Didnt we almost have it.., p.21
Didn't We Almost Have It All, page 21
In her 2017 memoir, The Mother of Black Hollywood, Jenifer Lewis recalled a moment she had with Whitney as they filmed The Preacher’s Wife. The legendary actress played the sharp-tongued mother to Whitney’s character. Lewis picked up on a vibe from Whitney, that she was perhaps unwell. Whitney was using daily at this point, as she admitted to Oprah in 2009, a reality that was surely impossible to hide on set given how much she loathed the early-morning call times required of film shoots. Between the scenes, Lewis pulled Whitney aside. She gave her some motherly advice by suggesting she consider therapy to help her cope with whatever might be troubling her. “Before I could say another word she whipped her head around and said, ‘Oh no Mama! My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will take care of me,’ ” Lewis wrote. Whitney was a woman of ardent faith, but she was mistaken to believe she could simply pray it all away. But that’s how faith works, right? Whitney believed she could heal herself with her prayer. Through prayer, she could overcome this—especially with her mother at her side. And Cissy, unwavering in her faith, obliged. But Whitney immediately went back to her ways, locking herself in her room as addiction closed in before Cissy freed herself of her denial and pushed for Whitney to get treatment for drugs.
***
We have to be honest about how ravenous our appetite is for watching stars shoot into orbit and come crashing back down to earth. Whitney had the great misfortune of being the product of a time when our relationship with celebrity changed under the rise of MTV and of tabloid culture, and the advent of gossip blogs and social media. Our appetite for celebrity destruction flourished under the rise of tabloid talk shows and the dawn of reality television. It should come as no surprise that MTV—which was still very much the quintessential hub for youth counterculture—was pivotal in the birth of the latter when it launched The Real World in 1992. “This is the true story of seven strangers picked to live in a house, work together, and have their lives taped—to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real” was the tagline. It was simple yet revolutionary. We hadn’t seen people live their lives in front of the camera in this way. The Real World was ground zero for a genre of television that fed on our desire to see how other people, regular or famous, lived—for better or worst (and of course the worse usually made for better viewing). The growing popularity of reality and talk show hosts that specialized in controversy like Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, Jenny Jones, and Ricki Lake created a market for humiliation that allowed tabloids to thrive. And the feeding frenzy was magnified with the Internet shifting celebrity news into a 24/7 churn. Celebrity access was no longer finely controlled by print and television empires as the Internet gave anyone with a connection the power to gawk and feed off the drama, and paparazzi went through exhaustive lengths to feed the beast. They violated starlets by snapping portraits of their crotches. They dived in trash bins to rifle through their waste. And they invaded their morning hikes, Starbucks runs, and lunch dates to get the perfect shot of them doing mundane things. Stars—They’re Just Like Us!
Gossip rags allowed us to see celebrities without the sheen we were used to, but celebrity tabloid culture became more voracious in the early 2000s as our access to tragedy and scandal widened. We went from having a few trashy gossip rags at the supermarket to thousands of blogs online that promoted the self-destruction of celebrities. That it was TMZ and not CNN that told us Michael Jackson was dead of a cardiac arrest felt like a pendulum swing. We had already consumed him and all his eccentricities and scandals to the point that his death felt like the overdue conclusion to a film we had fallen asleep watching. Tracking the downfall of our heroes was now a sport as the lines between mainstream media and celebrity blogs blurred. Before Amy Winehouse succumbed to alcohol addiction, her slow spiral was documented on a near-daily basis—paparazzi hounding her at every stumble. Amy’s story is as classically tragic an industry tale as they come. Her talent was profound, but the British press pounced on the vulnerability that was the bedrock of her music. Her alcohol and drug dependency overshadowed her sheer brilliance. We were in awe when she cleaned herself up and gave a spectacular performance via satellite for the 2008 Grammys after achieving international crossover success. But we watched in horror as her addiction sent her careening on the streets of London or onstage and as her toxic relationship with husband Blake Fielder-Civil unraveled her further. The relationship had inspired her magnificent breakthrough album Back to Black, a perfect mishmash of Motown-era soul, sixties girl groups, and contemporary R&B. Amy was a beautifully emotive singer, with a voice that could absolutely devastate you, but her spats with the press and her addictions became the focus. Amy blew up right as celebrity tabloid culture was experiencing its digital boom. There was Perez Hilton and Dlisted and Oh No They Didn’t and Just Jared and endless blind items and pages and pages and pages and pages of blogs and forums discussing and picking apart the intimate lives of anyone with a taste of fame. The Internet intensifying our appetite meant artists who took their time to create ran the risk of falling into oblivion, unless of course we were feeding on their scandals. The constant churn from blogs devoured every blunder and low point of Amy’s short orbit. There was even a dedicated website that polled visitors on when she would perish—with a free iPod for the winner.
