Chapter 1The Boos

Foreword

Every book I had written before this one was a Southern book. That has been my beat for as long as I have had one: the politicians and the preachers, the singers and the strategists, the public lives of the American South, written from a desk in New Orleans in a city that understands better than most what a voice is worth and what a funeral is for. So when I told people I was writing a book about Whitney Houston, more than one of them paused in the way polite people pause when they believe you have made a category error. She was Newark, they said. She was New Jersey, Arista, the crossover apparatus of the 1980s, the most Northern and most manufactured of stars. She was not, they meant, my subject.

They were wrong, and the reason they were wrong is in the second chapter of this book. Whitney Houston's story does not begin in Newark. It begins in Early County, Georgia, in a Black farming family named Drinkard working land in the southwest corner of the state two generations after slavery, and it goes north in the 1920s the way millions of Southern stories went north — in the Great Migration, carrying the church in its luggage. The New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, where a twelve-year-old girl stood up and sang her first solo to a congregation of women who knew exactly what they were hearing, was a Southern room that happened to stand in New Jersey. The voice was a Southern inheritance, three generations deep, passed from the Drinkard Singers to Cissy to the girl who called Aretha Franklin "Auntie Ree." I have spent my working life writing about what the South made and what the South cost. Whitney Houston is both. That is why I wanted her.

I expected to write the story the country already owns. The country owns a fall: the greatest voice of her generation, the bad marriage, the drugs, the bathtub at the Beverly Hilton. I worked from the record that any biographer of Whitney must now work from — the public record, vast and contested; the memoirs, the mother's and the best friend's, which do not agree; the press archives and the court filings and the coroner's findings; the documentaries, which do not agree either; and above all the recordings, which are the only witnesses that never changed their story. And the record kept refusing to give me the fall. It kept handing me instead a night in April of 1989, at an awards show in Los Angeles, when the community that had produced her booed her name — and, hours later, in the same building, introduced her to the man she would marry. One night. Two events. I came looking for a collapse and found a trap, built early, maintained by nearly everyone, and sprung over twenty-three years.

The book is called Suite 434 because that is the room at the Beverly Hilton where the trap finished its work, on the afternoon of February 11, 2012, while the industry gathered four floors below for a party that went on that night anyway. The room number is in the public record. I put it on the cover not for the shock of it but for the obligation of it: the reader should arrive at that door, as I finally did, understanding everything that led there — the church, the migration, the strategy, the boos, the marriage, the voice that twenty-four million people bought and no institution protected. A room is not a verdict. It is an address. This book is the long road to it.

Why does she deserve the book? Because the voice was not just the best of its era; it was an argument — proof of what a gospel-trained Black woman's instrument could do at the absolute center of American popular culture, and proof of what that culture would extract in exchange for letting it stand there. The triumph was real. The cost was structural. The two facts do not cancel each other, and a biography is the only instrument long enough to hold them both.

I began this book a Southerner presuming to write about the North. I finished it convinced I had been on my own beat the whole time — that Whitney Houston is the Great Migration's daughter, and that her story is the migration's longest sentence: begun in a Georgia field, carried through a Newark church, and ended in a Beverly Hills hotel room, still singing.

— Yvette Childress, New Orleans

Chapter 1 · The Boos

The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, on the night of April 13, 1989, was the kind of room that the entertainment industry constructed for itself once a year — a hall draped in lights and video screens and the theatrical apparatus that the awards-show economy required. Inside, on stage, in the wings, in the front rows where the cameras tracked the famous faces, was the Black music establishment. The Soul Train Music Awards had been created in 1987 to fill a gap that the Grammy Awards and the American Music Awards refused to fill: an awards show by, for, and about Black music. The Grammys had a habit of giving Album of the Year to white artists who had spent the year imitating Black ones. The Soul Train Awards were supposed to be the corrective. They were supposed to be the room where Black artists were celebrated by the people who had made the music possible.

