The story of Whitney Houston

A Newark church girl

Whitney Elizabeth Houston was born on the ninth of August 1963 in Newark, New Jersey, into one of the most musical families in America. Her mother, Cissy Houston, had grown up singing in the family gospel group, the Drinkard Singers, and would soon found the Sweet Inspirations, the vocal group that backed Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley. Her father, John Houston, was an Army veteran who later worked in the city administration of Newark's mayor. Cissy was still singing on recording sessions when her daughter arrived, and she remembered that the baby came hours after a Friday session at Atlantic Studios, well past her due date. She named her after the actress Whitney Blake, a star of the sitcom Hazel.[1] [2]

The family tree was full of voices. Dionne Warwick and her sister Dee Dee were Whitney's first cousins, and so was the opera star Leontyne Price. The girl group singer Darlene Love was her godmother. Aretha Franklin was a family friend whom Whitney grew up calling Aunt Ree, although she was never her godmother, whatever the press later said. Whitney had three older brothers, Michael, her half brother Gary, and her father's son John. Her father gave her the nickname that stayed with her for life, Nippy, because she was such a restless, mischievous little girl. By the age of four she was tagging along to Atlantic's studios, watching her mother sing background for Aretha and meeting stars like Wilson Pickett.[1] [2] [3]

At three, Whitney lived through the Newark riots of July 1967. In 1970, after Cissy signed a solo record deal, the family moved to a leafy corner of East Orange known as Doddtown. Church was the center of everything. Whitney joined the choir at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark at five, where her mother was minister of music, and she learned piano there too. In November 1975, at twelve, she sang her first solo in front of the congregation, the hymn Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah. Cissy became her vocal coach, and by her own admission a tough one. Whitney later said her mother could embarrass her so badly she wanted to slide under a chair, but that she learned what she needed to learn.[1] [2]

Home was not always peaceful. After John Houston survived a near fatal heart attack in September 1976, the marriage turned volatile, and Whitney later described a house full of arguments and panic. She started staying away, hanging around musicians and singers in New York, and she admitted failing four classes at Mount Saint Dominic Academy, the Catholic girls' school she attended from the age of thirteen. Her parents separated around the time she graduated in 1981, and divorced ten years later, though the split was kept quiet during her early fame. Drugs were close by, too. Her brothers have spoken about their own early drug use, and her best friend Robyn Crawford wrote that Whitney told her she first tried cocaine at fourteen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Learning the trade

Whitney's working life began at fourteen, singing backup in her mother's band at Manhattan cabaret clubs. In the summer of 1977 she entered a talent contest called the Garden State Competition and came second. In February 1978, during Cissy's show at New York's Town Hall, she stepped forward to sing Tomorrow from the musical Annie, and earned her first standing ovation. She also became a session singer. She was the featured voice on the disco track Life's a Party by the Michael Zager Band, and she sang background for artists like Lou Rawls and Chaka Khan. Years later she would turn Khan's I'm Every Woman into a hit of her own. She was learning from the best, in the booth and on the stage.[1] [2] [3]

Cissy had a way of pushing her daughter forward. Around 1980 she phoned Whitney before a show at a New York club called Mikell's, said she had a sore throat and could not sing, and told the seventeen year old to take her place. Whitney went on, and people at the club said she already carried herself like a seasoned performer. Cissy later admitted she had been only a little bit sick, and had done it to show Whitney she could handle a stage alone. Around the same time Whitney was spotted at Carnegie Hall and began modeling. She signed with the Wilhelmina agency, appeared in Glamour and Cosmopolitan, and landed the cover of Seventeen, one of the first Black women to do so.[1] [2] [3]

In the summer of 1980 Whitney met the person who would stand beside her for the next twenty years. Robyn Crawford was a college basketball player, three years older, and the two were working as counselors at a summer camp run by a community center in East Orange. They clicked at once. In her 2019 memoir, Crawford wrote that they were romantically involved for a short time, and that Whitney later handed her a Bible and said they had to stop, because it would make their journey harder if people found out. They moved into an apartment together in Woodbridge, New Jersey, as friends, and Crawford went on to become her assistant, then her executive assistant and creative director.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Record companies came calling early, but Cissy sent them away until Whitney had finished high school. After graduating in 1981 she took on a manager, Gene Harvey, and in 1982 she auditioned for Elektra and for CBS. She sang a ballad called Memories on an album by the New York group Material, and the critic Robert Christgau called it one of the most gorgeous ballads you have ever heard. Then an Arista Records talent scout, Gerry Griffith, saw her in a Manhattan club and persuaded his boss, Clive Davis, to see her the next night at a club called Sweetwaters. Davis was floored, and offered her a contract. With her parents present, Whitney signed with Arista on the tenth of April 1983. She was nineteen.[1] [2] [3]

