Did Whitney And Robyn Crawford Makeup
T he story told by Robyn Crawford in the pages of A Vocal For You, an account of her decades-long relationship with Whitney Houston is tender, moving and painful to read, the history of a friendship that is besides a love story. More than acutely, information technology is the story of two women who, for the entirety of Houston'due south life, concealed the sexual origins of that relationship, amongst intense and ofttimes prurient speculation. Meanwhile, Crawford was harangued, marginalised, and allegedly threatened with violence past the vocalist'southward family. "I establish comfort in my silence," says Crawford, whose conclusion to write the book was in part a rebuke to the tabloidisation of her friend's legacy. But it's the silence that lingers. Reading her book, one gets the chilling sense not only of how alien things were in the very recent by, only of a story that shouldn't be repeated in the future.
To suspension any silence is difficult – never mind one enforced over decades, at the risk of huge commercial damage to a brand every bit valuable as Houston'south. Even seven years later the singer's decease, Crawford conspicuously continues to struggle. In her publisher'south New York office, the 55-year-quondam is softly spoken and elegant, choosing her words with the care of someone still half stuck in the mindset of shielding her friend.
Crawford and Houston were teenagers when they met at a customs heart in East Orangish, New Jersey, the singer the younger by 3 years. "At that place was an instant connexion," Crawford says. She was a basketball game star, domicile from college; Houston was nevertheless in high schoolhouse. "And we clicked," she says. "She told me she was a singer and that she went to Mountain St Dominic Academy, and I told her I was playing basketball and in higher. Nosotros were two friends – it wasn't like we met at a guild. It was something that happened in the menstruum of a friendship."
By "something that happened", Crawford is referring to the years immediately after meeting when the two women were sexually involved. If she is coy about this, it'southward with good reason. The warping effect of denial isn't hands shrugged off and there is an overwhelming sense, both in the volume and in person, of someone running a gamut of internal barriers. Both Houston and Crawford had been raised in God-fearing households, at a time when, she says, "you were either this, or y'all were that". Officially, they were just friends, but even privately they resisted acknowledging what was really going on. "We never talked labels, similar lesbian and gay," Crawford writes. "We merely lived our lives, and I hoped it could go along that style for ever."
The friendship would, in fact, concluding two decades, just the sexual relationship was curt-lived. In 1980, when they met, it was already articulate Houston was heading for stardom: her cousin, Dionne Warwick, was a veteran star; her mother, Cissy, a successful backing singer; and Whitney had caught the centre of tape executives in New York. It was also clear that her human relationship with Crawford was going to be a problem. At the age of 19, Houston signed her get-go contract with Arista Records president Clive Davis. In an boggling scene in the book, she and so went to Crawford'south house, handed her a Bible and told her they had to quit having sexual practice, "because it would make our journey even more difficult". She also told Crawford that, "if they found out – because her career was taking off – they'd utilise it against us".
This is all said in a tone of quiet reflection, simply in the book the pain is acute. Crawford went along with Houston's wishes, and continued to in the years that followed. As shortly every bit Houston could beget to, she hired Crawford every bit her assistant and the women moved into an apartment together in Woodbridge, New Jersey. The vocaliser's management team was small in those days – even in the mid-1980s, when Houston's first two albums became two of the biggest-selling debuts of all fourth dimension, with some 40m copies sold worldwide (the eponymous Whitney Houston, with its huge hits How Will I Know and Saving All My Love For You; and its follow-up, Whitney, featuring I Wanna Trip the light fantastic toe With Somebody, And so Emotional and Didn't Nosotros Almost Have Information technology All). At that fourth dimension, Houston had a single managing director, Crawford recalls, "and he couldn't get her habiliment out, become it pressed, get up early and send information technology downstairs like I could. I did all those things."
She was glad to exercise them, she says. Care-taking came naturally; she'd grown up in a family where her begetter had violently driveling her mother and where, from a immature age, Crawford had taken on the role of protector. And she loved Houston, to whom she still refers by her nickname, Nippy. "Information technology was nearly existence partners on a journey that she knew she was going on," she says. "This wasn't someone who was pushed into show business. Nippy was someone who really chose it. She was very clear-headed about information technology, and I was very solid. I was made for that role."
