Deadly Love: Bobby & Whitney (2024)

[bunniefuu]

One, two, three, four,

we dont want your stupid w*r.

Five, six, seven, eight...

- As midnight draws closer,

the anti-w*r protests grow,

countered by the president's supporters.

S*ddam Hussein is a dangerous man.

If we do not take care of him now

and stop his aggression, we will have

to pay a very heavy price in the future.

If it does come to w*r, officials here

say, the president's inclined to order

an attack sooner rather than later.

He's said to be at peace with himself,

ready to make the tough

decisions that are necessary.

1991 was a memorable year

for the USA and its citizens.

At the time, America was in the Gulf w*r.

A lot of people had sons and daughters overseas.

It was a time of great patriotism.

And at the same time, you know, any

time you're at w*r, there's a deep insecurity and fear.

In the hours since we

suspended military operations

in the Kuwaiti theater of

w*r, considerable progress

has been made in moving towards

a ceasefire and postwar planning.

As our forces moved into Kuwait City, and

as the faces of these jubilant Kuwaiti citizens

have warmed our hearts,

the coalition leaders started

the arduous task of addressing the next stages

of the Persian Gulf situation.

The United States was at w*r in Iraq.

It was Operation Desert Storm.

And there was a lot of patriotism in the air.

It was still the first Bush administration.

And the U.S. hadn't been at w*r in a very long time.

So there was a lot of support for the w*r.

And Whitney Houston performed the

Star-Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl.

And it was just such an obviously phenomenal

performance that she released

it, and it became a chart hit.

The moment in time I remember, everyone remembers,

1991, Whitney's rendition

of Star-Spangled Banner, was

absolutely flawless, beautiful, and effortless.

She still looked so youthful.

And she rocked up, a little bow in

her hair, a tracksuit or a

jumpsuit, looking very girly.

And wow, who could have expected

what was going to come out of her mouth?

It was a difficult time for the United States.

The first Gulf w*r had just started.

I think it was about eight,

nine, ten days old at that point.

And she came in and she gave this

rendition of the American National Anthem, which is

generally recognized to be the finest rendition of

the Star-Spangled Banner that has

ever been performed by any artist.

And Whitney got up dressed in this tracksuit

in red, white, and blue, just the epitome

of youth and beauty, and opened her

mouth and sang, to this day I cry every

time I hear it, the most beautiful rendition

of the Star-Spangled Banner that

has ever been done before or since.

In fact, it was so popular that they

actually released it as a single, as a

single on the music charts, because

everybody wanted a copy of it.

It was the best-selling

Star-Spangled Banner of all time.

And Whitney donated all of the profits to

the Gulf Relief Fund and the Red Cross.

Never before had a National Anthem been released

and zoomed into the top five.

It was a huge achievement and no wonder.

And again, Americans just kept loving her more.

That was their song.

This was their girl.

And she was hugely patriotic.

I really don't care what anyone says.

I don't think anyone has ever sung

Star-Spangled Banner like Whitney did.

And I've always said that.

And, you know, she has owned that one rendition of that.

Every single other person that's come and sung

it, I don't remember except her one.

She completely nailed it.

Everyone was just like... This

was, and is now, still one of

the greatest moments in NFL history.

It was a defining moment in Whitney's career.

If she wasn't before the Star-Spangled Banner,

after she sang that, she was America's darling

for doing such an extraordinary job on such

a significant song at such an important time.

And that's what it was with Whitney.

Whenever she opened her mouth

and sang, you were transfixed.

Even if you had any prior reservations for

stories you read in the press or whatever

they tried to say about her or whatever

negative, when she sang, it was over.

You had nothing to say.

You just had to just say, speechless.

Life growing up for Whitney

Houston was kind of normal.

Her parents lived in a pretty middle-class

area, very respectfully involved with the church.

Her dad was an army serviceman.

It was happy.

And she was loved.

And their life really was all about the church.

Now, this means that they had a

huge extended family around them.

And she was in no two minds what was important.

And it was her mum, her dad, her family and religion.

Whitney Houston, from a musical point of view,

had the upbringing we can only dream about,

surrounded by some of the

greatest talents of our time.

Her mother, Sissy Houston, was a great vocalist

with the group The Sweet Inspirations, who had

a hit called Sweet Inspiration,

who backed Elvis Presley.

And as a backing singer, she backed Aretha

Franklin, most famously on a song called Ain't No Way.

If you just take time out to listen to

that and hear those high notes, you

will know where Whitney came from.

Oh, but how can I, how can I, how can I

Give ya all I can

If youre tyin both of my hands

Whoa-h* it aint no way

Several similarities, really,

between Bobby and Whitney was

he, too, began singing in church.

I mean, from a very, very small age.

And he, like her, was recognized

for his extraordinarily beautiful voice.

And he formed his first band called New

Edition when he was only 12 years old.

Candy girl, you are my world

You look so sweet, youre my special treat

In 1983, New Edition released

their first album called Candy Girl.

And the band became an overnight sensation.

It seemed that Bobby's extraordinary talent and the

way he'd been nurtured through church, right through

into starting his band as a

teenager, was bearing fruit.

Despite his success, Bobby

didn't feel he'd got the rewards.

