By MARK SEAL, VANITY FAIR, June 2012 -- At the celebration of Michael Jackson’s 30th anniversary as a solo artist, in September 2001, Houston arrived stick-thin, with the bones in her clavicle showing, a walking advertisement for the evils of drug abuse. Her publicist attributed the weight loss to stress over family matters. However, her hairdresser, Ellin LaVar, tells me, “I went into the bathroom with her that night and I said, ‘Look at you! You keep this up and you are going to die.’ I didn’t know what ‘this’ was, but she cried and said, ‘I know.’ ” The show went on, as always. Once again, Whitney was propped up by those who depended upon her to perform, no matter what. “That same night a stylist said, ‘Whitney, you look fabulous,’ ” says LaVar. “I said, ‘Why did you say that? Whitney doesn’t look good!’ ”
On September 10, 2001, after she canceled an appearance at another Michael Jackson event, reports surfaced that she was dead of a drug overdose. In the wake of the World Trade Center disaster, the following day, Arista vice president Lionel Ridenour announced, “We should be concentrating on the things that are really important right now, like the victims and the families with the tragedies here in New York and Washington.”
“If you had to name the devil … the biggest devil?,” Diane Sawyer asked Whitney in a 2002 interview. “That would be me,” she replied.
Other problems arose. In September 2002, a $100 million lawsuit was filed on behalf of her father by a man named Kevin Skinner. They claimed Whitney had failed to pay John Houston Entertainment for representing her from the fall of 2000 on and for engineering her $100 million, six-album deal with Arista Records in 2001, at that time one of the biggest deals in the history of the music business. After John Houston’s death, five months later, Skinner, a convicted Newark drug dealer who had been John’s driver, pressed on with the lawsuit. According to Dateline, Skinner even claimed to have supplied Whitney with drugs. “I was a cocaine distributor years ago … and that’s how I knew Whitney,” he said, adding that she and Bobby had gone to Clifton Avenue—a Newark neighborhood—to pick up the drugs themselves. Whitney’s longtime attorney, Bryan Blaney, says the suit was instigated by Skinner from the start: “[John] was aware of it. This was something that he’d been asked to pursue by Kevin. John was largely disabled by his illnesses, and he deferred to Kevin. Later he told his daughter and me that it was a mistake. The suit was baseless.” (It was dismissed in 2004.)
Skinner also claimed to be writing a Whitney Houston tell-all, The Rise and Fall of Daddy’s Little Girl. An ad for the book read, “Not only are the family’s most darkest activities revealed but also disclosed are situations involving Bobby Brown, Dionne Warwick, Pastor Rev. Thomas (New Hope Church), Robin Crawford (Whitney’s road manager) and many others.” It suggested that Houston was “truly knocking on death’s door” and called an overdose “almost inevitable.” Skinner’s hope, according to his Web site, was that the book would get Houston the help she needed and honor “John Houston’s last wish,” which was “for everyone to ‘please, pray for Whitney.’ ” (The book was never published.)
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Wednesday, May 30th 2012 at 7:35PM
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