The debut that changed everything

Clive Davis was in no hurry. He wanted to be sure no rival could steal her, and he wanted the right songs and the right producers, so the debut album took almost two years. In June 1983 he presented her to the country on The Merv Griffin Show, where she sang Home from The Wiz. She nearly took a part on The Cosby Show but pulled out to concentrate on music, and she did a Canada Dry commercial and restaurant jingles. Her first hit came as a guest. The producer Michael Masser, who had once walked into a club and heard her singing his own song, Greatest Love of All, paired her with Teddy Pendergrass on the ballad Hold Me in 1984, and it reached the top ten of the R&B chart.[1] [2] [3]

Another early partner was Jermaine Jackson of the Jackson 5, recently signed to Arista, who produced and sang duets with her. The two even performed together on the soap opera As the World Turns. Robyn Crawford later wrote that Whitney and the married Jackson, nine years older, had a secret affair, something Jackson has denied, though he admitted being around her was intoxicating. Songs for the album came from everywhere. The producer Kashif brought her You Give Good Love, first written with Roberta Flack in mind, and Whitney cut it in a single take. Masser brought Saving All My Love for You, an old ballad written for Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Junior. Clive Davis at first thought it too old fashioned.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The album Whitney Houston came out on Valentine's Day 1985, and it started slowly, entering the Billboard chart at number one hundred sixty six. You Give Good Love climbed to number three, and then Saving All My Love for You became her first number one that autumn. How Will I Know came next, a song its writers had originally offered to Janet Jackson, with Cissy on the backing vocals. Its bright, colorful video broke a barrier. MTV had been attacked for ignoring Black artists, and had passed on her first video, but this one went into heavy rotation. She became the first Black woman to get regular play on the channel, and How Will I Know went to number one as well.[1] [2] [3]

Clive Davis had been against her recording Greatest Love of All, the George Benson song written for a film about Muhammad Ali, but Whitney and Michael Masser talked him round. At first it was tucked away as a B side. Released as a single in 1986, it spent three weeks at number one, and its video, filmed at Harlem's Apollo Theater, starred Cissy as herself, cheering on a young Whitney from the wings. That made three straight number ones from one album, a first for a woman. In March 1986, more than a year after release, the album itself reached number one and stayed there fourteen weeks. It has sold around twenty five million copies, the best selling debut ever by a solo artist.[1] [2] [3]

The Grammys were a sore point. Because she had already sung on other artists' records, she was ruled ineligible for Best New Artist, and Clive Davis sent a letter of protest. Still, Saving All My Love for You won her first Grammy, for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and her performance of it on the broadcast won her an Emmy. She took home seven American Music Awards for the album. In July 1986 she set out on her first world tour, the Greatest Love World Tour, fifty four shows on four continents. Behind the scenes, not everything was wholesome. Robyn Crawford later wrote that the tour was nicknamed the Greatest Drug tour, because there was cocaine everywhere.[1] [2]

Seven in a row, and a backlash

Her second album, simply called Whitney, arrived in June 1987, produced mostly by Narada Michael Walden. Critics grumbled that it sounded too much like the first. Buyers did not care. On the twenty seventh of June it became the first album by a woman ever to enter the Billboard chart at number one, and it went to number one in Britain at the same time. It stayed at the top in America for eleven weeks. The lead single, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, was written by George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, the couple behind How Will I Know. It topped the charts in seventeen countries and sold more than eighteen million copies, the best selling single by a woman in the 1980s.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then came the record everybody remembers. Didn't We Almost Have It All, So Emotional and Where Do Broken Hearts Go all went to number one. On the twenty third of April 1988, Where Do Broken Hearts Go gave her seven consecutive number one singles in America, breaking the record of six shared by the Beatles and the Bee Gees. As of 2026, no one has matched it. Clive Davis remembered asking her whether she was pinching herself, and she said she was. The Moment of Truth World Tour ran to around one hundred sixty dates, including nine sold out nights at Wembley Arena, and in 1988 she recorded One Moment in Time for the Seoul Olympics, which went to number one in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

