Whitney Houston dead at 48 at the Beverly Hilton
An amazing voice and the woman who possessed it passed away yesterday in Beverly Hills, California, the night before the Grammy Awards. Kristen Foster, a publicist, made the announcement, and the police announced later that singer Whitney Houston was found unresponsive at the Beverly Hilton Hotel at around 3:30 PM on Saturday. Although CPR was performed on her by paramedics, she was pronounced dead at about 4 PM, according to Beverly Hills Police Lieutenant Mark Rosen. The cause of death will be investigated.
Whitney Elizabeth Houston was born on August 9, 1963 in Newark, New Jersey. Her mother was Cissy Houston, a gospel singer and back-up singer who worked with Otis Redding, Dusty Springfield, and Wilson Pickett. Whitney’s godmother was Aretha Franklin, and Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick were her cousins. By high school, she sang back-up for Chaka Khan and Lou Rawls and had begun a modeling career that placed her in the pages of Seventeen and Glamour magazines.
Clive Davis spent two years and $250,000 to prepare Houston before releasing her debut album, “Whitney Houston,” in 1985. The album became the first album by a new female artist to yield THREE #1 singles: “Saving All My Love for You,” “How Will I Know” and “The Greatest Love of All.” Houston’s second album, “Whitney,” in the summer of 1987 contained the hits: “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),” “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” “So Emotional,” and “Where Do Broken Hearts Go.” Some count her sales at more than 170 million albums, singles, and videos. In 1991, Houston sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl. The anthem became a signature for her and also a huge fundraiser for the American Red Cross.
The soundtrack for “The Bodyguard,” in which Houston costarred with Kevin Costner, won the 1994 Grammy for Album of the Year, and its single, “I Will Always Love You,” became the best-selling single by a female artist in history.
Whitney Houston met Bobby Brown at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards and married three years later. Their 14-year marriage was marred by drug abuse, Brown’s legal run-ins, and allegations of his domestic abuse. When Houston divorced Brown in 2007, she won the custody of their daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown at a court in Orange County. Bobby Brown, in his autobiography, wrote that their marriage “was doomed from the very beginning,” and that they separated in their first year and several times in later years.
“The biggest devil is me,” the singer told ABC’s Diane Sawyer in a notorious 2002 interview. “I’m either my best friend or my worst enemy.”
Whatever the cause, hers was a voice silenced too soon.
-Bill at
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