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December 1992

Thoroughly Modern Whitney

Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown. It may have seemed an odd match, the scrubbed pop beauty and the street-tough New Jacker. But, as Lynn Hirschberg found, theirs is a real and complex marriage—and now there’s a new addition on the way.

By Lynn Hirschberg Photograph by Michel Comte

It’s a balmy evening in late summer and just for tonight the sprawling back lot at Universal Studios has been transformed into Bobbyland. There are posters of Bobby’s new album cover blown up billboard size; walls of TV monitors playing Bobby’s newest video, “Humpin’ Around”; and partygoers mingling in baseball caps that read, simply, “Bobby.” It’s been four years since Bobby Brown’s last album, Don’t Be Cruel, sold eight million copies, and MCA didn’t want to release his long-anticipated follow-up (titled, simply, Bobby) without a great deal of fanfare. “So we decided to throw a party,” says MCA Records president Richard Palmese, a man not known for understatement. “And this is the greatest party in years.”

The mob is penned in by scaffolding and booths marked in big red letters: cajun popcorn, fried chicken, vegetable pantry, and fruit. There are two different levels to this bash, and in the V.I.P. tier, record execs are chatting each other up; members of Bell Biv DeVoe are munching on shrimp; and Sinbad is trying to conduct a radio interview with Mr. Brown himself. Despite the crowd screaming over the sound of “Humpin’ Around,” playing over and over and over again,the main point of curiosity at this party is Whitney Houston, a.k.a. Mrs. Bobby Brown.

Dressed in a pale-pink, loose-fitting silk suit, she is sitting at a table in between Robyn Crawford, her executive assistant, who bears a striking resemblance to Detroit Piston ace Isiah Thomas, and her new mother-in-law, Carol Brown, who is visibly ecstatic about the party. As Bobby emerges from the V.I.P. tent, looking characteristically dapper in a pale-green suit, a matching polka-dot shirt, and his trademark diamonds (watch, ring, pendant), he makes a beeline for the table, and his wife and mother beam in harmony. He kisses Houston, and she whispers something in his ear. He smiles and kisses her again. “I had my doubts about this relationship,” says a member of Brown’s camp. “But when you see them together, you know it’s love.”

There was certainly reason to wonder. On the surface, this couple seems remarkably mismatched. She’s the squeaky-clean pop diva in sequins; he’s the B-boy from the projects who was once arrested and fined for simulating sex onstage. She’s a morning person; he gets up at two in the afternoon. She is so devoted to her two Akitas, Lucy and Ethel, that she reportedly built a $75,000 house for them, a miniature version of her New Jersey mansion; he is afraid of dogs. She’ll wear the same thing two days running, while he travels everywhere with two extra pairs of shoes in case he gets tired of the ones he’s got on. (“Even as a kid I could never wear dirty sneakers,” he says. “I’d just keep going and steal me a new pair.”)

More significantly, there are the persistent rumors that Houston is gay (which she has repeatedly denied) and that Brown is a crackhead (which he has repeatedly denied). He was, however, definitely a ladies’ man (“Getting girls is how I live,” he once sang); he has three children, by two different women. “I think women are God’s gift to this earth,” explains Brown. “ I love women.” Houston, who previously dated Eddie Murphy, is now expecting Bobby’s fourth child. “It feels different this time,” he says. “It’s different being married.”

Despite all the disparities, this seems to be a real relationship. Whitney and Bobby are the inverse of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Like Ginger, Bobby gives a sexual charge to the pure image of Whitney (Fred), while she graces him with a veneer of class.

They rub off on each other professionally as well. In recent years, Houston has not sold to the black audience the way, say, Bobby Brown has. “Whitney’s gone through a real rough spot with her black base,” explains Ernie Singleton, president of the Black Music Division at MCA Records. “She wants to ‘cross-black.’ Being married to Bobby Brown might help her with that.”

But marketing considerations aside, the couple seems to understand each other, and their separate worlds. Right now, it’s getting late and Mrs. Brown is ready to leave Mr. Brown’s party and go back to the hotel. He walks her to her limo, kisses her good-bye, and returns to Bobbyland, where he parties with his pals until early in the morning.

“Nicollette married Harry Hamlin so she could get a green card?!?” It’s a week later and Whitney Houston is reading aloud from the National Enquirer and other tabloids as she gets her makeup done for a photo shoot. She is competing with her own voice: in the background, one of her cuts from the sound track for The Bodyguard her upcoming feature-film debut, is playing loud. “Fergie’spregnant?” Houston says now to Ellin Lavar, who is curling the hair on Whitney’s wiglet. “My oh my,” she continues, leafing through the pages, stopping at an article on Roseanne Arnold.