When he left New Edition in 1986, he

famously said that all he'd made

out of the band was $500 in a VCR.

He felt, and these are his words, that

he'd been treated like a sl*ve by the

record company, that he'd simply been exploited.

But, of course, he was used to success,

and it must have come as an enormous

shock and disappointment to him when his first

solo album sold very modestly and was nowhere

near as acclaimed as the first album

he'd done in 1983 with New Edition.

After the failure of his first solo album,

Bobby Brown went and worked with the R

&B producers Teddy Riley, L.A. Reid and Babyface.

And the result was an album which was

released to extraordinary critical acclaim.

It sold more than 7 million copies.

And his determination to overcome the failure of

his first album and his new beginnings with

these three producers seemed to have borne fruit

and he seemed to be on a trajectory of success.

Brown's high-powered,

sexually charged music and live

performances earned him

comparisons to his childhood hero

and idol, Michael Jackson.

This album spawned him five top ten hits

on the Billboard Hot 100,

including the single, My Prerogative.

This fight, sing

Everybodys talking all this stuff about me

Why dont they just let me live?

Tell me why

I dont need permission, make my own decisions

Thats my prerogative Its my prerogative

Its the way that I wanna

live Its my prerogative

But Bobby had his demons.

He was a hard drinker, and when he

was touring, his partying became legendary.

He began filling more new space for his

lifestyle, for his excessive

lifestyle, than he did for his music.

And of course, that was something that was

to become ever more prominent as a relationship

with Whitney Houston developed.

When Whitney Houston first appeared on the scene,

her voice captivated the world.

You know, someone has said before the invention

of auto-tune, there was Whitney Houston.

And if you think about how many artists

today are helped a bit in the studio

and go back to some of those clean,

pure vocals of Whitney's five

octave voice, it is just astounding.

Her gift was undeniable.

Whitney Houston was a pop producer's dream.

Now we're used to manufactured girls, boys coming

out who look perfect, and we kind of

know that they won't be able to sing

very well.

Whitney Houston had the face, the body, the

charm, that way where she was

so charismatic she filled the room.

So she looked like a supermodel.

She had the voice of an angel

that was massively versatile.

She had it all going on.

It was almost as if it was too good to be true.

I would like to think that what I

have, what has been God given to me,

would have gotten me into it anyway.

It's one thing having your mom and your

cousin being so successful in the business, but

it's something that you have to do on your own.

You have to establish your own abilities.

It's great to have them as my

family and it got me a lot of places,

but I'd like to think I could do it on my own.

As well as being a young singer,

Whitney became a model too.

In fact, she was the first black female

to grace the cover of Seventeen magazine in America.

This was huge.

And yes, she's known as The Voice,

but my goodness, she had the face too.

People forget just with how drugs and alcohol

took the toll on her, just how

beautiful she was as a young singer.

Back in, I believe it was 1983, she

was discovered, as much as you could be

discovered when you have that many connections, it

was the old-fashioned way.

Arista Records sent out an A&R

to see her perform at a nightclub and a

meeting was set up.

Then it led to her releasing her first

record and being on the Merv Griffin

show and it just took off from there.

Like yours, like, like mine

Like home

Home

Her voice was just more pop, but it didn't lose the soul.

She still had soul in it, but it was a pop voice.

And so she had this kind of ethereal,

pure sound with her voice

and it was very, very different.

It was very refreshing.

Early on, MTV was, for the most part,

playing specifically white rock bands.

Michael Jackson famously was unable

to get on MTV for a very long time.

How Will I Know, which was Whitney's third

US single, went to number one and was

really the first time that a young African

American woman was all over MTV.

That video was massively successful.

It was on constantly and it really cemented

Whitney's presence in mainstream America.

How will I know if he really loves me?

I say a prayer with every heartbeat

I fall in love whenever we meet

Im asking you cause you know about these things

How will I know? - How Will I Know was the voice

of any teen, 20-something girl who

was so enthusiastic about what was to come in life.

How will I know if he really loves me?

That's what we all want to know.

And Whitney was asking the question herself, too,

because she hadn't met her Mr. Right.

And many of her songs are autobiographical.

This one included the optimism of it.

You can see her now in that pop video, dancing around.

And I do think that it really captured

the innocent Whitney that we know who was

looking forward to life, finding Mr. Right and

all the successes she was about to enjoy.

I knew Bobby and we used to hang out in London.

This is just before he met Whitney.

You know, Bobby was sort of coming down

from prerogative and New Edition and all of

that was kind of going down a bit at that time.

But he was still very, very popular.

And we used to hang out in London and he was great.

And Bobby was the right character.

He was a nutter.

Contrary to all the stories you hear

about people, he's a really nice guy.

We had fun and he was very grounded.

And we took him around Brixton and stuff.

We wanted to hang with the

homies and we had fun, you know.

And then I remember when he came back

to London again, he had just met

Whitney and he was going on and on about

how amazing she is.

You know, he's really in love with her.

And he was really, really, he really fell for her hard.

When Whitney met Bobby

Brown, interestingly enough, they

met at like the Soul Train Awards.

This was a celebration of

blacks in the music industry.