Whitney wasn’t a stranger to the darker side of fame. Some of the secrets she tried to keep out of public view had made it into a few sordid tell-all exposés released in the early nineties, when she was reaching the apex of her fame. Books with juicy titles like Good Girl, Bad Girl and Diva arrived amid Whitney’s nineties peak and were deep dives into the gossip in her personal life and her career—and were written with all the breathless tawdriness one might expect. It all fed into the narrative that Whitney was a diva in peril and our thesis that the problem was Bobby and the drugs and her ego. And now the talk of her drug use was supplemented with paparazzi snaps of her looking haggard and unwell, confirming our belief. We gleefully consumed her humiliation. But even if we turned and looked the other way, there would always be an audience watching and waiting for the next stumble, for the next headline to devour. Whitney would tell Diane Sawyer about her penchant for partying and would tell us that she smoked weed and drank and used cocaine. But that’s not what stuck with us. It’s when she uttered those three words—Crack is wack—and solidified our view on her. Those three words went instantly viral, burying her in infamy. She had told some of her truth and shamed the biggest devil that lived inside her, but we were too busy feeding on her humiliation to actually notice.
THE UNDOING OF WHITNEY HOUSTON
Virtue, Vice, and a Requiem for Redemption
Whitney had a recurring dream in which she was standing atop a bridge that swayed back and forth from the weight of stormy weather. She was trying to flee a giant that was chasing after her. That’s nothing but the devil; he’s just trying to get you, Cissy told her. The words rang true to Whitney. She was constantly fleeing in her dreams, always getting away from the monster and waking up exhausted from all that running. The Diane Sawyer interview hardened our view of Whitney. As it related to her issues with drugs we saw an addict in denial. Her rebuttals were sharp and defensive, and she didn’t hide her irritation at the questions being asked. Diane wanted to know about the drinking, the weed, the pills, the cocaine, the weight loss, and Bobby. She wanted to know it all because she knew the world wanted to know. In retrospect, agreeing to the interview was not the sharpest move. Whitney and Bobby were sweaty and shifty, which made most of her refutations sound ludicrous. “We’re rock ’n’ rollers, man,” Whitney says, with Bobby quickly chiming in: “That’s the life we live here, you know?” They weren’t wrong. That they did drugs wasn’t that remarkable. A lot of people do drugs. But what Whitney and Bobby always failed to realize was the behavior that was generally permissible to the music industry didn’t extend to either of them. Her letting us know that she made too much money to ever smoke crack was her separating herself from our association of crack with the poor Black and brown folks strung out in the streets. Whitney and Bobby were rock stars, but they were still a Black man and woman on national TV talking about getting high. And one thing the War on Drugs taught us was that it’s impermissible for Black people to be high in this country without consequence. It’s in this talk about Whitney’s drug use where the most revelatory moment of the interview comes. Diane asks Whitney to name the biggest among her devils. “That would be me,” she replies soberly. “Nobody makes me do anything I don’t want to do. It’s my decision. So the biggest devil is me. I’m either my best friend or my worst enemy. And that’s how I have to deal with it.” Whitney was always running from that devil on her back. It had stripped her of so much. It had stolen her dignity and robbed her of much of the beautiful instrument we all hoped would return to its former glory. We wanted to blame the man sitting next to her on the couch during that trainwreck of an interview, or the parents who might not have always had their daughter’s best interest at heart, or the brothers who used her—we didn’t want to blame Whitney. She had given us too much. Even as we derided her, we pointed our fingers at Bobby and at Cissy but never at Whitney—and never at ourselves. Whitney wasn’t ready to let the world in on the extent of her troubles, but she shamed the devil, even if it was herself.
