Legendary
this my muhf--king natural...
"Barbed Doll: Whitney Houston"
Newspapers | Jackson, Alan - The Times (Oct 17, 1992, London (UK)):
Launched in 1985, Whitney Houston came ready-packaged as the black diva of her generation. Imagine that Pallitoy or Mattel, intent on creating the first-ever living doll, had examined every definable demographic within America about the purchasing preferences. Only after such a multi-million dollar research and development program might a commodity as finely tuned and consumer-friendly as the then 23-year-old woman from New Jersey have been launched.
Within the available range of female singers, she represented a luxury item with mass appeal. The voice, technically faultless and effortlessly expressive, had been trained both in church and by her gospel-star mother, Cissy, before being loaned to Mammon. It had the potential to inherit the legacy of fame enjoyed by the legendary women of 20th-century popular music. But which of those essential names certainly not Ella or Sarah or Aretha had reached point-of-sale so gloriously gift-wrapped?
Houston, a former model, was poised, glamorous, serenely beautiful. As such, she captured the Zeitgeist of aspirant, buppie America, without alienating the country's vast but conservative white mainstream. She was a brand leader from day one, the ultimate example of what the Americans like to call "a class act".
She was also, of course, a young woman barely into her twenties, suddenly expected to play a public role that was equal parts siren, sage and supermodel. Media expectations provide a script for such scenarios: she should have turned weird under the strain, living the diva's image to its tempestuous, neurotic, ermine-drenched hilt. But after seducing the world into buying some 40 million copies of the three albums she has released to date, the single weirdest thing about Houston is how normally she behaves within the hothouse atmosphere that inevitably encloses her. She may have an Olympic-sized swimming-pool at home, the initials WH inscribed on its floor in black Plexiglas, but first impressions are of a woman radiating a relentlessly sunny, if slightly hyped-up, normality.
Due at a Manhattan hotel to promote her film debut in the forthcoming Warner Brothers thriller The Bodyguard, her impending presence provokes seismic waves of nerves and anticipation among the huddles of television, newspaper and public-relations personnel assembled in an upstairs suite. Someone signs for the tray of tiny sandwiches and fresh berries that has just arrived via room service, and tries not to blanch at the $200 (Pounds 117) cost. A Japanese video crew, intimidated by the crush, retreat into the adjoining bedroom and sit in a nervous line on the very edge of an enormous four-poster.
"Thank you, thank you, I appreciate that", says the woman at the eye of this minor hurricane, graciously fielding congratulations on her recent marriage to singer Bobby Brown. Wearing a vividly patterned silk shirt over canary-yellow trousers, Houston looks at once exotic and strangely modest. An enormous diamond flashes from her third finger, left hand. Her eyes and smile are similarly bright. As yet, there is no visible sign of her recently announced pregnancy.
Even one-to-one, as we move to a neighboring room to talk, Houston projects a megawatt brilliance. It is the second time we have met, and she asks all the right "How've you been?" questions. Ice-breaking chitchat about July's lavish wedding (reported with breathless reverence within the pages of Hello!) is responded to with near-religious fervor. "The love that I have for Bobby... well, it overwhelms me," she says at one point, fingertips pressed together above her heart. The effect of this performance, observed at such close quarters, is spellbinding. Any instinct to giggle is swept away by that luminous smile. Applause would not seem inappropriate.
This is why the camera loves Houston. And it is also why the news of her much-rumored break into movies makes one think of the successes (Cher, Diana Ross albeit briefly) rather than the relative failures (David Bowie, Sting, Olivia Newton-John, and so on) among those of her profession who have attempted the transition before her. Not that the synopsis for The Bodyguard gives substantial grounds for such optimism. "Frank Farmer is a professional bodyguard, one of the best," it reads. "A former Secret Service agent, he has risen to the top of a demanding profession by never letting his emotions interfere with his work.
