He will always love her
Ten years after Whitney Houston's death, author and smitten fan Gerrick Kennedy revisits her life and legacy
Writer Gerrick Kennedy grew up loving the music of Whitney Houston, dreaming of one day meeting her. Once grown, he finally got his chance, but in a cruel irony, he did so just days before she died.
At the time, Kennedy was a young pop music reporter who was at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for a pre-Grammy event. Houston, struggling with her demons, was there too, and she wandered into the ballroom where a news conference was about to begin.
Kennedy writes that Houston was disheveled and visibly intoxicated, but her smile was still radiant. He recalls speaking with her briefly, telling her how much he loved her, and that she looked at him with a sadness in her eyes that's never left him.
Two days later, on Feb. 11, 2012, Houston was found unresponsive in the bathtub of her suite in the hotel. So soon after their brief encounter, Kennedy was now reporting on the death of his idol.
As the 10th anniversary of Houston's death approached, Kennedy's new book, “Didn't We Almost Have It All” (Abrams, $28), arrived. It's not quite a biography, not exactly a memoir, but combines elements of both.
“It did start from a really personal place, and it was just my own grief,” Kennedy says. “I had never really had a chance to sit with — not just her death, but my proximity to her that weekend.
“There were lots of things happening at the same time for me. I was thrust into this world of celebrity death coverage, but it's still a human being that you had loved and admired,” he says.
Still, people sometimes nudged him to write a book, which for years he insisted he wasn't interested in.
“We all knew what happened that weekend; we all knew how that weekend ended,” Kennedy says. “I didn't think there needed to be anything more.”
With time, though, the outlines of stories that hadn't been fully explored took shape in his imagination.
“I really had this frustration that this era which she helped really define, the MTV era, as well as going into the '90s and early 2000s, had not been told,” Kennedy says. “All of her peers have been studied and she has not been.
“So that was really a big motivating factor of writing it the way that I did,” he says. “Wanting to tell this story that connected not just my love of her, but the universal love of her.
“But also to kind of hold up a mirror to all of us, like, this is how we treated her when she was here, and it sort of took so many celebrities to die for us to sort of shift the way that we think and talk.”
Falling in love
As a young boy in Cincinnati, Kennedy fell hard for the voice, the smile, the whole dream of Whitney Houston.
“My mom, she was already a fan because she knew what Cissy [Houston, Whitney's singer mother] had done with Aretha [Franklin], so she was naturally invested in her daughter,” he says of his early awareness of Whitney Houston. “It was kind of this almost unspoken thing in the house where Whitney was just there.”
Born in the late '80s, he grew up when music videos were still at their peak, and Whitney Houston was one of the medium's brightest stars.
“If I'm thinking about a first song, it was by way of music videos,” Kennedy says. “It was watching MTV, it was watching BET, you know, `I Wanna Dance With Somebody' on a loop. It was seeing `How Will I Know.'
“It was seeing just the vivaciousness of this young woman and this voice and that smile,” he says. “And how it all worked together in a way that I hadn't seen for someone who looked like the girls in my neighborhood.”
Barely old enough for school, Kennedy saw Whitney Houston in “The Bodyguard” playing a star like herself opposite Kevin Costner, as her bodyguard and eventual love interest.
“I realized how much she meant when `The Bodyguard' was coming out,” he says. “It was like, `Oh, I can see her on the big screen as well, and there's also music.'
“It just is burned into my memory: I was sitting in the movie theater and being, like, `This is probably the most beautiful woman on the planet, but also somebody who sings like this?' It really did feel like an angel was singing directly to you.”
Off the pedestal
In “Didn't We Almost Have It All,” which takes its title from a Whitney Houston hit, Kennedy tells the story of her life, career and death in themed chapters, organizing the book in a series of linked essays.
The book opens with an exploration of his lingering grief in the aftermath of her death, and how slowly he returned to her music over the sad details of her final years.
Other chapters look into the importance of her hometown and early years in Newark, New Jersey, and the influence of her mother on Whitney Houston's own career.
One examines the speculation about her sexuality as well as her long friendship with Robyn Crawford, who wrote in a 2019 book that she and Whitney Houston had shared a brief romantic relationship. Elsewhere, he writes about how her being a Black woman in the White-dominated pop world led some to question her Blackness.
The later pages turn the focus on the reader, challenging us to consider how our interest in gossip and scandal led many to cast shame upon her, possibly contributing to the self-destructive behavior that doomed her.
“Black radio, if I can be completely honest, is where I learned people had a problem with Whitney Houston when I was a kid,” Kennedy says of how he first realized not everyone loved her as he did.
“You would hear this gossip,” he says. Kennedy adds that this speculation about her sexuality, her marriage and her drug use began to creep into magazine profiles and TV stories, tarnishing the tiara of the pop princess as her career slowed in the new millennium.
The public's complicity
Houston may have seemed the package of perfection when she arrived on the scene in the early '80s, but when she stumbled — in an era of much meaner and faster celebrity gossip — everyone gawked, Kennedy says.
“I really did want to have a conversation around our participation in her demise,” he says. “I would get a lot of grief when I would have these conversations as I was writing, where it's, like, `Well, we didn't make her do drugs.' ” That's correct, he says, but the relentless public scrutiny and criticism put pressure on the increasingly fragile and flawed singer.
“I think our complicity came into the hard truth of what her life was for so long,” Kennedy says. “Constantly reminding her, `Well it would be great if you could sing “I Will Always Love You” the exact same way you sang it in 1992, but since you can't, you're trash.'
“When she does `Being Bobby Brown,' it's, `Oh, you have to go on reality TV because your career is over,' ” he says. It's partly a symptom, Kennedy says, of the way in which famous women are treated. “There was such a constant reminder of her shortcomings, but also her mistakes,” he says. “It's something we tend to really only do with women. Look at Britney, look at Janet, look at Mariah. “You look at the ways in which these women were destroyed for, in the grand scheme of things, mistakes that weren't really that big of a deal,” he says. “They all had the same kind of treatment where people were predicting, `Which one's going to die?'
“It became a sport in a way. We all played a role in that.”
Peace from sorrow
Ten years later, Kennedy says, the thought of what might have been had she lived still haunts him.
“It's the one place where my grief really still exists,” he says. “Because the world, it's not that it's gotten that much better, but the freedom, that's enough to wish that she was here.”
Freedom to be open about an addiction, a love, a struggle is a luxury Whitney Houston never knew, Kennedy says.
He says he's sad when he considers the possibilities that might have been, “if we were just a little kinder, or if she would have been trying to escape a little bit less.”
But the years of work on the book have also restored his ability to love the art she created, and for that he's grateful.
“Writing this helped me get back to the place where I could just have love, adoration and joy, from her music, from her films,” Kennedy says. “That was really the greatest gift.
“I wanted myself to arrive there, but I also was hoping that by me doing this, that other people would arrive to that as well,” he says. “Because I really felt her music wasn't being celebrated anymore.”
“Wanting to tell this story that connected not just my love of her, but the universal love of her. But also to kind of hold up a mirror to all of us, like, this is how we treated her when she was here, and it sort of took so many celebrities to die for us to sort of shift the way that we think and talk.” — Gerrick Kennedy, on his reasons for writing a book about Whitney Houston