So emotional. Same Script, Different Cast? I Have Nothing. Heartbreak Hotel… All top titles from a legendary songstress and each a fitting depiction of the life and death of her daughter.
Bobbi Kristina Brown may never have reached the heights of her mother’s success – nor did she have her singing skill. But, like Whitney Houston, hers was an existence marred by contradictions.
Yes, she was the offspring of two of the biggest stars to emerge from the1980s and to the outside eye, she seemed to almost have it all. But as the cracks in Houston and husband, Bobby Brown’s toxic relationship grew into crevices of endless conflict spurred by their mutual substance abuse, the world began to realise life for baby Bobbi was far from a fantasy existence.
To the extent that a recently released book claims, where Whitney was already making a name for herself aged only 14 as a back-up singer for the likes of Chaka Khan, BKB’s 14th year was marked by a stint in a psychiatric facility. The motivation for her incarceration? Attempted suicide after stabbing her mother with the same knife she used to slash her wrists.
Meanwhile, Mommy and Daddy were too busy battling and blaming each other for the downward turn their lives had taken as they smoked, snorted and boozed their way towards divorce, to pay much attention to their only child’s blatant cry for help. Or to acknowledge that they were the very reason for her misery, for that matter.
Three years later, just shy of her 18th birthday, Bobbi found herself confined in a formal facility again, this one a drug rehabilitation centre. Then came Whitney’s sudden demise. Bobbi was said to be “broken” by the passing of the woman – the only person in her young life, really – who, for better or worse, had been her idol.
A further three years later, almost to the day, Bobbi was herself found comatose in a bathtub-and-drugs scenario eerily similar to that of her mother’s. She would never recover.
But is Bobbi’s death indeed a tragedy, as most have dubbed it, or a clear-cut case of spoilt little rich girl syndrome? After all, there are many children the world over – and a large number of them barely into their teens – who have lost a parent to drugs/violence/war/disease. And unlike Bobbi, they have no posse of people or a sizeable inheritance to afford them the luxury of wallowing in their grief indefinitely. They’re simply expected to pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps and get on with it.
Should money and fame alone, however, be sufficient cause to dismiss what was obviously her very real suffering? According to Al Bowman (Whitney’s chauffeur for two decades, who witnessed much of what went on behind the scenes in the Houston household from the time Bobbi was born) the answer is obvious: “That young girl was raised in a world no child should live in.”
And, as another social media commentator is quick to point out: “As an adult, Bobbi could have educated herself and chosen a different path. But I suppose being surrounded by ‘yes people’ with no one to guide her and everyone seemingly only after her money, the poor soul never stood a chance.”