***
What Whitney needed was a hit. After her glorious comeback with My Love Is Your Love, Whitney became a heartbreaking reminder of what once was. She had slowly extinguished the fire required to deliver the signature records that put her in the upper echelon of pop. Her vices and the burdens she soothed with weed, cocaine, and alcohol had taken a toll on her voice. It was harder for her to sing the way we expected—pristine and otherworldly, like she sounded when the record-breaking string of hits at the beginning of her career cemented her as the voice. But she was bound to her early successes, a prisoner of her own achievements. No one wanted to see Whitney without hearing a signature, defining record like “I Will Always Love You,” even if her lungs could no longer sustain the rigor of floating sky-high into the rafters. In performances far after her peak, you can see Whitney trying to push through the notes, struggling to muster the strength to deliver the crescendo runs from the top of her head voice. Those were the money notes she knew everyone was holding their breath to hear. Footage from a 1999 show in Frankfurt that made it into Can I Be Me shows Whitney working her way through “I Will Always Love You.” You can feel her exhaustion through the screen. Her eyes are sunken; she’s damp with perspiration and appears disconnected from the moment. She was in the final stretch of the My Love Is Your Love World Tour—a run that was ultimately her last victory on the road—and she was drained. Whitney braces for the moment she knows everyone is waiting on. That great big boom “and Iiiiii” that launches out her throat, like a volcanic blast, powered by damn near every muscle in her five-foot-eight frame. It’s where she works the hardest on the original recording and is, perhaps, the most famous vocal run in pop music. But onstage in Frankfurt, Whitney doesn’t deliver with the assured grace of an Olympic athlete somersaulting effortlessly through the air, the way we were used to. She lets out a sigh, catches her breath, and wipes her face as her eyes dart around in search of something only she knows. She’s paused long enough that folks in the audience wouldn’t have been mistaken in wondering if the big climax would go unmet. But she motions for the band to fire up the boom that signifies the assault of runs so many of us have attempted to do in our cars and in our bedrooms and in the shower while listening to the Bodyguard soundtrack. The notes are labored, but there’s still so much splendor and elegance that the performance is magical simply because she wills it to be so.
But Whitney’s magic was fading. We watched it slip further away from her grasp after she had reclaimed much of her glory with My Love Is Your Love, a biting album that pushed her deeper into the contemporary R&B that critics and Black music purists felt her work was devoid of. The album subverted her pop-queen image into something closer to who she was at the moment—a woman fed up with the man she loved and fed up with the world’s opinions of her. It made for records that were fierce and sexy and vulnerable and brimming with rage and pain; deeply lush and soulful records that saw her exploring reggae and hip-hop soul sounds that allowed her voice to flourish and set moods and not always have to climax toward the earth-shattering heights that were now laborious to replicate. Whitney had been waiting to exhale and she finally did, over hot tracks from Wyclef and Missy and Darkchild and Babyface and Soulshock & Karlin and Lauryn Hill. It was the best music she ever made, but that doesn’t stop the devil from running after you.