She used her fame for causes. She refused to work in apartheid South Africa, and in June 1988 she sang at Wembley Stadium for Nelson Mandela's seventieth birthday, while he was still in prison. That summer a concert at Madison Square Garden raised about a quarter of a million dollars for the United Negro College Fund. In 1989 she founded the Whitney Houston Foundation for Children, with Cissy in charge, helping sick and homeless children. She also raised money for AIDS causes in the early years of the epidemic, when many stars kept their distance, and in 1991 she spoke at an AIDS vigil in London about research and stigma.[1] [2] [3]

Success brought a backlash. Some Black critics and radio programmers said her polished pop had sold out to white audiences, and she was mocked with the nickname Whitey Houston, with the Reverend Al Sharpton among those using it. At the Soul Train Music Awards on the thirteenth of April 1989, part of the audience booed when her name was read out. Her saxophonist Kirk Whalum later said he did not think she ever recovered from that night. Yet the same evening brought someone new into her life. She met Bobby Brown, the twenty year old former New Edition singer with a bad boy reputation. He came to her birthday party that August, and by December they were dating.[1] [2] [3] [4]

She answered the critics with I'm Your Baby Tonight in November 1990, her first album as executive producer, made with the hot team of L.A. Reid and Babyface, plus Luther Vandross and Stevie Wonder. The title track and All the Man That I Need both went to number one. Then, on the twenty seventh of January 1991, ten days into the Gulf War, she walked onto the field at Super Bowl twenty five in Tampa, in a white tracksuit, and sang The Star-Spangled Banner. Her slowed down, soulful arrangement was inspired by Marvin Gaye's version from 1983. It was released as a charity single for the Red Cross, and it is still called the gold standard for the song.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Bodyguard

Hollywood had been calling for years. The Bodyguard was an old script, written by Lawrence Kasdan in the mid 1970s with Steve McQueen and Diana Ross in mind. Kevin Costner revived it, and in 1989 he contacted Whitney himself about playing Rachel Marron, a pop star with a stalker. She was terrified she was not good enough, and only agreed after he promised he would not let her fall. Warner Bros. executives worried about her pull at the box office and about an interracial romance, and floated other actresses, but Costner insisted the part needed a real singer. She passed a screen test in January 1991, and filming began that November.[1] [2] [3]

Her private life was moving just as fast. Bobby Brown first proposed in 1990 and she said no. In 1991 he asked again, in Germany, and this time she said yes. When filming began she was pregnant, and in January 1992 she miscarried. She told Barbara Walters it was painful, emotionally and physically, and that she was back on set the next day. She married Brown on the eighteenth of July 1992 at her mansion in Mendham, New Jersey, in front of eight hundred guests, with the gospel singer Marvin Winans presiding and Robyn Crawford as maid of honor. On the fourth of March 1993 their daughter, Bobbi Kristina, was born. She would be the couple's only child.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The song that came to define her arrived almost by accident. Costner first wanted her to sing the Motown ballad What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, but that song turned up in another film, Fried Green Tomatoes, as a hit for Paul Young. The replacement was a Dolly Parton country song from 1974, I Will Always Love You. Houston's version, produced by David Foster, opens with about forty five seconds of her voice alone, an idea Costner pushed for. Her saxophonist Kirk Whalum plays the solo, and a single thump on the drums from Ricky Lawson launches the famous key change. Parton, who had once refused to give Elvis Presley half the publishing on the song, later said Whitney's version earned her enough to buy Graceland.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Bodyguard opened in November 1992. Critics were hard on the acting, and she was even nominated for a Golden Raspberry, but audiences loved it, and it took around four hundred ten million dollars worldwide. I Will Always Love You spent fourteen weeks at number one in America, a record at the time, and topped the charts in thirty four countries. As of 2026 it remains the best selling single ever by a woman, at around twenty four million copies. The soundtrack spent twenty weeks at number one, became the first album to sell over a million copies in a single week under the SoundScan system, and has sold about forty five million copies, the biggest soundtrack of all time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1994 the soundtrack won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and at the American Music Awards she won eight trophies in one night, a record for a woman, with baby Bobbi Kristina carried on stage. She toured the album around the world for nearly two years. In October 1994 she sang at the White House state dinner for Nelson Mandela, the newly elected president of South Africa, and that November she became the first major star to play the new South Africa, performing for more than two hundred thousand people and giving the money to children's charities. But these peak years were also when things turned. She later told Oprah Winfrey her drug use grew heavier after The Bodyguard's success and her daughter's birth.[1] [2] [3]

