By MARK SEAL, VANITY FAIR, June 2012 -- “During her early hit years, Houston did few interviews,” Out magazine reported in a 2000 interview with her. “Music-industry insiders suggest that Davis limits the media’s access to Houston because of the disparity between her white-friendly image and her proudly black manner. It wasn’t long before the apparent vacuum of her personal life filled with a persistent rumor—that the diva was a dyke.” (Individuals close to Clive Davis have disagreed with the statement about him.)
Robyn Crawford, an all-state basketball star two years older than Whitney, had been her best friend since Whitney was 16, when they both had summer jobs at a community center in East Orange. They were almost like sisters, and from the beginning Robyn always had Whitney’s back. Early in Whitney’s career, they lived together in a small apartment in New Jersey, Houston’s then manager, Seymour Flics, tells me, until Flics and his business partner, Eugene Harvey, insisted that they move into a more secure building.
“Robyn was very much a protector, Whitney’s guardian,” according to Kenneth Reynolds. “Whitney had gone on a promotional tour without Robyn in 1985. When she came back, we were going to the National Association of Black-Owned Broadcasters Convention, in Washington, D.C.” Eugene Harvey went to Arista and said the company should buy Crawford an airline ticket to the convention. “Because Whitney missed her,” Reynolds says Harvey told him.
Reynolds tells me, “I got up and closed my door and I said, ‘Gene, the airline ticket costs $79 for Robyn to fly to D.C. and stay in the room with Whitney. Don’t make a big fuss about it at the company. All you need is a bunch of straight, macho radio jocks finding out that Whitney wants Robyn on the trip.’
“Anyway,” he continues, “pretty soon the whole building was buzzing about it.” When Whitney arrived at the convention, he says, disc jockeys and program directors from across America were all buzzing about it, too. “And that was the big weekend when rumors about Whitney’s s*xuality started,” he explains. (Aside from posting a short Internet remembrance of her longtime friend, Crawford, who continued to be Houston’s creative director until 2000, has remained silent in the aftermath of her death. “Refused by R. Crawford; does not want,” someone wrote on the FedEx package I’d sent her in hopes of an interview.)
Although Houston and Crawford would vehemently deny that they were anything more than friends and business associates, it has long been reported that Whitney’s management and family feared that the relationship could tarnish her all-American-princess image. “Whitney’s parents also resented Robyn’s powerful influence over their girl’s professional and personal life, which left them stranded in secondary positions,” wrote James Robert Parish in Whitney Houston: Return of the Diva. “All of a sudden she is dating Eddie Murphy,” says Reynolds. (Murphy would say they were just friends.) In spite of a reported year-long affair with the married Jermaine Jackson in the early 1980s, Whitney remained without a mate, at least publicly. “Any man would be a little bit threatened, because whoever stepped into those shoes was going to become Mr. Houston,” says BeBe Winans.
Houston was hugging Winans and his sister CeCe in their seats at the Soul Train Music Awards in April 1989 when she accidentally bumped up against a 20-year-old entertainer in their row who was also an R&B star. As a child of the projects, Bobby Brown had been shot at and stabbed in the shoulder. When he was 11, he saw a friend stabbed to death. By the time he was 14, after founding the band New Edition, he had become accustomed to being showered onstage with girls’ panties. He became a father at 17 and eventually would have three more children out of wedlock. The night they met, Whitney, whose image had become a little too sticky-sweet for some, was booed and called an Oreo when she was announced as a nominee. “For some reason, she became the target,” says her friend the singer Cherrelle. “People ridiculed her and talked about her and forgot about her songs. She was human, and that hurt.”
Bobby Brown, on the other hand, was already bad and on his way to becoming notorious: beating up a man at Walt Disney World, overdosing on heroin, doing time in prison and rehab centers, and eventually venting his rage on the pop diva, who was five years older than he and who, he would insist, made him look like an innocent. “She is the crazy one,” Brown once said.
Brown was just what some say Whitney felt she needed for her image. Though a renowned abuser of drugs and booze, Bobby, his friends say, had a nice streak. The moment she saw him that night in 1989, according to Cherrelle, she said, “That is going to be my husband.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Monday, May 28th 2012 at 8:21PM
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