Every Little Step: My Story (18 page)

In one telling sequence, she revealed her thoughts about what the public was watching:

“He’s a nut,” she said to viewers during the show after I did something silly. “But nobody knew that
she
was, so it’s exciting to see.”

It was never my plan for the show to make people think I’m a better person than I really am. No, the goal was just to show
who
I am.

A FEW WORDS FROM TOMMY BROWN

In the years leading up to the taping of the show, my relationship with Bobby changed considerably from what it had been when we were younger. He was married and focusing his energies on Whitney and his family. He didn’t need me as a manager anymore because I didn’t have anything to manage. He just stopped working. I thought it was a mistake at the time, but I couldn’t fault him for wanting to take care of his family.
He saw the way Whitney’s affairs were being mishandled, how people were taking advantage of her, and he wanted to fix all of that. She was his wife—how can you argue with that? I thought he could have continued working on some of his own stuff too, but I respected his choices.

And if her business affairs were going to be fixed, he was the right person to do it. One thing I always felt Bobby didn’t get any credit for was his business smarts. He might not have graduated from high school, but from the beginning Bobby was always extremely shrewd and visionary when it came to his business affairs. He’s brilliant. There are a lot of things he’s influenced in this industry that people just aren’t aware of—like moving to Atlanta more than twenty years ago and starting a label and a studio in the South because he saw that’s where the growth in the industry was going to take place.

In the beginning I didn’t see the shrewdness. He would tell me to go and ask for this and this and this when I was negotiating for him, and I wouldn’t always do it because I thought he was asking for too much. And then I would look back a year or two later and see that I should have done what he told me to do. He’d say, “Man, didn’t I tell you to ask for this?” So I learned to carry out his wishes because he might be seeing something that no one else could see yet. As he would always say, “You’re not going to get it if you don’t ask.”

The purpose of the show was to reveal another side of my brother, so I didn’t go into it thinking about how it was going to make Whitney look because I didn’t even think she was
going to be involved. Of course they’re a married couple so I knew she would be some kind of presence in the show, but I thought it would be very limited. I never expected her to be in almost every scene. When she kept showing up during the taping and not always presenting herself in the best light, I called her people and asked them if they perhaps wanted to become more involved. I was thinking,
Who’s in charge of her side of the fence—can you give me a little help?

Anybody who knew Whitney was aware of the fact that you weren’t going to control her. I couldn’t tell her what to do. But when I called her agent about what was going on, there wasn’t much of a change. They asked for right of refusal for the editing of the show, which we gave them. So what you saw on that show had been approved by Whitney’s team. They signed off on everything that was aired. In the few instances where we had a disagreement, it was usually about something that we thought should stay in because it presented Whitney in a more positive light.

When it was clear that Whitney’s side wasn’t going to get very involved, we took it upon ourselves to make sure her makeup looked right and to try to make her look as good as we could. There were things we edited out ourselves to try to make her look better. But if her people were really concerned about her and her image, it seems like they would have had somebody there on set representing their client. We didn’t do anything sneaky or exploitative. We were just rolling the camera. I’ve heard people say the show ruined her career. While
I don’t agree with that, I will say her management made no effort to stop it or to help her. And one thing everyone took away from the show was the love between Bobby and Whitney. People saw genuine love, even if many of them wound up picking a side and saying, “Wow, she needs more help than he does.”

I think what happened was Whitney was yearning to express her natural self to the world. That’s why she was so eager to be a part of
Being Bobby Brown
. She was itching for the world to know she wasn’t fitting inside the body that they had molded for her. It was like her declaration—“I’m tired of Miss Prissy. That’s not who I really am.” She no longer wanted to be trapped by her image.

A FEW WORDS FROM L
A
PRINCIA BROWN

I hated
Being Bobby Brown.
Everybody said it was so good, so funny. To me, it was so embarrassing. I was only on two episodes because a lot of it was filmed during the school year and I couldn’t miss that time from school. But the show didn’t give the best impression of my siblings either; it didn’t tell people who they really were. It also came at a bad time for me to have my family on a TV show—I was fourteen when it started filming, but I was almost sixteen by the time the show finally aired.

