I think people appreciated what Nippy did even more because it was obvious how deeply she felt about it. A few days before the concert, Nippy had been flown out to another carrier, the USS Saratoga, whose crew had suffered casualties in the fighting, to personally welcome some of the returning troops. There were thousands of people on that ship, and she must have shaken hands and signed autographs for every one of them. She also served food in the mess hall, hung out in the infirmary, sang for the guys, had a great time listening to some of the guys sing for her, and spent the night on the carrier. Even after she left, she couldn’t stop talking about how much fun she had and how kind those sailors and marines had been.
The next day, when she was scheduled to fly back to Norfolk, her navy escort told her, “We can take you a back way to get on the helicopter. You don’t have to go out and greet everybody all over again.”
She just looked at him and said, “Now, why would I do that? The whole reason I’m here is to see them!”
Nippy went right out onto the carrier deck, where a huge crowd of sailors and marines broke out in cheers. And when she boarded the helicopter, they spontaneously saluted her—hundreds of men and women, showing her their respect and gratitude just for having taken the time. Nippy looked out at all those faces and burst into tears.
A couple of weeks later, Nippy launched the U.S. leg of her I’m Your Baby Tonight tour in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was still laid up, so I couldn’t go on the tour with her, but John, Michael, and Bae were there from the start, and I did eventually manage to get to a few shows. It wasn’t always easy being around John, since I was still upset with him, but we kept things as light as we could.
As always, Nippy was in good hands, but there were still some scary moments on that tour—in particular, one incident in Kentucky that made me want to get out of my wheelchair and go kick someone’s butt.
Nippy and Michael told me it all started when they were at the hotel lounge one night, hanging out with their security guy David Roberts and a few other people. Nippy had just finished a show, and they wanted some time to themselves, to unwind. But there were two guys there who wanted to get an autograph or talk to Nippy, something like that. They were fans, but they had been drinking a lot, and they just wouldn’t let up. Finally, Nippy got tired of dealing with it. She decided to go upstairs, and she and David left the rest of them to finish their drinks in the lounge.
Later on, when Michael and the others came upstairs, they discovered that these two guys had somehow gotten on Nippy’s floor. They weren’t supposed to be there, as the whole floor was supposed to be secured. These guys, who were white, were drunk by now, and one of them said something racial to Michael. Michael tried to ignore him, but the guy wouldn’t let it go, and he started saying other stuff and getting all up in Michael’s face. As I mentioned before, Michael’s like me: he’s got a temper. If you push him too far, you’re going to know it quick.
Michael stepped toward the man and asked, “What did you say?” And suddenly the guy went after him and it was a fight. Michael got scratched or cut somehow, and he started bleeding all over the place, which only made him more angry. As they were punching each other, Michael suddenly grabbed the man and picked him up near the top of a spiral staircase. Aunt Bae heard the shouting in the hallway and came running out, and when she saw Michael holding that guy aloft at the top of the stairs, she knew all hell was about to break loose.
Now the other guy rushed in, too, and things were threatening to turn into a full-scale brawl. Nippy’s security man finally heard the commotion, so he ran out and mixed it up with the guy who was scuffling with Michael. And then Nippy appeared. She came running out of her room, and when she saw Michael bleeding, she just about went crazy. Though Nippy didn’t like confrontation, if anybody tried to mess with someone in our family—particularly Michael or me—you can bet she was ready to fight.
Because her security was wrestling with one of the guys, there was no one to hold Nippy back—she grabbed a lamp from a table in the hallway and started screaming, “You get off my brother!” She charged up behind the guy fighting with Michael and, well, the next thing anybody knew, he was on the floor. I’m not saying how, because I wasn’t there and I don’t want to stir up a legal hornet’s nest. But that man went down. And just after he went down, Aunt Bae did, too. She was trying to pull Nippy out of the craziness, and Nippy didn’t realize she was there. When Nippy stepped backward onto Bae’s foot, she broke Bae’s toe.