For years, Houston and Crawford effectively functioned equally a couple, living together, occasionally (and chastely) sharing a bed, and remaining emotionally shut. "You had cats!" I say: if that'due south not a lesbian couple, I don't know what is. Crawford smiles and insists that, "living together was similar [living with] whatsoever other roommate". They would stay up late talking about music and hatching plans. Simply when Houston started dating Jermaine Jackson in the mid-1980s, then Eddie Murphy, and rap star Bobby Brown, whom she married, Crawford admits information technology was tremendously difficult. "The physical part of our friendship was no longer, just the intimacy… our friendship was intimate on all levels, that's how deep it was, and I wanted her to call me and say, 'Guess what, this is happening [with Jermaine].' And she wasn't doing that, and that hurt more than anything. Information technology didn't feel similar she was cheating on me – information technology felt more like she was leaving me out." When the brief human relationship with Jackson ended, Crawford was there.
This would exist the blueprint of their lives together for the adjacent 10 years: Crawford equally the person to whom Houston would plow as the pressures of fame intensified. "I need someone that I know loves me for me," Houston once said of Crawford and as the star's celebrity increased, Crawford became i of the very few people she could trust. It is a force of her book that it evokes with such clarity a different era of stardom – one in which singers like Houston, Michael Jackson and Madonna dominated fewer media outlets, and at a higher voltage, than stars in today's atomised media. Information technology was besides a time when mainstream stars had to be even more unimpeachably heterosexual, and Crawford'southward visibility – she was always by Houston's side – became the bailiwick of increasingly frenzied speculation. Every fourth dimension Houston did an interview, she was asked who she was dating; and in 1987, a serious profile in Time mag made reference to the rumours, much to Houston's horror. The singer's lawyer even rang Crawford, once, to ask, "Did you two ever have sexual relations?" (She replied, "Look, I don't take to tell you anything," a response that infuriated Houston when she found out. "All you had to do was say no!" she yelled, and hung upward on Crawford.)
It'south a stretch to recast the silence brought on by homophobic bullying as noble, but there is something very moving well-nigh the way Crawford came to regard her secret history with Houston: equally their but private space in a life dominated past public involvement. "It was a story that was mine," she says. "She knew I had it, she knew I held it, she knew I would take care of it. And so I didn't feel an urgency to only talk. And believe me, people knocked on the door."
People within Houston'due south inner circle, meanwhile, became increasingly hostile. When Houston's mother, Cissy, chosen their friendship unnatural and "insisted that I no longer walk next to Whitney in public", Houston went along with it, while telling Crawford in private, "Robyn, you know I beloved you immensely." When Houston married Bobby Brown, he would occasionally yell at Crawford, and Houston would dorsum him up. In 1988, when Crawford suggested to Cissy that the vocalizer needed help for her drug addiction, she was given short shrift. Houston's male parent banned Crawford from business organization meetings and, in 1997, afterward years of touring with Houston, Crawford was shut out of a 10-date Pacific Rim tour.
Somewhen she quit, 20 years after she and Houston offset met. By the time of the singer'due south expiry in 2012, Crawford was living in rural New Bailiwick of jersey with her wife, Lisa, and two children, and hadn't spoken to Houston in several years. "Merely I was always there for her," she says. "I kept feeling she was going to come, and I told Lisa, 'When Whitney comes to our door, that door has to open.'"
I t is a distorting effect of fame that small 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 complimentary to keep on comfortably as friends. Instead, their relationship became the elephant in the room. In stark media terms, the simply reason whatever of this is a story – why we're here today – is because two women slept together and one became famous. And all the same, as Crawford points out, the emotions were existent. "That energy we had, that real beloved, people could feel it, but they didn't know what it was."
Afterwards Houston's death, Crawford constitute herself questioning whether she should finally speak out. "That was the start time my silence was shaken." Houston was found face down in the bathroom in a hotel room in Beverly Hills. The coroner ruled her expiry to exist accidental drowning, brought on in function by cocaine and heart disease. "I felt like I should do something, simply I didn't know what that was," Crawford says. "Only the anger was at that place." By 2012, she had finer moved on, going back to her basketball roots to become a personal trainer. "Whitney's world", equally she puts information technology, couldn't have been further away, and fifty-fifty later the singer's death, Crawford felt the best approach was to prevarication low. "But and then Krissie happened."
