Whitney Houston, a tremendous talent, dies tragically at 48.
Whitney Houston possessed one of the most beautiful female voices of the past quarter century. She was the only female singer to have won a Grammy Award, an Emmy, an MTV Video award, an MTV movie award, a People’s choice award and a Billboard Music Award. She won six Grammies and earned twenty-six Grammy nominations, as well as twenty-two American music awards and thirty-eight nominations—a record.
But the Whitney Houston I saw onstage at the Moline (IL) Civic Center after her 1992 marriage to Bobby Brown seemed unprepared. She didn’t know what town she was in and didn’t seem to care. She seemed lost in a fog. That fog may have swallowed her up on February 11, 2012, as she lay in the bathtub of her room at the Beverley Hilton Hotel, where singer Ray J around 3:30 p.m discovered her, underwater and unconscious.
The call for help went out at 3:43, but help came too late. Clive Davis, who had launched her career, was trying to help Houston get her career back on track, but the damage was done. She looked weary in the last footage I saw of her, a brief interview with Houston and Jennifer Hudson.
It was too late for Whitney to undo years of damage to her body and her voice, a downward spiral that most believe began with her 1992 marriage to Bobby Brown, with whom she had a daughter, Bobby Kristina, in 1993. Some say her death was no accident. A video of her onstage singing, “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” two days prior was her final performance. The 3 prescription drugs found in her hotel room are not to be taken simultaneously. Xanax, Valium and lorazepam are all powerful anti-anxiety drugs and taking any of them in combination with alcohol would be potentially life-threatening. Did Whitney take a prescription drug by accident, lose consciousness, and sink beneath the waters of her bath by accident, thus dying by drowning? One comment that came out after the tragedy was that there were orders that Houston was not to take an unsupervised bath. (It makes one wonder how something as private as a bath can be “supervised.”) Whitney’s last album, meant to revitalize her career, did not do particularly well, but it was much better-received than her touring, which is where singers really make their money. At several of her latest shows, her voice showed seemed so ravaged by her hard living that patrons demanded their money back. This must have been a bitter pill for the woman who electrified the world with her version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Superbowl in Tampa and whose “The Bodyguard” album sold millions of copies. Did Houston simply give up and give in, purposely taking the pills and slipping into oblivion? If so, she left no note, and she had talked to family members within a half-hour of her death.
Whitney charted seven consecutive Number One Billboard Hot 100 Hits: “Saving All My Love for You;” “How Will I Know?” “The Greatest Love of All,” “I Wanna’ Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)”, “Didn’t We Almost Have It All?”, “So Emotional,” and “Where Do Broken Hearts Go?” Those titles parallel the sad rise and fall of this beautiful and talented singer. The female lead in “The Bodyguard” opposite Kevin Costner, she also acted in three other films, including” Waiting to Exhale” and “Sparkle” and was working with Jordan Sparks on a new project, where she would play her mother. (To be released in August).
The Grammys were retooled to include a tribute to Houston with Jennifer Hudson singing a haunting rendition of “I Will Always Love You.”
A Feb. 20th issue of the Inquirer with unflattering photos of Houston detailed some late-night partying that had gone on in the days leading up to this year’s Grammys. Another article claimed she was broke, dependent on advances from the record company and from friends. Although there will be a surge in the sale of “I Will Always Love You,” it is the very much alive Dolly Parton, the songwriter, who will benefit, not the estate of Whitney Houston. Houston told Diane Sawyer in 2002, “The biggest devil is me. I’m either my best friend or my worst enemy.”