A Song for You: My Life with Whitney Houston

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It’s a stretch to recast the silence brought on by homophobic bullying as noble, but there is something very moving about the way Crawford came to regard her secret history with Houston: as their only private space in a life dominated by public interest. With robyn's account you begin to understand how whitney went from being a carefree, happy, excited teen who was finding herself and figuring herself out to an addict.

There were Houston's first solo recordings, with the already-seasoned singer nailing the lead to "How Will I Know" in one take. After giving it time to sink in, I realize the reason I was so conflicted was because this book is not so much about Whitney Houston, as it is about Robyn Crawford. I remember seeing Whitney Houston's appearances at various awards shows during her years of drug addiction, and I even remember the reality television show she starred in alongside her husband Bobby Brown.Both Houston and Crawford faced questions about their relationship that continued through Houston's life and, for Crawford, have never ended. I initially heard about Robyn Crawford from a background singer that told me there were rumors of Whitney being gay. Well firstly there is no way a woman let alone anyone would allow someone who they have been intimate with in the past to be around their spouse (in this case Bobby Brown) yet alone in their lives (working relationship or not) unless they deeply cared for them, just no way! One of the biggest misconceptions that I had about Whitney Houston was that it was Bobby Brown who introduced her to drugs, which is not true. Crawford smoked weed with Houston and was introduced to cocaine, and reflected that it wasn't a difficult decision to eventually quit using substance altogether-- though this wasn't the case for Houston, who spent years battling substance addiction.

Both Houston and Crawford had been raised in God-fearing households, at a time when, she says, “you were either this, or you were that”. An intimate look into life of Whitney Houston through the eyes of her best friend and loyal assistant of 20 years.In this book Robyn is very raw with how things went down behind the scenes with Whitney and her family. It is a strength of her book that it evokes with such clarity a different era of stardom – one in which singers like Houston, Michael Jackson and Madonna dominated fewer media outlets, and at a higher voltage, than stars in today’s atomised media. Bobby knew that Whitney loved him, but he also knew she wasn't in love with him and only married him to shrug off the gay rumours. In 1988, when Crawford suggested to Cissy that the singer needed help for her drug addiction, she was given short shrift.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Whitney was very religious and sang like an angel, yet she smoked cigarettes and weed on a regular basis. A Song for You describes the understandable challenges of working for your former lover: Crawford was devastated when Houston, with whom she shared an apartment, took up with Jermaine Jackson. I commend Robin for not going out of her way to trash Bobby Brown, Whitney's ex husband, but to tell stories of the things she saw and heard while an employee of Nippy’s.Crawford and Houston shared a few more moments of connection after the author quit the business of Nippy, but they were increasingly far between. Only Whitney's family and that alone speaks volumes as this "concern" was coming from another place and not Whitney's well-being, but merely as their cash-cow. The singer’s management team was small in those days – even in the mid-1980s, when Houston’s first two albums became two of the biggest-selling debuts of all time, with some 40m copies sold worldwide (the eponymous Whitney Houston, with its huge hits How Will I Know and Saving All My Love For You; and its follow-up, Whitney, featuring I Wanna Dance With Somebody, So Emotional and Didn’t We Almost Have It All). The warping effect of denial isn’t easily shrugged off and there is an overwhelming sense, both in the book and in person, of someone running a gamut of internal barriers.