Whitney – a heartbreaking portrait of celebrity self-destruction
New Whitney Houston Documentary Shows Daughter Bobbi Kristina Using Drugs, Hints at Suicide Attempt: ‘She Hated Her Life’
Heartbreaking details about the lives of both Whitney Houston and her daughter are coming to light with the new documentary Whitney.
In the film, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday and was executive produced by family member Pat Houston, numerous relatives, friends and associates offer unflinching accounts of Houston’s amazing life and the demons that plagued her and her only child, Bobbi Kristina Brown.
“She hated her life,” Pat Houston says of Bobbi Kristina in the documentary. Hers was a life that all agreed seemed doomed from the start.
A close family friend identified in the film as Aunt Bae, details the first time she met Bobbi Kristina as a newborn. Whitney, who’d just welcomed her baby girl with then-husband Bobby Brown, had reportedly checked herself out of the hospital early and brought the baby to Aunt Bae’s doorstep. “She was hunched over” the woman recalls in her interview of Whitney’s state when she handed over her baby. “She said ‘Aunt Bae can you bathe her?’”
According to Aunt Bae, Houston left and didn’t return. Before bursting into tears, the now-elderly family friend says she kept Bobbi Kristina for 2-3 months and that the child would go on to live with her for the first eight years of her life.
Everyone from Houston’s brothers to her trusted assistant Mary Jones admits to how hard life was on Bobbi Kristina, who from
childhood had a front-row seat to her parents’ chaotic marriage and struggle with drug abuse.
Despite Whitney and Bobby’s love for their only child, “They didn’t take care of Krissy,” says one family member when interviewed, “They just left her to the wolves.”
In one troubling scene, footage is shown of Bobbi Kristina at an unknown age lurched over an iPad, snorting a powdered substance. In another recollection, Pat Houston recalls the time Whitney had to rush to the hospital because Bobbi Kristina had reportedly “cut her arms.”
The anger Bobbi Kristina felt is said to have extended to her mother at times. Pat Houston says Bobbi Kristina once said of Whitney,
“I wish I could find a way to kill her and no one find out about it.”
Whitney Houston was sexually abused as a child
The documentary alleges that the singer was the victim of sexual abuse as a child.
The movie, called Whitney, has been directed by Kevin Macdonald, the Scottish filmmaker behind films like One Day In September and the drama The Last King of Scotland, and debuted yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival.
It alleges that Houston, who died in 2012, was molested at a young age by her cousin, the soul singer Dee Dee Warwick, the younger sister of Dionne Warwick.
The allegations are made in the film by Gary Garland-Houston, Whitney Houston’s half-brother, a former NBA basketball player who says he was also abused by Warwick between the ages of seven and nine.
It would mean that the singer would have been a toddler at the time of the alleged abuse.
Speaking about the claims, Macdonald told Deadline: “I first began to suspect that there might be some kind of abuse involved before anyone had actually told me. I just had a sense, having sat watching interviews about her, watching footage of her.
“I had a feeling that there was something wrong with her. There was something preventing her, in some way, from expressing her real self. She felt uncomfortable in her own skin in almost every interview there was with her.
“And I thought that was a very strange thing, and it kind of reminded me of people I’d seen who had suffered from abuse, just in their body language and their sense of holding something back.
“That was just an intuition, and then somebody mentioned it off-camera to me. They wouldn’t talk about it on camera, but they said Whitney had said to her that something had happened.
“And for a long time, that was where it lay. I didn’t know whether that was true. And then I interviewed Pat Houston and Gary Houston, who’s Whitney’s brother. He told me that he was abused by a woman in the family, and Pat Houston told me that, yes, Whitney had said to her, ‘This is what happened.’”
Dee Dee Warwick, herself a celebrated soul singer but who spent her career in the shadow of sister Dionne, was said to have struggled with drug addiction, and died in 2008 at the age of 63.
Though the Houston family has not commented on the allegations, the film, which also features interviews with her husband Bobby Brown, was made with their blessing.
It also alleges that Houston had earnings stolen from her by her father John Houston, who was also her accountant and who tried and failed to sue his daughter for $100 million in a breach of contract case in 2002.
Houston died after she drowned in the bathtub of a hotel room in Los Angeles, after many years dealing with her own problems with substance abuse.
‘Whitney’ doc trailer reveals never-before-seen footage, including her dissing Paula Abdul
It has been more than six years since the untimely passing of Whitney Houston, the transcendent singer whose career included numerous industry milestones and cinematic triumphs. With a voice as powerful as her personality was magnetic, Houston was one of the defining pop stars of her generation, and she’ll receive a fitting big-screen tribute when Whitney — boasting never-before-seen footage, rare performances, and archival music from her family vaults — arrives in theaters this summer. And now, that eagerly anticipated documentary has debuted its first trailer, replete with the star badmouthing the vocal capabilities of fellow 1980s chart-topper Paula Abdul.
“Paula Abdul ain’t s***,” Houston says at the 1:24 mark. “That girl is singing off-key on the record.”