That’s when I started getting more snappy with my father.
We had always been so close; I could tell him something and he would listen to me. Even when I was really young, when the bill would come and my dad would pay for everybody—he
always
pays for everything for everybody—I would say, “All of these are adults. How come they can’t pay for themselves?” I would say this out loud, to a table filled with family members and friends, when I was about eleven or so. I just feel like everyone leeched off him for so long. He’s your little brother—he shouldn’t have to be taking care of you and all your children. That’s a lot of pressure to be under when you’re dealing with your own stuff.

I think I was the only one who would say stuff like that to him. Nobody else would tell him these things. I was very protective of him. And when I said them, nobody would tell me, “Hey, you’re a child. You shouldn’t be saying that—stay in your lane.” I guess you could say I was a brat, but I feel like it was in the best way possible. I’ve learned to filter it now that I’m older; I know I can’t go around saying things like that out loud. But at the same time I feel like too many people are walking on eggshells around my dad. I feel like over time, if you become this really famous person when you’re fourteen and you’re supporting everyone and paying everyone’s bills, they rely on you for all of that. So they’re not going to be honest with you all the time. He needed more honesty in his life. You don’t need somebody sitting there and just saying, “Yeah, Bobby!” You need somebody saying, “No!” That’s how we end up in bad situations.

At a summer camp before I was about to go into fifth grade was the first time I heard anyone say anything about my dad and drugs. Some kid called me a “crack baby.” I was nine, so I had no idea what he was talking about. I remember thinking,
What’s a crack baby?
I figured it out later on when I started reading the tabloids and going on the Internet. When I saw all the stuff about my dad and Whitney doing drugs, I remembered what that kid had called me.
Ooohhh, that’s what he was talking about.

When I was about eleven, we went to Disney World in Florida and I got a taste of how funny and crazy my dad and Whitney could be together. One of the rides we went on was called Tower of Terror. After we got off the ride and were walking through the park, Whitney pointed to this guy who was on a different ride and said he was making a demon face. Later that day I was talking to them and said something about the Tower of Terror ride we had gone on.

“We never got on that ride,” Whitney said.

“Yeah, we would never get on that,” said my dad, who used to be afraid of rides—though he’s not anymore.

“Yes you did!” I said to them. “Dad, you were in the middle.”

They looked at me like I was crazy.

“He’s afraid of rides,” Whitney said.

So then they proceeded to convince me that it was a demon that was on the ride with me. I started to believe them, so much that I started crying. They laughed really hard and told me they were just kidding.

It wasn’t until maybe eighth grade, after
Being Bobby Brown,
when I started to realize what was happening with the drugs. Everything was so obvious to me by that point. I think before that, when I was in elementary school, my mom hid a lot of it from me. Now I became very sensitive and outspoken. If you said anything to me about them, I’d flip out. This was about when my dad’s song with Ja Rule, “Thug Lovin’,” came out. I started going on the Internet and reading stuff and feeling really hurt by it.

When you get to that age, you don’t want to be bothered with your parents anyway. I stopped wanting to visit for the summers. By the time they moved to Atlanta, I was in high school, I was cheerleading, so that changed my summers anyway. They were even further away from Massachusetts, where I lived with my mom, so they were a lot less accessible. I saw them a lot less.

I started having a lot of anger and resentment toward my father. I would get mad at him and ask him whether he was on drugs. People would tell me he was doing drugs, but he would say he wasn’t doing any, or maybe he would say he was just smoking weed. But if I was with him and I saw him around certain people and he was acting a certain way, I would get really frustrated. I would feel he was doing something he shouldn’t have been doing. So I wouldn’t talk to him.

