Villains exposed in Houston’s transcendent and tragic life
In the crowded world of celebrity tell-alls, Robyn Crawford, Whitney Houston’s best friend and the vaultlike repository of her secrets, is a rare big “get.” Rumors that Houston was a lesbian, and Crawford her lover, followed the singer from the earliest days of her career.
Crawford’s plain-spoken, affectionate new memoir, “A Song for You,” confirms most of what tabloids had alleged and fans had already guessed: Crawford and Houston, who met as teenagers, were involved in a secret love affair that ended out of necessity as Houston’s star rose. They remained close, until Houston’s drug use and her turbulent marriage to R&B star Bobby Brown drove them apart.
Crawford was 19 and Houston nearly 17 when they met in 1980, when both women were camp counselors at a New Jersey community center. Crawford was a student athlete. Houston, nicknamed Nippy after a comic strip character, was a model and a standout in her church’s choir. She was soft-spoken and avoided confrontation; Crawford became her protector. Their friendship quickly turned romantic, a fact they hid even as they moved in together. “We were everything to each other,” Crawford writes. “We weren’t falling in love. We just were. We had each other. We were one: That’s how it felt.”
Soon after signing her record deal, Houston gave Crawford a Bible and told her that their physical relationship was over. She feared public exposure and going to hell. Though they were no longer romantically involved, they remained best friends. As Houston became a superstar, Crawford worked as her gatekeeper and allaround aide-de-camp, the primary employee of Nippy Inc.
They began experimenting with drugs early in their friendship — Houston told Crawford that she started doing cocaine at 14 — but vowed to quit. “Whitney would often say, ‘Cocaine can’t go where we’re going,’ ” recalls Crawford.
But it did. Things got so bad that Crawford held an intervention for herself.
She also warned Houston’s mother, Cissy, a famous singer in her own right and one of the book’s most indelible villains.
In Crawford’s telling, which consistently rings true, she is an emotional bulwark for Houston, who found it difficult to stick up for herself. “Performing, Whitney was a lioness, but offstage she was quiet and rarely roared.” Family members took advantage of her, draining her finances and, according to Crawford, sometimes enabling her drug use. Houston’s family members viewed
Crawford as an opportunist.
Crawford’s book is a minor masterpiece of genteel score-settling: Houston’s ex-boyfriend Eddie Murphy seems to delight in humiliating the pop star. Though he was reluctant to publicly acknowledge their relationship, he called her on her wedding day to try to talk her out of marrying Brown, sensible advice that even Crawford hadn’t dared give.
Brown is a malign presence throughout the book, a skulking, aggrieved figure who abuses Houston and impregnates another woman during their courtship. Everything “he put his hands on ended up in ruins,” Crawford writes.
Their blowups became legendary. Crawford writes that she once witnessed Brown spit in Houston’s face and worried what he was doing to her in private. It’s Brown who ultimately drove Crawford away. After a particularly bruising argument with the couple, she quit: “I had done all I could do, and for the first time I realized that I needed to save myself.”
She and Houston, who divorced Brown in 2007, had only sporadic contact until the singer’s death by accidental drowning in 2012 (heart disease and cocaine use are cited as contributing factors).
Crawford worries that the scandal and tragedy of Houston’s last years can make it easy to forget the greatness of her life. “Yes, in the end it was tragic, but the dream and the rise were beautiful,” Crawford writes. “I owe it to my friend to share her story, my story. Our story. And I hope that in doing so, I can set us both free.”
Allison Stewart is a freelancer.