Whitney Houston's Ex Bodyguard
Speaks On
Whitney,Bobby,Drugs,Death... And
Why Their Daughter Now Lying In
A Coma Never Stood A Chance
It has been the painful and very public unravelling
of an American Dream. Millions of fans around the
world watched appalled as Whitney Houston, the
ultimate diva of her generation, descended into
the chaotic ravages of drug abuse and then,
eventually, death at 48.
And now, just three years later, her fate has been
replicated in an equally shocking style.
Today the singer’s 21-year-old daughter, Bobbi
Kristina, herself a drug addict, lies in a coma,
hovering close to death.
To many, her fate has seemed grimly predictable,
but few have been more affected than one man
who sits, watching, many hundreds of miles away
from Bobbi Kristina’s anxious family.
For seven years of his life, Welshman David
Roberts was a constant companion to Whitney, a
minder, fixer, and wise counsel, too.
He was not just her bodyguard – but The
Bodyguard, who helped inspire the role which
established her as the golden girl of Hollywood.
Like the hero played by Kevin Costner, Roberts
was a Special Forces-trained operative who lived
constantly by her side.
There may have been no romantic involvement,
but Roberts was the real-life recipient of a note
under his hotel door saying: ‘I will always love
you’ – the title of the power ballad from the film
that became more famous than the movie itself.
Whitney trusted him with her life. Yet unlike the
character on screen, Roberts proved tragically
unable to save her – or her daughter.
Now, aghast at the latest twist of fate to assail
Whitney’s family and her legacy, the bodyguard
has finally decided to tell how one of the most
glamorous women on the planet was brought low
by a disastrous cocktail of alcohol, celebrity and
hard drugs. And he is not slow to point the finger
of blame.
In his first interview since he finally left Whitney’s
household, he recalls how her toxic marriage to
‘bad boy’ rapper Bobby Brown eclipsed her talent
and she began the descent into helpless
addiction.
It was a world, he says, in which the infant Bobbi
Kristina would wear £20,000 diamond earrings –
while witnessing her parents consume paralysing
quantities of drugs.
After Bobbi Kristina’s birth in 1993, Roberts
worried she would have little choice but to follow
the same path as her mother.
He takes no satisfaction from being proved right.
‘That girl had no chance from the start,’ he says.
‘She was born into chaos. Her father was
instrumental in her mother’s downfall.
‘Everyone is responsible for their own actions, but
Whitney was vulnerable. She was obsessed with
Bobby Brown and he subjected her to so much
psychological abuse that she lost everything,
including her dignity.
'I watched Bobbi Kristina as a little girl, running
around the corridors of hotels we were staying in,
surrounded by the degenerates who were
supposed to be looking after her, and I worried for
her future.
‘When I heard what had happened to Bobbi
Kristina, I wasn’t surprised, but I was angry.
‘Everything good Bobby Brown’s ever had in his
life, he’s destroyed – his career, Whitney, and
now Bobbi Kristina. She’s another victim of his
poisonous personality.’
On January 31, Bobbi Kristina was found in the
same awful circumstances as her mother had
been, lying face-down and unresponsive in the
bath. Bobbi’s partner Nick Gordon is said to be
devastated.
Roberts, now 62, retains his Welsh lilt and speaks
in slow, measured tones. He has a fatherly air at
odds with his toughness, although the latter is
evident in the prominent scar on his head
acquired while defending Houston during a fight
between her brother, Michael, and a gang of racist
thugs in Kentucky.
His association with Whitney started purely by
chance. But within a short space of time he was
not just protecting her, but keeping her whirlwind
life and career intact
.
He had been a police officer and then a sergeant
in the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection
Department of Scotland Yard. He saw action in
Northern Ireland and was later trained as a sniper.
He was also involved in the Iranian embassy siege
in 1980 in London. In 1984 he started his own
security and investigations consultancy.
In February 1988, he was asked by the American
embassy to look after Whitney Houston during a
forthcoming visit to London. He’d never heard of
her. Their first encounter was at Heathrow airport,
where she was arriving on Concorde. She was
surrounded by a huge entourage – including her
friend and rumoured lesbian lover Robyn Crawford
– and Roberts was introduced to her only briefly.
However, a night out a few days later brought him
to the attention of the American security team
travelling with her.