I remember one time he was in Boston and he was supposed to take me and Bobby Jr. to the movies, along with my mom’s friend’s son. But when we were at his hotel, I didn’t like
the way he was acting and I didn’t like the people who were there with him. I told him he needed to get himself together and I got Bobby and the other little kid in the car and left him. I think he was there for two or three days and I wouldn’t answer any of his phone calls. I don’t know if he was high or drunk that day because it was kind of early in the day, but if you say you’re going to the movies with your kids, I shouldn’t get there and find random people there with you drinking.

During this time, as I dealt with my anger, the only thing that kept me positive was knowing that my dad was a good person, above everything else. I knew he loved his kids over everything. I kept feeling like there was a way I could get through to him. I took it upon myself to fix this, to fix him. And everyone else started depending on me to fix every situation too.

After my father got clean when he went to jail, everything changed. He became a different person with us. For the last decade or so he’s been a much better father—he started reaching out to us more, spending more quality time with us. He wouldn’t just come to visit and be gone the whole time; he’d come here and do things with us, bring us places.

One of the things that bothered me most when I was married to Whitney was the constant depiction of me as being out for Whitney’s money. In subtle little ways or in big obvious ways, the media and the public would make comments or write pieces that made me look like a money-grubbing, freeloading loser who was only interested in his woman’s cash. I was consistently outraged by this portrayal. Once when I got into a car accident, the headlines were quick to say, “Bobby Brown crashes wife’s car.” It made me look like some irresponsible leech, despite the fact that I had been in an accident, and as any married couple knows, whose name the car is registered under has no connection to who actually owns the car or who pays for it. I actually went into our marriage with more money than Whitney. I wasn’t wealthy; I was rich. It was often my money taking care of her, rather than the other way
around. But I knew the intent of these portrayals—they were a way to emasculate me, to further break me down as a black man, make me look like I was dependent on my woman.

At the beginning of our marriage, I had more than $50 million in the bank. Two years before we were married, I had the biggest album in the country. I then spent two years on the road, on a record-breaking world tour playing to sold-out stadiums. Why would I need Whitney Houston’s money? As a matter of fact, I couldn’t believe how little Whitney had in the bank, considering her massive success in her own right. That’s one of the reasons I was so compelled to take over her affairs, because I knew the people around her had to be taking advantage of her. There’s footage of her publicly declaring that her husband was now managing her career; I was able to show her the evidence of what was happening to her money, how she was being screwed. And I never took a dime from her—not one red fuckin’ cent. We were married. Our finances were bound together, like every couple in the world. All I ever wanted was the best for my wife.

One of my major moves was to get rid of her managers. Whitney was making money through various streams that she wasn’t even aware of. After reviewing the books, I concluded she wasn’t getting all the money she was entitled to. I even approached Clive Davis about her finances. I had some issues with the way Clive’s label was handling Whitney’s money. Ultimately, we worked it out and Whitney got what she deserved.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was allowing all of my stuff, my finances, my royalties, to get commingled with hers and to be taken care of by her financial people. When you have as much money as we did, you have money managers set up to pay all your bills. Instead of keeping the team I already had, I let my finances be handled by the same people who were handling hers. That’s how I ran into trouble with things like child support, because I assumed they were writing my child support checks regularly, only to find out they weren’t. Next thing I knew, Kim was having me arrested for falling behind.

That emasculating image of me as the leech continued throughout our marriage. When our marriage ended, it only intensified. That’s one of the main reasons why I walked away from my marriage without asking for a dime—even though I came into the marriage with tens of millions of dollars. I wanted Nippy to see that our union was never about money. She was listening to people, her family, her management, saying these things about me in her ear, and she started to believe them. They even floated a story in the press that I was suing her for spousal support, but that was just another ploy to make me look bad.

Things were wonderful between us for the first seven years or so of our marriage, but eventually the fighting, the drug use, the tabloids, the distrust, wore away at us until we didn’t have enough left to keep it going. Though I was repeatedly labeled in the tabloids as the cheater, let me say
that Whitney did her share of cheating too. In fact, she cheated before I did. She slept with quite a few of the producers and artists that she worked with or associated with over the years. I won’t drop names here because they’re still around and a few view me as a friend. When I found out about the first one, I was blown away. I thought,
Okay, okay, you gonna play me like that? I’m not that type of dude, but if you can do it, I can do it too.