"Then he encounters Rachel Marron (Houston). A flamboyant singer and actress, she doesn't think she needs a by-the-book bodyguard and doesn't mind saying so." If the idea of Houston playing a member of her own profession on screen sounds less than ground-breaking, there is an element to her presence in the film that is genuinely revolutionary, even in the Hollywood of late 1992. Taking the part of the bodyguard in Lawrence Kasdan's script is Kevin Costner, perceived by conservative white audiences as the acme of leading manhood. With black actresses still consigned to comic or stereotyped roles, Houston's presence as his co-star and interracial romantic lead in a $37-million production, predicted to be one of the winter's best box-office takes, is significant.
Jim Wilson founding partner in Costner's development company, Tig, and an Oscar-winner last year for his work on Dances With Wolves reports that even when the actor first suggested the project in 1988, he envisaged Whitney as its female star. "When Kevin suggested her, I asked the same question anyone else would: 'But can she act?"' he says. "I told him: 'Yes, she's a diva. Yes, she's a world-class beauty. But what on Earth makes you think she'd be able to carry off something like this?"' Costner remained adamant, however, and Houston agreed to go to Los Angeles for two days of screen testing.
"I'd heard that Kevin wanted me for the part, and that he was prepared to wait however long it took for me to be available to do it," Houston says. "Let me tell you, that was tripping me out. I thought: 'Why does this man want me so bad?' Then I read the script and I understood why. Rachel's a great singer, a good actress, she's up for an Academy award she's hot! Everyone loves Rachel. And I could relate to that because it's been that way for me in my career."
She continues: "There was a time when I first hit the scene that it was like I was on fire or something. For three years I was everywhere I kind of got sick of myself in the end, and that's why I took a break after the second album. I couldn't take it any more. It got to the point where I'd lay down at night and I could feel people talking about me. I had to get out of that fame aura for a while. So I knew what this character was about, and that maybe I could play her."
Houston admits that Costner's telephone entreaties almost persuaded her, but that the final impetus came from an entirely different angle. "It was something a friend of mine said that really made me decide. She said to me: 'Whitney, if you do this, do you realize what it will mean for other black actresses, for other black women period?' Immediately, I was encouraged. She was right. It's a very, very strong role for a black woman."
Even in a town as hyperbole-happy as Hollywood, the word is that Houston's performance is genuinely good enough to merit a parallel career in film, should she choose to pursue one. This, plus recent announcements by the cosmetic houses Revlon and Cover Girl that they will use black models for mainstream advertising campaigns in the coming months, may seem at first too frivolous to represent a watershed in white attitudes to equal opportunities. But they give high-profile proof of a move to dismantle ethnic barriers within the media even if it is for less than purely altruistic motives. America's black and Hispanic populations are growing twice as fast as its white, and have a younger demographic profile. The recession-hit market for consumer goods be they cosmetics or cinema tickets is waking up to the fact that it can no longer afford to ignore such a source of disposable income.
Yet there is an irony to Houston being seen as a standard-bearer in this erosion of subliminal discrimination and one that does not escape her for a minute. Although she has achieved her superstar status without resort to Prince's shock tactics or Michael Jackson's strange behavior, one frequent criticism dogged her through that first extraordinary rush of success. "Again and again I heard that I was too white," she says. "Because I had such huge success I was accused of selling out, of being a black singer doing pop for white audiences.
"I don't categorize either music or people on the basis of color. And there's no way I would attempt to make myself less black, whatever that entails, to be more commercial. I'm comfortable with myself and I don't want to change anything. I stay close to my roots. I don't pretend to be anything other than who I am nor do I want to be. But for so long we've been tortured with this negative image problem: it used to be that if you wanted to sell records as a black artist, you didn't even put your face on the sleeve. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with anyone who chooses to change their look for those reasons... but I don't want to sell out and I don't have the need to."
The allegation was provoked mainly by music-industry perceptions of the way in which her career launch was engineered. Responsible for refining her raw talent into the champagne-and-oysters sound of her debut hit, Saving All My Love For You, was Clive Davis, the avuncular head of Arista Records and a man with two decades of star-building behind him. "I didn't create Whitney, although I did work with her on a creative level," he says. "I was involved in picking the material with her, choosing the right producers, waiting until the top people were free to work with her. I saw a rare combination of talent and beauty, but even then I couldn't be sure it would all work."