Films, gospel and a sharper sound

In 1995 she starred with Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine and Lela Rochon in Waiting to Exhale, directed by Forest Whitaker. She called it a breakthrough for the image of Black women, and it went to number one at the box office. She also steered its soundtrack, produced by Babyface, into a showcase of female voices, including Brandy, Toni Braxton, Mary J. Blige and Aretha Franklin. Her own single, Exhale Shoop Shoop, entered the Hot 100 at number one, only the third song ever to do that. Its wordless hook exists because Babyface could not think of lyrics for that part and simply hummed. He said Whitney thought he had lost his touch when she first heard it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Preacher's Wife followed in 1996, a Christmas comedy with Denzel Washington. She was paid ten million dollars, at the time the highest fee for an African American actress. Its soundtrack, made with the producer Mervyn Warren and recorded partly with the Georgia Mass Choir in an Atlanta church, became the best selling gospel album of all time. When the Grammys gave it no gospel nomination, she boycotted the 1998 ceremony. With her partner Debra Martin Chase she ran a production company, BrownHouse, and their first project was a 1997 television version of Cinderella with a multiracial cast. Brandy played Cinderella, Whitney played the Fairy Godmother, and around sixty million people watched.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the films, the marriage was in trouble. Bobby Brown had repeated run ins with the law, including a drunk driving case after he crashed her sports car in 1996, and in 1995 her publicist admitted the couple had separated for a while. In 1997 she was photographed in Capri with a bandage over a cut on her cheek. She said she had stumbled on a rock, and Brown denied hitting her. She suffered further miscarriages, in 1994 and again in 1996. By her own account to Oprah Winfrey, by 1996 taking drugs was an everyday thing. She said she was not happy by that point, and that she was losing herself.[1] [2] [3]

In November 1998 she released My Love Is Your Love, her first studio album in eight years. It sounded younger and tougher, with producers like Rodney Jerkins, Wyclef Jean and Missy Elliott, and it earned some of the best reviews of her career. It included When You Believe, her duet with Mariah Carey from The Prince of Egypt, which won the Oscar for Best Original Song. Heartbreak Hotel, a song the group TLC had turned down, went to number two. On the title track you can hear little Bobbi Kristina, held up to the microphone by her mother. It's Not Right but It's Okay won her sixth and last competitive Grammy, and she thanked Bobby from the stage.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The 1999 world tour was a hit in Europe, but the North American dates were dogged by cancellations blamed on her throat. Rolling Stone later reported that in July 1999 her mother and others staged an intervention to get her into treatment, and that it failed. Footage shot on that tour for an unfinished documentary shows a singer who could still command a stage, though people around her said her voice was already being worn down. That June she also made a surprise appearance at New York's Pride dance on the piers. Asked by MTV why she had come, she said we are all God's children.[1] [2] [3]

Coming apart

The year 2000 began badly. In January, airport security in Hawaii found half an ounce of marijuana in her handbag, and she left before police arrived. The charge was later dropped. In March she failed to turn up to induct Clive Davis into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and weeks later she was dropped from the Academy Awards by the show's musical director, her old friend Burt Bacharach. Her publicist blamed her throat, but one account said she seemed distracted and jittery at rehearsal and sang a different song from the one planned. In May, Robyn Crawford resigned. Crawford later said she left because Whitney would not get help for her drug use.[1] [2]

Yet the business kept booming. In August 2001 she signed a new deal with Arista worth a reported one hundred million dollars, one of the biggest record contracts ever. The next month she appeared at Michael Jackson's thirtieth anniversary concerts at Madison Square Garden looking alarmingly thin, and rumors spread that she was ill. After the September eleventh attacks, her Super Bowl recording was released again to raise money for firefighters and police, and it reached number six, higher than the first time. In 2002 a company run by her own father sued her for one hundred million dollars, claiming it was owed for its work on her career. John Houston died in February 2003. She said they made peace at his hospital bedside.[1] [2] [3]

Just Whitney came out in December 2002 to mixed reviews. To promote it she sat down with Diane Sawyer, and when asked about drugs she produced the line that followed her for the rest of her life, crack is whack. She admitted using cocaine, marijuana and pills, but denied crack and denied having an eating disorder. In December 2003 police were called to the couple's home near Atlanta. Whitney told officers that Bobby Brown threatened to beat her and then struck her with an open hand, and she had a bruise on her cheek and a cut lip. He was charged with battery. Days later they left court arm in arm, saying they were still together. Years afterwards, Brown admitted hitting her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2005 the couple let cameras in for the Bravo reality series Being Bobby Brown. It gave the network its highest ratings ever, and many critics called it a train wreck. Whitney said later she did it to show the world she was proud to be his wife. That same year her mother visited the house in Alpharetta, Georgia, and found the walls spray painted with staring eyes and strange faces. Cissy came back with a court order and sheriff's officers and pressed her daughter into treatment. Whitney refused to film a second season. In September 2006 she filed for separation, and the divorce became final on the twenty fourth of April 2007, with Whitney winning custody of Bobbi Kristina.[1] [2] [3] [4]

