But when Houston started dating Jermaine Jackson in the mids, then Eddie Murphy , and rap star Bobby Brown , whom she married, Crawford admits it was tremendously difficult.
This would be the pattern of their lives together for the next 10 years: Crawford as the person to whom Houston would turn as the pressures of fame intensified. And believe me, people knocked on the door. In , when Crawford suggested to Cissy that the singer needed help for her drug addiction, she was given short shrift.
Eventually she quit, 20 years after she and Houston first met. I t is a distorting effect of fame that minor episodes can assume a much larger prominence than they deserve. Had Houston not been in the spotlight, her teenage romance with Crawford would probably have fizzled out anyway, leaving them free to continue on comfortably as friends.
Instead, their relationship became the elephant in the room. And yet, as Crawford points out, the emotions were real. The coroner ruled her death to be accidental drowning, brought on in part by cocaine and heart disease.
You are lucky to say you have a friend, and one you have through your life. Viewed from the outside, the confusing thing about all this is that, for much of the time, the relationship appeared to be starkly uneven.
Houston opened up the world for Crawford, exposing her to all the glamour, travel and interest that kind of fame can deliver. But the singer could also be capricious and spiteful. Once, while Crawford was on tour with Houston in London, she went on a date with one of her dancers. But she gave me a hug right after. Because she loved me. Surely it was because she was jealous? For years, Houston was actively homophobic, publicly comparing homosexuality to bestiality, then privately blasting Crawford for not denying the rumours about their relationship strenuously enough — behaviour Crawford disliked, but went along with.
After Crawford quit her job with Houston, she was offered a lucrative marketing job at Arista Records, until the offer was suddenly and inexplicably withdrawn. Crawford looks puzzled. I was there, I knew what my role was. I went through her modelling years with her.
I was watching her rise. Everything that she had told me she was going to do, I could see it happening. We worked well together. It was always there. In the end, it was tragic.
But the difference with me is: I said thank you. It took Crawford a while, but she did. At the time, Houston had vowed to quit, too. There was nothing Crawford could do but plead with her to stop and report her drug use to her mother. After Jermaine Jackson, Houston was largely single until she married Bobby Brown, although famous men often asked her out. According to multiple witnesses, Brown allegedly continued to be violent towards Houston and her drug use accelerated.
The couple divorced in It was a survival mechanism. Whitney Houston released her debut album at age 22 and scored three No. Whitney delivered four more No. With her marriage to singer Bobby Brown in and ensuing drug use, Houston's career got off track.
She eventually made a comeback with 's I Look to You and also co-starred in the musical film Sparkle. Houston died from accidental drowning in a hotel on February 11, Born on August 9, , in Newark, New Jersey, Houston almost seemed destined from birth to become a singer. Her mother and cousin were both legendary figures in American gospel, soul and pop music.
Even as a child, Houston was able to wow audiences; she later told Diane Sawyer that a rapturous response from the congregation at New Hope had a powerful effect upon her: "I think I knew then that [my singing ability] was an infectious thing that God had given me. By the time she turned 15, Houston was performing often with her mother and trying to get a record deal of her own.
Around the same time, she was discovered by a photographer who was awed by her natural beauty. She soon became an extremely sought-after teen model, one of the first African American women to appear on the cover of Seventeen magazine. But music remained her true love. When she was 19, Houston was discovered in a nightclub by Arista Records' Clive Davis, who signed her immediately and took the helm of her career as she navigated from gospel to pop stardom.
She and Davis spent the next two years working on her debut album, finding the best producers and songwriters available to showcase her amazing vocal talent.
In , the artist released her debut album, Whitney Houston , and almost immediately became a smash pop sensation. Over the next year, her hit singles "Saving All My Love for You" and "How Will I Know" helped the album reach the top of the charts, where it stayed for 14 non-consecutive weeks.
Houston followed the monumental success of her first album with a second release, Whitney , in During this time, the singer also appeared at a concert for Nelson Mandela's birthday and founded the Whitney Houston Foundation for Children, a nonprofit organization that funds projects to help needy children over the world.
By , Houston was on top of the world, but her life was about to get very complicated very quickly. At first, the marriage was passionate and loving, but things turned sour as the decade progressed. Both Brown and Houston battled substance abuse and increasingly erratic behavior, with Houston later alluding to emotional abuse from Brown and domestic violence.
In spite of these growing personal troubles, Houston continued to progress in her career, crossing over successfully into acting in by starring opposite Kevin Costner in the wildly popular movie The Bodyguard. With this project, she set a trend for her films to follow: For each movie she also released hit singles, creating sensational record sales for the soundtracks. Later in the s, Houston also starred in Waiting to Exhale and The Preacher's Wife , both accompanied by hit soundtracks as well.
In the late s and early s, Houston's increasingly rocky marriage, struggles with drugs and health problems threatened to derail her career. Several concert cancellations and a notorious TV interview with Sawyer in , in which Houston appeared far too thin and in poor health, led many to speculate that she was on the verge of a breakdown.
The show aired during the worst years of the couple's crumbling marriage; drug use, lifestyle excess and bad behavior were all caught on tape and Houston's reputation sunk to new lows.
Houston tried to ignore the controversy, charging ahead with her music by releasing Just Whitney… to combat her detractors, but it did not match the success of her earlier works. In spite of her troubled relationship, Houston was still celebrated as a singer, being named the most-awarded female artist of all time by Guinness World Records in Over the next few years, Houston attempted to repair her marriage and to break her drug habit, but after several relapses, Cissy had to step in.
As Houston explained to Oprah Winfrey in "[My mother] walks in with the sheriff and she says: 'I have a court injunction here. You do it my way or we're not going to do this at all. You're going to go on TV, and you're going to retire.
And say you're going to give this up because it's not worth it. After almost a decade of struggling with her personal life, Houston seemed to be pulling herself together. She released a new album, I Look To You , in The recording received a warm welcome from music fans, making it to the top of album charts. Her live shows, however, garnered mixed reviews, with some complaining about the quality of her voice. In early , Houston was rumored to be experiencing financial trouble, but she denied this claim.
Indeed, the artist seemed poised for a career upswing: Houston worked on the musical film Sparkle with Jordin Sparks, a remake of the movie about an all-girl musical group similar to The Supremes, and also reportedly had been approached to join the singing competition series The X Factor as a judge.
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