It did, of course. Brilliantly. The string of high-drama ballads and melodic dance tunes with which she made her name, together with the glamour gowns she wore when singing them, created an image that was glossy, sophisticated, preternaturally mature. Compared with the streetwise sound and images of such contemporaries as Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, Houston's appeal was up-market, almost princess-like. For Davis, one felt, the thrill came from having helped to fashion a new talent with the hauteur to rival those middle-aged divas he so much admired: Aretha Franklin, Patti Labelle, Whitney's older cousin Dionne Warwick.
Two years later, and almost ten years since she first submitted to Arista's star-maker machinery, Houston gives the appearance of having retreated behind her image. Whether facing an audience of tens of thousands from a concert stage or a single journalist across a room, she is professional to the hilt. But behind the dazzling smiles and friendly asides, there is the inescapable sense that she is approaching the encounter as just another item in her endless schedule one that requires her to play the role of Whitney, diva, yet again. Robyn Crawford, her one-time school friend and now executive personal assistant, acknowledges that riding the coat-tails of this intensity of fame is not always easy.
"The foundation we had years ago, the friendship that we shared, is pretty much back there in the past. Now it's business. Those of us who work with her have to change to accommodate what happens. I'd say that, as a person, Whitney has pretty much stayed the same. I think it's the people around her, including myself, who've had to make a change... And a lot of times you get your feelings hurt. I may look at her in a room and think, 'That's my best friend', but it's not about being that personal any more. It's about going as far as she wants to go." And now that Bobby Brown is sharing Houston's mansion in New Jersey, Crawford realizes further readjustments may be necessary.
"None of us around her, not her mother or father or me, could be to her what a husband can be. In a marriage, it seems to me that it is always the woman who has to do more commit herself more, devote herself, always be there. And Whitney is going to be that kind of wife: she's very traditional and Bible-written. And if that changes anything about her, I think it will mean she's going to take less sh!t. She's not high-handed or temperamental or arrogant, but although she walks softly, she carries an invisible stick. If you back her up against a wall, you'll be sorry. In the nicest way, she'll make you feel like this..." Crawford holds up her thumb and first finger only millimeters apart.
The strength of the understanding between the two women is such that it has withstood a constant record-industry whispering campaign that theirs is a lesbian relationship. These rumors went public two years ago when Houston found herself the subject of an attempted "outing" campaign by militant homosexuals. "I don't care who's sleeping with who," she said, when I interviewed her last. "I've become tired of dignifying the question of whether I'm gay with an answer. At first we all laughed. But it's disturbing, and not only does it affect me and my family, but that's my friend they're talking about and it's hard for her to deal with. Enough is enough, so lay off it now."
The rumblings have continued, though, irrespective of the announcements of her marriage and subsequent pregnancy. It has even been suggested, somewhat incredibly, that both events were planned as media smokescreens. In a homophobic climate, such speculation can damage the chances of winning sponsorship deals, endorsement opportunities and other lucrative sidelines to superstar status. More centrally to Houston's career, it could also alienate the sector attracted to her as a visible Christian. Yet today she seems more sanguine about, or perhaps just reluctantly resigned to, the gossip-mongering.
"I am not and never have been gay," she says. "But there's a sense in which all the things said about me have kept people's curiosity up and made me more famous than I really am. In a very odd sense, maybe it's been beneficial to me. Like they say, 'Negative press is just as good as positive, 'cos it's all going the same way down the toilet."'
For Crawford, however, without a famous boy friend or husband, there is no advantage, however tangential, to the rumors. "When I was younger, I used to pray that I'd have something to contribute," she says. "I wanted to be needed, counted on. Well, I guess I got what I prayed for, but I also got more attention than I ever bargained for. It's not easy trying to establish a career and be respected, knowing in the back of your mind that when you walk into a room some people are thinking, 'That's the girl who...' I've learnt to overcome that, but it's made me well-known in a way I wouldn't wish to be. They are a bunch of liars, though. I only have to answer to one person, and it's nobody here."