He recalls: ‘She went to Browns nightclub, and
there was a scuffle as she left, with photographers
swarming to take pictures of her.
‘One guy was trying to climb into the Rolls-Royce
to get to her, so I blocked him and his camera fell
to the ground and smashed.
‘Because I’d done my job – with the benefit of
local knowledge – the former FBI security guy
who was looking after her hired me to continue
providing security for the whole of her British tour,
followed by her European tour, and then as
director of security on a Far East tour.’
Roberts quickly found himself personally guarding
Whitney outside her hotel door as she slept at
night.
‘We developed a rapport and I liked her
immensely,’ he says. ‘At that time, she was a
very professional and articulate but slightly shy
and unworldly woman.
‘She had a wonderful sense of humour. We had a
lot of fun.’
Roberts believes that she had already
experimented with drugs at this stage, although
he saw no sign of them.
He was then asked to arrange the security for her
26th birthday party at her house in New Jersey.
She attended on the arm of actor Eddie Murphy,
but Roberts noticed a new male presence. ‘A bus
pulled up at the house and three guys got off.
One of them was wearing a turquoise and white
floral shorts suit, black loafers and white socks.
‘I asked if I could help him and he said he was
Bobby Brown and that he had an invitation to
come to the party. Later in the evening, I saw him
dancing with Whitney in a way they would call
dancing but other people might describe as
sexual assault. And that was it.’
Life for Roberts became a cycle of going on tour
for three months, then returning home to London
for two or three weeks.
‘It wasn’t a job, it was a vocation,’ he says. ‘It left
no room in my life for anything else, including my
wife at the time. I had to be there for Whitney, or
Nippy, as her friends and family called her,
whenever she needed me.
‘Once, she called for me because her false tooth
had fallen down the sink in her hotel room in
Hong Kong. I couldn’t retrieve it, so we had to
take her to a dentist to get it fixed. I didn’t mind.
We had a bond.
‘On tour, she’d push little notes under my hotel
room door, messages saying thank you. Once,
she wrote, “I will always love you”, years before
the song came out. She was sweet, and I think
she saw me as a sort of protective uncle figure.’
Officially, Houston and Brown’s romance did not
begin until 1991, although Roberts says Brown
had become a fixture long before that.
‘I could see the effect he was having on her. She
became obsessed by where he was and what he
was doing. She didn’t trust him, and the
emotional stress manifested itself in her starting
to lose her temper. She was unhappy; there
wasn’t the same laughter there had been.’
From the start, their pairing was an unlikely one.
Whitney, already America’s sweetheart whose
eponymously titled first album remains the
bestselling debut by a female artist in music
history, was the product of a showbusiness
dynasty.
Her mother was Cissy Houston, a singer, and her
father John Houston, a powerful entertainment
manager. Dionne Warwick was her cousin and
Aretha Franklin her honorary aunt.
By contrast, Brown was involved in gang violence
from an early age. He had become successful
with the group New Edition before becoming a
solo artist, but drug abuse, accusations of rape
and other criminal activities dogged him
throughout his career.
Brown began to travel with Houston when she
went on tour, and the pair would often hole
themselves up in their hotel room with large
quantities of alcohol.
‘Every two days, a bottle of brandy and a couple
of crates of Heineken would go in, and then he’d
be too ill to do anything for a day, and the
following day he’d start the process again,’ says
Roberts.
‘The only time I saw any drugs until the very end
of my time with her was before Brown was on the
scene, when we arrived in Long Island for a show
and Whitney’s maid Sylvia asked me to retrieve
Whitney’s glasses case, which she’d left on the
bus. It was full of weed.
‘But I knew they were taking drugs together,
because everyone knew.
‘As time went on, she started to cancel
performances and events because she wasn’t
well, and it was obvious why.’ He believes
Houston willingly allowed herself to be dragged
down by Brown.
‘I think that to make him feel less uncomfortable
about his inadequacies, and the fact she was
more successful than him, she went down to his
level. That meant joining him in his habits. When
they were out together, they were loud and brash.
They used bad language and had arguments to
attract attention. It was embarrassing.’
Wherever Brown went, chaos followed. During one
visit to London, Roberts received an urgent call at
4am from Houston’s driver.
‘Brown was having a fight with Michael Houston
on the Embankment. They’d been at Browns
nightclub, and they’d apparently met a man who
had £250,000 worth of cocaine with him and was
trying to sell it.
