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Back in May 1999, just before she launched her first extended concert tour in five years, Whitney Houston spoke to her fans, particularly to those who thought success had turned the former Seventeen model into a temperamental multimillionairess who woke up each morning fully made up and wearing one of her Dolce & Gabbana gowns. No, Houston explained, despite her mansion, marriage and endless millions, she was just an ordinary 35-year-old woman who loves to vacuum her house, lounge around in sweats and help 7-year-old daughter Bobbi Kristina with her homework.

Sure, she and Bobby Brown, her husband of eight years, had their troubles. But they loved each other passionately, madly. "When we're fighting, it's like that's love for us," she told Redbook. "We're fighting for our love, and sometimes that means being apart." And though his reputation as a party animal is well-earned, Houston said "you'd be surprised" at the real Bobby. According to her, he watches TV and eats dinner at home an average of five nights a week.

Basically, they were a normal family. The only thing missing from the picture Houston presented was Norman Rockwell's signature.

Fade out; fade in a year later. When the couple returned from vacation in the Bahamas on May 10, customs officials at Newark airport greeted Brown with an arrest warrant. Accused of violating probation stemming from a 1996 drunk-driving charge, Brown has been living in a Broward County, Florida, jail since, and may well remain a stranger to his Mendham, New Jersey, estate for a while. On May 22, Circuit Judge Leonard Feiner refused to set bail, calling the oft-troubled pop singer a flight risk. Depending on the outcome of his next hearing, set for June 19, Brown could face six more months in prison. "It's not fair," Brown was heard complaining in court. "This isn't right. They aren't judging me as a man."

But Houston may also be in trouble. On the surface, it's business as usual for her. At the beginning of June she was back home, resting after shooting three music videos in two weeks to support her latest release, Greatest Hits, which has sold a solid 300,000 copies since hitting stores May 15. But some in Houston's camp -- a loose association of cousins, managers, PR people and business associates -- are hoping that she is doing some soul-searching during this enforced separation from Brown, and that she will enter rehab.

Though her representatives have vehemently denied that the superstar has drug problems, the period from last summer to this one has been, for Houston, a year of living dangerously. US Weekly has learned of an incident involving Houston and Brown at the Beverly Hills Hotel that set the tone for this chaotic time -- and made it clear to some of her closest advisors that the singer needs professional help, as soon as possible. Late last July, Houston was finishing up the U.S. leg of her world tour. While the tour had been plagued by her now-infamous no-shows (she blamed the poor air quality of her East Coast venues, claiming that it caused her "bronchioles to shut down"), she had by most accounts performed splendidly the night before at L.A.'s Universal Amphitheater.

But after the show, something went terribly wrong. In the wee hours of the morning, a dazed Houston was sitting on her bed in her suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. According to sources, her plush living quarters looked like a battle zone. "It was a wreck," says a source. "Broken beer bottles were everywhere."

Houston, the star of ABC's Cinderella and such hit movies as The Bodyguard and The Preacher's Wife, was the focal point of a drug intervention. In the room were her friends and family, including her mother, gospel singer Cissy Houston, and at least two drug specialists. Hours earlier, confides a source, someone inside the singer's camp was disturbed enough by Houston's and Brown's behavior to call a drug professional for help, explaining that the two were in the midst of a crisis. The plan, a source explains, was to persuade Houston to enter "an exclusive treatment center outside of Los Angeles."

A spokesperson for Houston had no comment about the incident, but US Weekly has learned that for the next several hours, Houston listened to heartfelt pleas from those who cared most about her. As she sat on the bed, Houston seemed somewhat dazed, and with good reason: Apart from whatever else had happened that evening, the singer was exhausted from yet another incident involving her husband.

The circular lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel is a model of cool California elegance: cherry-wood furniture and banana palm trees arranged tastefully on a celadon-green-and-peach carpeting. The loudest sound heard there is usually the murmur of a guest asking to be directed to the famed Polo Lounge. But a source tells US Weekly that at approximately 3:30 that morning, Bobby Brown had been standing in the hotel's entranceway, "ranting and raving." Said a witness: "It was clear Bobby was high." Hotel security guards had been summoned and they were threatening to call the police if Brown didn't quiet down.

