Whitney Houston: The gospel truth
Tormented by tabloids, she finds solace in privacy, prayer

Date: December 13, 1996
By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff

From The Boston Globe
Submitted by: Larry A.


The question is: What would the world do if the tabloid headlines were wrong about Whitney Houston? What if America's tough-talking pop sweetheart is not really concealing a lesbian affair with assistant Robyn Crawford? What if her 4 1/2-year marriage to singer Bobby Brown is indeed the greatest love of all, and not an Image Thing? What if she is anything but a cavalier diva who demoralizes service people after arriving late to her movie sets? What if Whitney Houston has never touched a Dexatrim in her life?

Would that make the 33-year-old superstar less popular? Today, moody from the rigors of the first trimester of pregnancy, Houston is edgy on such questions of fame in America. She's admittedly overtired, and she's got a terrible hankering for Bobbi Kristina, having just gotten off the phone with her 3-year-old daughter, who is being tucked into bed by Houston's mother in New Jersey. "She said, 'Mama, come home,'" Houston says plaintively, "and I told her, 'Mommy's got some work she's gotta do.'"

The work she's gotta do is a dense week of promotion for "The Preacher's Wife," the third movie in Houston's surprise screen career. A contemporization of the 1947 Cary Grant comedy "The Bishop's Wife," "The Preacher's Wife" is one of the season's few out-and-out family films, with Denzel Washington as an angel who heals a neighborhood facing poverty and crime. The movie, directed by Penny Marshall, opens today.

As Houston settles onto her hotel suite couch, one tabloid notion about her is quickly dispelled. This former model has no need for diet pills, as the New York Post once alleged. Despite her pregnancy, Houston is remarkably thin and angular, a geometric tangle of long thin legs, long thin arms, long thin fingers and a chipmunk face that sometimes disappears behind her bouncy auburn wig. It's said that the screen adds weight, and in the case of Whitney Houston that is an understatement. Another truth: Whitney Houston wears the biggest engagement ring I've ever seen, a Flintstone-size diamond that fairly glitters from across the room.

"I spent a couple of years trying to explain myself, and it just didn't work," she says about her relationship with the press. "The more I talked the more they wrote and the more they misquoted me. The more they said I was this or I was that. And my husband was this or that. So I gave up on it, and I just deal with the joys that I have. I have enough to occupy me. My daughter occupies me, my husband and my family occupy me." To preserve her strained vocal cords, Houston talks in a half-voice and sucks steadily on honey-licorice cough drops. As she becomes impassioned, her words turn staccato, she articulates carefully and she leans forward.

"I pray a lot," she says. "I do ask God to help me get by. And I don't buy the press so I don't know what they are talking about, I don't, because once I do, then I get consumed with it. And it starts to make me feel bad. I wasn't raised to be a liar, I wasn't raised to hear untruths. I don't think it's right, so it hurts." Recently, she says, she passed a newsstand and caught the WHITNEY HAVING BABY TO SAVE MARRIAGE. It stung. "I'm trying to save my marriage again," she says with a derisive laugh. "I've gotta get pregnant to save my marriage?! That's so retarded. It's so ridiculous. Who wants to save a marriage with a baby? You don't. That's just corny!"

Last year, Houston and Brown were separated, and he was seen escorting other women on the town sans wedding ring. Those reports only confirmed what everyone already believed: That the bad boy from Boston, known to lock horns with the police, the IRS and alcoholism, would never last with the driven New Jersey girl who was raised singing gospel in a Baptist church. Last fall, in one of the worst Brown incidents, he and his bodyguard were leaving a Roxbury bar when bullets hit the passenger side of his car and killed the bodyguard.

Houston says that despite what people think, the marriage is fine, thank you very much. "We have our own romance, which has nothing to do with our public life at all. Which is more important." She says they will sometimes take off by themselves to see a movie, or to shop for their daughter at a toy store.

"Everybody will go, 'That's them!' And somebody will go, 'No, that's not them. They would never come here.' We do that kind of stuff, and it's romantic."

But those moments of freedom are the exception for Houston, whose three albums and two soundtracks before "The Preacher's Wife" have sold in record amounts, and whose first movie, "The Bodyguard," grossed $ 413 million worldwide. Like megastars such as Madonna, and like her character in "The Bodyguard," Houston is often the object of physical and psychological threats. The two stocky men standing guard outside her suite are reminders of the two stalkers who now live under restraining orders.