Houston is wearing skinny black jeans, black sneakers, and a white T-shirt. She has a lovely face, with an almost doe-ish quality, like a Disney character. Her manner is considerably more playful and girlish than her image: she is relaxed, but professional. “Madonna says k. d. lang looks so much like Sean Penn she could fall in love with her,” Houston recites. She folds the paper in half. “I like to read them,” she says. “It’s either me or Oprah they’re writing about. They take turns.”

Ellin laughs, and Houston concentrates on what Kevyn Aucoin, the makeup impresario, is doing to her eyes. She’s surprisingly nonchalant about being in the tabloid spotlight, but then again, she’s been around show business and its attendant vagaries all of her life. Her mother, Cissy Houston, is the great gospel singer who sang backup for, among others, Aretha Franklin, and Whitney’s cousin is Dionne Warwick. “Even before Dionne became famous,” Houston recalls, “my mother and her sister were singers—the Drinkard Singers—and they traveled widely and were famous in their own right.”

Houston, who is 29, grew up in East Orange, New Jersey, and first sang in the New Hope Baptist Church. “Church was the family function,” she has said. “Every Sunday that came I went to church. I was in church Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, skipped Wednesday because that was adult choir rehearsal, I was back Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then again on Sunday.”

At 17, she began modeling and was also singing “The Greatest Love of All” as part of her mother’s act. “My mother watched me,” Houston remembers. “When I did well, she would tell me. But she was more a corrector. She would never blow smoke up my ass. Everybody tells you you’re great, you’re fabulous, when you’re famous, but she’d always tell me, ‘Hey, did you wash your underwear today?’”

Despite the fact that Cissy Houston did not want her daughter in the music business (“Her fears were me and what people would do to me”), she did suggest that Whitney work with Clive Davis, the legendary president of Arista Records. Critics throughout the industry believe that Davis is responsible for Houston’s glossy sound—that he keeps her in diva mode.

Houston shrugs off the idea. “It’s an image,” she says. “Because I wear gowns and sequins, I’m a diva. And because I can handle what I do. A diva has control. And, besides, you want to hit. You don’t want to miss. Anybody who tells you, ‘Well, I want artistic creativity,’ they’re still trying to get a record off the ground.

“But,” she continues, “I already had my own little stuff in my pocket and Clive knew that. He knew that his job was to do what Clive did best. It wouldn’t be to try to make me a star, because I would have been a star without Clive.”

From the jump, her career ascent was spectacular: her first album, Whitney Houston, sold over 18 million copies worldwide, she surpassed the Beatles in consecutive No. 1 hits, and in 1988 alone she made about $45 million. Her third and most recent album, I’m Your Baby Tonight,sold only seven million copies, but her mainstream appeal has not flagged.

Hollywood was the inevitable next step. She was offered the part of Josephine Baker and the lead in the movie version of Dreamgirls, both to the dismay of Diana Ross. “Everybody thought of me doing it because it was so obvious,” Whitney recalls. “You want somebody who can sing and be a dream girl—get Whitney. But that’s why I didn’t want to do it—it’s too obvious.” Instead, she decided to star opposite Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. She plays a glamorous, world-renowned pop star—not much of a stretch—whose life is being threatened. Costner plays an ex-Secret Service man hired to protect her and find her pursuer.

The two have a love affair in the film, although Houston would not do nude scenes. “They own me, but they aren’t going to tell me to take my clothes off,” she says. “I’m not hired to show my ass. I don’t think it’s my greatest asset.” She pauses and starts to giggle. “I think it’s one of my flavors, but…It’s not a bad ass. My husband likes it.” She smiles rather slyly. “A lot.”

For most of her life, Houston says, she didn’t even think she would ever get married. “I just never wanted to be married,” she explains. “I had an independence that didn’t include marriage. I always thought men were full of shit. I did. For the most part, they used to talk shit to me all the time. They always had a rap. And I had two brothers, so they all told me what the deal was. They would tell me about the girls they did and they used to say, ‘Do you want to be a whore?’ ‘Do you want to be a slut?’ ‘Do you want to be treated like shit?’ They made me feel guilty for being a girl.”

When she met Bobby Brown at the Soul Train Music Awards in 1989, she was not particularly impressed. “I hit him in the head,” Houston recalls. “I was talking to some dear friends of mine—the Winans—and they were sitting in back of him. I’m hugging them and hitting Bobby in the head. And Robyn, my executive assistant, turns to me and says, ‘Quit hitting Bobby in the head. I don’t think he likes it.’ And I looked down at him and he turned around with that coolness he has and I said, ‘Bobby, I’m so sorry.’ He said, ‘It’s all right.’ And that was it.”

She invited him to her 26th-birthday extravaganza in New Jersey and then they saw each other again at a Winans concert in L.A. “He said, ‘If I asked you to go out with me, would you say yes?’” she recalls. “Because Bobby hates no. So, I said yes and that was the beginning of our friendship.”