‘The fight started because Bobby wanted to go
back to the club and rob this man of the drugs
and money. Michael was trying to stop him.’
In 1992, Houston made The Bodyguard film. The
similarities between the plot of the film and
Roberts’s involvement with the star was a source
of amusement to them both.
‘When I saw it, I was amazed,’ he says. ‘Whitney
wasn’t acting; it was her life. I saw Kevin Costner
doing everything for her that I did… obviously
without the sex and the shooting! Whitney and I
joked about it.
‘Her name in the film, Rachel Marron, was the
name I used to book her into hotels. We were
staying in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas one night
after filming had finished and she asked me to
come to her room and listen to her new song. It
was I Will Always Love You, and I told her it was
the best song she’d ever done. At that point, she
had everything.’
But one evening that spring, Roberts was in a
restaurant in Atlanta having dinner with Whitney
and her entourage.
He recalls: ‘She said to me, “David, I think I’m
going to marry Bobby.” I said, “Really, boss?” She
said, “Yes. What do you think?”
‘I just didn’t know how to say to her, “Please God,
no, don’t do it.” ’
They married in 1992 in a lavish ceremony at her
home.
Brown cheated on Houston frequently before they
divorced in 2007, and Roberts believes it was a
deliberate policy aimed at chipping away at her
self-esteem.
Roberts says: ‘Her behaviour was similar to
battered wife syndrome, which I’d seen in my
time in the police. He was jealous of her success,
so he rubbed her face in his cheating, but she
forgave him every possible indiscretion. I just
couldn’t understand it. And it ate away at her.’ As
Whitney later admitted: ‘He was too promiscuous,
dragging dirt into my home. It disturbed me.’
Once, she was about to go on-stage at a big
open-air concert in Lexington, Kentucky, when
she decided to call Brown in Atlanta.
‘A woman answered the phone, so immediately,
she wanted to fly to Atlanta to find out what he
was doing,’ says Roberts. ‘The crowds were
already arriving, but she cancelled the show. We
had to find a doctor to say she had lost her voice,
and then arrange a private jet.
‘We flew to Atlanta, and when we arrived, Whitney
and Brown had a furious argument. Fifteen
minutes later, they were having sex. That’s the
way it always was.
‘He and I were alone together in a bar one night
in Germany, and he was telling me he’d changed
and become a Muslim. But that evening, he left
with two prostitutes. He tried to offer one to me.’
Houston and Brown have admitted that it was
around the time of The Bodyguard that they began
to take drugs together every day, often cocaine-
laced cannabis joints. Bobbi Kristina was born the
following year, in 1993, and Roberts was
dismayed by the arrangements her parents made
for her care and concerned about the background
of some of the characters trusted to look after the
toddler.
‘Whitney and Bobby bought Bobbi Kristina
diamond ear-rings worth $20,000, information
that appeared in the press, so I was very worried
about her safety. I suggested to Bobby that they
take them out of her ears, but because I’d
suggested it, he refused.
He knew I disliked him intensely and it was
mutual.’
By the time Houston filmed the movie Waiting To
Exhale in 1995, her drug-taking had begun to
have a serious impact on her health.
‘She took an overdose of cocaine, and filming had
to be halted for a week,’ he says. ‘Her throat
doctor told me that he was giving her eight
months to stop the habit or she’d never be able
to sing again.
‘I was horrified, but shortly afterwards, we flew to
Brunei so she could sing at the Sultan’s niece’s
18th birthday party. She croaked her way through
her greatest hits. I was disgusted, and she knew
it.
‘I went home and wrote a report on what the
doctor had told me and sent it to her lawyers. A
week later, I was told that she would no longer be
travelling internationally so my services were no
longer needed.’
Roberts never heard from Houston again, and
went back to running his investigations and
security business. In 2010, he moved to Miami.
Over the years, he watched Houston’s decline
with a sense of sad inevitability.
‘I wasn’t surprised when she died – I was just
surprised by how long she lived. I like to think it
wouldn’t have happened on my watch.’
Of Brown, who has married again and still works
with his soul group New Edition, Roberts said:
‘Those around her failed her. With Bobbi Kristina
so close to dying, too, I wonder if he feels guilt
for the way he’s behaved. He should.’
culled from dailymail.
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