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And now, just three years later, her fate has been replicated in an equally shocking style. Today the singer’s 21-year-old daughter, Bobbi Kristina, herself a drug addict, lies in a coma, hovering close to death.
Roberts today left. Roberts on a boat with the singer in Australia in 1988 right
To
many, her fate has seemed grimly predictable, but few have been more
affected than one man who sits, watching, many hundreds of miles away
from Bobbi Kristina’s anxious family.
For seven years of his life, Welshman David Roberts was a constant companion to Whitney, a minder, fixer, and wise counsel, too.
He was not
just her bodyguard – but The Bodyguard, who helped inspire the role
which established her as the golden girl of Hollywood.
Like the hero played by Kevin Costner, Roberts was a Special Forces-trained operative who lived constantly by her side.
There may
have been no romantic involvement, but Roberts was the real-life
recipient of a note under his hotel door saying: ‘I will always love
you’ – the title of the power ballad from the film that became more
famous than the movie itself.
Whitney
trusted him with her life. Yet unlike the character on screen, Roberts
proved tragically unable to save her – or her daughter.
Now,
aghast at the latest twist of fate to assail Whitney’s family and her
legacy, the bodyguard has finally decided to tell how one of the most
glamorous women on the planet was brought low by a disastrous cocktail
of alcohol, celebrity and hard drugs. And he is not slow to point the
finger of blame.
In his first
interview since he finally left Whitney’s household, he recalls how her
toxic marriage to ‘bad boy’ rapper Bobby Brown eclipsed her talent and
she began the descent into helpless addiction.
It
was a world, he says, in which the infant Bobbi Kristina would wear
£20,000 diamond earrings – while witnessing her parents consume
paralysing quantities of drugs.
After Bobbi Kristina’s birth in 1993, Roberts worried she would have little choice but to follow the same path as her mother.
He takes no satisfaction from being proved right.
‘That girl had no chance from the start,’ he says.
‘She was born into chaos. Her father was instrumental in her mother’s downfall.
‘Everyone
is responsible for their own actions, but Whitney was vulnerable. She
was obsessed with Bobby Brown and he subjected her to so much
psychological abuse that she lost everything, including her dignity.
'I
watched Bobbi Kristina as a little girl, running around the corridors
of hotels we were staying in, surrounded by the degenerates who were
supposed to be looking after her, and I worried for her future.
‘When I heard what had happened to Bobbi Kristina, I wasn’t surprised, but I was angry.
‘Everything
good Bobby Brown’s ever had in his life, he’s destroyed – his career,
Whitney, and now Bobbi Kristina. She’s another victim of his poisonous
personality.’
On
January 31, Bobbi Kristina was found in the same awful circumstances as
her mother had been, lying face-down and unresponsive in the bath.
Bobbi’s partner Nick Gordon is said to be devastated.
Roberts,
now 62, retains his Welsh lilt and speaks in slow, measured tones. He
has a fatherly air at odds with his toughness, although the latter is
evident in the prominent scar on his head acquired while defending
Houston during a fight between her brother, Michael, and a gang of
racist thugs in Kentucky.
His
association with Whitney started purely by chance. But within a short
space of time he was not just protecting her, but keeping her whirlwind
life and career intact.
In
February 1988, he was asked by the American embassy to look after
Whitney Houston during a forthcoming visit to London. He’d never heard
of her. Their first encounter was at Heathrow airport, where she was
arriving on Concorde. She was surrounded by a huge entourage – including
her friend and rumoured lesbian lover Robyn Crawford – and Roberts was
introduced to her only briefly.
However, a night out a few days later brought him to the attention of the American security team travelling with her.
He
recalls: ‘She went to Browns nightclub, and there was a scuffle as she
left, with photographers swarming to take pictures of her.
‘One guy was trying to climb into the Rolls-Royce to get to her, so I blocked him and his camera fell to the ground and smashed.
‘Because I’d
done my job – with the benefit of local knowledge – the former FBI
security guy who was looking after her hired me to continue providing
security for the whole of her British tour, followed by her European
tour, and then as director of security on a Far East tour.’