By the time he proposed last September, the tabloids had already feasted on the romance. Her rumored affair with Robyn Crawford was the main point of gossip. It’s easy to see why conclusions were drawn: Houston and Crawford have been best friends for 15 years are virtually inseparable. Crawford counsels her on all aspects of her career—from what dress to wear at a photo shoot to how loud the vocal should sound on a particular track from The Bodyguard.They watch each other constantly. “Doesn’t Robyn look thin?” Houston will ask as she sees Crawford’s reflection in the makeup mirror.

Whether or not they were ever lovers (again, Houston denies this), their relationship is fascinating for its fierce intensity. It’s difficult to imagine anything—even Houston’s marriage—coming between them. Yet Crawford was the maid of honor when the couple made it legal last July.

The wedding was a spectacle: the bride and groom both wore white—her dress, made of French lace, cost $40,000—and the wedding party was dressed in shades of purple, Houston’s favorite color. Eight hundred people attended the wedding (“Too many,” sighs Brown).

“I was a nervous wreck,” says Houston, who cried during the ceremony, but she’s been ecstatic ever since. “Bobby is crazy,” she says affectionately. She asks Ellin to change the tape. “Humpin’ Around,” which, contrary to its title, is actually an ode to trust and fidelity, comes on and Houston sings along. “My baby can go,” she says, bopping about in her chair. “Bless his heart—he can go.”

On a scuzzy street in downtown Hollywood, Bobby Brown is out in front of his rehearsal studio, pitching quarters against a brick wall. He’s stripped to the waist, and the top of his Calvin Klein black-and-white striped underwear is sticking out above an extremely baggy pair of ultra-blue jeans. He’s crouching down on the sidewalk, and his diamonds—especially a huge ring that reads “BBB” (for Bobby Barrisford Brown)—glisten in the streetlights. Brown takes aim and tosses a coin. “C’mon. C’mon. C’mon,” he says. “All I want is the money.”

Brown wins and picks up the change. He’s playing with three of his “guys” (he usually travels with a large group—anywhere from five on up), including Stylz, a sweet-faced kid who raps on “Humpin’ Around.” Joseph Bushfan, his bodyguard, is standing behind them, watching the street.

Three guys from the neighborhood happen by and Brown happily lets them into the game. They don’t seem to realize who they’re pitching quarters against. Not even the rock around his neck or the pavé diamond Rolex on his wrist seems to give Brown away. He does look different from the way he did four years ago—he’s filled out and lost his trademark Gumby haircut. At first, he shaved one side of his head (“I looked like a nut, kind of scary”), but now he’s nearly bald all over.

Brown is angling to play dice, but the other guys want to stick with coins. Another neighborhood kid wants to get into the game, and Brown says, “Sure. More dime, more better.” They pitch again and Brown wins again. He walks down the street with his arms extended in a V and says, “I get everything!”

“We stayed out there all night,” Brown says the next day while dancers rehearse “Humpin’ Around” for the MTV Video Music Awards show. “And I broke ’em. I broke ‘em all.” He laughs. This is familiar terrain. Brown, who is only 23, grew up in Boston’s Orchard Park projects. “In the projects,” he recalls, “ I was famous for dancing. And fighting.”

The youngest boy in a family of six, Bobby was first put onstage at a James Brown show by his mother when he was three. “He was never shy,” says Tommy Brown, his brother and manager. “Not Bobby.” He began winning talent shows, but he was still a baby criminal. “I don’t think I ever felt like a kid,” he recalls. “I always hung around older guys, doing the older things. . . .You knew they were going to get money. And if they got money, you got money. Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money is better.” Brown pauses. “That’s why I still have boyish ways about myself.”

When he was 11, his boyhood friend James “Jimbo” Flint was stabbed to death in a fight. “That was the turning point in my life,” he says now. “That’s when I realized that running the streets can’t last forever. You don’t always have good luck. Right after that, we got New Edition started.”

Roughly two months after forming New Edition, which was patterned on the Jackson 5, circa 1968, the group placed second in a big Boston talent show. Local talent czar Maurice Starr liked what he heard and signed the group to a contract. In 1983, its first song, “Candy Girl,” was a hit, and New Edition, whose members’ average age was 14, was an instant sensation. “There were little girls chasing around us,” remembers Brown. “Little panties onstage. Some of the girls were fast and it broke a lot of us down.”

Despite its success, the group was, at best, a mixed experience for Brown. Although he’s made his peace with it, Brown felt that Starr rooked the group (“All I got was $500 and a VCR”), and he was also frustrated about not getting to sing lead vocals. “Bobby was a purist,” recalls MCA’s Ernie Singleton. “He’d throw mikes onstage when he couldn’t do his part as long as he wanted to. . . . There was a tremendous amount of friction between Bobby and the rest of the guys.”