What makes Can I Be Me so devastating is watching the tour footage with all that we know now. It guts you to see Bobbi Kristina just wanting a little more time with her mommy and the guilt from Whitney knowing she doesn’t have more to give; to see Robyn gritting her teeth and trying her damnedest to hold it together as Whitney and Bobby descended further into addictions that were painfully evident to everyone except them; to feel the distance between Cissy and her daughter and imagine the strain brought on by the burdens they both carried. What’s hardest to watch, though, are the performances. The joy Whitney was having leaning into the drama of the icy bangers that reinvigorated her countered by the sheer will she had to find to deliver those big, showy ballads that at this point imprisoned her by revealing the limitations of a voice damaged by years of drug use.
My Love Is Your Love was the beginning of a career stretch constantly defined by comeback attempts. In 2000, Clive and Whitney revisited the idea of assembling her classic records for a greatest hits collection. Guilting her into returning to the studio had resulted in enough material for a new album, and the retrospective set took a back seat to promoting My Love Is Your Love. Pairing her timeless hits with a handful of new records was the victory lap Whitney needed amid the flurry of negative press she was constantly bombarded with. But Clive was soon on his way out of Arista, and his protégé would be left to figure out her next move without her guiding light.
Arista reinvested in Whitney handsomely with a lavish $100 million multi-album deal, a mind-blowing sum unseen by a female singer at the time that was their way of showing their commitment to Whitney after her longtime mentor departed. The pressure was on the moment the contract was announced. She needed to show the world that she could score big without Clive, that she could do it despite the talk swallowing her career. That silly weed scandal in Hawaii, her frail appearance at Michael Jackson’s comeback concert, skipping Clive’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, getting fired from the Oscars—these all fed into the bigger story of a slow decline that was getting more attention than her music. But nothing makes bad press evaporate quicker than a hit. And so Whitney needed another smash. Another comeback. Building on the groove-heavy hip-hop soul that made her sound perkier and exciting again on My Love Is Your Love, Whitney got in the studio to record her fifth album, Just Whitney, with Missy Elliott, Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs, Kandi Burruss, and Charlene “Tweet” Keys—a crop of young songwriters and producers who were integral in steering the fusion of R&B and hip-hop into the twenty-first century—and with Rob Fusari, who crafted funky records for Destiny’s Child before going on to shape Lady Gaga’s seminal debut. Whitney also worked with trusted longtime collaborators like Babyface and Ricky Minor. The theme of the music, as Whitney told the press, was about survival and being a multifaceted woman. It was an approachable thesis that, like her last album, showed a woman in search of presenting herself as someone a little more real than her earlier music had. Whitney had abandoned the prissy pop-princess façade—in part out of necessity, but largely because she just stopped bothering to hide the rougher edges that came out when she drank or got high. Whitney eased into an elder stateswoman role. She doesn’t get enough credit for the comradery she carried with her throughout her career, but she was a woman who lifted as she climbed, as Black creatives often tend to do. Sisterhood was everything to Whitney. It was in the way she lifted up Brandy and Monica in her name and called on Faith Evans and Kelly Price to sing with her and forged bonds with Natalie Cole and CeCe Winans and Mariah Carey—putting to bed years of being pit against each other by the media with a blockbuster duet and a lasting friendship (and let us not forget that epic dress moment at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards).
Next to the blatant homophobia, the most offensive thing about the way in which people spoke of Robyn was the dismissal of her presence and influence in Whitney’s life. The media framed Robyn as someone who wasn’t as integral to Whitney’s success as Clive or Cissy. She was seen as someone whose sole purpose was linked to whatever may or may not have happened romantically between them when, in fact, Robyn and Whitney built the Nippy Inc. brand together and Robyn was a driving force in Whitney’s creative direction—the two even managed a short-lived girl group named Sunday under their banner. But like Clive, Robyn was no longer around to offer creative guidance—or career support. She had grown tired of Whitney’s self-destruction, and she was tired of fighting with Bobby and the Houstons, so she walked away from the job in 2000. For the first time in her career, Whitney was without the two people who had the most influence in it.