According to several sources, Houston was also in the lobby at this time, but she stayed aloof and, as one source put it, "in her own world." Sitting in a lobby chair, she seemed to try to distance herself from the situation by pretending to be on her cellphone. A source said that a short time later, Brown was whisked away to a local hospital, where he was quietly treated and released.

That night, after Brown left for the hospital, Houston's friends and family tried to convince her that enough was enough. The singer, though, would not agree to go for treatment. Nor would she take suggestion of her mother, who had often told her "Whitney, you have to have standards. If you don't, people won't respect you. You must let everybody know, this is how far I go." Houston has said that Cissy had a huge influence on her. But "there was nothing her mother could say that night to make her pay attention," a source recalls. "It was very sad." Another source says that the scene was "disastrous." Whitney was polite, but she didn't want to do anything."

Following that incident at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Houston bowed out of her next gig, at the Concord Pavilion near San Francisco on August 1. "She canceled 15 minutes before the show," said Doug Warrick, the general manager of the Concord. "Her staff and crew had set up the equipment, like nine buses of it. The band was ready. The crowd had filed in. Then we got a phone call- she wasn't coming. Her official word was that she took sick. People were very disappointed. We had to eventually refund the money."

Warrick was not the first promoter to get a cancellation call from Whitney's camps moments before she was scheduled to take the stage. The responsibility for making those difficult calls belonged to Robyn Crawford, Houston's companion since the two were teenagers. Their close relationship caused speculation that Houston was gay, a rumor the singer has denied. "I know what I am," she told Out magazine in May. "I'm a mother. I'm a woman, I'm heterosexual. Period."

And now she's a woman without a trusted advisor. In May, Crawford resigned from Houston's New Jersey-based company, Nippy Inc., and moved to Los Angeles. Houston watchers, who know that Crawford and Brown were often at loggerheads, were stunned by this once unimaginable fissure. "It's hard to imagine [Whitney] functioning without her," says a former associate.

Some blame Houston's bad habits on Brown, who grew up poor in Boston and who already had three children by two ex-girlfriends when they wed in July 1992 at Houston's five-acre, $11 million New Jersey compound. Within three years, they had a daughter, Brown was in rehab for alcohol abuse, and he was facing a paternity suit. "He's the crazy one," says a music manager associated with the both of them. "She can be difficult, but he's the problem."

In 1995, Brown was treated at the Betty Ford Center. A year later, he crashed his Porsche in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit; his urine showed traces of cocaine and pot. In 1998, he got arrested for fondling a woman at the Beverly Hills Hotel -- though charges were dropped -- and in December, when turning himself in to Broward County Jail for a five-day sentence, he allegedly showed up drunk and told a probation officer he had smoked marijuana.

When he's not in court or in jail, Brown accompanies Whitney on tour, as does Bobbi Kristina. A year ago, in the Redbook story, Houston admitted that the girl's teachers had chided her for pulling the child out of class to go on the road. "She can't be taken out anymore," Houston quoted the teacher as saying. "She has to catch up with the other children." But, Houston continued, "she and I need each other. Krissi will call me and say 'Mama. I miss you.' And that does it. I say, 'OK, I'm going to send for you tomorrow.' I'm weak like that."

One has to wonder what life is like for a child on the road with Brown and Houston. On January 11 of this year, security officers found 15.2 grams of marijuana in Houston's handbag at Keahole Kona International Airport in Hawaii. Houston and Brown left the bag and departed before police arrived. (Hawaii authorities are still investigating the case.)

To the music industry, Houston's most shocking behavior came in March, when she failed to appear at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony at which her mentor, Arista Records CEO Clive Davis, was honored. Davis, the man who had molded her recording career, was being forced out of the label he had founded. The 66-year-old executive could have used Houston's support, in the form of a single song that she was supposed to sing to open the program. But though Houston was upstairs in the same hotel where the induction was taking place, Crawford called 10 minutes before the singer was scheduled to appear, saying that her boss had "sudden laryngitis."

Three weeks later, Houston dropped out of the Oscar telecast. Brown is now reportedly in the detox unit of the Joseph Conte Detention Facility in Broward County. Houston, meanwhile, is promoting Greatest Hits. Reporting that everyone around her "sees the urgency," Newsweek has quoted a Hollywood star close to the singer as saying "It's like watching a car accident in slow motion and not being able to stop it." That's probably something only Whitney Houston can do.