E14 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022book worldBY ALLISON STEWARTT
he night Whitney Houston died in her hotel room at the
Beverly Hilton, she had planned to attend the annual gala for
her mentor, hitmaker Clive Davis. Houston, 48, was getting
ready for the party, her gown laid out in preparation, when
she drowned in the bathtub, in a foot of water so hot she
suffered burns from it (cocaine and heart disease were cited as
contributing factors).
Downstairs, the gala went on as planned, even though Houston’s
body had yet to be removed from her room, writes Gerrick Kennedy,
author of “Didn’t We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney
Houston,” a collection of unsparing, deeply personal essays on the
singer’s life and career that arrives 10 years after her death on Feb. 11,
2012.
That decision, which Kennedy, then a reporter on the scene for the
Los Angeles Times, calls “grotesque,” was merely another in a series of
heartbreaking indignities that did not end with Houston’s death. In
2018, Kanye West reportedly spent $85,000 on a notorious 2006 photo
of Houston’s drug-strewn bathroom. The picture, taken by a family
member, had initially been sold to the National Enquirer, which put it
on the cover (“Inside Whitney’s Drug Den!”). West used the photo as an
album cover for rapper Pusha T, recycling Houston’s humiliation for a
younger generation that knew her mostly as an unwitting provider of
cautionary, crack-is-wack drug memes. “He knew we’d get the joke,”
Kennedy writes. “After all, we were all in on it.”
In early 2020, Houston’s estate sent a holographic version of the
singer on tour, hoping that an uncanny valley version of Whitney
would provide the income stream that her relatively paltry musical
vaults had not. Unlike its real-life counterpart, this Whitney didn’t
cause trouble. It was forever smiling and thin — and never late for a
show. It didn’t look too young or too old — or, the closer you got, much
like Whitney at all.
Hologram Whitney was, in its own way, a fitting reincarnation.
Houston, Kennedy says, had long felt trapped by the things we wanted
her to be. Under the supervision of Davis and Houston’s mother, gospel
legend Cissy Houston, Whitney became a genre-smashing superstar
whose appeal to crossover (read: White) audiences was integral to her
success. For Houston, it was a tightrope walk. She struggled to seem
neither “too Black” nor not Black enough. “Before Whitney, the
country hadn’t collectively christened a Black girl as America’s
Sweetheart,” Kennedy points out. “But what had she given up to get
there?”
Pretty much everything, it turns out. Early in her career, Houston
presented as an angelic diva in glittering gowns, though she grappled
with private demons: the alleged sexual abuse she suffered as a child,
the substance abuse issues that began when she was a teenager, the
fallout of her love affair with her best friend, Robyn Crawford.
None of these things were acceptable topics of discussion during
Houston’s mid-1980s rise, Kennedy says, and like Janet Jackson and
Britney Spears, she was treated shabbily for reasons that most people
would find unacceptable now. In every way, Houston got the worst of it.
Jackson and Spears had remained mostly quiet during their years in
exile, and they survived long enough to earn our sympathy. But
Houston never made it that far, as her private struggles soon became
public. In 2000, a worried Burt Bacharach kicked her off the Oscars
show. Her voice, weakened by years of misuse and Newport menthol
cigarettes, was shot. She canceled concerts, and co-starred with her
husband, R&B star Bobby Brown, in an alarming reality show that
depicted her as a sweaty, hollow-eyed oversharer, more a punchline
than a person. She tried our patience until we no longer wanted to save
her, we just wanted to look away.
Kennedy’s book, unlike so many before it, is not a gossipy biography
but a collection of often powerful meditations on Whitney’s life and the
culture that failed her; it also features a foreword by singer-songwriter
Brandy (“Whitney made me feel like anything was possible, even
though everything she was doing had been so impossible for Black girls
to achieve.”) Kennedy was a lifelong fan who dreamed of meeting
Houston, and when he did, at a pre-Grammy function shortly before
her death, she was clearly out of it — but kind to him. When Kennedy
confessed his admiration to the star, he writes, “Though her eyes were
sad, there was that smile, so radiant and warm. Whitney gently pressed
her hand into mine. ‘Thank you, baby. God bless you.’ ”
Photographer Bette Marshall, the author of the slim, heart-rending
“Young Whitney,” first met Houston when she was on the cusp of
stardom at 18, and getting her picture taken was still a novelty.
Marshall’s husband was a lawyer on Houston’s team, and, at least in the
early years, Marshall was granted the kind of access Kennedy couldn’t
dream of. Marshall photographed Houston singing in the studio; at her
first major label audition; at the church where, 30 years later, her
funeral would be held; giggling on a Princess phone in her childhood
bedroom in her family’s New Jersey house, the stereotypical ’80s
suburban home right down to the plastic slipcovers on the sofa.
Houston is radiant and unselfconscious in front of the camera,
writes Marshall, who regarded her with maternal concern. One of the
last times Marshall saw her is at Houston’s wedding to Brown. It was a
cursed affair: It was hot. Donald Trump was there. Houston’s mother,
who feared the scandal-prone Brown was a bad influence on her
daughter (though it may have been the other way around), looked
miserable. It was impossible to penetrate the 800-strong crowd
surrounding the couple, Marshall writes, and Houston waved from her
elevated platform, like Queen Elizabeth.
To Marshall and Kennedy, Houston is forever trapped in amber, a
lost soul ill-suited to the time in which she lived. Whether she might
have fared better in today’s climate is anybody’s guess. Likely, we would
have torn her down anyway, but we might have felt worse about it. “We
know better now,” Kennedy writes, “but should have known better
then.”
[email protected]Allison Stewart writes about pop culture, music and politics for The
Washington Post and the Chicago Tr ibune. She is working on a book about the
history of the space program.10 years after Whitney Houston’s death,w hat have we learned about her — a nd us?DIDN’T WE ALMOST HAVE IT ALL
In Defense of Whitney Houston
By Gerrick Kennedy
Abrams Press. 320 pp. $28.00.PHOTOS BY BETTE MARSHALL
FROM TOP: Whitney Houston in her bedroom in 1982 and on the set of her “Greatest Love of All” music video in 1986.
Photographer Bette Marshall, author of “Young Whitney,” h ad unusual access to Houston during her ascent t o stardom.YOUNG WHITNEY
Stories and Photographs
By Bette Marshall
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