Roberts quickly found himself personally guarding Whitney outside her hotel door as she slept at night.
‘We
developed a rapport and I liked her immensely,’ he says. ‘At that time,
she was a very professional and articulate but slightly shy and
unworldly woman.
‘She had a wonderful sense of humour. We had a lot of fun.’
Roberts believes that she had already experimented with drugs at this stage, although he saw no sign of them.
He was then asked to arrange the security for her 26th birthday party at her house in New Jersey.
She
attended on the arm of actor Eddie Murphy, but Roberts noticed a new
male presence. ‘A bus pulled up at the house and three guys got off.
One of them was wearing a turquoise and white floral shorts suit, black loafers and white socks.
‘I
asked if I could help him and he said he was Bobby Brown and that he
had an invitation to come to the party. Later in the evening, I saw him
dancing with Whitney in a way they would call dancing but other people
might describe as sexual assault. And that was it.’
Life for Roberts became a cycle of going on tour for three months, then returning home to London for two or three weeks.
‘It
wasn’t a job, it was a vocation,’ he says. ‘It left no room in my life
for anything else, including my wife at the time. I had to be there for
Whitney, or Nippy, as her friends and family called her, whenever she
needed me.
‘Once,
she called for me because her false tooth had fallen down the sink in
her hotel room in Hong Kong. I couldn’t retrieve it, so we had to take
her to a dentist to get it fixed. I didn’t mind. We had a bond.
‘On
tour, she’d push little notes under my hotel room door, messages saying
thank you. Once, she wrote, “I will always love you”, years before the
song came out. She was sweet, and I think she saw me as a sort of
protective uncle figure.’
Officially,
Houston and Brown’s romance did not begin until 1991, although Roberts
says Brown had become a fixture long before that.
'I
could see the effect he was having on her. She became obsessed by where
he was and what he was doing. She didn’t trust him, and the emotional
stress manifested itself in her starting to lose her temper. She was
unhappy; there wasn’t the same laughter there had been.’
From the start, their pairing was an unlikely one.
Whitney,
already America’s sweetheart whose eponymously titled first album
remains the bestselling debut by a female artist in music history, was
the product of a showbusiness dynasty.
Her
mother was Cissy Houston, a singer, and her father John Houston, a
powerful entertainment manager. Dionne Warwick was her cousin and Aretha
Franklin her honorary aunt.
By contrast,
Brown was involved in gang violence from an early age. He had become
successful with the group New Edition before becoming a solo artist, but
drug abuse, accusations of rape and other criminal activities dogged
him throughout his career.
Brown
began to travel with Houston when she went on tour, and the pair would
often hole themselves up in their hotel room with large quantities of
alcohol.
‘Every
two days, a bottle of brandy and a couple of crates of Heineken would
go in, and then he’d be too ill to do anything for a day, and the
following day he’d start the process again,’ says Roberts.
‘The
only time I saw any drugs until the very end of my time with her was
before Brown was on the scene, when we arrived in Long Island for a show
and Whitney’s maid Sylvia asked me to retrieve Whitney’s glasses case,
which she’d left on the bus. It was full of weed.
‘But I knew they were taking drugs together, because everyone knew.
‘As
time went on, she started to cancel performances and events because she
wasn’t well, and it was obvious why.’ He believes Houston willingly
allowed herself to be dragged down by Brown.
‘I
think that to make him feel less uncomfortable about his inadequacies,
and the fact she was more successful than him, she went down to his
level. That meant joining him in his habits. When they were out
together, they were loud and brash. They used bad language and had
arguments to attract attention. It was embarrassing.’
Wherever Brown went, chaos followed. During one visit to London, Roberts received an urgent call at 4am from Houston’s driver.
‘Brown
was having a fight with Michael Houston on the Embankment. They’d been
at Browns nightclub, and they’d apparently met a man who had £250,000
worth of cocaine with him and was trying to sell it.
‘The
fight started because Bobby wanted to go back to the club and rob this
man of the drugs and money. Michael was trying to stop him.’