Whitney Houston was twenty-five years old. She was the daughter of Cissy Houston, the gospel and soul singer who had spent the 1960s and 1970s backing Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley as the founder of the Sweet Inspirations. She was the first cousin of Dionne Warwick. She had grown up calling Aretha Franklin "Auntie Ree." She had grown up in the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, and she had sung her first solo at the age of twelve to a congregation of women who recognized in her voice the same gift that had been recognized in Cissy and in Dionne and in Aretha — the gift that the Black church had been producing and the Black community had been hearing for as long as Black people had been singing in America.

Whitney Houston was nominated that night for Best Female R&B/Urban Contemporary Single, for "Where Do Broken Hearts Go." When her name was read out by the presenter, the audience in the Shrine Auditorium booed.

It was not the first time. The previous year, at the 1988 Soul Train Awards, when Whitney's name had been called for "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," the response had been mixed — applause and boos in roughly equal measure, the boos audible enough that everyone in the room had heard them and that the cameras had caught them and that the next morning's papers had reported them. In 1989, the boos were louder. They were unmistakable. They were the sound of a community publicly rejecting one of its own.

The Black audience at the Shrine Auditorium that night had a name for what they were objecting to. They called her "Whitey" Houston. They said she was too pop. They said she was too white. They said she had sold out. They said she had abandoned the music that had made her possible in order to sing the kind of crossover ballads that white audiences preferred. They said she was Clive Davis's product. They said she was Arista Records' creation. They said she was not, and had never been, what she had been packaged to be.

She heard them. The cameras caught her face. She did not, on the surface, react. She had been trained, by Cissy and by the Catholic high school in Caldwell, New Jersey, where she had spent her teenage years, to maintain composure under pressure, to never let the world see what was happening underneath. The composure held. Underneath the composure, something broke that would never quite mend.

Later that same night — and this is the detail that the biography must record because the night had two meanings, not one — Whitney Houston met Bobby Brown.

The two events are not separate. They happened in the same room, on the same evening, within hours of each other. Whitney was at the Soul Train Awards as a nominee. Bobby Brown was there as a presenter and performer, a twenty-year-old former member of New Edition whose solo album Don't Be Cruel had spent the previous year producing a string of Top Ten singles and was on its way to selling eight million copies. Brown was the most successful young Black male solo artist in pop music. He was also, by reputation and by his own later admission, the bad boy of the moment — the artist who said what he wanted, did what he wanted, and represented, in his persona and his music, the masculine confidence that the Black community in 1989 was choosing over the carefully managed femininity of Whitney Houston's brand. Brown was being celebrated by the same audience that was booing Whitney. The contrast was the point.

They were introduced. The introduction was casual. The casualness did not last. Within four months, Brown would attend Whitney's twenty-sixth birthday party. Within three years, they would be married. Within four years, they would have a daughter. Within fifteen years, they would be divorced, and the marriage would have produced — alongside the daughter — a documented history of drug use, domestic violence, and the slow-motion collapse of Whitney Houston's voice and Whitney Houston's life. The marriage would become, in the popular telling, the cause of Whitney's destruction. The popular telling was wrong. The marriage was a symptom of something larger, and the something larger was the thing that the boos at the Shrine Auditorium had announced: that Whitney Houston was a woman trapped in a position no one had prepared her for, and that the people around her — her mother, her label, her cousins and aunts, her best friend Robyn Crawford, eventually her husband — would respond to the trap not by helping her escape it but by reinforcing it from different directions.

What was the trap? The trap was the gap between two things that the music industry of the 1980s could not, or would not, hold together: the voice that Whitney Houston had inherited from Cissy and Dionne and Aretha, and the image that Clive Davis and Arista Records had constructed around the voice in order to sell it to white America. The voice was Black. The voice was gospel-trained, church-formed, the instrument that came out of the New Jersey-and-Newark Baptist tradition that had produced everyone in Whitney's family for three generations. The image was something else. The image was crossover. The image was the carefully styled hair, the carefully chosen ballads, the carefully managed presentation that Davis had designed to bypass the segregation of American radio and to put Whitney on white pop stations and on adult-contemporary stations and on the kind of mainstream programming that had not, before Whitney, been welcoming to Black female singers in the way it had welcomed her.