And Whitney, who was probably a little bit

insecure about whether or not she was quote

unquote black enough for her peers, I think

she was a little insecure going into that.

Now, Bobby Brown at the time was really

at the top of all the R&B charts.

He was about as successful and popular as

any young African-American

artist could be at that time.

Everybody forgets that when Whitney met Bobby, he

was just about as successful as she was.

You know, he was very popular.

And he had all this confidence and swagger.

Whitney was almost immediately drawn to him.

She said, you know, men are intimidated by me.

Men are threatened by me.

But Bobby understood all I really wanted was love.

We had this dynamic where this very strong,

powerful woman meets a man who is

not afraid to put her in her place and

she finds it a turn on.

In some ways also, Bobby validated

Whitney's African -American roots.

You know, he made her more connected to

that community because of the fact that he

was so associated with the R&B charts.

At the same time, Whitney elevated him to

a huge degree, put him on an international

scale of fame by being associated with him.

One thing we all need as people is a witness.

We just want someone to see us,

not as who we pretend to be or who

they imagine us to be, but who we truly, really are.

And for artists, for people who live in

the public eye, that is

especially difficult because

everybody wants a piece of them.

Everybody wants them to be whatever they need

to be in order that they can feed

off the artist's fame, their

celebrity, their money, whatever.

But what Whitney saw in Bobby and I

think the connection was she

just felt she could just be herself.

She didn't have to pretend anymore.

She had to be something she wasn't.

She could simply be who she really

believed and knew herself to be.

Although on paper it doesn't work, Bobby Brown

and Whitney got on so well because

he treated her like a normal girl.

And she said that many guys were

just so scared of her and wanted to be

overly nice that she was massively attracted to

this guy who was gentlemanly

but had nothing to prove.

And she says that all he knew she needed was love.

There was chemistry, full stop.

Of course it shouldn't have worked, but how

many girls know they shouldn't have gone out

with a bad guy but can't help that

feeling, that gut feeling, that you're just for

some reason attracted to him,

that you want to be with him.

She was magnetized to him.

He was a total laughter.

He was funny.

He was really funny.

I brought him back to my house

to meet my mum and stuff like that.

My mum cooked him Jamaican food and the

bodyguards and we had a right laugh.

He was lovely.

There was no two ways about it.

They were good people and I thought it

was great that he was starting to date her.

I thought it was fine that you didn't

think it was a strange thing at all

outside of the media I'm talking.

To everyone else it was like, God, what's that about?

Why are they together?

But he's funny.

So I can imagine that Whitney, who's always

been around the gowns and all of that

life and stuff like that, he must

have been a right laugh for her.

She was like, oh yeah, I'm going to have fun now.

This is great.

Each of us has a deep need.

Every human being has a deep need to

live as authentically as we possibly can.

We want to be affirmed as who we are.

We want to be affirmed in the identity

that we believe is ours, our right to choose.

And we want to be seen for who we are.

And there's nothing more

destructive psychologically than the

cognitive dissonance that

comes when we are pretending

to be one person when we are really another.

And not only was that the case with

Whitney when it came to this angelic image

of her as some innocent, pure Christian girl

and that fed into her connection with Bobby,

who she felt allowed her to be her authentic self.

It also, perhaps at an even deeper level,

related to her relationship with her assistant, who

she'd met when she was 16, called Robin Crawford.

And Whitney entered into a

g*y relationship with Robin.

And of course, the few things at

that time, it's only, what, 30 years ago?

At that time, there were deeply h*m* times.

And for a woman of Whitney's background to

be in a g*y relationship would have been

deemed unacceptable by all those closest to her.

It was widely known in show business

that Whitney and Robin were together.

And this was not some kind of scandalous pickup.

They'd known each other from high school.

They were best friends all the way through

adolescence, and there were all kinds of rumors

about a relationship between Whitney and Robin.

In fact, Robin was actually

working for Whitney for a time.

She was like an assistant, and they were together.

Bobby alluded to this himself when he looked

back on the marriage, kind of implying that

one of the reasons Whitney married him was

to combat these l*sbian rumors, because it wouldn't

do at that time for America's sweetheart to be g*y.

Most of the rumors in Whitney Houston's case

have been confirmed by very close sources, such

as her bodyguard, family members.

I mean, as hard as it was for Whitney

Houston to be a black woman, you

know, taking American

mainstream by storm, imagine if

she was a black l*sbian woman.

It certainly, at that time particularly, would have

been very difficult, if not impossible, to win

over, you know, the very reactionary Middle America.

So if you were saying, like Whitney did,

that I am a good girl, I'm an

honest girl, I'm an all-American girl, I

am who I say I am, I'm a

heterosexual girl, when

you're saying all those things

to the world, and the truth might be

slightly different, that

creates all kinds of problems,

particularly when you have

a religious upbringing like

she did, because what it means is she's

not just being dishonest to other people and

dishonest to herself, she's

also being dishonest to God.

Anyone in a loving relationship wants to spend

time with their partner,

and Whitney was no different.