I Look to You, and the final days

Her voice had paid a heavy price. The vocal coach Gary Catona, who began working with her in 2005, later said that at first it was simply gone, hoarse from years of drugs and cigarettes, and that it took years to bring part of it back. Clive Davis, back at her side, spent three years building a comeback album with writers like Alicia Keys, Diane Warren and R. Kelly. When I Look to You came out in August 2009, it entered the Billboard chart at number one, selling over three hundred thousand copies in its first week. She also gave Oprah Winfrey a two part interview, speaking frankly about her addiction and about her marriage, and said Brown had once spat on her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Nothing but Love World Tour, her first world tour in more than a decade, was much harder. On opening night in Brisbane in February 2010 her voice sounded hoarse and weak, some fans walked out, and at one point she paused in the middle of I Will Always Love You to sip water. In Britain, a clip of her voice wobbling at a Birmingham show made the television news. In January 2011 she made her last television appearance, joining her friend Kim Burrell at the BET Celebration of Gospel to sing I Look to You. That May she entered rehab again, calling it part of a long recovery, and a month later there were reports she had been diagnosed with emphysema.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In late 2011 she went back to acting in Sparkle, a remake of the 1976 film about three singing sisters, playing their mother opposite the American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, and serving as an executive producer. It was her first film since The Preacher's Wife. In early February 2012 she recorded Celebrate, a duet with Sparks for the soundtrack, and people at the session remembered her dancing and laughing in the booth. It would be her final recording. She had plans. She was talking with Simon Cowell about The X Factor, and about a sequel to Waiting to Exhale, and she hoped to make a new album with Clive Davis.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

She checked into the Beverly Hilton in early February for Clive Davis's annual pre-Grammy party. Accounts of those last days pull in different directions. Davis said she told him she was swimming every day, had given up cigarettes and would have her high notes back by August. Her old musical director Rickey Minor saw her at a rehearsal, and she told him she was swimming again and getting her wind back. Others described her as disheveled and erratic. On the ninth of February she burst into a rehearsal by Brandy and Monica, and that night at a Hollywood club called Tru she joined her friend Kelly Price on stage to sing the hymn Jesus Loves Me. It was her last public performance.[1] [2]

On Saturday the eleventh of February 2012, she spoke with her mother on the phone at about a quarter past three in the afternoon, and Cissy said she seemed fine. Minutes later her assistant Mary Jones and her bodyguard Ray Watson found her under the water in the bathtub of Suite 434. Paramedics worked on her for more than twenty minutes, and she was pronounced dead at five minutes to four. She was forty eight. In March the Los Angeles County coroner ruled her death an accidental drowning, with heart disease and cocaine use as contributing factors. Downstairs, Clive Davis let the party go ahead as a tribute, a decision Chaka Khan called complete insanity.[1] [2] [3]

After Whitney

The next night's Grammy Awards became a tribute, with Jennifer Hudson singing I Will Always Love You, and the show drew nearly forty million American viewers, its second biggest audience ever. Online, her death became the most tweeted breaking news story up to that time. On the eighteenth of February her funeral was held at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, where she had first sung as a child. Scheduled for two hours, it lasted four. Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys and CeCe Winans sang, and Kevin Costner spoke about two Baptist kids swapping stories of church. Bobby Brown left early after a dispute over seating. She was buried beside her father in Westfield, New Jersey.[1] [2] [3]

