A Whitney Houston Investigation: The Long, Sad Road to her Beverly Hilton Death | Hollywood | Vanity Fair 17/05/12 10:30

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June 2012 The Devils in the Diva

While the glory of her voice propelled Whitney Houston into the pop stratosphere, her demons kept dragging her down, a powerful undertow of drugs and toxic relationships. But early this year, with new music, a new man, and a new movie—Sparkle, due out this summer—she seemed to be resurfacing. Following her death in a Beverly Hilton bathtub, Mark Seal investigates Houston’s final days: the prayers and the parties, the Hollywood con artist on the scene, and the message she left behind.

Related: See a slide show of Houston’s fashion highlights through the years.

By Mark Seal

FROM ART & COMMERCE.

BREAKOUT STAR Houston at 22, photographed by Steven Meisel in 1986, between her first two albums, which would sell nearly 50 million copies.

cheduled to appear at the pre-Grammy Awards party given annually by her mentor, the music impresario Clive Davis, on February 11, Whitney Houston arrived in Los Angeles a week early, without fanfare, and checked into the Beverly S Hilton with her small entourage under the pseudonym Elizabeth Collins. She was put in Room 434, which the hotel calls a “presidential junior,” consisting of a small sitting room, bedroom, and bath.

On the day of the party, Whitney’s assistant, Mary Jones, left the hotel to pick up a package at Neiman Marcus. Before going, Jones laid out a gown for Whitney to wear that night. About 3:35 P.M., Jones returned to the room, where Whitney’s bodyguard and brother-in-law, Ray Watson, was on watch in the hall. Jones entered the suite, and when she walked into the bathroom she found Whitney facedown in a foot of water in the tub. As they frantically administered CPR, Jones told the switchboard to call 911.

Fans were already gathering at the Hilton for Clive Davis’s party when Ed Winter, the coroner, took the elevator to the fourth floor. The hallway there had become a crime scene, with police tape blocking the area, and a dozen family members and friends were demanding, “What happened? Why did she drown?” There were no immediate answers and no real evidence. Though the surrounding rooms were occupied by people who loved and depended upon the singer, if she called for help she had gone unheard. The police http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2012/06/whitney-houston-death-bathtub-drugs-rehab.print Página 1 de 4 A Whitney Houston Investigation: The Long, Sad Road to her Beverly Hilton Death | Hollywood | Vanity Fair 17/05/12 10:30

found plates of food, a bottle of beer, and an opened bottle of champagne. On the bathroom counter were a spoon and what the coroner’s report called a “white crystal like substance.” When the initial autopsy results were released, six weeks later, they attributed Houston’s death at 48 to accidental drowning, with contributing factors of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use. She had used cocaine “just probably immediately prior” to drowning, and her condition indicated an “acute use” of the substance. There were also traces of marijuana, the muscle relaxant Flexeril, the allergy medication Benadryl, and Xanax.

After Whitney’s death, the singer Chaka Khan, a friend and fellow recovering addict, spoke out about the “vampires” of the “ugly ass” music business, lambasting all those who had allowed Houston, only nine months out of rehab, to arrive in the city of temptation a week before Davis’s party: “Whoever flew her out to perform at that party should’ve provided someone to be there, to somehow keep the riffraff from out of the situation, to keep some of the dangerous people away.” In the weeks that followed, a portrait of Whitney’s sudden relapse began to emerge. She had been spotted drinking vodka in Hollywood nightclubs to celebrate the 31st birthday of her alleged boyfriend, the singer-actor Willie “Ray J” Norwood, who was famous for being Kim Kardashian’s partner on an explicit 2007 sex tape. She had made a spectacle of herself in the hotel, complaining about watered-down drinks in the lobby bar. She had done handstands by the pool and erupted in the gift shop over a headline in the National Enquirer: WHITNEY COLLAPSES! STRUNG OUT & BROKE, IT’S WORSE THAN ANYONE THOUGHT.

