The Whitney I Knew (19 page)

Several of us close to Whitney felt the same way; this was no secret. But it's also unfair and inaccurate for anyone to claim that Bobby ruined Whitney the moment they started hanging out.

Bobby and I stood on the common ground of understanding. I respected what Bobby did in his career, as he did with me. So make no mistake, my words here are not meant to diminish Bobby in any way. I simply thought that he and Whitney were unequally yoked. I felt they would be great as friends, but not as husband and wife.

Whitney knew I didn't approve of their relationship early on, and especially their pending marriage. That's probably why she revealed her wedding plans to me in such a roundabout way.

Whitney had her assistant call me one day to ask me to fly out to Vegas just to hang out with her and CeCe and a few other close friends.

“No, not coming,” I said. At that moment, I had other things to do—I just couldn't fly on a whim from Nashville to Vegas.

Then Whitney called. And it was then she revealed her true plan to me: It wasn't just to come and hang out. It was to be with her and the gang because she and Bobby were going to elope.

“Why didn't you just tell me this upfront instead of trying to trick me?”

“I know, I know. Well, we're talking now . . . aren't we? Won't you please come out?” she begged.

“No. I'm not coming, Whitney.”

Because I didn't say no very often, she knew something was up. So, she spilled the beans. “Alright, let's talk.”

Here is where The Pact really kicked in. We needed to talk about this because we promised we would.

“Aren't you even going to say hello first?” I chided her.

“Hi. Now, let's talk.”

So, we had our “Bobby” talk.

We talked about how she was going to handle the other women in his life—the women who had his other children. I asked how she was going to handle his drinking and his use of pot. But the main issue we discussed was his insecurities. Any man—I don't care who you are—would struggle with insecurities if he'd had the amount of success Bobby did and then married into what was the phenomenon of Whitney Houston. It was inevitable that Bobby would experience a diminishing sense of self. Like it or not, his career would be overshadowed by Whitney's massive success. Would he be able to handle that?

“Don't act like that ain't gonna change things between you,” I said.

She understood, assured me that everything was going to be okay, and thanked me for talking. After our conversation, I told her I would definitely be at the wedding when she had a proper one. And she promised me that if things didn't work out between the two of them, she'd get out.

When your wife makes Whitney's kind of money and you make a significantly lesser amount, that's going to cause problems. I was sure that tension would cause problems in their relationship. Couple that with a firecracker like Whitney, and you've got a combustible mix. I knew her, and I knew there'd be pressures with the mothers of Bobby's other children. Whitney had to battle that.

Not only was this difficult for her, but it placed Bobby in an unenviable position. I just didn't see it panning out.

Did they love each other deeply? Yes. But passion quickly fades in a marriage when those times of hard decision come. How would Whitney respond when Bobby needed to be there for his other children? What kind of pressure would that place on Bobby? On the marriage itself?

Those were the types of questions I tried to get Whitney to think through.

I wanted better than the best for her. I wanted her to be with someone who would love and respect her for who she was, not for who she'd become. I wanted her to see the whole situation and think through the realities of it.

That's what family does: they protect. And Whitney knew that about me. That's why she kept their idea to elope a secret until she could no longer hide it from me.

Again, in all this, you don't hear me saying that Bobby isn't a good guy. He was just not the guy I saw for her.

What frustrates me now, and especially in recent years—with their 2005 reality show and all the escapades that ensued—is how the public judges Whitney (and Bobby too, unfortunately) solely on their marriage, which unraveled so publicly.

Was it the best idea to do the reality show? No. But people need to understand, that show was supposed to be about Bobby's career, not Whitney's. People remarked that even though the show was about “Bobby's world,” Whitney received as much, if not more, camera time than he did.

Of course
her fame eclipsed the show! Her fame eclipsed many things! But fame can't eclipse the way the public views you. Instead, fame inflates the public's view of you.

I think the show was a bit of a wake-up call to both of them.
Being Bobby Brown
thrust their marriage into the public eye. As a result, this intimate relationship that should be kept private was broadcast to anyone wanting to watch. Right or wrong, it further tainted Whitney's professional persona and cast Bobby in a negative light as well. In essence, everyone watched their tumultuous relationship fall apart. And we don't like stories if they don't end in “happily ever after.”