The strategy worked. By the time of the 1989 Soul Train Awards, Whitney Houston was the biggest pop star in the world. Her debut album had produced three #1 singles — the first debut album by anyone, ever, to do that. Her second album had produced four #1 singles — making seven in a row, another record. Both albums had sold millions of copies apiece and were still selling. Her face was on every magazine cover. Her songs were on every radio station. The Grammy Awards had given her Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for "Saving All My Love for You" in 1986 and for "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" in 1988. She had won American Music Awards and MTV Awards and the kind of cumulative recognition that, in the music industry, indicates that a strategy is working perfectly.

The strategy was working perfectly. And the strategy was producing the booing.

The booing was the cost. The Black community whose tradition Whitney had come from could see, just as clearly as the white audience could see, that Whitney's records were being marketed to the mainstream. They could hear that her producers were the ones Davis chose. They could see that her image was managed. They could see that her live performances at major events were calibrated to avoid the things that would scare suburban white listeners — the riffs, the runs, the testifying, the raw gospel testimony that Cissy could deliver and that Aretha had built a career on. Whitney could do all those things. Whitney could out-sing every pop singer of her generation and most of the soul singers, too. But Whitney's records, the records that Davis produced and Arista released, were not the records of an artist working in the gospel and soul tradition. They were the records of an artist working in the crossover-pop tradition that the industry had decided would be her vocation.

The Black community took this personally. They took it personally because they had a long memory of what crossover meant. Crossover meant the loss of the artist to the white audience. Crossover meant Diana Ross becoming Vegas. Crossover meant the singer's audience being replaced by an audience that did not understand what the singer had come from and did not value the tradition the singer was leaving behind. Crossover meant the death of one kind of art in service of the success of another kind. The Black community had seen this happen many times. They knew the pattern. And in 1988 and 1989, when Whitney Houston's name was read out at the Soul Train Awards, they used the only public mechanism available to them to register their objection.

They booed. They booed an artist they otherwise admired, an artist whose voice they recognized as one of the great voices of their generation, because the voice was being put in service of a strategy they did not approve of, and the strategy was the only mechanism by which they could register their disapproval. The booing was not personal. It was structural. It was the Black community's collective response to the music industry's machinery for converting Black voices into white-coded products.

Whitney heard it as personal.

She would talk about it later. Two years after the 1989 booing, in the summer of 1991, she sat down with Arsenio Hall on his late-night talk show — Hall being, in 1991, the most prominent Black television host in the country and the host of the show that had become, by default, the place where Black entertainers went to address Black audiences directly — and she addressed the booing for the first time on national television.

"I got a lot of flak about I sing too white," she said, with the exhausted directness of a woman who had been holding the response in for two years. "I grew up on Soul Train just like every other black kid, you know?"

The line is worth pausing on, because it contains everything: the exasperation, the assertion of authenticity, the appeal to a shared childhood, the implicit accusation that the audience that had booed her had failed to recognize her as one of their own. The line says: I am not what you said I was. I am you. I came from where you came from. I sang what you sang. I watched what you watched. I am Whitney Houston from Newark, New Jersey, and I belong to you, and I do not understand why you have decided that I do not.

The audience watching Arsenio Hall in 1991 mostly believed her. The booing did not happen again. The Soul Train Awards eventually gave Whitney their highest honor — the Soul Train Artist of the Decade Award, Female — in 2000, a kind of institutional apology for the booing, an acknowledgment that the booing had been wrong or at least premature. The acknowledgment came too late to undo the damage. Whitney never forgot the boos. The people who knew her — Cissy, Crawford, the small circle of friends who had been with her since the early years — would say later that the booing was one of the things that broke her, that she carried the wound for the rest of her life, that no amount of subsequent recognition could erase the moment when the room she had hoped would receive her had instead rejected her.

But this is the night, not the wound. The wound takes the rest of the story to describe.