“What you doin’!” Michael shouted at Nippy. “You could’ve got hurt! Mommy would have killed me if anything happened to you.” He was right about that; if anything had happened to Nippy on the road, you can bet somebody would have paid for it. But outside of Bae breaking her toe, everybody was fine. One of the guys threatened to sue, but nothing ever came of it. And in fact, he ended up becoming a topic for late-night television hosts when they showed pictures of this big, muscular guy alongside the skinny little girl who had supposedly knocked him out. That year, Nippy was at her peak, and it seemed like nothing, and no one, could ever knock her down.
CHAPTER 11
The Bodyguard . . . and Bobby Brown
After Nippy finished her I’m Your Baby Tonight tour, Kevin Costner started calling her. A few months earlier, he had sent her the script of a movie he wanted to make, and ever since, he’d been trying to convince her to star in it with him.
At first, Nippy didn’t want to do The Bodyguard—and Clive Davis didn’t want her to, either. Clive had read the script, about a famous singer named Rachel Marron who falls in love with her bodyguard, and he thought Rachel was a diva. Clive was worried that if Nippy did a good job playing her, people would just assume it was because she was a diva herself.
Kevin kept on pushing, though, because he didn’t want to make the movie with anybody else. Though he didn’t know her, he was convinced she was the one for the role. So when Nippy’s tour came to an end in the fall of 1991, he kept on calling until she finally agreed to do it. The way the agreements were drawn up, Nippy took very little money up front, but she got a great deal on the back end and the soundtrack. Once Clive had a chance to review the music deal, he didn’t waste any time deciding this movie was a pretty good idea after all.
The movie’s producers asked Nippy to fly out to Los Angeles to test with Kevin to see how they looked together on camera. Because Kevin had so many recent hits, movies like Bull Durham and Dances with Wolves, he had a lot of clout in Hollywood, so the role was already Nippy’s, just because Kevin said he wanted her. She went out for a screen test anyway, though, because that was what the studio wanted. And she was anxious. You know, she had never done anything but small TV roles before, little guest spots on shows like Silver Spoons and Gimme a Break. So, as talented as she was, Nippy hadn’t faced a challenge on this scale in a long time. She wasn’t one to let fear keep her from trying something, but this was the kind of big risk that made her second-guess herself. So I did my best to encourage her.
“Just put your mind to it,” I told her. “You can do anything you want to do.” She might not have believed it quite yet, but I did.
When she arrived for the screen test, Kevin could tell she was nervous, so he just told her, “Be yourself. Be natural.” He said that wherever she’d pause in regular conversation, that’s where she should pause in her lines. “Just say it like you’re speaking to a friend,” he told her.
And that’s what she did. In the end, she was so natural onscreen and looked so good with Kevin, the studio couldn’t wait to go. They scheduled shooting to start in the late fall of 1991.
In the meantime, Nippy was still riding high after Welcome Home Heroes and her I’m Your Baby Tonight tour. And that summer, People magazine had also chosen her as one of their 50 Most Beautiful People. I’m not sure that really impressed her one way or another, but it seemed to impress pretty much everybody else, as I found out one morning.
I
had been sleeping, and when I woke up I saw some doctor on television drawing lines on a giant picture of Nippy’s face. What was going on? Had something happened to Nippy? I was still half asleep, and all I could think was, What in the hell is that man doing to my baby? But as I focused on the screen, I finally understood that the doctor was a plastic surgeon, and he was pointing out the lines and symmetry on Nippy’s face, saying it was as close to a perfect face as possible. I just laughed. I knew Nippy was beautiful, but I never in my life would have imagined waking up to find a doctor on TV telling the whole world how perfect she was.
In an interview for the People magazine article, the reporter asked Nippy about the ring on her finger, trying to get the lowdown on who she was dating by saying, “And who is going to be your baby tonight?” Nippy just smiled and answered, “He knows who he is.”