Three years after Houston's expiry, her only daughter, Bobbi Kristina, died from a combination of drowning and drug intoxication at the age of 22; earlier she died, she spent months in a coma. "That's when I really tuned into Whitney," Crawford says. "The tone of everything was negative Рyous could experience it. I didn't take Whitney Houston on my resum̩ only at work, sometimes, people would say, 'Y'all used to piece of work with Whitney, how was that?' Like it was a joke. That must've been something." She looks pained. "And that was non it. I felt compelled to stand up up at that point, non only to lift her legacy, but to honour our friendship, considering friends aren't something that you should simply toss away. Y'all are lucky to say you have a friend, and one y'all have through your life. I tell my kids all the time [when they overuse the word friend]: that's an associate, that's a fair-weather friend right there."
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 could exist loyal: when, in the early days of their friendship, Crawford was employed at a car dealership and couldn't sell a unmarried car, Houston dropped in and bought ane from her, without and so much every bit taking information technology for a test-drive. Houston opened upward the globe for Crawford, exposing her to all the glamour, travel and interest that kind of fame can deliver. Merely the singer could also be arbitrary and spiteful. In one case, while Crawford was on tour with Houston in London, she went on a date with one of her dancers. When Houston found out they'd kissed, she slapped Crawford in the face.
"She did later tell me that she was feeling vulnerable," she says. "She probably was feeling defeated. I think she slapped my face because she felt that I had washed something, and she wanted me to know that I'd earned that slap. Just she gave me a hug correct later on. Considering she loved me."
Surely it was because she was jealous? "I would say Whitney was possessive. The jealousy I've witnessed was volatile – that which my mother experienced with my father, and quite frankly, the fashion I saw Bobby treat Whitney – that's jealousy. Hers was possessiveness: you lot're mine."
Crawford's acceptance of Houston's rotten behaviour can at times be infuriating. For years, Houston was actively homophobic, publicly comparison homosexuality to bestiality, then privately blasting Crawford for not denying the rumours nigh their relationship strenuously plenty – behaviour Crawford disliked, but went along with. Subsequently Crawford quit her task with Houston, she was offered a lucrative marketing chore at Arista Records, until the offer was suddenly and inexplicably withdrawn. Months later, Crawford ran into LA Reid, the so head of Arista, who told her information technology was Houston who had nixed the chore, because "she wasn't comfortable with me bringing you in". Information technology reads every bit a tremendous betrayal, all the more and so because, in the book, Crawford recounts how at the time she defended Houston's behaviour to her wife. "She'due south not in her right mind," she told Lisa. "It'south the people around her."
In 1995, in an even more than jaw-dropping episode, Crawford learned of a story running in the National Enquirer in which information technology was alleged that Houston's father had hired a thug to "break her [Crawford'south] kneecaps". Houston was riding high on recent laurels wins, including 3 Grammys, viii American Music Awards and 11 Billboard Awards, and her vocal, I Will Always Beloved You, the championship rails from The Babysitter, spending 14 weeks at number one. Rather than considering her ain position, Crawford's offset thought on hearing near the Enquirer story was for Houston. "They weren't thinking about how that was making Whitney feel," she says. "They weren't respecting her. Information technology wasn't like she told them to go practice anything to me." It'south an extraordinary response to an alleged threat of physical violence: that no one was thinking of Houston.
Wasn't there a power imbalance in the human relationship, I ask. Crawford looks puzzled.
"What practise you mean, exactly?"
I mean that, for all that Whitney needed you, wasn't everything on her terms? "We worked side by side. I was there, I knew what my role was. I went through her modelling years with her. I had a driving licence, she didn't, so I'd drive her. I was watching her rise. Everything that she had told me she was going to practise, I could run into it happening. So if yous're request me, from the beginning was at that place an imbalance, we always had balance. We worked well together. But and so the more people came into information technology, and the bigger she got – you know, she's not black enough, they're always together, what's going on there, she's non dating anyone – all of that got bigger and bigger, and she rose. Information technology was ever there. We couldn't escape it."
She adds, "If Whitney partnered with yous, she didn't try to practise your job, she worked with y'all as a partner. In the end, it was tragic. But the difference with me is: I said thank you lot. And I think that's what the others should say, likewise."
By the others, she doesn't only mean the legions of fans; she means those who profited directly from Houston – the concern associates and layers of family who, Crawford contends in the book, bled the vocalizer and so dry out that she had no option but to go on going on tour, even as her drug abuse left her physically vulnerable. Cocaine had been part of the 2 women'southward lives as teenagers, until Crawford's mother had institute out and yelled at her to quit. It took Crawford a while, just she did. At the time, Houston had vowed to quit, as well. With awful poignancy, Houston once told her: "Cocaine can't go where we're going."
