Whitney: it was impossible to be herself
As a new documentary gives the legendary singer her voice back, Nick Broomfield tells Elizabeth Day what drew him in
Whitney Houston has long been a source of fascination. She rose to fame as a seemingly squeaky-clean pop diva, but her life spiralled into drug addiction and she was found dead at the age of 48.
Known for both her extraordinary voice and her beauty, by the time she died in 2012 she had sold more than 200million records, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time. And yet Houston was a woman of fatal contradictions.
Her mother was the famed gospel singer Cissy Houston and her cousin was Dionne Warwick, but Nippy (her childhood nickname) was born and raised in New Jersey, where she witnessed the worst race riots outside of LA and was surrounded by family members’ casual drug use.
At the age of 20, Houston was signed by Arista Records, who set about marketing her as a sanitised pop singer who could appeal to a mainstream white audience. The more unsavoury elements of her past were glossed over. And it worked: by the time she was 23, Houston had achieved seven consecutive number ones in America, eclipsing a record previously set by The Beatles and the Bee Gees.
Now her life is the subject of a new documentary directed by Nick Broomfield, the acclaimed film-maker, which was released in cinemas in June and will air on BBC Two tonight.
“She was the first black female star to create black female stardom,” he says. “She paved the way for Beyoncé.”
But as Broomfield’s film, Whitney: Can I Be Me makes painfully clear, Houston struggled with fame. She never had much of a chance to speak for herself though as some musicians shunned her for being “too white”.
“She was passionate and strongwilled,” Broomfield says. The Whitney created by Clive Davis, the former boss of Arista Records, “was not Nippy from Newark and every time she strayed, she was censored and disapproved of. He had made white America fall in love with this other person.”
Eventually, the tension between the public and the private would contribute to her undoing.
The film, co-directed by Rudi Dolezal, charts Houston’s tragic disintegration. Despite her beauty and her self-evident talent, Houston would eventually destroy her voice through an increasing reliance on drugs and alcohol, leading to her untimely death.
‘She was the first black female star. She paved the way for Beyoncé’
“She grew up in the hood and was a product of it, that’s what she related to,” says Broomfield. “It was just impossible, at that time, for her to be who she was.”
The film is something of a departure for Broomfield, who normally appears in his own documentaries. In the Nineties, he pioneered a directorial style, adopted by Louis Theroux, in which he made himself part of the story. On-screen, he was a quizzical figure wearing a crumpled shirt and an equally crumpled expression, often holding a sound boom with a tape recorder slung around his neck.
The impression was that of a slightly shambolic English gentleman who had accidentally wandered on to set. But Broomfield would ask a devastatingly simple question and the interviewee would find themselves confessing to all sorts without really intending to.
His award-winning documentaries include Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (1995) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) and were compelling precisely because the story he told the audience was also about the story he was telling to himself.
But for Whitney: Can I Be Me the 69-year-old removed himself. There is no voice-over or on-camera asides. Instead, never-before-seen footage from her 1999 European tour is interspersed with interviews from friends and entourage.
“There was so much [footage] that my story and the surrounding stuff seemed irrelevant,” Broomfield says when we meet in London, a few days before he’s due to fly back to his home in Los Angeles where he has a fiveyear-old son. “I wanted it to be her film. I wanted Whitney to be talking as much as possible, for the audience to be emotionally with her.” Making the film was an unexpectedly emotional process, too: “It was upsetting. I felt she was such a tragic figure and what happened to her was so painful.”
Her abusive marriage to the rapper Bobby Brown is also tackled. Broomfield believes Houston was attracted to Brown because he understood where she’d come from. But after Brown entered her life, her drug use got worse and she became addicted to crack cocaine.
Houston’s close relationship with her female assistant and childhood friend, Robyn Crawford, was a source of tension in the marriage. Broomfield believes Houston and Crawford were lovers and that she had to repress her sexuality so as not to upset the public.
“There was a wonderful shamelessness to her,” he says with a half-smile. “I think she didn’t give a monkey’s. None of which helped her very much. She was defiant in a way that was incredibly spirited.”
And if there is a through-line that connects his subjects, who range from Kurt Cobain (Kurt and Courtney) to Margaret Thatcher (Tracking Down Maggie), it’s that Broomfield is drawn to those who break the rules. He was a naughty child and after his parents, Morris Broomfield, a photographer, and his wife, Sonja, sent him to boarding school in Somerset, he was repeatedly suspended for bad behaviour before finally being expelled.
“I was anti-authority,” he says. “I didn’t take rules very well. I think my parents were kind of rebellious too so they were pretty supportive.”
He went to university to study law, then political science, before going to the National Film and Television School in London. He has never been particularly interested in objectivity.
“My films have always been completely subjective,” he says cheerfully. “I always put the accidents in, the interruptions. It worries me that people seem to be so into scripts for documentaries… I think there’s been a shift, where people withhold bits of the story in order to extend it into a three-act structure, which makes it more manipulative and contrived.”
Is he talking about box-set truecrime documentaries such as Netflix’s Making a Murderer or The Keepers?
“I didn’t actually get through all of Making a Murderer. The Keepers I did watch and I did feel it was very carefully edited and scripted so that they could make it an eight-part series, which I find slightly annoying, and then there’s not really sufficient pay-off at the end.” He pauses, then adds politely, “but I think there’s a lot there that is amazing and incredible.”
Broomfield is a charming conversationalist, always ready to ask a question rather than answer one. It’s easy to see why people open up; why they feel easy in his company.
“I’m genuinely interested and I’m pretty un-judgmental. I don’t have a problem accepting people for who they are. I think that’s the most important thing. People like talking, they like feeling appreciated and feeling they’re being listened to.”
As if to prove it, Broomfield peppers me with questions at the end of the interview. His manner is solicitous and attentive and without quite realising it, of course I say much more than I should have done.
It’s hard to think of a better person to have given Whitney Houston back a voice of her own.