God give me strength
Life Is Great When You're Famous - Except That The Media Keep Bothering You. Whitney Houston Has Much To Complain About

Date: January 05, 1997
By Sara Villiers

From Scotland on Sunday
Submitted by: Larry A.


'STEP by Step' may have catapulted Whitney Houston, America's favourite black pop diva, into the UK charts at number 15 today, but the single's title is hardly an appropriate signature tune. Leaps and bounds is more her modus operandi. La Houston did not inch her way to the top but arrived there as if by magic, launching a worldwide takeover of the pop charts in 1985 with a slickly-produced eponymous album which proved to be the biggest selling debut album ever.

With her pitch-perfect soaring vocals and drop-dead gorgeous looks, Houston seemed an intoxicating mix of beauty and talent.

The first female singer to go straight to the top in the influential Billboard charts, she floated - at a curious distance from planet pop - through the Eighties, touching earth only to pick up a clutch of awards.

Her cinematic crossover in 1992, playing opposite Kevin Costner in the mainstream romance The Bodyguard caused critics to grudgingly concede that she could act, and had the accountants doing jigs of joy as the movie cleaned up.

Whether you reckon Houston's sheaf of chart-topping hits are tear-jerking, emotive ballads or cold-hearted paeans to pompous self-love there are two undeniable facts.

First: her talent is quite unique. This can be proven by the fact that she does not lend herself well to imitation. Houston is, albeit inadvertently, responsible for horrifying crimes against the eardrums, as anyone who has sat through a karaoke rendition of one of her high-noted ditties can attest.

Second: she has the Midas touch. She has sold over 96 million records worldwide, second only to Madonna in the ranks of female solo artists, and her formidable presence helped catapult the lacklustre female-buddy movie, Waiting To Exhale, into blockbuster status.

Now Disney is hoping Houston will bring the same box office golddust to The Preacher's Wife.

Directed by Penny Marshall and released on January 17, the film is a remake of the 1950s classic, The Bishop's Wife. That movie memorably featured Cary Grant as an angel who offers celestial guidance in mortal form, a role reprised by the tasty Denzel Washington in this black makeover.

Houston is modest about her evolution as an actress : "I'm probably more comfortable with the atmosphere and what happens in it, but I'm not sure if I'll ever be that confident. I'm always asking, like 'Denzel, can you help me with this? Penny tell me this or that'. I'm an asker, I will ask for help when I need it, I'm not ashamed. I have no shame in my game." She slips, self-mockingly, into street argot: "I know the beats now, I got the beats pretty much down, you know. I got that beat thing they have in Hollywood, I can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time."

In The Preacher's Wife Courtney Vance plays an inner-city minister beset by financial strife and his congregation's predicaments and Houston plays, yep, you guessed it.

Houston's Julia feels fed up and ignored by her harassed husband but eventually comes to a greater spirituality and sense of mutual responsibility through the ministrations of her angelic mentor.

Touching, at times. Predictable, always.

Much has been made of Houston's suitability for the role, evoking as it does her Christian morality and her church choir background.

Her mother , who has a cameo in the movie, schooled young Whitney through a gospel choir training. The soundtrack features eight gospel numbers alongside four more typical saccharine pop ballads, which include 'Step by Step', penned by Annie Lennox. This return to her roots effectively completes Houston's rehabilitation into the heart of black America. Radical blacks have always been wary of the way Houston was initially prettily packaged for a white mainstream audience, a charge she has always denied.

She denies the aloof, buppie image, saying she has always been passionately committed to the black community. She still lives in a black neighbourhood of Newark in New Jersey (though the word ghetto does not spring to mind) and she has an ambition to make a film of the life of black actress Dorothy Dandridge, who featured in Porgy and Bess. She rails against the legacy of right-wing politics on disaffected black youth, sounding cliched but sincere. "I don't believe that when you become famous, large, big, huge or whatever that you have to leave the community, I mean, forsake it. I do believe that you build it up, because there is a lot that has been drained out of the community.

In this country Reaganomics killed us, they took everything, they took our recreation, they took a lot of things out that left children with nothing to do, which I think at that point in time made a lot of young people lose faith."

Like her character Julia, Houston has invested in her local church, both financially and with her time, organising annual Christmas parties for children. There are other instances of life imitating art in her participation in The Preacher's Wife. The role of put-upon spouse is perhaps one which Houston, the wife of maverick rap artist Bobby Brown, can empathise with.

Houston warily agrees. "I think that in marriage you go through the ups and the downs, every marriage goes through it. I don't know any two people who haven't experienced that. Two people who are famous just get it on a larger scale and sometimes that's exploited.

"In this film, the thing that I loved about Julia was that, even though it must have been a little frustrating at times, she never lost faith. One thing Julia wasn't going to do was leave, because if you quit, then you'll never know what it's like, you'll never know what the good times are about, you'll never know what the bad is about, you'll never grow as a person."