I’m sure there will be people who will read this and think it’s easy for me to throw out such an explosive accusation about my ex-wife as she’s no longer here to defend herself, but I have no interest in slandering Whitney without cause. My intent in discussing what happened between us is not for the sake of salacious smearing; it’s more about trying to paint the most accurate picture of what went on inside our marriage.

One of her affairs that I am willing to mention is the one she had with Tupac. This occurred in the first few years of our marriage, during a time when I thought we were in a good place. I will admit it here that the news of the affair really fucked me up. I could not believe that Whitney was willing to jeopardize what we had, which I knew was hot, heavy, and unique, for some fling.

We fought long and hard about the cheating, lobbing hurtful accusations back and forth. We were together in September 1996 when we found out that Tupac had been killed. Whitney bawled her eyes out, crying for days over his
death. Her tears were painful for me because I knew what they meant—my wife was mourning the passing of a lover. Of course, I was really sorry Tupac was gone too. He was a talented artist gone too soon. He and I had talked about my signing to a label he wanted to form called Makaveli Records, which sadly he never was able to get off the ground.

When our marriage reached the end of the line, there was a lot of conflict, a lot of arguing, a lot of sadness and unhappiness. One of us would decide to run away, but a week or two later we’d be back in each other’s arms—until the next explosive conflict. There were separations of a few days or a few months. During one of our longer splits, I even lived with another woman, Louanna Rawls, the daughter of legendary singer Lou Rawls. I lived with her in Los Angeles during this emotionally tumultuous time. Louanna soon started getting threatening phone calls telling her to stay away from me. After a couple of months I broke it off with her and went back to Whitney.

Eventually you reach a place where you ask yourself whether there’s enough left to be worth all the tension and heartache. Finally, I got to the point where I thought,
If you don’t want to be with me, then let’s end this
. And I walked away forever. You have to understand that I was only twenty-three when we got married. By the time we were having our serious problems, I was thirty-seven—a grown-ass man. My tolerance for bullshit and craziness was lower than it had been in the beginning. I wanted some peace. We were still in love, but
we couldn’t fight all the other shit that we dealt with on a constant basis.

When Whitney went to rehab, the counselors began to convince her that I was the source of her problems, the trigger for her drug use. So when she came back home, she began to treat me like I was the enemy. That wasn’t something we were going to be able to recover from. It eventually became clear that her drug habit had nothing to do with me. I got clean in jail and never used again except for one two-week slip during our separation when I couldn’t beat back the depression over missing Whitney and Krissi. I emerged from that and I’ve been clean now for nearly a decade. But even after I was gone from her life, Whitney was still using.

When I look back on the evolution of my bad-boy reputation, I realize that it was only after I got together with Whitney that I really became the bad boy, at least in the eyes of the media. Before Whitney, it wasn’t open season on my personal life. I wasn’t treated like some kind of criminal degenerate. Yeah, I got arrested for lewdness during that early concert, but that was my only brush with the law—and that was all about my stage performance. When the media began to write about me and Whitney together, they questioned everything about my character. It hurt me to my core. I felt like it was destroying what I had created as an entertainer.

There’s this story line about the end of our marriage that presents Whitney as fleeing me, like I was some kind of monster. But the reality is that I walked away. I walked away with
about $1,000 and a one-way plane ticket to Los Angeles. I left my cars, my houses, my jewelry, everything I had, with her. I didn’t ask for anything to be sent to me. I didn’t have credit cards; I didn’t even have ID. I was going to move to Los Angeles, make some music, rebuild myself and my career. I wasn’t even sure where Whitney was staying when I left. It was several months before I saw her and Krissi again. The breakup triggered a spate of press reports that left me feeling suffocated and enraged—all with the narrative that the beauty had finally been freed from the beast.

