Superstar who couldn’t shake demons
Whitney Houston just wanted to dance with somebody who loved her. But life moved too fast for the tragic pop diva. That’s the main takeaway of
Whitney, a documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin Macdonald ( Touching the
Void). It helps explain how a churchgoing gospel singer from suburban New Jersey, always ready with a shy smile, became a global superstar in the 1980s and ’90s — only to yield to a raging cocaine addiction and other personal demons that left her dead at age 48 in an L.A. hotel bathtub in 2012.
Houston’s equally troubled daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, would also be found unconscious in a bath three years later. She died several months later at age 22.
The film includes at least one major revelation, uncovered by Macdonald through exhaustive interviews with Houston’s family and friends: she was sexually molested as a child by her cousin Dee Dee Warwick, the sister of pop singer Dionne Warwick.
Houston’s half-brother Gary Garland was also molested by Dee Dee, who died in 2008. The allegations were confirmed on camera by Mary Jones, Houston’s aunt and personal assistant, the woman who found Whitney’s body in a Beverly Hilton Hotel bathtub.
Jones said Houston confided in her about the sex crime but never spoke of it to her domineering mother, soul singer Cissy Houston, for fear of scandalizing the family. The abuse made Whitney doubt her sexual orientation — years later, as an adult, she’d have a brief sexual liaison with Robyn Crawford, her best friend and employee — and the consensus is her disastrous marriage to R&B singer Bobby Brown was in part an attempt to prove she wasn’t gay or bisexual.
Macdonald barely mentions Houston’s drug use in the first half of the two-hour film, as he documents an early life that was anything but the typical Hollywood hard-luck tale: living with her parents, two brothers and a cat named Misty Blue in a house with a pool in Orange, N.J., where she attended a private Catholic girls’ school. Houston was known as “Nippy” to her family and friends, a nickname given her by her civil servant father John, whom she adored.
The only apparent early sign of trouble was the gift her brother Michael gave her on her 16th birthday: an introduction to both marijuana and cocaine, which she immediately decided she loved.
Houston was eager to use the magnificent multi-octave voice she felt God had given her, so she left home at age 18 and briefly (but reluctantly) pursued a modelling career before being signed by Arista Records to make Whitney Houston, the 1985 album that made her not just a star, but a record-setting one. It yielded multiple hits, including “How Will I Know” and “Saving All My Love for You,” and was heralded as one of the bestselling debut albums by a woman in history.
But she had many doubts and fears.
In an archival interview that opens the film, Houston speaks of a recurring nightmare of being chased by a giant who repre- sents one or more of the personal demons she’d have to vanquish in life: “When I wake up, I’m always exhausted from running,” she says.
More chart-toppers and a movie career would follow, the latter including the 1992 smash The Bodyguard, a romantic drama in which she co-starred with Kevin Costner, and which yielded the monster hit “I Will Always Love You.”
But that same year she’d marry Brown, whom she’d met at the 1989 Soul Train Awards, where she was infamously booed by an audience that considered her music “too white” — a knock she endured throughout her career and which she took very personally.
Brown was jealous and possessive — he admits in the film he was “conceited at the time” — and Houston made her career secondary to playing the role of wife to Bobby and mother to Bobbi, her only child.
She was briefly happy, but not for long.
Career reversals, vocal troubles, a bitter divorce and a comeback tour that wasn’t all took a toll, magnified by the drug and alcohol addictions Houston was unable to shake, despite stints in rehab.
Drowning prompted by heart disease and cocaine intoxication was the coroner’s official reason for Houston’s death, but her family and friends interviewed in Whitney all seem to think that it was her inability to reconcile herself with her dual personalities as sweet Nippy from New Jersey and superstar Whitney who ruled the pop world.
“If you can’t know who you are, nothing’s gonna save you,” one of them says.