Her daughter never recovered from the loss. Bobbi Kristina inherited the estate, and she became engaged to Nick Gordon, a young man who had lived in the Houston household since he was twelve. On the thirty first of January 2015, Gordon and a friend found her face down in a bathtub at her home in Georgia, a terrible echo of her mother's death. She spent six months in a coma and died on the twenty sixth of July 2015, aged twenty two. The medical examiner cited immersion with drug intoxication, and could not say whether it was accidental or intentional. A lawsuit filed on her behalf accused Gordon of assaulting her hours before she was found. She was buried beside her mother.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The films that followed reopened old wounds. In 2017 Nick Broomfield's Whitney: Can I Be Me argued that her label had shaped her to sound less Black, and that she had been pulled between family, faith and her sexuality. In 2018 Kevin Macdonald's Whitney, the first documentary made with her estate's approval, went further. In it, her brother Gary and her assistant Mary Jones alleged that she and Gary had been sexually abused as children by their cousin Dee Dee Warwick, who had died in 2008. Cissy Houston and Dionne Warwick strongly rejected the claim. In 2019 Robyn Crawford published her memoir, A Song for You, telling their story in her own words for the first time.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Her music kept finding new listeners. In 2019 the Norwegian producer Kygo remixed Higher Love, an old bonus track from I'm Your Baby Tonight, and it reached number two in Britain. In 2020 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, introduced by Alicia Keys, and Cissy accepted on her behalf in what became her own last public appearance. That same year the video for I Will Always Love You passed a billion views on YouTube. A biopic, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, starring Naomi Ackie, opened in December 2022. Cissy Houston died at home in Newark on the seventh of October 2024, aged ninety one, and was buried beside her daughter and granddaughter.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Her influence is everywhere. The BBC traced a whole generation of big voiced singers, from Beyonce to Christina Aguilera, back to her melisma, the art of spinning many notes across a single syllable, and the producer Pete Waterman said Pop Idol judges ended up asking contestants to stop singing her songs. Rolling Stone ranked her the second greatest singer of all time in 2023, behind only Aretha Franklin. She sold more than two hundred twenty million records, and as of 2026 she is still the only artist with seven straight number one singles in America. In early 2026 the Recording Academy honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award. More than anything, people remember the voice.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston and Cissy Houston. Cissy was her mother, first teacher and fiercest critic, a gospel veteran who trained her hard and pushed her onto stages before she felt ready. She sang on How Will I Know and appeared in the Greatest Love of All video. Later she staged interventions, once with a court order and sheriff's officers. Their bond survived everything, though Cissy's disapproval of Robyn Crawford hurt both women. Cissy outlived her daughter by twelve years.[1] [2] [3]

Whitney Houston and Robyn Crawford. They met as camp counselors in 1980, when Whitney was sixteen. Crawford became her roommate, assistant, creative director and protector, and by her own account her first love. Whitney's family and later Bobby Brown resented how close they were. Crawford left in 2000 over Whitney's drug use, and they barely spoke again. In 2019 her memoir A Song for You finally told the story, and it became a bestseller.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown. They met the night she was booed at the 1989 Soul Train Awards and married in 1992. Whitney said he was the first man in the business she could be real with. The marriage brought their daughter, a Guinness record as the most successful star couple, arrests, shared drug use and a 2003 battery charge. They divorced in 2007 but had grown friendly again, and saw each other a week before she died.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Whitney Houston and Bobbi Kristina Brown. Her only child was born in 1993 and grew up in front of cameras, from awards show stages to Being Bobby Brown. Whitney insisted on taking her on tour rather than leaving her behind. Bobbi Kristina can be heard on My Love Is Your Love, and she sang with her mother on stage. She was with Whitney at the Beverly Hilton in 2012, and died three years later, aged twenty two.[1] [2] [3]

Whitney Houston and Clive Davis. The Arista boss signed her in 1983 after seeing her at Sweetwaters, then spent two years finding her songs. He shaped her crossover image, which critics later blamed for the not Black enough backlash, and he was the guiding hand on her comeback in 2009. She died in his hotel on the day of his party. At her funeral he said you wait a lifetime for a voice like that.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner. Costner chased her for The Bodyguard for more than a year, promised he would not let her fall, and fought studio doubts about casting a Black singer opposite him. They bonded over growing up Baptist. Tabloid claims of an affair were false, but the friendship lasted. At the request of Dionne Warwick he spoke at her funeral, a long eulogy that moved the church.[1] [2] [3]

Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. The press set them up as rivals in the early 1990s, and Whitney did not help, telling one interviewer what do I think of her, I don't think of her. Their duet When You Believe in 1998 changed that. They laughed through the sessions, mocked the feud at the MTV awards, and became friends. Carey wept at Whitney's funeral and paid tribute at the BET Awards.[1] [2] [3]

Whitney Houston and Dionne Warwick. Her older cousin was her model for stagecraft and poise, and Whitney watched Warwick's shows from childhood. They sang together at Arista's anniversary gala and on record. Warwick spoke at the funeral and asked Kevin Costner to do the same. In 2018 she angrily rejected the documentary claim about her sister Dee Dee, calling it hogwash.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Whitney Houston and BeBe Winans and CeCe Winans. Whitney called the gospel siblings her brother and sister. She sang background on their records, BeBe co-produced Jesus Loves Me for The Bodyguard, and CeCe duetted with her on Count On Me and became Bobbi Kristina's godmother. When Whitney tried to get clean she stayed at their homes. Both sang at her funeral, where BeBe said he would miss crazy Whitney most.[1] [2]