The night had a sequence. The Soul Train Awards happened. The boos were heard. The cameras captured them. Whitney maintained her composure. The show went on. Bobby Brown performed and was celebrated. At some point during the after-party, or during the show, or during one of the brief moments backstage when artists from different parts of the music world cross paths and exchange the small social acknowledgments that the industry requires, Whitney and Bobby were introduced. Whitney was beautiful. Whitney was famous. Whitney was, in the description of every man who described her in those years, one of the most striking-looking women in popular music, a woman whose physical presence matched the size of her voice. Bobby was confident. Bobby was talented. Bobby was the kind of young man who, having been told all his life that he was a star, behaved like one — without the apologetic restraint that women in entertainment were required to display.

The introduction was brief. They went their separate ways. Whitney went back to her hotel. Bobby went back to his. The Soul Train Awards ended. The press the next day reported the booing, reported Whitney's nominations, reported the winners and the losers. Nobody reported the introduction. There was nothing to report.

Four months later, in August of 1989, Whitney threw herself a twenty-sixth birthday party at her estate in Mendham, New Jersey. The estate had been bought with the proceeds of the first two albums — a substantial property in a wealthy New Jersey suburb, the kind of house that someone who had grown up in Newark and East Orange acquires when they have made the kind of money that Whitney had made and want to make a statement about the distance they have traveled. The party was lavish. The guest list was extensive. Whitney invited Bobby Brown.

He came. They danced. They talked. The talking did not end. Two years later, in 1991, Bobby would propose. The next year, they would marry. The marriage would consume the next fifteen years of Whitney's life and the next fifteen years of her voice, and the marriage would be blamed for everything that came after — by Cissy in her memoir, by Robyn Crawford in her memoir, by the public in its various judgments — and the blame would not be entirely fair, because the marriage was not the cause of Whitney's destruction. The marriage was one of the consequences of the destruction. The destruction had begun earlier, on the night when the Black community of the Shrine Auditorium booed her name and announced that she was no longer one of them, and when, in the same building, on the same night, she was introduced to the man who would become both her great love and her great wound.

Two events. One night. The trajectory of a life condensed into a single evening at an awards show in Los Angeles. Everything else can be traced back to this night: the gospel-church voice, the carefully managed product, the impossibility of being both, the attempt to escape into a marriage that promised authenticity and delivered chaos, the slow-motion collapse that the industry watched and managed and finally exploited, the bathtub in the Beverly Hilton twenty-three years later, the funeral at New Hope Baptist Church a week after that, the daughter who would die the same way three years after the mother. The story begins on April 13, 1989, because the life that followed had already been set on a course it would not survive.

She went home. She went to Mendham. She went into the studio to begin work on the next album, the album that would become I'm Your Baby Tonight, the album that would mark her first deliberate attempt to sing more Black, to lean into the R&B production that she had been criticized for avoiding, to record with L.A. Reid and Babyface and Stevie Wonder and the producers whose work the Soul Train audience had been booing her for not working with. The album would be the first concession to the booing. The concession would not be enough — the album would be successful but not as successful as the previous two, and the next album, the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, would push her further back into crossover territory than ever before, because that was what the market wanted and that was what Davis knew how to deliver.

The trap remained. The trap had not been built by the booing audience, and it could not be undone by the booing audience. The trap had been built by the industry, by the strategy, by the way that pop music in the 1980s had been organized to reward Black artists who could be sold to white audiences and to ignore Black artists who could not. Whitney could be sold to white audiences. The selling was the trap. The selling produced the records, the records produced the fame, the fame produced the access, the access produced the partnership with Bobby Brown and the cocaine and the slow erosion and finally the bathtub. The chain was visible from the beginning, if anyone had been looking for it. Hardly anyone was. Whitney was twenty-five years old. The boos lasted maybe five seconds. The cameras moved on. Bobby Brown took the stage to perform. The audience cheered. The night continued. And Whitney Houston, sitting in her seat at the Shrine Auditorium, smiled the way she had been trained to smile, and prepared to leave the building, and met a man who would change her life, and the story that begins on this night continues, in different forms, until she dies.