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  Dedicated to the unique spirits of Whitney and Krissi

  INTRODUCTION

  The cable guy was running late when he rang the doorbell at approximately 10:20 AM on January 31 at the luxury town house in Roswell, inside the well-heeled gated complex of the tiny Atlanta suburb where Whitney Houston had lived before her 2012 death.

  The door was answered by Max Lomas, who was apparently unaware that Bobbi Kristina Brown—his ex-girlfriend—had been expecting a service call. He went off to look for her. Moments later, he found Bobbi lying facedown in a bathtub filled with water. Hearing cries of help, his buddy Nick Gordon came running. As the two pulled Bobbi’s body out of the bathtub, they were joined by Max’s girlfriend, Danyela Bradley, who had stayed over the night before.

  At 10:29 AM, while Nick performed CPR, Max phoned 911 to report that a girl had been found “drowning.” In the nearly twenty minutes it took for paramedics to show up, the two men took turns attempting to revive the twenty-one-year-old young woman with whom both men had a tumultuous history. As Danyela looked on, terrified, she couldn’t help but notice that the bathwater was ice-cold and that the girl had strange marks around her mouth and chin.

  Just under twenty minutes later, paramedics arrived and transported the unconscious victim by ambulance to the nearby North Fulton Hospital in Roswell. Less than an hour later, the world learned that Bobbi Kristina Brown was fighting for her life in circumstances that eerily paralleled the death of her famous mother, who had accidentally drowned in a bathtub nearly three years earlier, also facedown.

  But when I received a call at my home in Miami on February 4 from someone with indirect ties to the case, the caller shared a cryptic piece of information:

  “It looks like we have ourselves another Natalie Wood.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  In February 1994, Whitney Houston was at the pinnacle of her career. Thanks to her work on the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, and its megahit single “I Will Always Love You,” the awards and accolades were pouring in. On February 7, she attended the American Music Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in LA, where she swept a total of eight awards that evening. When Best Soul/R&B album was announced, she came rushing across the stage with a baby in her arms to accept the award. As she began her speech, little Bobbi Kristina—a pink ribbon in her hair—reached for the microphone. Before she could grab it, Whitney scolded her and went on with her speech. It was a portent of a life spent reaching for the spotlight in her mother’s shadow, but never quite getting there.

  Three decades earlier, Whitney Houston had also started life in the shadow of a performing mother.

  Cissy Drinkard’s parents were part of the first major wave of black Southerners to migrate north. In 1923, they relocated with three children from the seething racism of Georgia to a working-class, mixed-race neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, to a home with their first indoor toilet. Cissy came along ten years later, the last of eight children, at the height of the Depression. Her father was one of the lucky ones whose strong back served him well in a steady series of jobs repairing roads and pouring iron to keep his family fed and clothed while many around them went hungry.

  Devout Christians, the family attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church where voices raised in music and prayer could be heard day and night, not just on Sundays. Their devotion helped the family get through their overwhelming devastation when Cissy’s mother lost two sets of twins at birth in succession. Giving birth to twelve children by the time she was thirty took a tremendous toll on Delia Mae Drinkard’s health. At age thirty-four, she suffered a massive stroke that left her in a wheelchair with brain damage and impaired movement in her arm and leg. Not long afterward, the tenement building where they lived in a cramped apartment was engulfed in flames, destroying all the family’s possessions. The fire proved a mixed blessing when city services relocated the Drinkards to a better neighborhood and a new church.

  Cissy was only five years old when her family began attending the St. Luke’s A.M.E. Church, where, she later recalled, you could feel the “force of the Spirit and the music” from the moment you stepped inside its doors. Their old church had a piano, but St. Luke’s had cymbals, tambourines, and even a washboard to accompany the joyous clapping and syncopation that rang through its pews. It was the first time Cissy began to experience music as something spiritual, and, along with her brothers and sister, she wholeheartedly embraced it. When her father heard them singing together, he decided they had something special and made them practice at home for hours at a time. Sometimes Cissy didn’t feel like practicing and would run outside and hide behind the car, but her father would always find her and threaten her with a beating. And, although he wouldn’t hesitate to take his hand to the other children, Cissy was his “baby,” and she was always spared.

  Cissy recalls these first few years in the new neighborhood as the happiest times of her young life. But in May 1941, a dark cloud would descend on the family when Delia Mae suffered another stroke. As the children gathered at the window to watch their father bring her home from the hospital in her wheelchair, they watched instead as he arrived alone and sobbing. An aunt shouted out, “Your mother is dead.” Cissy would never recover from the emptiness and sorrow that came with losing her beloved mother at such a young age. The only thing that kept the family from falling apart, she recalls, was music.

  Her father would often come home from his job late at night, only to wake the children and ask for a song. Soon, the Drinkard family was being booked to sing in churches and gospel programs in New Jersey and even New York. Although her father permitted them to listen only to gospel music, Cissy and her sister would sneak Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington records onto their old Victrola or duck out to the local teen spots and listen to the jukebox. As they danced to the blues, they dreamed of singing in the nightclubs across the river that their father had warned them were filled with sin and temptation.