Well, we in the family knew who he was, too, and most of us weren’t all that happy about it. After meeting Bobby Brown at the Soul Train Awards in 1989, Nippy had invited him to her twenty-sixth-birthday party in Mendham later that year, and pretty soon they started dating.
At first, it seemed pretty casual. Bobby was six years younger than she was, and he didn’t really appear to be the settling-down type, if you know what I mean. They would see each other when he was in New York or if they happened to be in the same town. Occasionally she would travel to visit him, but that didn’t happen too much; they just had very different lifestyles. Something seemed to change, though, after she sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Suddenly they started seeing more of each other.
In the time that Nippy and Bobby had been dating, I’d had a chance to learn a little bit more about him. I’d heard that as a kid in Boston he’d grown up rough, and supposedly he even got shot once at a block party, which didn’t impress me very much. I also learned that he already had a few kids, and there were lots of rumors flying around the music world about his supposed bad-boy reputation and other female artists who had a thing for him.
Bobby could be charming, there was no doubt about that. And I’m sure when he turned his attentions on Nippy, she liked it, especially since he had that image of being such a street-smart tough guy. I don’t know, maybe that was the reason she liked him. Maybe she got tired of that middle-class, churchgoing, good-girl image she had. She’d been telling everybody a few years earlier she was from “the bricks”—well, here was somebody who really was from the bricks. And he had chosen her.
After Nippy and Bobby got serious, there wasn’t a whole lot of conversation with Nippy about Bobby being bad for her. I’d told her early on that I didn’t know if he was the right choice, and I think that’s how most everyone around Nippy felt, but it wasn’t something that kept coming up over and over again. People close to her knew it might not be the best choice, but it was what Nippy wanted. And eventually, I was willing to support whatever Nippy decided to do when it came to taking the next step with Bobby. If they were going to get married, I wasn’t about to try to talk her out of it.
When she began shooting The Bodyguard in Los Angeles during the last months of 1991, Nippy was already secretly engaged to Bobby—and had been since April. Very few people outside the family knew about the engagement, but when I’d first heard the news, I wasn’t surprised. After they got engaged, they’d been able to keep it quiet because she wasn’t on tour and she didn’t announce it. In the months since, they’d actually set and postponed a small ceremony twice. Then, while Nippy was in Los Angeles filming The Bodyguard, she lived in a house with Bae, and her friends Carol Ensminger, Tommy Watley, and Robyn. Bobby was spending a lot of time out there, too. And that’s when they chose the date for their wedding: July 18, 1992.
It was about that time that I got another shock from John. Just as Nippy started preparing for her own wedding, I discovered that John had gotten remarried, not long after our divorce had become final. He had married his girlfriend Peggy, and they had invited only a few friends. Not only did he not invite Nippy, Michael, and Gary—he hadn’t even told them it was happening.
I just couldn’t believe it—both that he’d gotten remarried, and that he’d kept it secret from everybody, including his children. And what was worse, John then asked Nippy if he could bring Peggy to her wedding in July.
Now, John was a Virgo, so he wasn’t above trying to hurt people. And he liked to control things, too. But he never could control me, and when Nippy was grown, he couldn’t control her, either. She was still very close to John, but she didn’t even hesitate. “You can’t bring Peggy,” she told her father. “Not if Mommy’s gonna be there.” Nippy wanted her wedding day to be a happy one for all of us, not some kind of drama-filled mess.
John didn’t like that too much, and so he continued to press Nippy and everyone else he felt might have some influence with her, but Nippy was firm. He told her that he’d come alone, then, to walk her down the aisle. But he said he’d be leaving after that. And she told him she hoped he wouldn’t actually do that, but if that’s how he felt, then it was his choice.
The Bodyguard started shooting in Los Angeles, but in early 1992, the production moved to Lake Tahoe and Florida for location filming. By the time she got to Tahoe, Nippy was pregnant. But when she got to Florida a few weeks later, she had a miscarriage.
