Rise and fall of Whitney the tragic star

AS DOCUMENTARIES go about the dazzling rise and tragic fall of brilliant but troubled female singers who took too many drugs and died too young, 2015’s Amy, about Amy Winehouse, was something of a masterpiece.

Nick Broomfield’s similarly themed film about Whitney Houston isn’t quite that, but it’s terrific, all the same, and terribly sad. Actually, it’s striking how much the two women had in common.

Both had problems with their fathers (and, in Whitney’s case, with her jealous mother, too) and both fell for the wrong man: Amy for the irredeemable Blake Fielder- Civil and Whitney for the selfstyled bad boy of R&B, Bobby Brown.

Broomfield doesn’t quite manage to extract a definitive answer to the enduring question of whether Houston had a long-term lesbian relationship with her devoted assistant Robyn Crawford, though it is likely that she did. More significantly, it seems clear that her drugfuelled downward spiral really began when Crawford was edged out of her life by the controlling Brown.

It’s rather heartbreaking to see just how vibrant and exciting Houston was when she first emerged at the age of 19.

Soon she had eclipsed the stardom of her cousin Dionne Warwick — with a debut album that sold 25 million copies worldwide and more consecutive U.S. number ones than The Beatles.

One of her backing singers asserts that she paved the way to the very top of the mountain for black women, that without Whitney there would be no Beyonce. Yet some powerful African-Americans in the music industry felt she’d sold out, that she’d been cheerfully repackaged by white executives for white audiences. Their disapproval hurt her deeply.

By 2002, her star was waning. That was the year in which she was hired to sing at the Oscars, but fired, in the words of Burt Bacharach, following a ‘trainwreck’ of a rehearsal. It was also the year that her father sued her for $100 million.

If Brown was the most conspicuously malign influence in her life, her parents were close runners-up. Her mother Cissy, also a singer, evidently felt Whitney had the career she should have had.

What a tragic story. The film’s sub-title, by the way, refers to her favourite saying — she was so many things to so many people but only ever wanted to be herself.