So he decided to go solo. “I just felt it would be best for me to go and do what I wanted to do,” he says. Immediately, rumors began to circulate: Brown was doing cocaine, Brown was on crack, and, finally, Brown was dead. “People are going to paint their own picture,” he says with no small amount of frustration. “[Some of the business people] we had and I were fighting all the time, and in order to try and blacklist my name, that’s what they did. But I’ve never used drugs and never been on drugs. My only drug is, I think, alcohol. I drink beer a lot. That’s my best drug.”

At 17, Brown not only had a new recording deal with MCA, he was also a father. “It was one of those nights,” he says, shaking his head. “It was my birthday and the guys had given me a party at the hotel. I was drunk and one thing led to another, and another thing led to that thing, and I forgot the bag and POW! My little boy came.” Landon Brown, who is now six, lives with his father. (Brown’s two other kids, Laprincia, who is three, and Robert junior, eleven months, live with their mother, Kim Ward, who was Brown’s longtime girlfriend and “first love.”)

In 1986, Brown released King of Stage, which was largely ignored, although he still seems to have a fondness for all things regal (crowns are everywhere in Bobbyland). Don’t Be Cruel,released in 1988, was a completely different story. Producer Teddy Riley helped combine, hip-hop, pop, and a bit of funk to make Don’t Be Cruel the first “New Jack Swing” record. There were four hits in a row and the album sold an astonishing eight million copies.

A large part of Brown’s success was based on his live shows. He performed exhaustively, sometimes playing a city three times in one tour, and his shows were soaked in sex. His dancing combined glissé and a grinding pelvis; he somehow managed to be both smooth and hard. “Bobby Brown,” wrote John Leland in Newsday, “is the most electrifying performer of his day.”

But being the flyest, baddest Mack Daddy on the block did not make Brown a happy teenager. “It just brought me more and more problems,” he says rather plaintively. “I was sad. Very sad. I got real sick, but I kept performing, and it just got worse and worse. It all came down on me. I was feeling alone, not knowing if tomorrow was promised to me.”

After playing Japan two years ago, Brown and his brother moved from L.A., where they had been living, to Atlanta. For the next two years, he cooled out, bought a mansion and acreage (for $2.2 million), a studio (which he renamed Bosstown), and he wooed Whitney. “I’d stay in the house,” he says. “I was kind of scared to go to the movies or go to the mall. Because I didn’t know what people were thinking in their minds. Because everyone would ask me, ‘When’s your stuff coming out?’ So I just wouldn’t go.

“Nobody else saw me, but I would be at home in front of the mirror trying to sing like I was onstage.”

Marriage seems to have steadied him (“I feel secure now”), and he’s eager to get back on the road. “Bobby is going to be all around this country,” says Tommy Brown. “He won’t be worryin’ about Atlanta or Jersey [where Whitney lives]. He’ll be living at Sheratons for the first couple years of his marriage.”

There is some worry in Bobby’s camp that a happily married Bobby Brown will not have the same sex appeal. “This wedding is beneficial to him personally,” says Brian Irvine, Brown’s business manager. “But professionally we have to play the wedding down. His image is the young bad boy who’s handsome and who moves his hips, and the girls love that. He can’t lose that. So, he has to keep his private life private. The problem is, he’s good for Whitney’s image. And that’s the battle.”

The contradiction doesn’t seem to concern Brown. “I just want to get onstage,” he says again and again. “The rest—forget it. Just let me onstage and everything will be fine.”

“Where’s my baby?” Brown is yelling at Houston as she comes into the studio where he’s rehearsing “Humpin’ Around.” Although she’s only three months pregnant, she walks stomach first. “There she is!” he exclaims. Houston plops down on the sofa next to Brown and grabs at his sweatshirt. “Let me see, “ she coos. He pulls the loose neck of his top down over his shoulder and shows Houston the tattoo he just had done. It reads, “BBB Posse.” “All my guys are going to get them,” he says. Houston winces. “He’s talking about putting someone’s face on his chest,” says one of his legion. “Whose face?” says Houston. “Your face?” Brown pauses. “No,” he says finally. “Pia Zadora’s ass.”

They kiss and Brown pats Houston’s stomach. “I think it’s a girl,” she says. “Well then, I’m gonna spoil that baby girl,” replies Brown, who recently gave his three-year-old daughter a ruby-and-pavé-diamond Rolex. “I want presents. Lots of presents. Shoes and dresses and diamonds and all that for her.”

“You want everything, baby,” she says. “Yeah,” he agrees. Houston smiles almost maternally. “We’ll see. We’ll see.”