Yet if Houston's romance with Brown raised eyebrows, it was largely for the seeming incompatibility of their respective images. Six years her junior, the former teen star is renowned for his suggestive dance routines. During his 1989-90 world tour, he was arrested in Georgia for lewdness on stage. The four-year delay between his second album and its recent successor fueled talk denied by the singer that he had a heavy drug habit. Touted as the ultimate bad boy, he made a surprising choice of partner in the hospital-endowing, charity fund-raising Whitney. Cynics pounced.
"How miraculously coincidental that Bobby Brown should release his crucial follow-up to the multi-platinum Don't Be Cruel only weeks after his Hello! photo-spreaded marriage to Whitney Houston," sneered The Independent in August. "Can her next album be far behind? And would it be too cynical to ask which came first, the relationship or the release schedule?"
Such withering comment was nothing compared to that made in America, however. Crawford recalls one showbiz commentator describing Brown as "a spermbank" on screen (a reference to his three young children from previous relationships), and suggesting that he would make as reliable marriage partner as Senator Edward Kennedy. There were gleeful tabloid reports, too, of an alleged brawl between Crawford and Houston outside a Los Angeles hotel an incident said to have been caused by the former's intense jealousy of Brown. "All a complete lie," she says wearily, but with underlying anger.
Houston herself may hate the gossip and innuendo, but says she enjoyed the fact that her and Brown's opposing images provoked such a stir. "If you looked at us just in terms of those images, you might well imagine we had nothing in common, but we do," she says. "Bobby's family is very close, just like mine, and he was raised with the same good sense of God as I was. All the fundamental, important things we share. Out on stage he does his thing and I do mine, but we don't go home together as Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston we go home as husband and wife. People look at us and see a certain surface, but you have to look deeper than that to know the truth. If you only knew how uncomplicated we really are."
The interview over, she gives me a kiss, a hug, and another flash of the diva's dazzling smile. "It's been a pleasure," she says. "Any time you want to talk to me..." What will she be doing for the rest of the day, I ask. There is no answer. The door is open and Whitney Houston is already walking quickly down the corridor. She seems to become more herself with each retreating step.
@NoLies @The Standard @Jane Williams @Nippian @REDM1217 @Butterflyj82 @Witty_Houston @CriDionne @Lilac89 @Niecey0788 @sade @Kahota @SaintTitus @mizzsparks
Newspapers | Jackson, Alan - The Times (Oct 17, 1992, London (UK)):
Launched in 1985, Whitney Houston came ready-packaged as the black diva of her generation. Imagine that Pallitoy or Mattel, intent on creating the first-ever living doll, had examined every definable demographic within America about the purchasing preferences. Only after such a multi-million dollar research and development program might a commodity as finely tuned and consumer-friendly as the then 23-year-old woman from New Jersey have been launched.
Within the available range of female singers, she represented a luxury item with mass appeal. The voice, technically faultless and effortlessly expressive, had been trained both in church and by her gospel-star mother, Cissy, before being loaned to Mammon. It had the potential to inherit the legacy of fame enjoyed by the legendary women of 20th-century popular music. But which of those essential names certainly not Ella or Sarah or Aretha had reached point-of-sale so gloriously gift-wrapped?
Houston, a former model, was poised, glamorous, serenely beautiful. As such, she captured the Zeitgeist of aspirant, buppie America, without alienating the country's vast but conservative white mainstream. She was a brand leader from day one, the ultimate example of what the Americans like to call "a class act".
She was also, of course, a young woman barely into her twenties, suddenly expected to play a public role that was equal parts siren, sage and supermodel. Media expectations provide a script for such scenarios: she should have turned weird under the strain, living the diva's image to its tempestuous, neurotic, ermine-drenched hilt. But after seducing the world into buying some 40 million copies of the three albums she has released to date, the single weirdest thing about Houston is how normally she behaves within the hothouse atmosphere that inevitably encloses her. She may have an Olympic-sized swimming-pool at home, the initials WH inscribed on its floor in black Plexiglas, but first impressions are of a woman radiating a relentlessly sunny, if slightly hyped-up, normality.
Due at a Manhattan hotel to promote her film debut in the forthcoming Warner Brothers thriller The Bodyguard, her impending presence provokes seismic waves of nerves and anticipation among the huddles of television, newspaper and public-relations personnel assembled in an upstairs suite. Someone signs for the tray of tiny sandwiches and fresh berries that has just arrived via room service, and tries not to blanch at the $200 (Pounds 117) cost. A Japanese video crew, intimidated by the crush, retreat into the adjoining bedroom and sit in a nervous line on the very edge of an enormous four-poster.
