It breaks my heart to hear my friend Bobbi Kristina’s voice. She was laid to rest on Saturday, but before she died she had started narrating a documentary I was working on – a tribute to her mother Whitney Houston.
We started the recording on a cold day in February 2014, on the second anniversary of her mother’s death. Last week I played the tape again. In a shaky, childlike voice, Bobbi Kristina – or Stina – talks about her mother. ‘I miss her like hell,’ she says on the recording. ‘Once you have met this woman, you are attached to her for ever. It was her heart, it was her smile, it was her face. It was the way she talked, it was the way she did things. She was so very lovable.’
When we stopped recording, Bobbi Kristina confided that she felt she had to rush through life, as if she feared she would end up like her mother. I will never forget her disturbing words. Sadly, her premonition came true.
Whitney was found dead in the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles in 2012 aged 48. In an eerie portent of what would happen to Bobbi Kristina, a coroner ruled that Whitney had accidentally drowned in the bath. Heart disease and cocaine use were listed as contributory factors.
Stina was found face-down and unconscious in a bath at the home she shared with her boyfriend Nick Gordon, 25, in Georgia on January 31 this year. She never regained consciousness and died last Sunday.
I’m haunted by a message she sent to my Twitter account, but that I didn’t pick up until it was too late. It said simply: “Please come and get us,” with flowers and heart emoticons. I torture myself that I didn’t see it in time.
I first met Bobbi Kristina at the beginning of 2014 after I was passed some video footage of her mother’s marriage to Bobby Brown. Stina immediately accepted the invitation to narrate the tape, telling me: ‘Nobody can talk about my mother, it has to be me. If there’s a film about her, I would want to play her.’
We never had time to finish the tribute to her mother, who had been visibly pregnant with Bobbi Kristina as she walked down the aisle.
From the first time we met in Los Angeles in January 2014, I immediately liked Stina. She may have been born into showbusiness royalty – she would always tell me: ‘My mother was royal, we were raised like royals’ – but her life had been troubled because of her parents’ problems with drugs. And I could see Stina, too, was beginning to take refuge in drugs.
She was born into one of America’s greatest singing dynasties – her mother remains one of the bestselling soul singers in history, her father had a string of hit records, her maternal grandmother is the soul legend Cissy Houston, and Dionne Warwick is a cousin – with all the money and privilege that brings.
But Stina was adrift: she had no mother who could reassure her or tell her how special and beautiful she was. Far from the glamour and the fame of being Whitney’s daughter, all she really wanted was a middle-class life – a little house, a husband and kids, and a dog.
It soon became clear to me that both she and Nick Gordon – who she constantly referred to as her husband even though they were not married – were addicts.
She called me as soon as she got off the plane from her home in Atlanta and told me: ‘Nick and I arrived sick, very sick. We need a doctor.’
I arranged for someone to drive them to a doctor, but only Nick got in the car. Bobbi Kristina told me: ‘I am too famous to go. Nick is going to the doctor for both of us.’ The plan was to go for lunch and then watch her mother’s wedding footage together. But after Nick joined us with a prescription, Bobbi Kristina’s attention was only on one thing – to get hold of the drugs.
I assumed they were anti-flu pills and suggested they give the prescription to the concierge of their hotel, but they both resisted fiercely. Nick and a friend who travelled with them drove from one pharmacy to another while Stina stayed with us. She chatted happily about her plans for the future: ‘To start recording. To learn how to be a woman,’ and then talked about how missing her mom was a pain she couldn’t express. She looked lost. She kept repeating, again and again: ‘I can’t go into the pharmacy with Nick. I am too famous.’
My suspicion rose further when she began to ask every few minutes: ‘Where are they? Why does it take so much time to get the pills?’
Finally Nick and his friend emerged. He opened a bottle of pills and asked her: ‘Is that what you wanted?’ She nodded and the three of them rushed into their hotel room, while she was shouting: ‘We will see you later, yes, Japanese… Dinner… I love you.’
I feared the worst. Sadly, I was proved correct. The next time I heard from them was three days later. ‘We are in Atlanta. We didn’t mean to disappear. We got sick,’ she said, adding: ‘Can you fly us to LA?’
I was already a sort of surrogate mother to Stina by this time. I was concerned about her and asked if they were addicted and what kind of pills they took, but all she would say was that they wanted to come back to LA ‘to stay with you’.
The following day I discovered a pharmacist’s receipt in Nick Gordon’s name. The prescription had been for Oxycodone, a synthetic painkiller similar to morphine, used by terminally ill cancer patients. I was so concerned I decided to tell Nick’s grandmother. She is a religious woman who has been very strict with him, and she wrote a long, no-nonsense letter to them.
She then told me Nick had put Bobbi Kristina on the phone and they both swore to her that they were not taking drugs. She knew better.
I know Nick was angry with me, but Bobbi Kristina never mentioned my intervention and continued to call and text me. She had her own, inner, imaginary world where Nick was her ‘hubby’ – we could never get from them details about where and when they tied the knot. She once asked me if I could help organise ‘another’ wedding ceremony in California on Nick’s birthday.
She even told Nick’s grandmother when they visited his family that she had given up alcohol, drugs and cigarettes because she wanted to get pregnant. But even as she was saying it, she was tipsy.
Above all, she always said that she wanted to be part of a normal family. Something, of course, she had never experienced. ‘I want children with Nick. I am learning how to be a woman and want to have a dog, a house and a career.’
Her imaginary career included playing her mother in a film of Whitney’s life: ‘I am the only one that can sing like her.’
Nick and Stina were in touch with me regularly. She often spoke about ‘coming to LA to start my career’, but would then disappear for days.
Their lives were dominated by their addiction. It was so sad to see two co-dependents dragging each other down. Whenever I asked if she wanted to do something with her life, she would seize on it, saying: ‘Yes, yes, I am coming to record. Yes, I am writing all the time. Yes, I will show everybody was wrong.’
Did the couple fight? Certainly there were disagreements.
Once, when I returned a missed call from Nick, he answered, but sounded so weak it was clear he was under the influence. He kept saying: ‘I need help.’
I was trying to help them face their problems and asked about a recent TV appearance when they came across as ‘out of it’.
Suddenly Bobbi Kristina grabbed the phone from Nick, and asked me about the show. Then she started to scream at him, blaming him for the fiasco. He kept saying, ‘I need help,’ as she kept shouting.
From what I observed, it was clear she was in the driving seat.
I remember with sadness our last phone call, a few weeks before she went into coma. She was down. She talked about a programme about her late mother on TV.
She was upset not to have been asked to contribute. I told her that her there would be hundreds of books and films about Whitney, but her memories would always be special to her. Stina felt instantly better and repeated that she wanted to come immediately to LA to record.
From what I witnessed, Stina and Nick were in love. But they were co-dependent in a very dangerous world full of money, drugs, booze – and very little else.
I will always remember her sweetness and her dreams of a family and career success: a future cruelly cut short at the age of tender age of 22.
• To hear Bobbi Kristina talking about her mother Whitney Houston, go to mailonsunday/bobbitape and daphnebarak.com
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