She spent more and more time with Robin,

and friends and family grew more and more

concerned about the impact this would have on

her public image, and the tabloids began running

stories on it, because they felt there was

something in this, that the sweet, nice, natural,

pure Whitney Houston was not as nice, natural

and pure as people imagined, and the h*m*

behind that type of reporting

was very prevalent at the time.

And it became exacerbated when she flew into

London for an A*DS awareness event, and people

were thinking, well, why would she do that?

You know, why is Whitney getting involved, and

what's that got to do with Whitney?

Sadly, there is a stigma associated

with those afflicted with A*DS.

Even as we speak, it is sweeping away

our children, our families, our loved ones.

Our world must, we must continue through research

to work toward finding a cure.

But of course, she was part of the

LGBT community, and she was in a g*y

relationship, and she wanted to stand as best

as she could in solidarity with those who

affirmed their identity, and to give support to

those who affirmed their identity in the way

in which she was trying to affirm hers,

and to provide support for them, really in

times of trouble, disease and death.

And you know, there have been theories about

Whitney's drug use, including some g*y activists who

have said that if Whitney had been allowed

to live as a l*sbian woman, she

wouldn't have had all these drug demons.

This was probably the most

positive relationship in her life.

Robin was like the guardian angel.

Whether she was g*y or not is the secondary question.

Yes, I think they had a romantic life

together, but you know, there was a kind

of witch hunt, which is like, you know,

who has the right to harass somebody in that way?

And she had to put up with all that stuff.

I think it only makes what happened in

her death and her addiction and

her marriage that much more sad.

You've just got a picture of the psychological

landscape that Whitney was living in.

She knows who she really is.

She knows who she really loves.

And yet she can't be that person.

Crushed by rumors, isolated perhaps by family and

friends, berated by them for her lifestyle, her

relationship with Robin Crawford.

In 1992, she made the choice which perhaps

in some way she felt would give her

some social acceptability,

and she married Bobby Brown.

Whitney Houston and Bobby

Brown are officially married.

The pair wed last Saturday in front of

800 people at Houston's 5-acre,

$11 million New Jersey mansion.

Whitney and Bobby were married on July 18,

1992, and for her it must have felt

like gaining social acceptance or at least a

degree of social acceptance again

after a relationship with Robin Crawford.

But again, there were questions and criticisms of

Whitney for the choice she'd made because people

didn't see Bobby as an acceptable partner for

the innocent, lovely, you know, American sweetheart.

It's very hard to underestimate the scandal and

the shock that people had back in 1991

when you have this America's Darling singing the

Star-Spangled Banner

representing the best and brightest

of our country marrying somebody who was famous

for all these music videos with numerous nearly

naked women grinding up on him, had a

foul attitude, was intoxicated all over the place,

rumored to be doing drugs.

Really this kind of horrendous, it was like

two opposites attracting, and nobody liked the fact

that they felt Whitney was being brought down,

including her family, by the way, by

this guy who was in no way her equal

or a good influence.

This has to be part of the quest

for some sort of emotional

and psychological authenticity

because she felt that with a man like

Bobby she'd be seen for who she was

rather than who she was supposed to be.

So she went ahead and they got married

and she felt that she'd made her own

choice, she felt it affirmed something about her

to marry Bobby, but there was another secret

that she was carrying which would obviously come

to not just dominate her life, but ultimately

take her life, and that was her addiction to drugs.

Hes a lot of fun, hes a gentleman, professional.

I'm learning a lot, I'm taking tricks, you know?

Not long after Whitney and Bobby got married,

she was cast alongside as the lead, alongside

Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard.

The Bodyguard cemented Whitney's

role really as an iconic legend.

She'd already kind of been hailed as this

extraordinary voice in beauty, but

with The Bodyguard she was a movie star.

She was great in the movie.

She's not a natural actress, but she did

everything well enough,

she was intelligent enough to

read the lines in a believable way, she

had great chemistry with Kevin, who

really fought for Whitney in the role.

He said, in fact he said at her

funeral, a lot of guys could have played

my part, but only one person

could have been Rachel Marin.

What's really interesting about this is that there

was the controversy over

her interracial relationship on

screen with Kevin Costner, which in 1992 was

not as socially acceptable as it would be today.

There had been industry rumors that Kevin Costner

had to fight to have a black female

lead opposite him in The Bodyguard, but we

didn't know if it was true until

he said it in his own words at her

funeral, and he said that there was an

underlying racism, nobody

came out and said, Whitney's

black, she can't be the lead, but

they were kind of like, do you want to

think about this girl, that

girl, who happened to be white?

He said no, and then they found out

that Whitney was busy when they

were due to be filming The Bodyguard.

Kevin Costner said, no problem, we'll just wait

for Whitney Houston, and the

producers were kind of like, what?

But I guess they respected Kevin

Costner, who was, is, but was huge then.

Box office gold.

He wanted Whitney so badly, he got her,

and it paid off.

It's astonishing to think that even in some

of the marketing for The Bodyguard, it said

that Whitney's face was

slightly hidden because they

were trying to hide the fact there

was an interracial relationship.

My goodness, have we moved on since then?

It's not an issue, and thank God we've moved on.

But it's astonishing to think it was such

a perceived problem for these men who were

only interested in the money and playing safe.