It was so early in the pregnancy that Nippy hadn’t even been showing, and she hadn’t told anyone, so none of the movie people were even aware of it. But as soon as she told Kevin Costner and the producers, they shut down production for a week. I had no idea Nippy had even been pregnant until she called me from Miami and told me the news. And then she said what I always hoped she would say. “Mommy,” she told me, “I need you. Please come.” I went straight to Florida, as she knew I would.
Nippy was in okay shape when I saw her. She was sad, of course; she had wanted that baby, but it was early enough in the pregnancy that she felt pretty strong. She wanted me there, and she wanted her daddy there, too. So she’d called John to come, too, and he did.
Even with everything John and I had been through, we couldn’t help but get along most of the time. He was a dog, and would sometimes tease me about his supposed “size two” wife, who was younger than the milk in my refrigerator. I mean, if he was fool enough to want that, there was nothing I could do to set him straight. But I did poke at him a little bit about how he’d come down in the world after me, and despite everything, he had to laugh.
After a few days of rest, Nippy was feeling better and the shooting resumed. And so I was lucky enough to be there in Florida when they filmed Nippy, as Rachel, singing “I Will Always Love You.” Kevin Costner had chosen the song, which was written and originally recorded as a kind of country ballad by Dolly Parton. Nippy didn’t like the song when she first heard it, but Kevin loved it and asked her to give it a try. Together with producer David Foster, Nippy rearranged it as a soul ballad, and as they worked on it she grew to love it. Everyone loved that song, especially Clive Davis, who declared that he thought it would be bigger than anything Nippy had done yet.
Well, I didn’t know about that. Nippy’s rendition of “Greatest Love of All” was one of the most beautiful songs she ever recorded, as far as I was concerned, and it had become her signature song. I didn’t think anything could surpass it. But Clive was convinced, and in fact he came down to Florida to see Nippy sing it for the movie.
Ordinarily, Nippy would have recorded the song in the studio, and then the movie folks would have shot it. But they had decided to do things a little differently this time. They wanted to record Nippy singing the song as they were shooting it, right there on location, because they thought it would have more power and emotion if Nippy did the song in character, as Rachel.
The day they shot it, at the Fontainebleau Hotel ballroom in Miami Beach, I went to the set to watch. The first thing I thought when I saw Nippy was, Damn, she is just so beautiful. And then I thought, That’s my daughter! Some things just don’t seem r
eal, you know? You could see people on the set stopping to stare when she went by—and these were people who had seen plenty of movie stars. But Nippy was just a gorgeous girl, inside and out.
Then she stood up there on the stage and sang those first notes—“If I should stay . . . I would only be in your way”—and I just started crying. I cried because that song was so beautiful in the first place, but Nippy turned it into something else entirely. She just turned it around from the way Dolly Parton had sung it and made it a whole other thing. As a mother, when you think of the trials and tribulations you’ve tried to bring your child through, it’s just emotional. You cry. That’s what mothers do.
But the other thing about that song is, it’s a song of goodbye. “I will always love you” . . . yet I can’t be with you. John and I were both here, both watching our daughter sing, and the tears were just rolling down my face. I couldn’t even look at John, and I surely didn’t want him to see me crying. But I couldn’t stop. I was thinking of him at that point—thinking about how even though we would never be together again, I would always love John, and he would always love me. And we did. We did.
That July, Nippy and Bobby got married at her estate in Mendham. It was a big, beautiful party on a gorgeous summer day, and even though John had threatened to leave right after the ceremony, he ended up staying for hours, like I knew he would. And you know, we actually ended up having fun together. It was just that kind of a day.
Everybody started smiling the minute Michael’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Blaire, started walking down the aisle. All the flower girls and other kids in the wedding had gotten their hair combed and fixed before the ceremony, but Blaire stamped her feet and refused. The child just wasn’t having it, and although Nippy was a little put out at first, she finally said, “Okay, if Blaire doesn’t want to get her hair done, just leave her alone.”
Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped Page 13