Things change when you get inside a marriage, when you have a child, when you attain massive success. It's that change that threw Whitney, I think, and probably Bobby too. It's that change that drove her as well.

At the funeral, so many memories were going through my mind. Like the day of her wedding. No, they didn't elope after all. They did it properly—at her New Jersey home, with 800 guests attending the reception—and it was magnificent. Whitney asked my brother Marvin to officiate, and CeCe was a bridesmaid.

About two weeks before the wedding, Whitney called me. “I need you to write a song for the wedding.”

“Oh, okay. I'm just supposed to pull a song out of the air, right?”

I put up a good front, but I wrote the song and loved doing it. Then I sang it at the ceremony.

“Enough Said” was the name of the song. Everyone was predicting that Whitney and Bobby's marriage would never last. So I tried to encourage them both with a song that told them to stop worrying about the whispers.

I thought that “Enough Said” encapsulated both Whitney's and
Bobby's personalities. They knew what everyone was saying, but you know what? Enough said.

The lyrics go like this:

When the outside world and even her closest friends told Whitney that her marriage didn't stand a chance, did people not expect her
to react? You can't say something like that to someone who's as driven as Whitney was, and who has achieved such a high level of professional success. It just made her all the more determined to prove everyone wrong.

For Whitney, even when things between her and Bobby got out of hand and seemed to escalate to a point of no return, there was within her a switch that did not allow her to quit. She stayed, not because everything was great, but because she wanted to silence the naysayers. She wanted this as much as she wanted the relationship.

In the end, their “us against the world” mentality is what kept them together as long as they were.

I believe Whitney truly loved Bobby. He was energetic and real and gave her life a tangibility she longed for. He was an adventure for her, and she loved him for that. They had great chemistry.

Despite that very real and deep love, though, how could the marriage stand up to the pressure of everyone looking on and saying, “It's destined to fail”? You try to overlook the bad and wish it away; you want to prove that it was right and that you were right, but it doesn't always happen like that.

And compounding everything was the reality of Whitney's life. People need to realize the challenges and tensions that entered in when Whitney married Bobby. They married on July 18, 1992. Later that year,
The Bodyguard
released. Then, on March 4, 1993, Bobbi Kristina was born. And as the phenomenon of
The Bodyguard
kicked in, the movie and the soundtrack consumed Whitney's life for the better part of three years.

From the outset, Bobby and Whitney were thrust into an almost impossible situation. Whitney later admitted that her substance
problem began just prior to
The Bodyguard
and her union with Bobby. So the tension in Whitney's life was unbelievable.

And then Bobby became clingy. When
The Bodyguard
craziness ramped up, you could really see his insecurities come through. He'd been a key support for her during the filming of the movie, urging her almost daily to not quit when her own insecurities threatened her confidence. As she reported to Diane Sawyer, he told Whitney, “If you quit now, you're going to blame me for the rest of my life. You're going to do this movie and . . . do it well. You can't quit now.”

But as time went on, things changed. He would walk out on stage at the end of her concerts, when the throngs of people were going crazy for her, and hug her. Her spotlight never turned off, while Bobby's was steadily dimming. To his credit, Bobby continued to help Whitney as much as he could through this time. While he was helping her, however, his own star was fading. And that presents another tension in a marriage.

I spoke to her about this—about Bobby going on stage and hugging her—and told her it needed to end. “Everyone knows you're married,” I said. “They don't need to see all this stuff going on.”

There were signs to me early on that they were in trouble. But so what? I think everyone understands they weren't set up to succeed. Their stars collided, literally.

That's also in the past. What we need to realize now is that Bobby and Bobbi Kristina need support and prayers, not more rumors and gossip about Whitney's past or Bobby's tainting of the Princess. These notions are overblown.

I love what Michelle Obama said in
Ebony
magazine upon Whitney's passing: “Now is the time we need to pray for [Whitney's] family, in particular her daughter, Bobbi Kristina. . . . We all have to
wrap our arms around that young girl and send her all our love and prayers and support and hope that she gets through in one piece.”

Whitney was a big girl. She made decisions that were not the best, like every single one of us. If she were here today, she would claim it. The truth is that we all have made and will make wrong decisions. The only difference between our decisions and Whitney's is that hers played out on the world's stage. Our responsibility as her friends, and even as adoring fans, is to allow the grief process to run its course and let people heal; allow her memory to shine through the dark times and finally let her rest.