And this is the thing that we couldn't

understand, was that this shy, beautiful, pop, black

singer was also a really good...

I mean, she was really good in it.

She can't be gorgeous, have a great voice,

and be a good actress.

What's that about?

The soundtrack itself was

just Whitney Houston's biggest

hit of her entire career, which was saying

something, because her first

album sold 13 million copies.

Now, I Will Always Love You is such

an interesting song because it was written by

Dolly Parton not as a love song,

as we know romantic or sexual love.

It was a farewell to her singing and

business partner, Porter Wagoner,

with whom she made her first hits.

Funnily enough, it nearly wasn't to be.

They had another song in mind which had

been released a few months earlier, so decided

to go with I Will Always Love You

because it hadn't been released for years.

It was number one for 20

consecutive weeks in America.

Dolly Parton says thank you, Whitney, for making

this a far more beautiful song

than I could ever have hoped to.

Darling, I love you

Ooh, Ill always, Ill always love

You

Having a baby, you know, I'm looking forward to that.

Raising a child, you know, hearing Mommy, you know.

That's what's foremost in my head right now, you know.

I can't... The movie's done, you know, the soundtrack's done.

Thinking about doing a gospel album, you know.

So, you know, I'm just kind of

like, you know, going with the flow.

A year into her marriage with Bobby, they

had a daughter, Bobby Christina, and to all

intents and purposes it seemed to have brought

them some, at least brought Whitney a degree

of contentment and gave her a different purpose,

direction in life, which she clearly

both needed and it seemed enjoyed.

For ordinary people, it's hard to imagine the

pressures that people who live in the public

eye, especially huge megastars like

Whitney Houston, have to go through.

And here she was, having to be a

mother to cope with her addiction, to cope

with her relationship with Bobby, to cope with

the complexities of her life and who she really was.

And really, as human beings, we have to

have enormous empathy for

that because people always

imagine that money and wealth gives people a

degree of freedom, and of course it does.

You know, they can pay their bills, they

can do what they want, they can

travel where they want to travel.

But as psychologists have known for decades, you

know, that once people's basic life needs are

fulfilled, particularly the

need for love and belonging,

money only adds complexity.

And certainly, money combined

with fame is extraordinarily

difficult to deal with.

So here was Whitney with her beloved child

Bobby and having to cope with what

she'd had to cope with up to that point,

now amplified, because she not only had to

protect herself, she also

had to protect her daughter.

But despite the film's success, Whitney didn't gain

the approval from everyone.

The issue with her new husband was the

fact that he was really beside himself with

jealousy and didn't approve at all of the

on-screen intimacy between

Whitney and Kevin Costner.

And that really gave her an idea, really,

of what was to come in their relationship

as her career would soar and Bobby's would decline.

But then I think it started to spiral out of control.

What started to happen was there started to

be too many stories about the marriage being wrong.

Now, remember, everyone had already thought that it

was a bad choice of partner for her

anyway, because they can't understand what she would

be doing with a guy like Bobby.

They could never understand that, because he was

the bad boy and she was the diva.

They couldn't understand it.

But the reason why I'm talking about that

is because the synergy of that would be... That's work.

Diva is work.

Outside of that, you're at home

and you want to be a home girl.

Because Bobby couldn't

handle the on-screen intimacy

between his wife and Kevin Costner,

he stormed out of the screening.

He didn't simply sit there and accept it

or sit there and think, well, it's just acting.

He took it as a personal affront

and stormed out of the screening.

And, of course, that was complicated by the

fact that their relationship

was already volatile and

she'd had a miscarriage.

During the filming of the

bodyguard, Whitney miscarried.

And so there's this combustible series

of events that really come together.

The extraordinary success of the film, the on

screen intimacy with Kevin

Costner, the volatility of

the relationship, the miscarriage.

All this combined, really, to create great conflict,

really, between Whitney and Bobby.

All of it driven by Bobby's jealousy and

Bobby's inability to deal with his wife's success.

Why are you trying to take pictures of me?

You're a famous star, man.

That's enough.

Okay. - Thanks.

Thanks.

You're filming me.

I don't like that. Can I have that?

Hey, whoa, hey, let go, man.

Let go!

Let go of the f*cking camera.

The marriage started to take

up way too much of the headlines.

Every time you saw the two of them,

they looked smashed and, you know, the media

really went on a field day with it.

And then you had this going on for 14 years.

It got to the point where you were

actually used to hearing of disaster stories with

Bobby and Whitney and it exasperated the public.

People started to get tired of it, started

to go, for goodness sake, Whitney, Bobby, not again.

The bodyguard also exacerbated

the cognitive dissonance that

really was a... Perhaps all her life had been a feature

of Whitney's life, that she had to pretend

to be someone that she knew she was not.

And the bodyguard catapulted

her, stratospherically, really, into

a level of fame and a level of

celebrity which was beyond

what she'd achieved before

and that was in itself considerable.

But she had to hide herself.

When she was this innocent, you know, Miss

America, she had to hide her true nature.

When she was in a relationship, a g*y

relationship with Robin Crawford,

she had to hide her true nature.

And now she had to hide something else.

And it became ever more difficult to hide

it and that was her drug addiction.

