Every Little Step: My Story (12 page)

On July 18, 1992, Whitney and I said our vows and became husband and wife in a glorious ceremony at the mansion she had bought in Mendham, New Jersey. It was a memorable day that was big news in virtually every newspaper and magazine in the free world. But for me the path to the actual nuptials was one of the craziest times of my life.

In the months leading up to the wedding, Whitney told me that since I was only twenty-three she wanted me to get all the partying and fucking around out of my system before we said “I do.” I thought that sounded like a grand idea, so I planned a trip to bring my boys around the world with me for the most outrageous monthlong bachelor party any groom-to-be had ever created. It made
The Hangover
look like a Boy Scout convention in comparison.

I’m not going to go into all the details here to protect
the innocent and the guilty, but I will say that even a twenty-three-year-old hits a party wall at some point. I rented a private jet that took us to all the well-known party spots, from Las Vegas to New York City to Miami to Paris. You might think of it as me trying to complete my fucking bucket list—strippers, midgets, you name it. Let me say the night with the midget blew my mind. You can do things that just aren’t possible with an average-sized woman. The midget came in the middle of the thirty days. By the time we got to the end of the run, we found ourselves in California. We had all gotten to the point where we had had enough women, drugs and alcohol to last us a long time. Though I’m sure she didn’t intend for me to dive into the concept with such gusto, in effect it worked: I had no interest in straying for a very long time after that because I had had my fill. But I don’t think you should try this at home.

Toward the end of the thirty days, we found ourselves in Southern California in the middle of a major earthquake. The June 28, 1992, earthquake was 7.3 magnitude, the largest quake in the US in forty years. There were only three deaths and minimal damage, because the epicenter was out by the Mojave Desert. This quake was far more powerful than the 6.9-magnitude quake three years earlier in San Francisco during the 1989 World Series, but that one was right in the middle of a major population center and resulted in sixty-three deaths.

After partying all night on Saturday, we were awakened
at five
A.M
. on Sunday by the feeling of our hotel suite trembling. My first reaction was to wonder if it was all a figment of my drunk imagination, but I soon realized that I was in the middle of my first earthquake. If you live in LA long enough, you’re going to experience your share of shakes. But that was my first and I didn’t like it one bit.

Some might say the earthquake was a sign of what was to come in the marriage, but I didn’t see it that way. I just wanted to get the hell out of LA.

My partying continued right up until the night before the wedding. Therefore I woke up the morning of the wedding feeling odd, uncomfortable and still a bit high. I guess prewedding jitters are normal for brides and grooms, but I was suddenly paranoid that I was making a mistake. It might actually be misspeaking to say I woke up because I don’t think I had actually gone to sleep the night before. I had alcohol and weed in my system and even some cocaine, which I had tried for the first time during the preceding thirty days. With all of that coursing through my body, how did I react when I realized what was about to happen in a few hours? I cried.

I started wondering what I was about to get myself into. I knew I loved Whitney with all my heart, but I was starting to feel like I didn’t know much about her. She still wasn’t talking openly about our relationship in public and of course I had been reading and hearing all the rumors about her possible sexual relationship with her friend Robyn Crawford, so
in my mind I started to play with the idea that maybe this all really
was
a publicity stunt on her part.

Then I started thinking of the women in my life I would be walking away from. I had broken up with Kim, but I had gotten her pregnant again at the same time as I was dating Whitney. In addition, I had also been dating the actress LisaRaye McCoy, and I hadn’t really told her much about how serious it was with Whitney. I felt like my affairs were sort of a mess, and my emotional state was about the same.

My friends tried to talk to me, to get me to a better place. At one point on the morning of the wedding day, I even talked to Alicia Etheredge, my longtime friend (who would eventually become my wife almost exactly twenty years later). Alicia came into the bathroom where I was hiding and persuaded me to come out and be happy that I was about to marry a woman I loved—how’s that for irony?

As the ceremony grew closer, I decided that I wanted to get together with my bride and have a quickie before we walked down the aisle. Maybe I was looking for some sort of proof of her love to ease my mind. We were always horny, always sneaking off to inappropriate places to get busy, so I thought this was a perfect time for some quick intimacy. I wasn’t thinking about traditions or superstitions or any of that stuff. I just wanted to find Whitney and spend some time in that place I loved. I left the mansion’s large garage, where all of the groomsmen were getting dressed, and I went in search of Nippy (Whitney’s nickname).

I found Whitney in her room. When I opened the door, I was shocked to see her hunched over a bureau, snorting a line of coke.

“You want some?” she said, looking up at me.

“No,” I said.

“Okay, well now you know—I do coke sometimes,” she said. “I’m so fuckin’ nervous.”

I was unnerved to see my woman doing cocaine, but her brother Michael had already told me she indulged. Turns out he’s the one who introduced her, as he admitted to Oprah many years later. While I was disturbed, I was also a bit impressed that she was clearly not the princess the world thought she was.

Oh, she’s a fuckin’ G.