"Thank you, thank you, I appreciate that", says the woman at the eye of this minor hurricane, graciously fielding congratulations on her recent marriage to singer Bobby Brown. Wearing a vividly patterned silk shirt over canary-yellow trousers, Houston looks at once exotic and strangely modest. An enormous diamond flashes from her third finger, left hand. Her eyes and smile are similarly bright. As yet, there is no visible sign of her recently announced pregnancy.
Even one-to-one, as we move to a neighboring room to talk, Houston projects a megawatt brilliance. It is the second time we have met, and she asks all the right "How've you been?" questions. Ice-breaking chitchat about July's lavish wedding (reported with breathless reverence within the pages of Hello!) is responded to with near-religious fervor. "The love that I have for Bobby... well, it overwhelms me," she says at one point, fingertips pressed together above her heart. The effect of this performance, observed at such close quarters, is spellbinding. Any instinct to giggle is swept away by that luminous smile. Applause would not seem inappropriate.
This is why the camera loves Houston. And it is also why the news of her much-rumored break into movies makes one think of the successes (Cher, Diana Ross albeit briefly) rather than the relative failures (David Bowie, Sting, Olivia Newton-John, and so on) among those of her profession who have attempted the transition before her. Not that the synopsis for The Bodyguard gives substantial grounds for such optimism. "Frank Farmer is a professional bodyguard, one of the best," it reads. "A former Secret Service agent, he has risen to the top of a demanding profession by never letting his emotions interfere with his work.
"Then he encounters Rachel Marron (Houston). A flamboyant singer and actress, she doesn't think she needs a by-the-book bodyguard and doesn't mind saying so." If the idea of Houston playing a member of her own profession on screen sounds less than ground-breaking, there is an element to her presence in the film that is genuinely revolutionary, even in the Hollywood of late 1992. Taking the part of the bodyguard in Lawrence Kasdan's script is Kevin Costner, perceived by conservative white audiences as the acme of leading manhood. With black actresses still consigned to comic or stereotyped roles, Houston's presence as his co-star and interracial romantic lead in a $37-million production, predicted to be one of the winter's best box-office takes, is significant.
Jim Wilson founding partner in Costner's development company, Tig, and an Oscar-winner last year for his work on Dances With Wolves reports that even when the actor first suggested the project in 1988, he envisaged Whitney as its female star. "When Kevin suggested her, I asked the same question anyone else would: 'But can she act?"' he says. "I told him: 'Yes, she's a diva. Yes, she's a world-class beauty. But what on Earth makes you think she'd be able to carry off something like this?"' Costner remained adamant, however, and Houston agreed to go to Los Angeles for two days of screen testing.
"I'd heard that Kevin wanted me for the part, and that he was prepared to wait however long it took for me to be available to do it," Houston says. "Let me tell you, that was tripping me out. I thought: 'Why does this man want me so bad?' Then I read the script and I understood why. Rachel's a great singer, a good actress, she's up for an Academy award she's hot! Everyone loves Rachel. And I could relate to that because it's been that way for me in my career."
She continues: "There was a time when I first hit the scene that it was like I was on fire or something. For three years I was everywhere I kind of got sick of myself in the end, and that's why I took a break after the second album. I couldn't take it any more. It got to the point where I'd lay down at night and I could feel people talking about me. I had to get out of that fame aura for a while. So I knew what this character was about, and that maybe I could play her."
Houston admits that Costner's telephone entreaties almost persuaded her, but that the final impetus came from an entirely different angle. "It was something a friend of mine said that really made me decide. She said to me: 'Whitney, if you do this, do you realize what it will mean for other black actresses, for other black women period?' Immediately, I was encouraged. She was right. It's a very, very strong role for a black woman."