Behind all that success, tragedy was looming and

it was driven by a combination of the

psychological complexity of

Whitney's life, what was turning

into an a*usive and

difficult relationship with her

husband, Bobby, and her inability, really, and the

complexity of having to deal with leading life

where she had to pretend to be someone

she wasn't, which made it increasingly difficult, as

time went on, for her to get the

love support that she needed to get to

a place where she could recover.

There are many reasons why

people can become addicted.

It can be to fill a void that

they feel they've got in their lives.

It can be to cover over a

psychological isolation that they feel.

There's many different

reasons why people spiral into

these self-destructive

lifestyles and as her relationship

with Bobby developed, her drug addiction grew more

intense and her inability to cover it up

had an increasingly devastating

psychological toll on Whitney,

and what's interesting was that Bobby is often

portrayed as rightly as the bad boy, and

there was no doubt that he mistreated Whitney.

What's interesting, though, is that his drug of

choice was alcohol and it was

Whitney who introduced him to cocaine.

So we have here, really, what could only

be described, I guess, on one aspect of

their relationship as a classic

co-dependent relationship,

where the boundaries between

them were getting blurred,

their dependency on each other became more intense,

and they fueled, each one fueled the most

destructive and helpless side of the other.

Of course, when that happens,

escape becomes extraordinarily difficult.

What was astonishing and

heartbreaking was to listen

to her voice because it had gone, in

part she sounded like she was really struggling

to speak, it was sore, and of course

we know now that it was because she

smoked crack cocaine.

Of all the drugs she could have taken,

of all the ways she could have taken

them, injecting, taking orally, she decided to do

the thing that would take away her voice, her gift.

The voice was the mechanism which put her

in front of the world and put this

person before the world who wasn't really the

person that the world thought they were looking at.

And so by destroying the voice,

she actually breaks that illusion.

That's, you know, well documented with people who

find themselves in the public eye as someone

or something, they can't actually reconcile with who

they really are, they want to sabotage

that and they want it all to end.

I think she was uncomfortable with having such

a huge gift that eclipsed him, and

this was her way of messing it all up,

taking it all away, so she could kind

of say to Bobby, to please his insecurities,

look, I'm just like you now.

I love the children.

They will do much for their kids.

Whitney loves and believes in children.

They do.

Hello, hello, hello.

In around 2009, any time Whitney Houston was

seen in public, it was unfortunately

a field day for the tabloids.

She would often look

disheveled, unnaturally thin, often

saying things that made

little sense, basically doing

nothing that didn't counter the idea of her

being too far gone into her addictions.

When she performed that particular song in 2009

American Music Awards, any time she was seen

in public, it was more often than not

fueled to the rumors of her demise being

not too far in the future.

If you cant feed your baby

Then dont have a baby

And dont think maybe

If you cant feed your baby

Youll be always tryin to

stop that child from cryin

Hustlin, stealin and lyin

Youve got to be tryin

So you wanna be startin somethin,

you got to be startin somethin

Gotta be So you wanna be startin somethin

Startin You got to be startin somethin

And people were shocked by her appearance, you know.

Absolutely shocked.

She was frail, gaunt, voice wasn't what it was.

People have a fascination, and a morbid fascination

really, with people who are self-destructive, and

the more that Whitney was destroying herself, the

more the media reported it.

It was no longer a secret now

that Whitney had problems.

Her friends knew, her colleagues

knew, the press knew, her fans knew.

Everybody knew.

And this is the thing about addiction, because

people who go into this spiral of self

destruction, they don't feel good about themselves.

They don't think, great, I'm just having a

drink, I'm just having some cocaine.

They feel ashamed, deeply,

profoundly ashamed, right to their bones.

And Whitney felt she had let her mother

down, she'd let her family down, she'd let

her daughter down, she'd let herself down.

But how do you cope?

How do people cope without support?

How do people cope with that

level of psychological pressure?

And the answer that she and many others

find is they take more drugs, because that

kills the pain, because drugs are perhaps initially

for people a means of gaining pleasure.

By the time addiction really takes a grip

of anyone, drugs are nothing more

than a way to ease the pain, to block it

out, to pretend it's not there.

And that's where she ended up.

This goes back to the same thing again of people...

Some people are saying that, you

know, was she trying to sabotage herself?

Was she trying to slowly k*ll herself?

And all of this... Look, let's just keep it real.

Bottom line is this.

She's a human being.

And what happens is she came from a

very normal upbringing,

middle-class family, as normal

as it could possibly imagine.

You know, Sissy was working with big stars

and was associated with stars and stuff like

that, but she had a very normal life.

And her mum's little thing was like, I

guess, was like, ooh, that's my

little view of what stardom is.

And it was exciting, but she was a normal kid.

She had a normal life.

You thrust that...

You go from that and thrust a

little 16, 17-year-old into this big, big

arena, fame, fortune and all of the above

that goes with being the biggest-selling

female of all time in your teens.

This will cause a psychosis.

One of the key things that happens when

people get into a spiral of addictive behaviour

is it becomes more and more destructive.

It doesn't lessen, it gets more and more extreme.

And, of course, when people's lives spiral out

of control and when they're

in codependent relationships,

as Bobby and Whitney were, then tragedy and

catastrophe is really inevitable.

