Her final public performance two nights before her death spoke volumes about how low she’d sunk from the days when the world and Kevin Costner swooned at every quivering note of I Will Always Love You in The Bodyguard film.
She staggered on stage at a tiny Hollywood club called Tru, drunk, puffy-faced and dishevelled, to sing a dreadful one-minute duet of Yes, Jesus Loves Me with soul singer Kelly Price.
Whitney ended up in a fight with another singer, then left with her hangers-on and blood trickling down her leg.
She spent the next night (her last) in the bar of her hotel, drinking heavily and treating staff and fellow guests to her trademark behaviour of wandering around, flailing her arms, doing handstands and burbling unintelligibly. The following afternoon she was dead.
Her long-time friend Robyn Crawford said afterwards: ‘I don’t know what kind of pressure she was putting on herself.’
While family members and close friends insisted Houston had shaken off drugs, others — including therapists who spoke to her relatives — claimed her loved ones had cynically ignored her drug abuse because they were relying on her as their breadwinner.
Houston was by her own admission ‘no angel’, however much her marketing people tried to manipulate her image.
Friends revealed that she was taking drugs before she even met Bobby Brown, the ex-gang member, convicted criminal and drug addict who became her husband and supposedly ruined her.
In 2006, a few months before the couple got divorced, Brown’s sister Tina sold shocking pictures of Houston’s bathroom in her mansion, which the star had turned into a crack den. Her teeth had fallen out from drug use, and she was so incontinent she was wearing nappies.
Associates told newspapers that Houston and Brown used to cruise the streets of New Jersey and Atlanta in chauffeur-driven limos, looking for crack.
In the Nineties, Whitney was reported to have paid $750,000 to one drug dealer alone.
According to U.S. tabloid Globe, she owed $1.5 million to drug suppliers when she died.
Whether or not the murder theory has any credence, Whitney’s death was a particularly pitiful end for a star who, thanks to her legions of black and white fans across the world, represented a colour-blind showbusiness world.
Her demise became a polarising moment in much of America. Amid the national grieving, some commentators condemned Houston as a disgusting junkie who squandered her huge talents and deserved no eulogies.
So could it be possible, as the FBI is now being asked to consider, that a similarly damning attitude dissuaded investigators from spending more time examining her depressingly sleazy death?
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