writing the book, someone sent me a package,” says Ammons’s co-writer, Nancy Bacon. “I opened it up, and it was a snake. It didn’t smell—it had obviously been sent to me alive. She told Kevin I was like a snake in the grass because I was writing bad things about her.”


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.” Houston was replaced on the program.


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.”