Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped

by Houston, Cissy

  Nippy was better than anybody I know at keeping her stuff private—or at least, keeping it private from me, even when I got the chance to spend time with her. Ever since her first album, I would always come see her do a few shows on each tour. And everyone who was with her always knew that when I came to town, they’d better get their stuff together. Early on, Robyn Crawford nicknamed me “Big Cuda”—short for barracuda—and that suited me just fine. The name stuck, and from then out, whenever I’d be coming somewhere to see Nippy, people would warn each other that Big Cuda was coming.

  Now, obviously, the people who worked closely with Nippy could see if she was having problems—with drugs or Bobby or anything else. But Nippy was their boss, and if she didn’t want me to find something out, they were damn sure not going to tell me about it. They knew she would feel betrayed, and they didn’t want to lose their jobs. So even if they wanted to warn me about something that was going on, it wasn’t so easy to do.

  And you know, as much as I love my daughter, Nippy was no angel. She could be a straight-up heifer to people if they revealed things she didn’t want them to. She was the head of a multimillion-dollar enterprise, a company that was built around her and that would come crashing down without her. So she wasn’t shy about doing everything possible to keep things the way she wanted them. It definitely put the people she worked with in a difficult position.

  As Nippy encouraged people to keep me in the dark, she was helped by the fact that I never read the tabloids. For years, avoiding those rags had kept me safe from a whole lot of baseless rumors and the nastiness of the gossip business, but when Nippy actually started to have a problem with drugs, it also meant that I was sheltered from the speculation about how bad things really were.

  Yet even through all these barriers, every once in a while I’d hear about something. Very often it wasn’t anything too specific—someone would say they’d heard Nippy was doing this, or Nippy and Bobby were doing that. Just enough to make me think that something could be wrong, but not enough to know what to do or whether to believe it. Other times, I even dreamed about things that were happening. And I’d want to check in, to make sure Nippy was okay. There were times when I’d call Toni and say, “What’s going on with Nippy?” and Toni would hem and haw and try not to answer. And I would just say, “Toni, I don’t have time for your shit today. What is going on with my daughter?”

  I had no choice but to ask the people who were close to her, because Nippy didn’t call me very often during these years. It’s hard to say when exactly it started, but a distance had begun to grow between us. Nippy knew that if I picked up on something being wrong, I would come right to her, and she didn’t want that. She wanted to handle things herself, so part of her solution was for us not to talk, to keep me from getting involved.

  She also knew that I would tell her the truth, and she didn’t necessarily want that, either. Nippy, Michael, and Gary all grew up knowing that Mama was going to tell you what’s on her mind. If I needed to hold her and kiss her and take care of her, I’d do that, too. But I was going to tell her the truth, unlike some of the people who worked for her, who didn’t want to upset her. She could occasionally be intimidating to people, and she wasn’t afraid to use that.

  Michael always used to say that he and I were the only ones who wouldn’t let Nippy get away with anything. So, if she wasn’t ready to face up to something, she’d just keep us at bay. I never understood the point of keeping all those secrets, though. I used to tell her, “Nippy, you have to stop keeping things from people.” She’d just say, “Oh, Ma, I don’t want to worry you.” But she worried me so much more by not telling me—it frustrated the hell out of me, and sometimes I just wanted to snatch her by the scruff of the neck and say, “What is wrong with you, child?”

  There was one other reason she didn’t tell me things—and for her, I guess it was the biggest reason of all. Nippy was always afraid of disappointing me. She would rather act like everything was okay, and shoulder all her burdens by herself, than reveal her weaknesses and have me be disappointed in her. I tried to tell her that everybody falls short sometimes, but she never wanted to do that in front of me. That’s a lot of pressure for anyone, but it was part of our relationship. Whatever part of her wasn’t perfect, she didn’t want to show to me—and maybe she was afraid I didn’t really want to see it, either.

