by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan
I watched a Lifetime Behind the Headlines special on Whitney Houston, yet another episode in
their weird “tribute” to her that included the TV-movie about her, Whitney (so focused on her ill-advised — to say the least —
marriage to Bobby Brown one commenter on an imdb.com message board said it
should have been called Bobby),
an hour-long tabloid interview with Bobby Brown giving his side of their
relationship and the one I would most have wanted to see but didn’t, a one-hour
“performance special” I caught a bit of (and which contained a clip of a very young Whitney Houston singing a nondescript song but
singing it powerfully in a Broadway-ballad style that didn’t sound at all Black
but was still considerably moving). I was hoping last night’s show would be a
rerun of that but instead it was a bit of sleazy tabloid story-mongering
starting with the factoid that Houston died in the Beverly Hills Hotel on the
eve of the big Grammy Awards pre-event party being thrown by Clive Davis, the
head of her record company (Arista), and Davis went ahead with the party,
ostensibly turning it into a tribute to her, while her body was still in the
hotel several floors above. The show gave a thumbnail sketch of her career, and
included the interesting revelation that the earliest and last performances of
Whitney Houston that exist on video are both of her singing religious songs: a
clip of her from the New Hope church in her home town of Newark, New Jersey
(where her mom, Cissy Houston, was music director when she wasn’t on tour as a
backup singer for Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley) and a drop-in she did at a
nightclub where she joined a much younger male R&B singer in a hymn. (They
showed a bit of this and her voice was considerably more ragged than it had been in its prime, though a
different sort of artist could have used this to her advantage and presented
herself as a hard-bitten woman who had been through a lot and survived it —
sort of like the way Billie Holiday and Judy Garland presented themselves
during their last years.) There
wasn’t much of an attempt to get an insight into What Made Whitney Run — and
the rather pat summing-up at the end, talking about how sometimes addiction is
more powerful than love or fame,
didn’t really answer the question, “Why Whitney Houston?” You might as well
ask, “Why Billie Holiday?” “Why Judy Garland?” “Why Dinah Washington?” “Why Amy
Winehouse?” (Though in Winehouse’s case she already had a big — and well-known
— drug problem before she became a star, and her most famous song was a forthright
statement about why she wasn’t
going to go to rehab.)
Whitney Houston’s case was complicated by the fact that
her carefully built-up image (mostly by Clive Davis, who was pushing her — as
Berry Gordy had pushed Diana Ross earlier — for the “Black Barbra Streisand”
market niche) didn’t allow for the complexities of real life to intrude: while
Billie’s, Dinah’s and Judy’s pain became part and parcel of their work, Whitney
was marketed as a performer whose beautiful, pure voice could soar over all that was
mean and sordid in life — and the embarrassments of the later years (including
her weird appearances on the TV “reality” series Being Bobby Brown, in which we got to see Mr. and Mrs. Brown playfully
but edgily confronting each other in their kitchen over breakfast, which
probably did as much to de-mythologize Whitney Houston as all the tabloid
headlines about her drug use ever did) blew her career in ways that for other
kinds of performers (including Bobby Brown himself, with his carefully
cultivated “bad boy” image) wouldn’t have hurt and to some extend would
actually have helped their
myth-making. Whitney Houston’s story is a sad waste of talent, and despite all
the churning of her private life in shows like this and tabloid articles both
during her lifetime and since her death, we’re really not any closer to an idea
of why a singer who seemed to
have it all fell so far, so fast, and didn’t have the kind of either personal or career longevity
her obvious models, Streisand and Ross, did.