At that place was nothing Crawford could do just plead with her to end and study her drug use to her mother. "I can cease, but she can't," she said to Cissy, who every bit far as she knows did nothing. Crawford was equally powerless when information technology came to Houston'due south relationships. After Jermaine Jackson, Houston was largely single until she married Bobby Brown, although famous men often asked her out. Robert de Niro bothered her for a while and she fell for Eddie Murphy, who messed her effectually and on her wedding mean solar day called to say, "Don't marry Bobby, he's no skilful." This turned out to be true. In Crawford'due south business relationship, Houston returned from her honeymoon with a three-inch scar down one side of her confront – the result, Houston told her, of a glass thrown during a fight. According to multiple witnesses, Brown allegedly connected to be violent towards Houston and her drug use accelerated. The couple divorced in 2007.
"A lot of the physical stuff that Bobby did was when I wasn't there," Crawford says. "But you never knew when he would misbehave. He would trash her path and I didn't respect him for that." For a long time, she couldn't understand why Houston was so publicly forgiving towards Brown. "But now I do," she says. It was a survival mechanism. "Considering behind closed doors, she knew how he could behave. So if he's out in the open creating a scene, yous want to defuse it. And she didn't similar to embarrass people."
It'southward telling that the well-nigh touching part of Crawford's story has null to exercise with Houston; instead, it's the trajectory of her relationship with Lisa, her married woman, an editor whose at-home, healthy demeanour throws into definition the sheer dysfunction of the world Crawford was leaving. Their romance took off only equally Crawford was exiting Houston's orbit, and Lisa told her she needed to go help. "She encouraged me to get to therapy," she says and laughs. "'Either go to therapy, or this ain't happening' – that's what she said. And information technology was clear I needed to help myself."
Long after the two were married and had children, however, Crawford was still in danger of existence sucked dorsum in. People would try to talk to her about Houston, or she would read something in a magazine and of a sudden, "I would be in that zone of looking out for her and trying to figure information technology all out. Lisa could see me migrate into information technology. She would say, 'You demand to focus on you.' She'd remind me that there I am, going dorsum in." Crawford refused to participate in Nick Broomfield'due south 2017 documentary nigh Houston, Whitney: Can I Exist Me, and says she hasn't seen information technology.
The simply thing she thinks about now with regret is a phone message Houston left not long before her death, that Crawford accidentally deleted afterward a few seconds, earlier she had a run a risk to hear it play out. "When I heard that tone, her vocalization was unlike. The manner she said my name: "Robyn." She says this very softly; it was the just part of the bulletin she heard. At the fourth dimension, Houston was booked to go on some other international bout, which horrified Crawford. "Because I had heard she had gone to rehab. And the beginning matter out of my mouth was: 'She tin can't exercise that.' I wish I'd found a way to get to her. Simply she was waiting for me, and I was waiting for her. Whitney had a lot of pride. She wasn't a pitiful person." She adds: "It wasn't meant to be."
Did she know how to grieve for Houston? "That was rough. I really felt my insides just fall. And I had a lot of emotions. I was angry, the mode it happened. The stuff I was hearing; I had spoken to people who were there on the flooring… "
Function of Crawford's purpose in writing the volume – apart from to deliver a cautionary tale to her kids well-nigh drugs, and to arm them against all the gossip – was to redeem and celebrate something of the original energy between the two women, when "we were young, and fearless, and free". On that mean solar day in 1983 when nineteen-twelvemonth-erstwhile Houston visited Crawford and gave her a Bible, the two women inscribed the book with lines testifying to their feelings for each other. "Love unconditional," they wrote and signed their names underneath. Crawford felt no shame, she says. "I loved her, and there was goose egg I felt was incorrect about loving her. And she was loving me for me. I didn't have to do anything. That's where friendship is supposed to exist. Nosotros were connected."
She smiles. "We weren't ready for everything that came with information technology."
A Song For Yous: My Life With Whitney Houston by Robyn Crawford is published by Dutton at £20. To buy a re-create for £17.60, get to guardianbookshop.com.
If you would similar a annotate on this piece to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine'south letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your proper noun and address (not for publication).
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/nov/16/friendship-intimate-on-all-levels-whitney-houston-robyn-crawford-addiction-fame-secrecy
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