  I don’t know, maybe Nippy thought I just wanted her to be that pretty little girl with ribbons in her hair, who knew how to smile and charm everybody. Maybe she felt like if she were less than that, nobody would love her. I know I was hard on Nippy sometimes, but I never meant to make her feel that way. Even if I was disappointed in her behavior sometimes, I wasn’t disappointed in her as a daughter. And I never, ever stopped loving her.

  All I can do now is hope and pray that my baby understood that. I wish I had said it to her more.

  In January 2000, Bobby and Nippy were about to fly back from Hawaii when airport security officers found marijuana in her purse. The security people went to get the police, and Nippy decided she didn’t feel like waiting around to get arrested. She and Bobby just went ahead and boarded their flight, and although the plane was still on the ground when the police got there, they decided not to stop her because the amount they’d found was small.

  People all got to talking about that, because Nippy had never been in trouble with the law before. Bobby was another matter, of course—he’d been arrested so many times for so many things, they used to joke that he had a lawyer in every town they went to. I didn’t know what exactly happened in Hawaii, but I just couldn’t believe Nippy would have been walking around with marijuana in her purse. I’d heard that she’d smoked marijuana before and I knew that people around her smoked, so it wasn’t like this was suddenly proof of the rumors I’d been hearing about bigger problems. Concerned as I was, I still didn’t take that episode in Hawaii as a sign that something was really wrong with Nippy. Because it seemed like such a surprising, isolated incident, I was willing to look past it.

  That was only the beginning of what would soon turn into a very bad year. The next month, Nippy was scheduled to sing at the Academy Awards show, for which Burt Bacharach, who had been a friend of the family for many years, was serving as music director. But at the rehearsals, she apparently wasn’t performing up to snuff. According to people who were there, she appeared to be high. Bobby was with her and she kept singing to him, missing her cues, singing songs that she wanted to sing rather than what she was supposed to sing, walking off the stage to hug Bobby, and generally behaving inappropriately. After a while, Burt asked her to leave, and understandably, he was very upset with her.

  Now, Nippy had sung at many awards shows at this point. And unlike most performers, she sang live rather than lip-synching, so she was used to being the hit of every show. She always pulled herself together to perform, no matter what, and I suspect she thought she could just do the same thing this time. But the Academy Awards are broadcast live, and Burt just wasn’t willing to take a chance. So he replaced her.

  Nippy was really shocked when he let her go, because up to that point, the stage was the one place she always knew she was in control. She was so confident onstage, in ways that she wasn’t in everyday life. She knew she could get up there and sing and do whatever she wanted to with her voice, and for years, even the shows where she wasn’t at her best were still magnificent. Nippy loved to sing, and the way she expressed herself best was through her voice. For those reasons, she always owned whatever stage she was on. Now she was even losing control of that. And while that loss of control scared her, I don’t think she was able to make the connection between problems with her performances and her escalating drug use. She just didn’t seem to know what to do about it.

  By this point, bit by bit, I’d come to understand that something really was wrong. There was never one big “aha” moment, but all the little things I’d been hearing began to add up, and
as I started asking more questions, it became harder and harder for the people around Nippy to cover for her.

  Finally, one week while Nippy was in Los Angeles, her film agent Nicole David helped arrange an intervention and asked me to come be a part of it. I know some people will call me naïve, but I truly was surprised when I found out just how much trouble Nippy was really in. Though I’d been putting the pieces together for a while, she was so good at hiding things from me that I didn’t understand how bad it had gotten. Maybe if I read the gossip magazines and watched the tabloid TV shows, I would have realized sooner. But the only times I ever knew Nippy was in trouble were the times when I’d either seen it with my own eyes, or I was told by people I trusted. And when neither of those things happened, I always assumed Nippy was okay.

  I flew out to Los Angeles, and along with Robyn Crawford, CeCe Winans, and Michael’s wife, Donna, we all confronted Nippy at her hotel. “We’re here to get you the help you need, baby,” I told her. She was shocked to see us all, and right away she started crying, and pleading with us not to send her to any rehab.