And as their lives spiraled out of control,

as the addictions grew more and more

intense, they withdrew from the world.

They would disappear, really, for months at a

time, you know, living in isolation,

just Whitney, Bobby and crack cocaine.

After Bobby moved on to heroin, he almost

died from an overdose and he was permanently

d*sfigured with a crooked mouth as a result of that.

Apparently, he didn't take heroin

again, but the damage had been done.

And, of course, the damage with any drug,

with any addiction, is

never principally physical, it's

principally psychological.

And the damage wasn't just to

him, it was also to their relationship.

And, of course, because Whitney was so famous,

they were rich, they had money, they had

power, there's plenty of people who enable that.

Plenty of doctors, plenty of friends, plenty of

colleagues, plenty of people

who will enable it for a price.

And I think at a certain point, she

just wanted to stop, but her family and

this entourage who were living off her, you

know, apparently she was supporting over 50 people,

buying their cars, their houses, sending their kids

to school, paying their medical

bills, which in America is something.

So there was a massive pressure on her.

And so they were, on the one level,

had complete power over those around them, and

yet on another level were

completely powerless because

they were psychologically

powerless over the addiction that

got a hold of them.

If you look at the dynamic between Whitney

and Bobby over the years again and

again, you see a woman who is trying to

bring herself down to the level of someone

else so that he doesn't feel

threatened and he feels comfortable.

The best example of this is being Bobby Brown.

The reality show that Whitney

and Bobby starred in together.

Rather than ask what went wrong with the

marriage, when you saw them on TV and

the documentary following

Bobby Brown but Whitney's very

much involved, the question really

was, what's right with that marriage?

The executives at the channel would not even

consider the show unless Whitney agreed to appear.

Bobby was desperate to get some fame

on his own, apart from his wife, so he

persuaded her to be on the show.

When Whitney agreed to be

filmed, the show got the green light.

But it was one of the worst decisions she ever made.

For the rest of film history, we can

watch these scenes of a

deteriorating Whitney talking

about bowel movements,

talking about being drunk, clearly

under the influence of all kinds of drugs.

If I don't have it, I'm not the man.

You're frigging hallucinating.

I want things.

I like things.

I am things.

I don't want nothing.

I don't need money.

I don't need cars.

I have love.

You could see him trying to

drag his power back from Whitney.

Like when he said one day when she came

into the room, you know, Jack, be nimble.

Jack, be quick.

Bring that a*s in here quick and I'm

going to show you what I'm going to

do with it.

And that's a man who's trying to sit

down and say, don't think she's the boss. I am.

It is train wreck television.

You would see Bobby Brown just, you know,

delusions of grandeur, ego out of control, drinking

during the day, and Whitney Houston during the same.

It broke me in two because I know

that something must have just gone wrong there

cos they weren't like that in the early 90s, OK?

When you saw the two of them

together and they were out, it was fun.

A man like Bobby Brown doesn't want to be Mr Houston.

He wants his wife to be Mrs Brown.

And because that could

never happen, the implications

for their marriage were severe and damaging.

So sometimes two energies come

together and they can destroy each other.

It's not about blame.

You can't blame anyone.

Sometimes two people are toxic together.

Sometimes that can happen.

And I think that's what happened there, and it's sad.

She did it for her husband, she

did it to help him, and it was very

typical of their relationship

that everything she did

to help him just brought her down.

And then in 2002, perhaps as a desperate

attempt really to rehabilitate

her image, Whitney did

a famous crack-his-whack

interview with Diane Sawyer.

The Diane Sawyer interview

was absolutely astonishing.

You had Whitney come in, sit down very

regally, as you'd expect, trying to keep herself

together, and you thought,

OK, maybe she's all right here.

When Diane Sawyer went for the jugular and

asked her the tricky questions, as a good

journalist should, did you take crack, she was,

you could tell, very angry

and trying to suppress that.

It's not just thin.

Don't listen.

Diane, tell me.

Do you know?

It's scary thin.

Whitney dying.

Crack rehab fails.

First of all, let's get one thing straight.

Crack is cheap.

I'd make too much money to ever smoke crack.

Let's get that straight, OK?

We don't do crack.

We don't do that.

Crack is whack.

And she came across as very disjointed, jumpy.

If she hadn't taken anything, any drugs then,

then she certainly had quite recently before, as

later came to be the truth.

But she was very emotional and fragile, and

it's hard to watch, because now we

know just how much of a lie she was

living.

For the most part, Whitney stayed

away from L.A. She spent a lot of time

in Atlanta, where she lived in a big house.

Didn't really do much, didn't

really work, just kind of hung around.

Coming out to L.A. for the Grammys was a big deal for her.

The last song that Whitney

publicly sang was Jesus Loves Me.

It was an impromptu performance for her friend,

the singer Kelly Price, who the next day

was going to be receiving a Grammy Award.

And it was heartbreaking, because

that was going to be the final song.

Then how poignant that she's talking to Jesus,

that religion means so much to her, and

she wasn't to know that the next day she'd be gone.

So

I love you so much.