Rhetorical learnedness aside, Houston has certainly tasted her share of the bad times throughout her four-year marriage to Brown, eight years her junior. He has brawled publicly, recently having to settle a suit after a scrap in a nightclub in Disneyworld, and been found with alcohol and dope in his blood after a crash in her Porsche.

Their relationship seemed to reach its lowest point last year with tabloid allegations of Brown's extramarital dalliances. They briefly separated. Brown checked into rehab and the couple duly reunited.

Houston is a committed Christian who takes her wedding vows seriously. The couple may have negotiated a rocky road but so far they have sidestepped the curse of Hello! who covered their 1991 wedding with typical gushy froth.

Houston is now pregnant with their second child, due in July. She insists she is sleepy and sick but on the publicity tour for her film she is as glowing and beautiful as ever.

"At the moment all I can think of is just having this baby; all you can deal with is all these biological changes happening to you hormonally," says Houston, who claims she first realised she was pregnant when she went into the studio to record the movie soundtrack and realised her voice had dropped two octaves. This confirmed the suspicion already triggered by midnight cravings for cookies with pickle.

Houston has been criticised for being a soulless performer but she does seem to live by her lyrics. Her steadfast loyalty to her man evinces the sentiments of 'I Will Always Love You', but she's very clearly no doormat. Instead she evokes icy serenity, like a black Jackie Kennedy.

She has maintained this dignity in the face of snide accusations of a 'too good to be wholesome' variety. Houston may be black America's very own slice of apple pie, but her whiter-than-white image has been tarnished by rumours that she is a lesbian, her marriage a sham and that the birth of her daughter Bobbi Kristina in 1993 was a cover-up. The innuendoes centred on Houston's close relationship with childhood best friend, Robyn Crawford, her personal assistant. Both women have wearily denied the rumours. Such gossip-mongering has been the downside of Houston's success.

"The respect of privacy, that's what I lost: and I swear to you, I wish I could get it back, I do, but I just don't think that people like me or Michael or Bobby or Madonna, whoever, will ever get that back; because we gave it up."

Her regret is palpable: "I don't think we knew it though, I don't think we knew we would be giving up so much. I don't think we knew that every week we would be in the rag mags, that are talking about us like we're these animals or something. It makes you cry sometimes, it does."

Crying all the way to the bank, a cynic might sneer. Houston is rumoured to be worth some $50m.

She's a hard-headed businesswoman and despite having only two previous cinematic excursions, albeit both box-office successes, she was able to command $10m for The Preacher's Wife, a fee which puts her in the same league as screen goddess Sharon Stone. When she put her name on the dotted line with Arista record company in 1983, she was effectively making a pact with Mammon. It is a deal which has earned her such perks as the multi-million dollar Newark mansion , with its Olympic-sized swimming pool, featuring her initials carved in black Plexiglas on the floor.

Houston is a smart, sussed woman from a family brimming over with smart, sussed women, including her older cousin Dionne Warwick. She is certainly far from naive; when she signed up for a future of relentless self-promotion she must have appreciated that there would be a price to pay for the Porsche et cetera, for the fame her efforts would bring. Surely the manifest rewards help soften the blow of media invasion?

Apparently not. Houston is adamant in her anger over the tabloid invasions of her privacy, of the endless suppositions about her sexuality. She exudes total conviction that she is occupying the moral highground on this issue. Always charming to interviewers, she can seethe about certain members of the Fourth Estate. Her rarely-expressed vitriol seems almost like a threat, but mostly her criticisms are dully tempered.

"There has been this surge of bad, ugly journalists; these are not real journalists anymore, they want to write about what somebody's doing in their bedroom or something like that. I don't get it. Whatever happened to people who want to write about the talent or goodness of what you do?"

She becomes impassioned in her defence of her friend Michael Jackson. "You know, we always hear about the crap; how come we don't know what Michael's done in the good, about how much money he's distributed to children all over the world? How come they don't talk about that? Is that too much to ask, is that too good to talk about?"

Her indignation causes the sweet-talkin', clean-livin' Houston to cuss. "I don't get it, that part of it bothers me and I have to contain a certain amount of temperament, because it pisses me off. The only thing that you can do is turn inward and ask God to give you the strength to keep a certain temperament because I have a fire in me that can go off and I can really get you, man."

Whew. Fair enough, get your point. But no, Houston is on a roll now, inflamed to evermore fiery sentiment. "So I'm trying to keep a real balance on that, because this mouth can go. You know, Michael Jackson and myself, Madonna, we all had to go through a lot of mud and I took it seriously, because I'm very serious about the person I am, and when you talk differently about me, I want to know who you're talking about, I want to know what your problem is, I want to know where you live ..."

Gulp. Thankfully the diva is now laughing at herself, although she soon returns to serious mode when asked if fame feels more comfortable over time or if it gets worse.

"It doesn't get worse, it can't get worse for me. I mean, everything and anything they wanted to say, they've said it; they disrespected my marriage, my husband, my parents, my family. That sucks, and I don't care what anybody says, nobody asks for that."