The gospel according to Whitney
INTERVIEW - WHITNEY HOUSTON
The star of `The Preacher's Wife' can't avoid questions about her husband

Date: December 14, 1996
By Charles Laurence

From The Daily Telegraph
Submitted by: Danielle C.


WHITNEY Houston, pop superstar, is sizzling. She has just been asked a question, a personal question well outside the limits set for a lunch laid on to promote her new album and film, and she is responding with the sort of sizzle her critics say she tends to lack in front of camera or microphone.

She is pregnant, due in July. Her husband, "bad boy" rap singer Bobby Brown, has been in trouble and the tabloids have focused on another celebrity marriage in difficulty. Are the two getting on all right?

"We are fine, just fine," she snaps. She unfurls long arms that have been protectively wrapped around her still-slender midriff, puts her elbows on the table and raises a finger. A light comes into her eyes, she talks faster, with a lilting hint of a black American accent, and her pale coffee skin flushes with a whole new glow. She looks absolutely beautiful.

"Listen," she says. "We are fine together, and it is not because of the baby that we are fine. The baby brings me joy, but in a marriage you have to make each other happy. We are just normal people - understand? - it is just that we are famous, and people exploit that."

There is a great deal riding on The Preacher's Wife, the 32-year-old singer's third movie and, if all goes to plan, second pop-chart buster with an album of the same name based on the soundtrack. The album from The Bodyguard, her first film, made with Kevin Costner, became one of the biggest sellers of all time, and Houston, with total sales of more than 96 million records, stands at the pinnacle of the mass-market music business.

But despite the protestations of her publicist "minders", Houston proves at her most animated when talking about her family life and her pregnancy. She fiercely disputes marriage problems, angry at the suggestion that her father, who is also her manager, pays her entourage to keep tabs on Brown and compiles a dossier of his erring ways. His latest scrapes include settling a suit after a fight in a nightclub at Disney World, and being found with alcohol and dope in his blood after a crash in her Porche.

This, she insists, has nothing to do with the happiness of a couple looking forward to their second child. "Bobby and I both hope it will be a boy this time," she says. "But we don't know yet whether I have a boy or girl. We haven't thought of a name. And as I'm pregnant, I'm feeling sick and sleepy at the moment."

The state of her marriage, and her pregnancy, actually seem perfectly relevant to her role as the preacher's wife. The film, directed by Penny Marshall for Disney, is an "uplifting" sermon centred on gospel music, and a remake of the Cary Grant classic The Bishop's Wife. Houston plays the feeling-ignored wife of a black inner-city minister overwhelmed by his struggles to help his flock. It has become a very black film. All the characters are authentically black, and all the themes, all the cultural references, are those of America's troubled black communities.

In the movie, which features Denzel Washington in the old Cary Grant role of an angel sent by the Lord in answer to a prayer for help, Houston's character learns that it is up to her and her minister husband to make each other happy, just as she says. They have to take responsibility.

But underlying all the frenzied speculation on a black pop star's private life is the hidden assumption that Houston, so successful as a "crossover" black artist, could have made a much safer marriage than one to an angry rap singer.

It is indeed Houston's international crossover ranking that must sell both the film and album, which has eight purely gospel songs from the film to four more familiar Whitney Houston gospelly-ballads. There is an assumption within the mainstream in which Houston sells so well, an arrogant assumption, that she must want to use her success to flee her Newark, New Jersey, inner-city roots.

She doesn't. She nurtures a "black" marriage and seems quite genuine in her greater concern for making an authentically black film than one which might be easier to sell. With the gospel album, she says, she has "gone home". Sales receipts will tell whether her audience - all those suburban teenagers, all those Japanese housewives - are ready to follow her. The world will either be celebrating Christmas with gospel music soaring heavenwards in its headsets, or Whitney Houston will have notched up a first flop.

"I never left the black community," she says. "My old church in Newark is still there. I have used my money for a building fund, and we have expanded it, not abandoned it."