And whether Im wrong

Lord tells me, good

So

On the last day of her life, February 11th,

2012, Whitney Houston didn't leave her hotel room.

She spoke on the phone to her cousin, Dionne Warwick.

She tried to call her pastor, but he didn't pick up.

And perhaps that was symptomatic maybe of what

she was going through, this constant pull between

light and dark, between

addiction and sobriety, between

life and death, this half-life that so

many people who get deeply addicted live, where

on the one hand they're spiraling downwards, even

as they stretch maybe a hand or finger

just upwards to try to grip onto

something solid to give them hope.

And that was the battle she was

fighting on the last day of her life.

At 3.45 in the afternoon, one of

Whitney Houston's assistants turned up in her hotel

room and found her unresponsive in the bath.

She was dead.

There was champagne, bottles of beer, and of

course, rather than to try and memorialize Whitney

Houston at this point, of course, plenty of

people did, but much of the press

simply sensationalized her death.

Here was the voice which Oprah

Winfrey had described as the voice of God.

The voice had gone, now the life had

gone, and what took her life was her

addiction.

I had literally just got off stage,

and I got a text message from the BBC,

please urgent call.

So I rang back.

He said, Misha, this is Stan from the BBC.

Whitney Houston has just, we've

just found out that she's died.

And I was like, I mean, I let out this scream.

I just couldn't believe it.

I was like, what are you talking about?

It's just, no, it's a mistake.

It can't be right.

But then I thought, well, for him

to be calling me at 12 o'clock at

night, you know, it must be real.

How she died, well, it was the combination

of the drugs in her system,

alcohol, the steam from the bath.

She'd lost consciousness, and she drowned.

It's fitting that Whitney's funeral was held at

the New World Baptist Church in New Jersey,

which is the very place where she

began singing when she was a child.

And this time, you know, she was being laid to rest.

The most iconic artists of the era, Elton

John, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Beyonc,

they all turned up to her funeral.

It's really to bear witness

to her extraordinary talent.

And, of course, Bobby turned up.

Bobby Brown turned up and left very suddenly.

Bobby Brown's behavior at the funeral was nothing

short of odd and disrespectful in many ways.

Many would say that they wouldn't

have expected him even to be invited.

It is no secret that Whitney's family despises

him and to a great degree blame a

lot of Whitney's problems with substance abuse on

her marriage and her relationship to Bobby.

However, Whitney's family went on the record and

said, no, he is invited to the funeral,

and Bobby was invited to

bring two guests along with him.

Now, on the day of the funeral, here

comes Bobby Brown with an entourage of nine

because they'd been asked to move, not Bobby,

but some of the people he'd brought.

He became irate.

He became very angry.

Al Sharpton, who was at the funeral, actually

tweeted, I'm trying to calm down Bobby Brown.

Today is not about him.

Today is about Whitney.

No matter how he was feeling,

that day was not about him.

That whole thing was just like a media

circus, you know, trying to interpret what it

might have meant that Bobby Brown left early.

Is it because he cared too much?

Is it because he doesn't care enough?

Whitney Houston died in 2012.

Just three years later, in July 2015, her

daughter, Bobby Christina, died in

remarkably similar circumstances.

Died of a drug overdose and drowning.

And one can only speculate

because it's psychologically

true that patterns in dysfunctional

families can sometimes

repeat themselves.

An addicted mother or an addicted father can

find that their children

will have similar behavioral

issues and will suffer similar

consequences for those behaviors.

And tragically, Bobby

Christina died in a remarkably

similar way to Whitney Houston, and

in this case, at the tender age of 22.

There'll never be another Whitney.

There's only one Whitney Houston, you know, and

there'll never be another one.

I think she was a real, kind of a real survivor.

And I think when you see the number

of movies and albums and tours that she

did over such a short space of time,

I just don't know how she, she must

have had no time to herself at all.

And I think at a certain point, she just wanted to stop.

For me, it's sad because she didn't get

that personal fulfillment, it

seems, in her personal life.

Whitney Houston's death really

did reverberate around the world.

You know, sometimes I think you don't realize

what an iconic figure someone is until they're gone.

Well, I think one of the really fascinating

but infuriating things about Whitney is that I

don't think she ever knew who she was.

She was always struggling to find herself.

There's two great lines from Whitney.

One, she said, I am my own worst enemy.

And in one of her most famous and

moving songs, really, which is I Have Nothing,

she said, I can't hide from myself.

I can't run from myself.

The only time I feel that she ever

felt comfortable, the only time she ever felt

sure of who she was was when she

was on stage and she was singing.

And those moments are, you know, the real her.

We'll just remember the genius

that took her to the top of the world.

And in posterity, we'll make sure she stays there.

I think the thing with Bobby, the

sense I get of him from the footage of

him over the years is that he's

someone who's always putting on a front.

You know, he had this tough guy image,

but actually, I think he was not ever a tough guy.

He was kind of a bit pathetic.

He's a kind of closed person in some ways.

You know, I don't think he's reached the

stage of his life where he's ready to

open up and to talk openly about this.

Maybe he never will reach that stage.

Sometimes people not answering and seeing how they

don't answer a question is almost more revealing

than actually having them say something.

And I think this is one of those cases.