In the second part of our world exclusive interview with TINA BROWN, she charts WHITNEY HOUSTON’s descent into drug crazed madness!
PREVIOUSLY in PART ONE click here: WORLD EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: "I DID CRACK WITH WHITNEY!"
The whole intervention team checked into rooms for the night and promised to regroup in the morning. Whitney and Tina BROWN (Bobby Brown's sister) were in one suite together. They got high all day long.
Before they fell off to sleep, the two were laughing so hard about Whitney’s antics, the singer peed herself.
Tina said that one of her older children is handicapped and uses pull-up diapers. She had a pair in her purse. Whitney found them and put them on.
That’s when the laughter stopped. Tina saw something that frightened her to the bone – black and blue bruises up and down Whitney’s legs.
Tina cried out: “Nip, what the hell!”
Whitney’s answer frightened Tina even more.
“The devil be hitting me,” said Whitney. “I walked by and he just go bam.”
Tina said: “ ‘No, Nip. That’s not the devil. That’s you.’ I mean there was black and blue all up and down her legs. I said, ‘Does Bobby know this?’ She said, ‘No, no, it’s going to be all right. You know I rebuke the devil. He’s always hitting me.’ But it’s her hitting herself.”
In the morning, Whitney’s relatives saw the bruises too.
“All kinds of psychiatrists came up to the hotel room. And she went off with them. It was a big thing about the bruises.”
At the end of that bizarre intervention, Whitney reluctantly agreed to go into outpatient rehab at a center in Smyrna, Ga., but only if Tina went with her. Whitney would smoke crack before the sessions.
Tina ultimately moved into Whitney’s house, acting in a sort of maid’s capacity after Bobby Brown got out of jail. The drug deliveries continued.
Whitney would purchase eightballs of crack – pieces of rock cocaine weighing an eighth of an ounce each. She’d cut open a cigar, take the tobacco out, put in marijuana and the whole piece of crack – and puff away.
In June 2004, Tina was sent to prison for a year for possession of drug paraphernalia and violation of probation. She has a record of arrests for drug offenses.
It was a blessing, she says, to be away from Whitney and the nonstop drug use.
But Bobby Brown was worried. Tina may have been Whitney’s drug partner but at least she was able to keep Whitney at home when the singer binged on drugs.
Now, with Tina in jail, Whitney started to disappear for days at a time, sometimes doing drugs with friends, but other times visiting crack houses in dangerous areas of Atlanta. From jail, Tina remembers calling her mom Carole Brown. Her mother was weeping.
“A drug dealer had called Bobby and said, ‘Come get your wife. I’m sick of this bitch. She’s in here peeping out the windows and doing all kinds of s–t in the house.’”
Tina learned Whitney had been in the drug den for days giving orders to dealers and drug buyers, telling some to leave, telling others where to sit, seeing demons, thinking she was under surveillance. It became too much for the dealer.
“Bobby and security had to go get her,” said Tina.
When Tina was released from prison on June 3, 2005, she was drug-free but that ended July 5, the first time she went over to Whitney’s house.
“I started again. She needed some help in the house and that was it,” said Tina.
At that time, Whitney was actually getting ready to cut a single with record producer Jermaine Dupri. It would be the first time she’d entered a studio in years, said Tina.
But Whitney’s beautiful singing voice, the one that sold more than 100 million albums, the one that hit those impossible-to-imagine high notes, was gone.
“It’s horrible. She couldn’t sing anymore,” said Tina.
Still, Tina did her best to get Whitney ready for her studio session.
“She had a machine to get her voice in shape. I’d hook it up and put this liquid in this holder and this breathing device in her mouth. It’s like steam and she had to do these treatments for an hour, three times a day. But she kept doing it just once.
“She put off the studio appearance for like two weeks. They were calling me and I told them, ‘You come and get her out of the damn room. I can’t make her go.’”
Tina’s relationship with Whitney eventually ended. She kept up her own battle to become drug-free and prayed for a Whitney comeback, a day when she’d reach the top once again.
It didn’t happen.