Whitney Houston and John Houston. Her father gave her the name Nippy, ran her company Nippy Inc and became her manager, describing himself as an intense one. In 1991 MC Hammer said John asked him to marry Whitney at the Super Bowl. Late in life his company sued her for one hundred million dollars, which broke her heart, but she said they reconciled before he died in 2003.[1] [2]

Whitney Houston and Brandy. Brandy grew up worshipping Whitney, got her on the phone as a child through the Winans, and was cast by her as Cinderella in 1997. Whitney called herself Brandy's godmother. Two days before she died, Whitney handed Brandy a note at a rehearsal. Brandy has kept its contents private, and she was among the stars who sang in Whitney's honor that year.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Whitney Houston

• Whitney was named after Whitney Blake, an actress from the 1960s sitcom Hazel. Cissy Houston chose the name from the sitcom star Whitney Blake. The middle name, Elizabeth, came from John Houston's mother, Sarah Elizabeth Houston.[1] [2]
• Her great great grandfather was the abolitionist Jeremiah Burke Sanderson. On her father's side, Whitney descended from Jeremiah Burke Sanderson, a nineteenth century campaigner against slavery who fought for the civil and educational rights of Black Americans.[1]
• Aretha Franklin was never actually Whitney's godmother, despite years of press claiming she was. According to Cissy, Whitney joked in an interview that Aretha was her godmother, the press ran it as fact, and she never corrected it. Her real godmother was Darlene Love.[1] [2]
• Cissy faked a sore throat to force a teenage Whitney to perform in her place. Around 1980 Cissy phoned Whitney before a gig at the New York club Mikell's, claiming she could not sing. Whitney went on and impressed the crowd. Cissy later admitted it was a test.[1]
• Whitney nearly joined the cast of The Cosby Show before her music career took off. In the early 1980s she was close to landing a role on the sitcom but pulled out as her career began to take off. She did land a cameo on Gimme a Break and a Canada Dry commercial.[1]
• You Give Good Love was written with Roberta Flack in mind, and Whitney recorded it in a single take. The producer Kashif offered the song to Arista after Flack's side turned it down. Whitney nailed the vocal in one take, and it became her first big solo hit, reaching number three.[1] [2]
• How Will I Know was written for Janet Jackson, whose management turned it down. George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam wrote it with Janet Jackson completely in mind. When her team passed, an Arista scout grabbed it for Whitney, and Narada Michael Walden reworked it.[1]
• Clive Davis almost blocked Greatest Love of All, which became her third biggest American hit. Davis was against her recording the George Benson song, but Whitney and the songwriter Michael Masser persuaded him. It was first a B side, then spent three weeks at number one in 1986.[1]
• The songwriters of I Wanna Dance with Somebody first offered her Waiting for a Star to Fall. Merrill and Rubicam wrote it after seeing a star fall during her 1985 show at the Greek Theatre. Clive Davis turned it down for her, and they came back with I Wanna Dance with Somebody.[1]
• Michael Jackson offered Whitney a duet on I Just Can't Stop Loving You, but Clive Davis said no. In 1987 Jackson pitched the ballad for Whitney, but Davis feared it would clash with promotion for her album Whitney.[1]
• In 1991 Whitney jumped on a man attacking her brother in a Kentucky hotel. In Lexington, a scuffle broke out with three men who reportedly shouted racial slurs. Whitney punched one of them off her brother Michael. Assault charges against both siblings were dropped.[1] [2]
• She planned to wear a black cocktail dress at the Super Bowl, but switched to a tracksuit because Tampa turned cold. The white tracksuit, headband and Nike sneakers became iconic, later copied by Brandy and honored by Madame Tussauds with a wax figure in that outfit.[1]
• The NFL and CBS were so wary of her slow arrangement that they had a standard version recorded as backup. Her musical director Rickey Minor said the network and league thought changing the song was sacrilegious, so a safety version in the usual key was recorded. Hers aired instead.[1]
• The Florida Orchestra, which played on her Super Bowl recording, sued Arista for royalties in 2001. After the recording was re-released following the September eleventh attacks, the orchestra said it had not received royalty statements for years. It withdrew the lawsuit three days later.[1]
• Her father reportedly asked MC Hammer to marry her at the 1991 Super Bowl. Hammer was already married with children at the time. He and Whitney never dated, but they remained friends until her death.[1] [2]
