No one could save Whitney Houston as she blew £100m and sought oblivion in crack cocaine

By the end, Whitney Houston had thrown away every last scrap of the poise and beauty that had made her the ultimate diva of her generation.

Leaving a Hollywood nightclub two days before her death, she was drenched in sweat and disoriented, a wad of mint chewing gum visible in her gaping mouth.

Blood from a cut trickled down her leg. But the lady herself, surrounded by party-loving hangers-on, didn’t seem to notice.

Alternately waving and cursing, this was not the Whitney who conquered the world - a church-going supermodel with a once-in-a-generation voice of exceptional power and sweetness. This was a woman who, despite at least three attempts at rehab in the past eight years, appeared fully in the grip of drug addiction: wired, wrecked and out of control. Inside the club, it is claimed, she nearly came to blows with a partygoer who she felt had ‘got into her face’. So why could nobody save Whitney Houston? In truth, having spent almost two decades destroying herself, she was past saving.

Her voice, with her signature, high-octave power note, had been pitifully diminished by years of abuse, particularly the smoking of crack cocaine. The soaring vocals had become a soft, whispery falsetto. ‘She don’t want to come, my soprano friend,’ she told a booing concert audience in London in 2010. The years of material plenty were behind her, too. She was reportedly once again ‘flat broke’, even though she should have had a fortune well in excess of £100 million. Indeed, despite earning up to £20 million with a colossal 50-date global tour only two years ago, she was reportedly this month reduced to asking her great benefactor, Clive Davis, the music mogul who ‘discovered’ her, for hand-outs yet again.

Her home in New Jersey was said to be in danger of being repossessed. Another home in Atlanta already had been. She was partying at the Beverly Hilton only because she was on someone else’s tab: the record label was paying for her to be with them in the run-up to last night’s Grammy awards. There were hopes of yet another album from Whitney, despite the relatively poor performance of her comeback in 2009, and she had recently been in the studio. She had also finished making a film, Sparkle, a showbiz saga about a trio of singers, which Sony has announced will still be released in August. Her most recent romantic partner was a 31-year-old rapper, Ray J, who is chiefly famous for being the man in a homemade sex tape shot in 2003, which made reality star Kim Kardashian famous. He is also the cousin of rapper and drug advocate Snoop Dogg, so he was not the kind who might have been counted on to keep her on the straight and narrow.
The two had an on-and-off four-year liaison, which her fans felt had depressing echoes of her mutually destructive marriage to ‘bad boy’ rapper Bobby Brown, who she divorced in 2007. Born in 1963 in Newark, New Jersey, Whitney’s mother was the successful gospel singer, Cissy Houston. Her cousin was Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin was her godmother. Known as Nippy as a child, she was the youngest of three children. Her mother divorced John Houston, an Army serviceman, but Whitney remained close to both parents. They supported her in her dreams of stardom — a fact she later said accounted for her enormous self-confidence. From the age of five she would sing in the choir at the All Hope Baptist church in Newark, where the family worshipped. As a teenager, she started to get involved in the music business. Aged 15, she sang backing vocals on the Chaka Khan hit I’m Every Woman. Clive Davis of Arista records first laid eyes on her in 1983, when she was 20, and was bowled over. Her first album, Whitney Houston, was released two years later, yielding the No 1 hits The Greatest Love Of All, How Will I Know and Saving All My Love For You. It remains the best-selling debut album by a female artist in music history. Her second album, Whitney, released in 1987, included the hits I Wanna Dance With Somebody and Where Do Broken Hearts Go. It sold 25 million copies worldwide.

She would often travel with her mother. Also always present was her ‘executive assistant’ Robyn Conway, her best friend at school, who she said was ‘like a sister’ to her. She put Robyn on her payroll, but was she something more? Whitney always denied the persistent rumours she was bisexual, and claimed people got the wrong impression only because she didn’t start dating until she was in her late 20s. In 1989, she met Bobby Brown at a music awards show, and they married in 1992. Daughter Bobbi Kristina was born a year later.
Whitney was at the peak of her fame, thanks to the film The Bodyguard and the colossal cover version I Will Always Love You. But outside the spotlight, her life was far from perfect. She and Brown had settled in a huge mansion in New Jersey, complete with a pool and recording studio, but the marriage was not happy. He was accused of domestic violence against her in 1993. She said he had slapped her during a jealous argument. In his autobiography, Bobby Brown hints she deceived him about her true sexual orientation and that their marriage was designed to cover up her bisexuality. ‘I realise Whitney had a different agenda than I did when we got married,’ he said in his book. ‘I believe her agenda was to clean up her image; mine was to be loved and to have children.’ Talk of her impossible behaviour began to circulate as she started failing to turn up to events, including a celebration of the career of her mentor, Clive Davis. She admitted in a recent interview that she would take cocaine ‘every day’ in the mid-Nineties. She became skeletally thin and appeared disoriented at times. She was fired from a slot on the Oscars ceremony in 2000 after singing the wrong song at rehearsals. Later that year, she and Brown were found to be carrying marijuana on a trip to Hawaii.

In 2002, she gave a notorious interview in which she denied taking crack, on the grounds that it was ‘too cheap’ a drug for her. ‘We don’t take crack. Crack is whack,’ she said. Nobody was very convinced by her denial. Clive Davis tried to get her into rehab in 2004, with an ultimatum that they could not work together again if she didn’t clean up. In 2005, her sister-in-law leaked pictures to the Press of her bathroom in Atlanta — a sordid, dirty space covered with crack pipes and other drug paraphernalia — to try to shock her into sobriety. In 2006, Davis tried again. Whitney recalled in an interview: ‘Clive called me one day and said: “OK, are you ready now? I’m tired of seeing what I’m seeing. I want you back.” ’


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