Why Whitney doco reveals ‘beautiful’ star’s sex abuse: ‘It was time to stop’
Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney arrives trailing a comet’s tail of scandal that stretches back to its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Just two weeks before he was due to deliver the finished edit of the film to the festival, he did two final interviews that confirmed something he had suspected: the brilliant, talented Whitney Houston, who died a drug-addled death in a hotel bathtub in 2012 at the age of 48, was the victim of childhood sexual abuse.
He also had the name of her abuser, who was famous in her own right. It was a potentially sensational cap to his story of a fallen angel.
Macdonald was initially lukewarm when Nicole David, Houston’s former agent, approached him with the idea of making a film about her. What persuaded him was the quest for truth; he describes Houston as ‘‘a psychological detective story’’.
‘‘It was an intriguing mystery story to understand why someone who had everything – the beauty, the talent, the money and every opportunity – went so wrong,’’ he says.
David told him she had worked with Houston for 25 years and ‘‘never understood why what happened to her happened, so I would like you to make a movie to try to understand that’’, he says.
He knew she would be a tough case to crack; she didn’t give much away, even in her work. ‘‘She’s not like Amy Winehouse, who wrote songs about her life. Her talent was about the vocal emotional power of her voice,’’ he says.
Unlike Nick Broomfield’s documentary Whitney: Can I Be Me?, which came out last year,
Macdonald’s film was ostensibly authorised by the family.
Bobby Brown, who spent 14 years with Houston in an intermittently violent marriage, gave a cheery interview in which he denied drugs played any part of her death. That was quite typical, says Macdonald. ‘‘People were not being fully truthful. I’ve never encountered so many people who gave me just a superficial PR perspective on things.’’
Houston’s closest friend and sometime lover Robyn Crawford refused to talk at all.
So nobody had told him anything at the point where he first started to think Houston had a deep-seated problem. ‘‘I realised that there was something strange about the way she wasn’t comfortable in her own skin,’’ he says. ‘‘She was a beautiful, beautiful woman but there was something about her that was almost asexual. I thought she felt like somebody who has had a trauma in childhood, so I started to ask about it.’’
Eventually, her half-brother Gary Garland-Houston confirmed Whitney had been sexually abused over a long period. He knew that because the same person abused him. The accused is Dee Dee Warwick, Dionne Warwick’s sister and the Houston children’s cousin. Dee Dee died in 2008, having also had a history of drug addiction.
The revelation was a huge explosion in the Houston family. Whitney’s formidable mother, Cissie, and Dionne Warwick said they only found out what the film included two days before it went to Cannes, that the accusations were ‘‘overwhelming and unfathomable’’ and based on ‘‘rumour, innuendo and hearsay’’.
In Cannes, Macdonald shrugs off any question about the ethics of making a public accusation. ‘‘It seems like it would be a much worse situation if we didn’t name her,’’ he says.
For him, the key moment in the film comes when the ravaged Gary leans towards the camera, speaking directly to us. ‘‘He says, ‘You know, as a family we had a lot of secrets and when you don’t address them, they never ever go away – never ever’. If there is a single message in this film, that is probably it.’’
For the duration of Houston’s fame, the whole family had contrived to keep its secrets, with most of that burden falling on her shoulders. In Macdonald’s view, it was time to stop.
‘‘There was something strange about the way she wasn’t comfortable in her own skin.’’ Kevin Macdonald
Whitney is in cinemas now.