By MARK SEAL, VANITY FAIR, June 2012 -- It was all about the voice, “the voice of our time,” as the songwriter Diane Warren once called it. The gospel singer BeBe Winans first heard it when Whitney was opening for the singer Jeffrey Osborne. “I went backstage, and we met, and I said, ‘I want to know what church you come from, because, singing the way you sing, you come from somebody’s church,’ ” recalled Winans. “She looked up and she said, ‘New Hope Baptist!’ ”
New Hope Baptist Church sits at 106 Suss*x Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. There, where her mother, whose name is Cissy, led the choir, Whitney was saved, infused with the Holy Spirit. She could see her artistic future as she studied her godmother, Aretha Franklin: “She closed her eyes, and that riveting thing just came out That’s what I wanted.” Across the street from the church was the now defunct James M. Baxter Terrace public-housing project, and near that, on Wainwright Street, the house where Houston was born and lived until she was four. From the start, the battle lines of her future were drawn: God on one side, the ghetto on the other.
But Whitney didn’t grow up in the ghetto. After Newark’s week of race riots in 1967, the family moved to East Orange, New Jersey. When she was 13, she spent every Saturday for months in the local movie theater, from the matinee to the last show, transfixed by a film called Sparkle,about three young female singers falling prey to hustlers, addicts, and thieves. “As a young girl back in the 70s there was the black-exploitation movie thing,” she later said. “This was a positive reinforcement for young African-American women. For anyone who wanted to pursue their dream and present their gifts. It just appealed to me.”
Houston helped spearhead the new Sparkle, which is being released this summer, and co-produced it with Debra Martin Chase. “It was actually kind of eerie seeing it, because it’s a great movie, but just knowing that she’s saying good-bye through it brought a deeper depth,” says another of the film’s producers, Bishop T. D. Jakes.
Like the mother in Sparkle, Cissy, who started as a gospel singer, tried to protect her daughter. Cissy sang with the Sweet Inspirations, who became a regular act in New York City nightclubs and went on the road as backup for Elvis Presley, Dionne Warwick, and Aretha Franklin. When talent scouts began to circle the teenage Whitney, Cissy told them it was too soon. By 18, however, after graduating from an all-girls Catholic high school, Whitney was ready.
She was discovered by Gerry Griffith, director of A&R for Arista Records, who was stunned when he heard the girl blow the roof off the Seventh Avenue South nightclub, in Manhattan, with her one solo, “Home,” while she was backing up her mother. Griffith led her to the master, Clive Davis, who had guided the careers of Janis Joplin and Bruce Springsteen, and he embarked on a feat of creation that Billboard called “a De Mille extravaganza—epic and expensive.”
Whitney was already a successful model, signed to the Click agency (and, later, Wilhelmina) in New York, and she had appeared on the cover of Seventeen and in several ad campaigns. Her father, John Houston, a part-Native American “gospel groupie” who drove a cab, then a truck, and helped manage Dionne Warwick’s early singing group before working in a Newark-government office, handled the business end. His daughter’s enterprise was called Nippy, Inc., after Whitney’s nickname, which came from a comic-strip character who was always getting into trouble.
“Whitney was a product of Clive,” Kenneth Reynolds, who worked with Davis as director of Arista’s R&B product management, tells me. “Clive had been trying to create the pop diva, an artist that transcended all genres. He tried with Aretha, but she was too defined as the Queen of Soul. He tried with Dionne, but she was in a niche already by the time she came to Arista. Finally, along came Whitney, who was beautiful, talented, a little rough around the edges, but that could be fixed. Clive made it clear in meetings: this Houston project better be huge. He’d gone on The Merv Griffin Show with her. He picked every song on her albums.”
The result was Whitney Houston, released in 1985, when Whitney was 21. It sold 25 million copies. Her second album, Whitney, released in 1987, was equally successful.
Forbes magazine said she was one of the 10 highest-earning American entertainers, worth $44 million. By 1988 she had surpassed the Beatles’ record with seven consecutive No. 1 hits.
“She became a huge star,” says Reynolds, “but, like so many creations, they fall apart.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Monday, May 28th 2012 at 8:23PM
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