This, indeed, is a central theme of The Preacher's Wife, a metaphor for the concern that a central blight of black communities is that those who find success leave, taking with them their money and their ability to provide positive role models. A black developer is plotting to buy the old church - the boiler explodes as the choir is practising for Christmas and the children rehearse their nativity play - and Washington's angel gives the minister the inspiration to fight back and save it.

"Everybody wants to get on, to move up in the world," says Houston. "But you don't have to forsake the community to do that. I support the church, we still sing there, and I have a charity for kids. I'm working on their Christmas party now, a great big party for all of them."

Like most of America's great black singers, Houston found her voice in the gospel choir. Her mother Cissy Houston was, and still is, the director of the choir in the old New Jersey church, and has a singing role as a choir member in the film. The movie, and the soundtrack, features the Georgia Mass Choir, produced by Mervyn Warren, a Grammy award winner who once led the gospel group Take Six. He does not accept the view, often held by black critics, that with all her success in the white marketplace Houston lacks the "soul" for real gospel. "She has been singing gospel all her life," he says, "and has one of the great natural gospel voices."

In taking her audience to the church, Houston does let fly in a way she rarely manages on pop albums. There is a scene in the film when her choir was captured as they were transported by the Holy Spirit, just as they would be in any church on any Sunday, and ignored the director's repeated calls of "Cut!". Houston stands before them, a faraway smile on her face, her lips trembling and her voice quavering in just that Gospel authenticity.

The problem is that Gospel can be an acquired taste. "I don't know if you have to be into God to feel the music," she says. "I have my faith, and that's what I believe. But close your eyes, and just feel it. Let the music take you - don't try too hard to take it any place."

Marketing caution prevails with the choice of singles released from the album: Step by Step for Britain, and I Believe in You and Me for America. Neither is gospel, although both are gospelly, and both were recorded in the studio without the Georgia choir. Step by Step was written for Houston by Annie Lennox - "Annie sent me this really beautiful, spiritual song, and it fit the groove of the album, right away" - and it has a more rocking beat. But it is a curious choice for a destined chart-buster: with its chorus line of "step by step, day by day", it sounds like an anthem for Alcoholics Anonymous and the Twelve Step programmes.

Houston's musical record speaks for itself; she is there for the mainstream and, like Mariah Carey, has found a formidably profitable place in an increasingly difficult, shrinking market.

The surprise so far has been the success of of her movies: Madonna's Evita pending, Houston has had greater critical and commercial success than any of the recent batch of stars from pop or modelling who have ventured to Hollywood. The Bodyguard was a worldwide hit, and while Waiting to Exhale found a more limited audience of blacks and women, at least in America, it was well respected by the critics.

GIVEN the level at which she is playing - she earned $10 million for The Preacher's Wife, which makes her a star on the Sharon Stone level - Houston is remarkably relaxed about acting. All three roles, she points out, were well within her own "world" of experience, and she found she could, for the most part, play herself.

"I grew up in church, remember, gospel singing and knowing a lot of preacher's wives," she says. "We call them the First Ladies of the Church, and I used to watch how they acted and how they lived. That was important for the role."

She makes a convincing job of the part, apparently at ease with co-stars Washington and Courtney Vance, who plays the preacher. But she doesn't take herself seriously as an actress, which is almost unheard of in the Hollywood realm.

"I'm a singer in my heart, a singer who can act a bit," she says. "I don't really know what you do to become an actress; you just get into it. The Bodyguard was very popular, so we do it again, but I don't try to extend myself. I'm not into it that seriously."

As the film opens for the Christmas season, and as the album and singles reach the stores, she is going to jet about on a promotional tour. Then she is going to do a short concert tour in Japan in January. After that, she thinks she will have better things to do than be out on the road, earning more millions.

"I'm going to be pretty busy," she says. "I'm going to have a baby!"

'The Preacher's Wife' opens in the UK in January. 'Step by Step' was released this week; the soundtrack album was released earlier this month.