In
1992, Houston made The Bodyguard film. The similarities between the
plot of the film and Roberts’s involvement with the star was a source of
amusement to them both.
‘When
I saw it, I was amazed,’ he says. ‘Whitney wasn’t acting; it was her
life. I saw Kevin Costner doing everything for her that I did… obviously
without the sex and the shooting! Whitney and I joked about it.
‘Her
name in the film, Rachel Marron, was the name I used to book her into
hotels. We were staying in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas one night after
filming had finished and she asked me to come to her room and listen to
her new song. It was I Will Always Love You, and I told her it was the
best song she’d ever done. At that point, she had everything.’
But one evening that spring, Roberts was in a restaurant in Atlanta having dinner with Whitney and her entourage.
He
recalls: ‘She said to me, “David, I think I’m going to marry Bobby.” I
said, “Really, boss?” She said, “Yes. What do you think?”
‘I just didn’t know how to say to her, “Please God, no, don’t do it.” ’
They married in 1992 in a lavish ceremony at her home.
Brown
cheated on Houston frequently before they divorced in 2007, and Roberts
believes it was a deliberate policy aimed at chipping away at her
self-esteem.
Roberts
says: ‘Her behaviour was similar to battered wife syndrome, which I’d
seen in my time in the police. He was jealous of her success, so he
rubbed her face in his cheating, but she forgave him every possible
indiscretion. I just couldn’t understand it. And it ate away at her.’ As
Whitney later admitted: ‘He was too promiscuous, dragging dirt into my
home. It disturbed me.’
Once, she was about to go on-stage at a big open-air concert in Lexington, Kentucky, when she decided to call Brown in Atlanta.
‘A woman
answered the phone, so immediately, she wanted to fly to Atlanta to find
out what he was doing,’ says Roberts. ‘The crowds were already
arriving, but she cancelled the show. We had to find a doctor to say she
had lost her voice, and then arrange a private jet.
‘We
flew to Atlanta, and when we arrived, Whitney and Brown had a furious
argument. Fifteen minutes later, they were having sex. That’s the way it
always was.
‘He
and I were alone together in a bar one night in Germany, and he was
telling me he’d changed and become a Muslim. But that evening, he left
with two prostitutes. He tried to offer one to me.’
Houston
and Brown have admitted that it was around the time of The Bodyguard
that they began to take drugs together every day, often cocaine-laced
cannabis joints. Bobbi Kristina was born the following year, in 1993,
and Roberts was dismayed by the arrangements her parents made for her
care and concerned about the background of some of the characters
trusted to look after the toddler.
‘Whitney
and Bobby bought Bobbi Kristina diamond ear-rings worth $20,000,
information that appeared in the press, so I was very worried about her
safety. I suggested to Bobby that they take them out of her ears, but
because I’d suggested it, he refused.
He knew I disliked him intensely and it was mutual.’
By the time
Houston filmed the movie Waiting To Exhale in 1995, her drug-taking had
begun to have a serious impact on her health.
‘She
took an overdose of cocaine, and filming had to be halted for a week,’
he says. ‘Her throat doctor told me that he was giving her eight months
to stop the habit or she’d never be able to sing again.
‘I
was horrified, but shortly afterwards, we flew to Brunei so she could
sing at the Sultan’s niece’s 18th birthday party. She croaked her way
through her greatest hits. I was disgusted, and she knew it.
‘I
went home and wrote a report on what the doctor had told me and sent it
to her lawyers. A week later, I was told that she would no longer be
travelling internationally so my services were no longer needed.’
Roberts
never heard from Houston again, and went back to running his
investigations and security business. In 2010, he moved to Miami. Over
the years, he watched Houston’s decline with a sense of sad
inevitability.
‘I
wasn’t surprised when she died – I was just surprised by how long she
lived. I like to think it wouldn’t have happened on my watch.’
Of
Brown, who has married again and still works with his soul group New
Edition, Roberts said: ‘Those around her failed her. With Bobbi Kristina
so close to dying, too, I wonder if he feels guilt for the way he’s
behaved. He should.’
Culled UK Dail Mail
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