er friends and family chose to concentrate on the positive. Whitney was a multifaceted woman, they said, who always loved the Lord. In her final days, she prayed and partied, confident that she was on the brink of another H comeback. The handstands by the pool, they said, were not the antics of an addict but proof of her newfound stamina, her dedication to daily exercise, and a vow to quit smoking. She had a new movie, new music, and a new man. Also, she had reportedly worked again with Warren Boyd, her drug counselor over the years. According to the producer Harvey Mason Jr., she was on time at the studio the Tuesday night before her death to record one side of a duet called “Celebrate” with the American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, and she played a CD of the song for Clive Davis at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “She was way more energetic than the young people, more excited to be in the studio, more passionate to make something outstanding,” said Mason. Everyone agreed that she was also clean and sober on the set of her upcoming movie, a remake of a 1976 film called Sparkle.

In the Beverly Hilton on February 11, a Houston aide told a VH1 crew waiting for an interview, “Whitney can’t make it She’s dead.” On the fourth floor, meanwhile, the R&B singer Brandy—Ray J’s older sister—who had starred with Houston in the 1997 TV movie Cinderella, was out in the hall, crying. Bobbi Kristina, Whitney’s 18-year-old daughter with the singer Bobby Brown, was attempting to gain access to her mother’s room. Dionne Warwick, Whitney’s cousin, remained calm. She shook Winter’s hand and said, “I know Mr. Winter will take good care of Whitney,” adding, “and thank you for taking such good care of Michael Jackson.” By the time Winter went downstairs, the lobby was crawling with stars—Tom Hanks, Tony Bennett, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Neil Young—arriving for the party. Winter waited until 1:35 A.M. to remove the body from the hotel. “The family wanted to maybe spend a few minutes with her before we loaded her off,” he told me. But it didn’t happen, “because Bobbi Kristina wound up going to the hospital,” he said, after reportedly becoming “hysterical, exhausted, and inconsolable.” He added, “And Pat Houston [Whitney’s manager and sister-in-law] had kind of an anxiety attack.”

While Houston’s family would insist that they had seen no evidence of her recent drug use, members of Bobby Brown’s family went on television to tell a different story. Brown’s sister Leolah Brown, Whitney’s former assistant, said on the Dr. Drew TV program, “When I first heard she passed away, I said, My God, somebody gave her a bad bag.”

If Whitney had arrived in L.A. a diminished diva, she left it a fully restored icon, seizing headlines, mourned on talk shows, and memorialized at a three-and-a-half-hour, star- studded, nationally televised funeral. Pat Houston would later blame Whitney’s death not on drugs but on “lifestyle.” She told Oprah Winfrey, “The handwriting was kind of on the

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wall.” The cause of death clearly went deeper than toxicology. The last days of Whitney Houston began long before her arrival in Los Angeles.

a born pop diva t was all about the voice, “the voice of our time,” as the songwriter Diane Warren once called it. The gospel singer BeBe Winans first heard it when Whitney was opening for the singer Jeffrey Osborne. “I went backstage, and we met, and I said, ‘I I want to know what church you come from, because, singing the way you sing, you come from somebody’s church,’ ” recalled Winans. “She looked up and she said, ‘New Hope Baptist!’ ”

New Hope Baptist Church sits at 106 Sussex Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. There, where her mother, whose name is Cissy, led the choir, Whitney was saved, infused with the Holy Spirit. She could see her artistic future as she studied her godmother, Aretha Franklin: “She closed her eyes, and that riveting thing just came out That’s what I wanted.” Across the street from the church was the now defunct James M. Baxter Terrace public-housing project, and near that, on Wainwright Street, the house where Houston was born and lived until she was four. From the start, the battle lines of her future were drawn: God on one side, the ghetto on the other.

But Whitney didn’t grow up in the ghetto. After Newark’s week of race riots in 1967, the family moved to East Orange, New Jersey. When she was 13, she spent every Saturday for months in the local movie theater, from the matinee to the last show, transfixed by a film called Sparkle, about three young female singers falling prey to hustlers, addicts, and thieves. “As a young girl back in the 70s there was the black-exploitation movie thing,” she later said. “This was a positive reinforcement for young African-American women. For anyone who wanted to pursue their dream and present their gifts. It just appealed to me.”

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