Instead of returning all of my belongings, the Houston family got rid of all my stuff—my Grammy, my American Music Awards, my People’s Choice Award. Those are my accomplishments, my career, and all of it is gone, scattered in the wind. I have no idea where they are. I think they might have sold it. I had at least two million dollars’ worth of jewelry—gone. I was so focused on getting myself together at the time that it didn’t occur to me until later how thoroughly I had been disrespected by these actions. It also took me a long time to have my royalties from all my publishing redirected to me. They had been going to Nippy Inc., Whitney’s company in Newark, for the longest time and being absorbed into our joint finances. When I split, it took me far too long to have the bimonthly checks sent to me once again.

When I moved to LA, I didn’t have a place to stay, so I hooked up with a friend who was going to help me restart my career. My brother and my father decided to stay with
me, to help me deal with the pain and get me pointed in the right direction. Eventually I ran into my old friend Alicia Etheredge, who just happened to own a house right down the street from where I was staying with my brother and father. It was so good to see her—she was a connection to a better time in my life, when the world was so full of possibilities and I was just about to rocket into the stratosphere. Alicia was a huge help to me at this point in my journey, helping me to rent a car, even helping me try to reconnect with my wife so that I could see my daughter. Although I had always been extremely attracted to Alicia, it still would be a long while before she would even entertain the idea of some kind of romantic or intimate connection between us. She’s always been a very practical girl, and my life was far too messy for her at that point to consider going down that road. She had developed a very successful career in artist management, so she was all too familiar with the dramas of messy artists and their messy lives.

The breakup was incredibly hard on Krissi. Sadly, I can now see that it was the event that began her downward spiral. After I moved to LA, I found out that she and Whitney were also in LA, staying at some rehab center where Whitney was trying to get clean. She had Krissi there with her. I borrowed Alicia’s car and went to see them. At the time I told Alicia that I was trying to put my family back together, that I desperately needed to see my daughter.

Whenever I did see Nippy and Krissi, it was difficult
because Nippy was always trying to entice me, trying to switch the purpose of the meeting from seeing my daughter to talking to her about our getting back together. My sister Leolah told me she had pledged to my family that she was going to get me back and she wanted the family’s help. But when I was around Whitney, I knew it wasn’t going to work; I needed to get away from the drama and conflict that life with Whitney entailed. I wanted to try to find some normalcy, a life that wasn’t lived in the headlines and tabloid front pages.

It all must have been terribly confusing for Krissi, the back-and-forth between me and her mom, the uncertainty about our status and the future. I was extremely alarmed when I spent time with them and I saw Krissi pull out a cigarette. I exploded, but Nippy started screaming at me.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Bobby, she can smoke a cigarette!” Whitney said.

But my teenage daughter pulling out a cigarette right there in front of me wasn’t okay with me. I started to worry about what was going on in their household in my absence. But I began to feel increasingly helpless about what kind of impact I could have because Whitney would try to keep Krissi away from me as much as possible. She didn’t give me a chance to be a father to her anymore. Anytime I wanted to see Krissi, I had to see Whitney. And when I saw Whitney, it would become about something else, our relationship, not about my seeing my daughter.

Even worse, Whitney was making Krissi think that I didn’t care for her or for Whitney, that I had abandoned both of them. It was such bullshit, but as an absentee father, there was nothing I could do to fight against it. Any dad whose marriage falls apart knows what I’m talking about, the incredible frustration and helplessness you feel in trying to reach out and parent your child and getting pushed away each time—particularly if the mother is badmouthing you to the child. Things got to the point where Whitney would insist on having security present when I saw Krissi, just to be spiteful, in my opinion, because I was not threatening to her and certainly not to my daughter. But what all of this did was create the impression in Krissi’s mind that I was poison, that she was supposed to stay away from me—while she was being given the freedom when she was with her mom to do God only knows what.