  “Mommy,” she said, “please don’t let them do this to me. I can take care of it.” I wasn’t convinced that she could, but she wouldn’t give in, saying, “Let’s you and me do this together. Just come stay at my house, and you can look after me, and I’ll quit. I promise! Please, Mommy”—she was just begging now—“I know we can do this together.”

  And you know, I let her talk me into it. Deep down, I didn’t really believe her. After learning the extent of her problem, I didn’t think she could really quit on her own. But hearing my baby say she needed me, and having her ask me to come to Mendham to help, was more than I could bear. So I told her I would do whatever she needed. “All right, baby,” I said. “I’ll come with you. I’ll help you.”

  So I moved into Nippy’s home in Mendham for a few weeks. But that house was so big, with so many different rooms and suites, that Nippy would just lock herself up somewhere and not come out. When she did show her face, she swore up and down that she wasn’t doing anything. But she spent too many hours hiding herself for me to believe that was true. I would have done whatever it took to get Nippy clean, but as I suppose she knew, there was no way for me to keep an eye on her in that house.

  I think Nippy really did want to stop at that point, but she didn’t know how. And because I couldn’t force her to stop, I eventually just moved on back home. I had hoped that together, Nippy and I could face her demons. But I never should have let her talk me into abandoning the intervention, because the truth was that I really didn’t know how to help her. I only knew that she had asked me to help her and I couldn’t say no. Nippy knew I would come whenever I thought the situation involved her and me against the world. Only this time, I hadn’t been able to fix it. She was still in trouble, and things were about to get even worse.

  Around this time, Nippy really started keeping more to herself. Robyn resigned from the company, which wasn’t good because, despite whatever I thought of her, she at least tried to look after Nippy. And I still wasn’t seeing very much of Nippy, either, because as long as she was having trouble, that was how she wanted it. Though she had been pulling slowly away for a while before the intervention, it seemed to get worse after I moved out of her house. After that she didn’t call much, and she often didn’t pick up when I called.

  Her brother Michael did spend a lot of time with her, but he was unfortunately also doing drugs. Michael and Nippy were so close, and he would have done anything for her. If she called him in the middle of the night, he’d leave Donna and his two children to go to her, sometimes staying for weeks at a time.

  Nippy just started to close in on herself. She wasn’t spending time with anyone but her brother, Bobby, and Krissi, and Michael later told me that things between her and Bobby weren’t good. Bobby was constantly in trouble with the law, and he even went to jail in Florida in May 2000, for a drunk driving charge. Nippy stood by him, though, and when he got out in July, she threw herself at him like he’d just come home from a war. Her whole world seemed to have shrunk down to one thing: what was happening with Bobby.

  With all of Bobby’s flaws, Nippy remained devoted to him. In some ways, I think Bobby was Nippy’s rebellion. Around him, she didn’t have to be the perfect girl, or America’s sweetheart, and she felt she could relax and just be the person she truly was. Of course, drugs complicated their relationship. Yet unlike a lot of people, I don’t blame Bobby for introducing Nippy to drugs or for the things that ended up happening to her. At the same time, I also don’t believe he did much to help her. He had his own demons to fight, and spent his fair share of time going to court-ordered rehab and trying to stay straight. But when it came to getting clean, he and Nippy never seemed to be in the same place at the same time, and that made the process much harder.

  The people who were around Nippy in that period felt she was depressed during that whole time. If Bobby wasn’t there, she’d walk around that big house wearing her slippers all day, and sometimes Michael would find her just shuffling around late at night, not knowing what to do with herself. She began losing weight, and Nippy wasn’t a big woman to begin with, so she didn’t have a lot to give.