Even in a town as hyperbole-happy as Hollywood, the word is that Houston's performance is genuinely good enough to merit a parallel career in film, should she choose to pursue one. This, plus recent announcements by the cosmetic houses Revlon and Cover Girl that they will use black models for mainstream advertising campaigns in the coming months, may seem at first too frivolous to represent a watershed in white attitudes to equal opportunities. But they give high-profile proof of a move to dismantle ethnic barriers within the media even if it is for less than purely altruistic motives. America's black and Hispanic populations are growing twice as fast as its white, and have a younger demographic profile. The recession-hit market for consumer goods be they cosmetics or cinema tickets is waking up to the fact that it can no longer afford to ignore such a source of disposable income.
Yet there is an irony to Houston being seen as a standard-bearer in this erosion of subliminal discrimination and one that does not escape her for a minute. Although she has achieved her superstar status without resort to Prince's shock tactics or Michael Jackson's strange behavior, one frequent criticism dogged her through that first extraordinary rush of success. "Again and again I heard that I was too white," she says. "Because I had such huge success I was accused of selling out, of being a black singer doing pop for white audiences.
"I don't categorize either music or people on the basis of color. And there's no way I would attempt to make myself less black, whatever that entails, to be more commercial. I'm comfortable with myself and I don't want to change anything. I stay close to my roots. I don't pretend to be anything other than who I am nor do I want to be. But for so long we've been tortured with this negative image problem: it used to be that if you wanted to sell records as a black artist, you didn't even put your face on the sleeve. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with anyone who chooses to change their look for those reasons... but I don't want to sell out and I don't have the need to."
The allegation was provoked mainly by music-industry perceptions of the way in which her career launch was engineered. Responsible for refining her raw talent into the champagne-and-oysters sound of her debut hit, Saving All My Love For You, was Clive Davis, the avuncular head of Arista Records and a man with two decades of star-building behind him. "I didn't create Whitney, although I did work with her on a creative level," he says. "I was involved in picking the material with her, choosing the right producers, waiting until the top people were free to work with her. I saw a rare combination of talent and beauty, but even then I couldn't be sure it would all work."
It did, of course. Brilliantly. The string of high-drama ballads and melodic dance tunes with which she made her name, together with the glamour gowns she wore when singing them, created an image that was glossy, sophisticated, preternaturally mature. Compared with the streetwise sound and images of such contemporaries as Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, Houston's appeal was up-market, almost princess-like. For Davis, one felt, the thrill came from having helped to fashion a new talent with the hauteur to rival those middle-aged divas he so much admired: Aretha Franklin, Patti Labelle, Whitney's older cousin Dionne Warwick.
Two years later, and almost ten years since she first submitted to Arista's star-maker machinery, Houston gives the appearance of having retreated behind her image. Whether facing an audience of tens of thousands from a concert stage or a single journalist across a room, she is professional to the hilt. But behind the dazzling smiles and friendly asides, there is the inescapable sense that she is approaching the encounter as just another item in her endless schedule one that requires her to play the role of Whitney, diva, yet again. Robyn Crawford, her one-time school friend and now executive personal assistant, acknowledges that riding the coat-tails of this intensity of fame is not always easy.
"The foundation we had years ago, the friendship that we shared, is pretty much back there in the past. Now it's business. Those of us who work with her have to change to accommodate what happens. I'd say that, as a person, Whitney has pretty much stayed the same. I think it's the people around her, including myself, who've had to make a change... And a lot of times you get your feelings hurt. I may look at her in a room and think, 'That's my best friend', but it's not about being that personal any more. It's about going as far as she wants to go." And now that Bobby Brown is sharing Houston's mansion in New Jersey, Crawford realizes further readjustments may be necessary.
"None of us around her, not her mother or father or me, could be to her what a husband can be. In a marriage, it seems to me that it is always the woman who has to do more commit herself more, devote herself, always be there. And Whitney is going to be that kind of wife: she's very traditional and Bible-written. And if that changes anything about her, I think it will mean she's going to take less sh!t. She's not high-handed or temperamental or arrogant, but although she walks softly, she carries an invisible stick. If you back her up against a wall, you'll be sorry. In the nicest way, she'll make you feel like this..." Crawford holds up her thumb and first finger only millimeters apart.