• The Bodyguard was written in the 1970s for Steve McQueen and Diana Ross. Lawrence Kasdan's script stalled for years. Ryan O'Neal later replaced McQueen, Ross dropped out, and Kevin Costner revived it in the late 1980s with Whitney in mind.[1] [2]
• Dolly Parton joked that Whitney's version of her song earned her enough to buy Graceland. Parton had refused to hand Elvis Presley's camp half the publishing on I Will Always Love You. Keeping it paid off hugely when Whitney's version became the best selling single by a woman.[1]
• The famous key change in I Will Always Love You is launched by a single drum hit. Drummer Ricky Lawson's one note fill on the toms kicks off the final chorus, after a saxophone solo by Kirk Whalum. Both were members of Whitney's own band.[1]
• Whitney co-wrote Queen of the Night, and it earned a Golden Raspberry nomination. She added lyrics to a Babyface and L.A. Reid track for the club scene in The Bodyguard. The film collected seven Razzie nominations, including one for her acting, but won none.[1] [2]
• She married Bobby Brown on Nelson Mandela's seventy fourth birthday, with Donald Trump among the guests. The wedding on the eighteenth of July 1992 drew eight hundred guests to her Mendham mansion. She chose purple for the bridesmaids and groomsmen, and Ebony called it the wedding of the decade.[1]
• The shoop shoop hook in Exhale exists because Babyface ran out of words. Babyface said he could not think of lyrics for that section, so he hummed along instead, and it felt so good he kept it. The song entered the Hot 100 at number one.[1]
• Heartbreak Hotel was first offered to TLC, who turned it down. The Danish production team Soulshock and Karlin sent the ballad to TLC for their album FanMail. After the rejection it went to Whitney, with Faith Evans and Kelly Price, and reached number two.[1]
• Bobbi Kristina's baby voice can be heard on the song My Love Is Your Love. Whitney brought her daughter to the studio and held her up to the microphone. Her small voice is heard in the first verse and again at the end of the track.[1]
• Michael Jackson was her first choice to duet on If I Told You That, but he declined. She asked Jackson in 1998. George Michael later sang the duet version, which became a European hit from her 2000 greatest hits album.[1] [2]
• Whitney asked Alicia Keys, completely off the cuff, to produce her, and got Million Dollar Bill. Whitney walked up to Keys at a Clive Davis party and asked if she could produce her. Keys wrote the song with Swizz Beatz, and it became Whitney's last single released in her lifetime.[1]
• R. Kelly wrote I Look to You for Whitney about a decade before she recorded it. The ballad became the title track of her 2009 comeback album, which entered the Billboard chart at number one.[1]
• The FBI investigated a blackmail attempt against her demanding up to two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Files released in 2013 show someone threatened to reveal details of her private life. Whitney said the person was a friend, and the case was closed after a private agreement.[1] [2] [3]
• One fan investigated by the FBI claimed to be President of Europe and to have bought Brazil. The Dutch fan, visited by agents in 1999, had sent Whitney threatening letters and tapes of songs he said he had written for her. He was judged harmless.[1] [2]
• Her half brother Gary Garland played in the NBA before singing backup on her tours. Gary played in the 1979 Final Four for DePaul against Larry Bird's Indiana State, then spent a season with the Denver Nuggets. He sang on her tours from 1986 to 2010.[1]
• In the first hour after her death, about eighteen percent of all tweets mentioned her. There were almost two and a half million posts in that hour, and her Wikipedia article drew over a million and a half hits an hour, the site's biggest spike since at least 2010.[1]
• Tony Bennett told Clive Davis she was the greatest singer he had ever heard. Bennett recalled the call at the party held the night she died, before singing How Do You Keep the Music Playing in her memory.[1]
• An orchid, Cymbidium Whitney Houston, was registered in her name in 2014. The Hatfield Orchids nursery registered the hybrid with the Royal Horticultural Society. Her elementary school in East Orange had already been renamed in her honor in 1997.[1]
• A Garden State Parkway service area in New Jersey is named after her. In December 2023 the New Jersey Hall of Fame renamed the Vauxhall service area the Whitney Houston Service Area, part of a program honoring its inductees.[1]
• At Dee Dee Warwick's funeral, Whitney left her seat to join the choir. The cousins stayed close. When Dee Dee died in 2008, Whitney reportedly got up during the service to sing The Lord Is My Shepherd with the choir.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.