Grammy winning gospel singer Cissy Houston has no love for R&B singer Bobby Brown. In her memoir “Remembering Whitney”, Cissy Houston, 79, recalls the days when her daughter was madly in love with Brown, and she couldn’t understand why.
Whitney Houston drowned in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub at age 48. The coroner’s report listed cocaine, prescription drugs and alcohol in her system.
“Does it feels like a year already?” since Whitney passed, asked Oprah in an interview for Oprah’s Next Chapter, which aired Monday. “It feels like two years,” Cissy Houston replies.
In “Remembering Whitney”, which was released Tuesday — 2 weeks before the 1st anniversary of Whitney’s death — Cissy Houston says she believes Whitney’s life may have turned out differently if she’d never met Brown.
“I do believe her life would have turned out differently,” Houston writes. “It would have been easier for her to get sober and stay sober. Instead she was with someone who, like her, wanted to party. To me, he never seemed to be a help to her in the way she needed.”
Houston believes Whitney’s all consuming love (read: addiction) for Brown drove a wedge between them.
“In my darkest moments, I wonder whether Nippy loved me,” she writes. “She always told me she did. But you know, she didn’t call me much. She didn’t come see me as much as I hoped she would.”
Houston blames Brown for the rampant drug use that sent Whitney’s career spiraling downward. Cissy Houston also hints at an abusive relationship.
Cissy Houston describes a 1997 incident when Whitney sustained a “deep cut” on her face while on a yacht with Brown in the Mediterranean. Whitney insisted it was an accident; Brown had slammed his hand on a table, breaking a plate. A piece of china flew up and hit Whitney, requiring surgery to cover any possible scar.
The injury was minor, the effects possibly fateful.
“She seemed sadder after that, like something had been taken away from her,” Houston writes.
Cissy Houston recalls how she ignored the rumors of Whitney’s drug use for years, until one day when she visited Whitney and Bobby’s Alpharetta, GA mansion, and saw “the walls and doors were spray-painted with ‘big glaring eyes and strange faces.’ Whitney’s face had been cut out from a framed family picture, an image Cissy Houston found ‘beyond disturbing.'”
“She was so angry at me, cursing me and up and down,” Cissy writes. “Eventually, after a good long while, Nippy did stop being angry at me. She realized that I did what I did to protect her, and she later told people that I had saved her life.”
When she heard that Whitney was divorcing Brown, Cissy Houston said she was “extremely relieved” and “thanking God so much I’m sure nobody else could get a prayer in to Him.”
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