That’s what I was thinking. I had already felt that way, but that sight in her bedroom really hammered it home. She was classy and street at the same time. She was the first person to introduce me to Cristal champagne; it was her preferred drink. I mean, we gave away bottles of Cristal to our eight hundred wedding guests. Can’t get much classier than that—it costs over $200 a bottle. But then here she was, getting lifted on one of the biggest days of our young lives.

When the ceremony time finally came and I stood there watching my gorgeous bride float down the aisle in a $40,000 lace wedding dress at her father’s side, I was very aware of the stakes for me. I was thinking about the fact that I was marrying into power, moving into a situation that would bring me
to the next level of influence and clout. I could feel the power surrounding me, especially when I looked out at the crowd to see some of the most influential men and women in my business and many others.

Nobody can fuck with me now. I have money, power, and the most beautiful woman in the world. What?

After Marvin Winans presided over the vows inside the house with a smaller contingent of our close family and friends, we went outside for the reception with eight hundred people.
Way
too many people. One of the most dramatic moments was when we released a dozen lovely white doves. As if on cue, they soared over the festivities and drew gasps from the crowd. It was exactly as we had pictured it. But what we didn’t picture was that three of the doves would like our property so much that they decided to stay. For at least three years, they made a home on the roof above our bedroom. We thought it was a powerful omen, that these symbols of peace and love had chosen to stay, as if they were blessing our bedroom.

One day I looked out into the backyard of our estate and I came across a chilling sight: the carcasses of the doves were strewn about in the yard. They had been attacked by crows and eaten. I might have taken that as another omen about our marriage and relationship, but I didn’t think of it that way. By that time, I was doing drugs nearly every day, so I viewed the dead doves in a haze. I’m sure my thoughts were more along the lines of,
Damn. Dead doves
.
That’s fucked up.

A FEW WORDS FROM LEOLAH BROWN

When my brother and Whitney got married, it was actually the first wedding I had ever attended and I had the honor of being a bridesmaid. Oh my God, it was so beautiful! All seven groomsmen and seven bridesmaids wore purple, which was Whitney’s favorite color. Whitney’s gown, which was form-fitting and all lace, designed by a woman from East Orange named Diane Johnson, was unbelievable. From start to finish, everything about that wedding was just perfect. I distinctly remember the glow that was in Bobby and Whitney’s eyes. My family was so happy because Bobby decided to invite so many of the people we grew up with back home in Orchard Park. And of course there were celebrities everywhere you turned—Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, Donald Trump, Dick Clark, Ashford and Simpson, LA and Babyface, basketball star Isiah Thomas . . . the list goes on. My brother Tommy was practically drooling over Phylicia Rashad.

When Reverend Marvin Winans was talking, I was looking directly at Bobby and Whitney, trying to figure out what they must be thinking. I focused on their eyes and I felt the love between them. When they said their vows I couldn’t hold back my tears. The whole spirit in that room was beautiful, so real. There was no faking it. You knew that they loved each other because of the feeling you got just being there and seeing them together.

When we went outside, their good friends the wonderful
Bebe and Cece Winans sang to them and then they released all those beautiful doves. It was such an amazing day, I will remember it for the rest of my life.

After the wedding, I asked Whitney why she loved my brother. She and I talked a lot. I’m five years older than Bobby, so Whitney and I were almost the exact same age. We were both born in August, her in 1963 and me in 1964. We got along so well that I eventually became her full-time assistant.

She thought about my question for a few seconds, then she said, “Because he allows me to be myself.”

She said Bobby was never anybody but himself, which was important to her. She said she had dated men who were always acting too timid and too shy because of who she was. But she said Bobby was different. He didn’t give a damn. He was himself, take it or leave it. She said she loved that about him.

“He’s not starstruck—he’s just real,” she said.

The world wanted to paint this pretty picture of Whitney, but she didn’t like that at all. I think she was always trying to get away from that.

After Whitney and I got married, the media coverage of us changed and became much nastier. The gossip was so bad and so ridiculous that we stopped caring what they said. We felt that as long as we did our business, took care of our ca
reers, we couldn’t give a damn because we were an unstoppable force.

One of the worst things that was written at this time concerned our honeymoon, when it was reported that I cut Whitney’s face, like I was some kind of knife-wielding thug. I couldn’t believe it. That was so far from the truth of what actually happened. We were all playing on a boat in Italy. As I told you before, my father, Herbert, was the funniest man in the world, so my siblings and I used to imitate him all the time. Whitney and I were eating breakfast, laughing and having fun, when I did this imitation of my father. I slammed my hands down on the table like my father would and inadvertently hit the edge of a fork, which popped up and hit her in the face. It was the craziest, freakiest accident. I looked up and saw that her face was bleeding. I was like,
Man, what the fuck?

We had to rush her to the hospital because we saw that the cut was pretty deep. The Italian police officers who helped us wanted to kill me because they didn’t know what had happened. They just saw this black man and they saw Whitney Houston with a cut on her face, blood pouring down. I’m sure they thought I had assaulted her. If they
did
know who I was, that didn’t help, because there were many reports that I was cheating on Whitney and treating her badly. This, of course, couldn’t have been further from the truth. But to those Italian police, I was either some random black guy who had assaulted America’s princess, or the bad-boy husband.
Either way, they looked like they wanted to seriously fuck me up.