  Despite all the upheaval, Arista signed Nippy to a new record deal in August 2001. Even with everything that had gone on, Clive still believed in Nippy and her talent, and L.A. Reid, who was head of Arista at that time, signed her to do six new albums. Clive saw it as the beginning of a comeback, her chance to show that whatever problems she had were behind her, and L.A., who had worked with her when he and Babyface wrote and produced several of her recordings and had become a friend, believed it was a chance to show the world she was still Whitney Houston. In September, after the 9/11 attacks, Arista also rereleased Nippy’s recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which inspired people all over again and reminded people of the magic Nippy could create with her voice.

  But the good feelings wouldn’t last. Because in September 2001, at a thirtieth-anniversary concert for Michael Jackson, Nippy shocked everybody with her appearance.

  The concert was at Madison Square Garden in New York City, so I came into town to see Nippy perform. When I walked into her dressing room, I couldn’t believe my eyes. She was just as thin as she could be, almost skeletal. Her face was gaunt, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a while. I was scared to death, seeing her like that. What was happening to my baby? But I was so afraid of scaring her away, I didn’t even say a word to her about her appearance. I feared that if I said something, she would shut me out.

  And you know, Nippy knew what she looked like. It wasn’t like some magic word from me was going to suddenly make her change her ways. I had to console myself by thinking, At least she is letting me see her. At least I am in her life. The way things had been going, I was afraid she would just disappear forever. Nippy was a stubborn, hardheaded girl. She would not let herself be led by anyone, and especially not by her mother, so I tried to give her space and respect. Yet she still thought I was trying to run her life, and I knew she just didn’t want to hear it.

  Seeing her that day, I knew that my staying at her house hadn’t gotten her clean. But this was one of the only times that I can remember when I didn’t tell Nippy what I really thought. I had always trusted her to know when she was pushing things too far, and clearly that wasn’t the right choice on my part—but at that point, it was the only way that I felt I could stay in her life. And I didn’t know how to change our dynamic so that I could actually help her.

  Ever since Nippy had been living in Mendham—first with Robyn, then with Bobby—I didn’t go around there much. Sometimes when Krissi had a school thing, I’d go up, and once in a blue moon I’d just stop by if I felt like seeing my daughter. Nippy would always say, “Mommy, would you please call before you come?” But sometimes I just felt the need to see her, so I’d drive on over and drop in.

  One day I went
up there, and when she opened the door, I looked at her in shock. She was just as high as she could be. I had never seen anything like that before—her eyes were glassy and she was completely out of it. I said, “Nippy, what the hell are you doing?”

  She said, “Oh, Ma. Don’t worry so much about everything.”

  I was so angry at her, I started shaking. “You better get yourself straightened out,” I said, “before I straighten you out myself!” I had never seen my baby like this, and it frightened me. And I wouldn’t let it go. I guess that was why she didn’t want me coming around—maybe she knew I would go crazy if I saw her in that state. Maybe she just wanted to do whatever she did without anyone seeing. Up to that point, I had never seen my daughter high before. That’s why, no matter what other people were saying, I’d stubbornly held on to the idea that things really weren’t as bad as other people said they were.

  Nippy tried to blow off my concerns, but I wasn’t having any of it—because now I had seen with my own eyes that she had a problem. I felt overwhelmed, and there was no way to reason with her in that state, so I just turned around and left. When I tried to talk to her later on, she didn’t want to hear it. “I’m not addicted,” she told me. “I’m a grown woman. I can take care of myself.”

  Now, I’m no better mother than anyone else—I loved my daughter just like any mother loves her daughter. But Nippy broke my heart that day. That’s all I can say. She broke my heart.

  And you know, her brothers did, too, because they were all doing that same thing. I was so surprised at them, and disgusted, too. They were supposed to protect her, but the same thing happened to her that was happening to them. I was shocked, and hurt, and confused. I didn’t understand it then, and I still don’t. I suppose I never will.

  Photo Section 2

  Nippy with Bobby Brown, his kids Bobby Jr. and LaPrincia, and Krissi in her pink hat.