"Bodyguards are necessary for people in my position," she says. "People love to hate you. And they love to hurt you. And that's frightening." She's also tense when fans gawk at her in public. "I can deal better with people mobbing me in adoration than with people staring. . . . Like when I'm eating in a restaurant and they're looking at me. What do you think I'm going to do? Or interrupting me when I'm talking to someone. Or stepping over my husband to get to me. That bothers me."

She says she has become used to holing up in her multimillion-dollar New Jersey estate. "I can stay within my walls," she says. "I can do business from my home, and basically anybody that works for me is around me during the day. I don't have to go out of my realm to do anything. I was always a little like that, and as I got more famous, you get reclusive. You get afraid of what people want, what they might say, what they might do. So I'm better off in the house, I think. I don't have any longings to be here, there, everywhere. Done that, been there. I don't have desires to be the big famous person. Maybe that's why the press gets a kick out of talking about me. Because they don't see me hanging out and they don't know what I do."

When "The Bodyguard" hit the box office jackpot in 1992, Houston was as surprised as anyone. "I was thinking, is this real? I mean, I did a movie and it wasn't even really substantial, it didn't have any political stance to it, it didn't have any message except for this is a day in the life of Rachel Maron and her bodyguard." She'd had to be persuaded to take the role by Kevin Costner, who starred opposite her, just as she needed to be convinced to take her second role, in "Waiting to Exhale," by none other than Terry McMillan, author of the best-selling novel.

Not surprisingly, then, the persistence of Denzel Washington was required for her to finally agree to star in "The Preacher's Wife." The project, which hinged on the fact that the preacher's wife is a rousing gospel singer, was developed by Washington, whose father was a preacher. At a restaurant one night, Washington and his wife cornered Houston for two hours to recruit her, reminding her of her childhood singing in church. "Then Denzel started talking to me about how important it is for our children," she says, "and I said, 'Oh, D, now you're going to lay this trip on me about how important it is for our community and all this stuff?' And he's, like, 'Yeah, I am.' "

In other words, Houston is leery about making the transition from singer to actress. "There are actresses in Hollywood who are actresses and live and breathe this thing," she says. "I don't. I am not the consummate actress. I'm not consumed by it ... I take direction, I take the lead from someone else." She says she clicked with Penny Marshall on "The Preacher's Wife" - "It was instant sisterhood," she says - and she imitates Marshall's famous deadpan Laverne voice saying, "I want you to just look out to the air, Whitney, just look."

Houston, daughter of singer Cissy Houston and first cousin to Dionne Warwick, owns a polished, three-octave, Grammy-winning voice. Each of her movies has had a Houston soundtrack attached to it, with "The Bodyguard" selling 32 million copies, and "Waiting to Exhale" a smaller but far from insignificant 9 million.

"Music is always my first feeling," she says. "It comes naturally to me. I would be more inclined to sing than to act. I know that world. I know how to peak and how to come down. Acting? That's like a long, long video. And it's hard work. It is. It requires stamina. As a performer, I want to go onstage and do my 2 1/2 hours, sometimes three if I'm feeling good, and get on a bus and go to another city. Acting is, like, one more time, here we go again, reload. It's a process of waiting and trying to keep that energy, even if it's 3 in the morning and you've done it 90 times."

Houston's comfort with the singing life may be the source of those persistent diva-on-the-set rumors, which inevitably recall the time she kept Nelson Mandela waiting two hours. Because she's not a morning person, and her voice doesn't find itself until later in the day, the cast and crew of "The Preacher's Wife" had to be sensitive to her needs for the gospel-singing scenes. Marshall, she says, booked her filming hours in the afternoon and nighttime, and everyone on the set was fine with that.

"What is a diva, anyway? When we wrapped, I was friends with everyone. Usually divas don't have any friends, right? The press looks for dirt. They hear good things, but they don't want to hear that. They want to hear the dirt because in this country, unfortunately, dirt sells."

In "The Preacher's Wife," Washington's angel helps a preacher, played by Courtney Vance, in the midst of his spiritual and marital crisis. Along with the holiday season's other angel movie, John Travolta's "Michael," "The Preacher's Wife" represents the country's continuing fascination with the Winged Ones.

Houston says she believes in the concept of angels: "Anybody that wants to be good for somebody else is an angel. Anybody that wants to help anybody, to assist you in matters when it seems like there's no way out."

She says her parents are her angels, as is her daughter. "She makes me smile even when I'm sad." Her love for Bobbi Kristina, who she says is "very musical," is what has encouraged her to have another child. And that, she says, is her current goal: "I ask myself all the time, 'Where do you want to go? What's next?' ... Right now, I just want to have a healthy baby. That's it. Anything else comes second."