The strength of the understanding between the two women is such that it has withstood a constant record-industry whispering campaign that theirs is a lesbian relationship. These rumors went public two years ago when Houston found herself the subject of an attempted "outing" campaign by militant homosexuals. "I don't care who's sleeping with who," she said, when I interviewed her last. "I've become tired of dignifying the question of whether I'm gay with an answer. At first we all laughed. But it's disturbing, and not only does it affect me and my family, but that's my friend they're talking about and it's hard for her to deal with. Enough is enough, so lay off it now."
The rumblings have continued, though, irrespective of the announcements of her marriage and subsequent pregnancy. It has even been suggested, somewhat incredibly, that both events were planned as media smokescreens. In a homophobic climate, such speculation can damage the chances of winning sponsorship deals, endorsement opportunities and other lucrative sidelines to superstar status. More centrally to Houston's career, it could also alienate the sector attracted to her as a visible Christian. Yet today she seems more sanguine about, or perhaps just reluctantly resigned to, the gossip-mongering.
"I am not and never have been gay," she says. "But there's a sense in which all the things said about me have kept people's curiosity up and made me more famous than I really am. In a very odd sense, maybe it's been beneficial to me. Like they say, 'Negative press is just as good as positive, 'cos it's all going the same way down the toilet."'
For Crawford, however, without a famous boy friend or husband, there is no advantage, however tangential, to the rumors. "When I was younger, I used to pray that I'd have something to contribute," she says. "I wanted to be needed, counted on. Well, I guess I got what I prayed for, but I also got more attention than I ever bargained for. It's not easy trying to establish a career and be respected, knowing in the back of your mind that when you walk into a room some people are thinking, 'That's the girl who...' I've learnt to overcome that, but it's made me well-known in a way I wouldn't wish to be. They are a bunch of liars, though. I only have to answer to one person, and it's nobody here."
Yet if Houston's romance with Brown raised eyebrows, it was largely for the seeming incompatibility of their respective images. Six years her junior, the former teen star is renowned for his suggestive dance routines. During his 1989-90 world tour, he was arrested in Georgia for lewdness on stage. The four-year delay between his second album and its recent successor fueled talk denied by the singer that he had a heavy drug habit. Touted as the ultimate bad boy, he made a surprising choice of partner in the hospital-endowing, charity fund-raising Whitney. Cynics pounced.
"How miraculously coincidental that Bobby Brown should release his crucial follow-up to the multi-platinum Don't Be Cruel only weeks after his Hello! photo-spreaded marriage to Whitney Houston," sneered The Independent in August. "Can her next album be far behind? And would it be too cynical to ask which came first, the relationship or the release schedule?"
Such withering comment was nothing compared to that made in America, however. Crawford recalls one showbiz commentator describing Brown as "a spermbank" on screen (a reference to his three young children from previous relationships), and suggesting that he would make as reliable marriage partner as Senator Edward Kennedy. There were gleeful tabloid reports, too, of an alleged brawl between Crawford and Houston outside a Los Angeles hotel an incident said to have been caused by the former's intense jealousy of Brown. "All a complete lie," she says wearily, but with underlying anger.
Houston herself may hate the gossip and innuendo, but says she enjoyed the fact that her and Brown's opposing images provoked such a stir. "If you looked at us just in terms of those images, you might well imagine we had nothing in common, but we do," she says. "Bobby's family is very close, just like mine, and he was raised with the same good sense of God as I was. All the fundamental, important things we share. Out on stage he does his thing and I do mine, but we don't go home together as Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston we go home as husband and wife. People look at us and see a certain surface, but you have to look deeper than that to know the truth. If you only knew how uncomplicated we really are."
The interview over, she gives me a kiss, a hug, and another flash of the diva's dazzling smile. "It's been a pleasure," she says. "Any time you want to talk to me..." What will she be doing for the rest of the day, I ask. There is no answer. The door is open and Whitney Houston is already walking quickly down the corridor. She seems to become more herself with each retreating step.
@NoLies @The Standard @Jane Williams @Nippian @REDM1217 @Butterflyj82 @Witty_Houston @CriDionne @Lilac89 @Niecey0788 @sade @Kahota @SaintTitus @mizzsparks