  After her father announced he was getting remarried and that Cissy would come to live with him and his new wife, Viola, she remembers running out of the house in tears and ending up at St. Luke’s despairing about the hardships that had been visited on her. As she heard the voice of the reverend preaching to the congregation, and the voices of the choir reverberating, she describes an epiphany where, for the first time, she shared her father’s vision of the purpose of singing. Gospel music was a ministry, “an end in itself,” spreading the Word of the Lord through song. She knew where she wanted to devote her life.

  Meanwhile, the Drinkard Singers were starting to make a name for themselves getting gigs all up and down the Eastern seaboard. Traveling the gospel circuit, they regularly opened for established acts such as the Swan Silvertones and the Dixie Hummingbirds. Booked to accompany the Soul Stirrers, sixteen-year-old Cissy met their lead singer, Sam Cooke, and fell for his devastating good looks. He proposed, and she was tempted, but in the end, his fast life and secular music was incompatible with the values of her devout family, which considered such a lifestyle a form of backsliding from the church.

  As manager of the Drinkards, Cissy’s older sister Lee Warrick (her daughters would later change the spelling to Warwick)—determined to keep the group far from the “temptations” of popular entertainment—rejected a number of recording deals, national road tours, and even TV shoots. But some offers proved just too tempting to turn d
own, especially the opportunity to appear at Carnegie Hall with the legendary Mahalia Jackson—a performance so raucous that Jackson threatened to call the police to empty the hall if the crowd didn’t settle down. But even an appearance on the world-renowned stage couldn’t convince Nicholas Drinkard to loosen the tight grip he firmly believed was necessary to keep his children on the straight and narrow. To the family patriarch, music served only one purpose—to preach the Word. Cissy’s talents would be put to better use directing St. Luke’s choir and helping others to express their gift to the Lord. Reluctantly, Cissy agreed to take over the grueling task with what she called “a firm hand” while “taking no mess.”

  In 1952, the family received yet another blow when Nicholas was diagnosed with stomach cancer. A week later he was dead, and Cissy was an orphan at eighteen. Rudderless, she turned to alcohol and partied almost every night in the dens of sin from which she had always been sheltered. Her faith unshaken, Cissy still found herself in church every Sunday morning and still determined to lead the choir in order to honor her father’s memory. But her heart was no longer in St. Luke’s, which held too many painful memories of a happier time.

  The Drinkard Singers had performed on a number of occasions at the New Hope Baptist Church in the University Heights section of the city and had always enjoyed its welcoming vibe. Together, the family made the decision to leave St. Luke’s and make New Hope their new spiritual home. Cissy felt rejuvenated at her new place of worship and before long was directing the choir that would one day produce a superstar named Nippy.

  * * *

  During her young life to date, Cissy had turned down more than one marriage proposal and beaten back the advances of countless men. But now, freed from the strict reins and moral compass of her father, she let her guard down. Wooed by a handsome construction worker named Freddy Garland, she agreed to his hasty marriage proposal after dating for a little more than a month. Looking back, she would explain that she rushed into marriage because she was “lonely,” especially since all her brothers and sisters had by then started families. At age twenty-one, the two tied the knot at a ceremony held at New Hope attended by her family. It was a colossal mistake. Within months, Cissy came to regret her decision and was on the verge of leaving Freddy when she found out she was pregnant. Stuck in a loveless marriage and with a baby on the way, she weighed her options and foresaw only years of misery. Without looking back, she packed up her belongings one day and moved in with her sister.

  She was already starting to show when the Drinkard Singers got the call that would change Cissy’s life. The quartet was invited to appear at the Newport Jazz Festival—the biggest in the world at the time—with Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward. The reception to their rollicking performance that day was overwhelming—they were nearly mobbed by the huge crowd—and within days, Lee received an offer for the group to sign with RCA Victor, making them the first gospel group ever to sign with the prestigious label. Four months later, Cissy gave birth to a boy named Gary. She was now a single mother.

  In 1958, the Drinkards released their first album, A Joyful Noise, which received some radio play though the sales were not spectacular. Among those who were most impressed by their sound was a young Elvis Presley—then at the height of his career—who invited the group to record and tour with him. Shocked by his brazen sexuality, Lee immediately rejected the offer. Rock and roll was incompatible with the Spirit of the Lord, she insisted.

  Not long afterward, the group was invited to perform a weekly televised gospel show from Symphony Hall in Newark. Watching from his living room one Sunday morning, a truck driver named John Houston was struck by the look of the group’s beautiful lead singer. Determined to meet her, Houston made his way to the hall and introduced himself to Cissy following the broadcast.

  When she laid eyes on the tall, light-skinned man who, like her father, was part Native American, she was immediately struck by his looks. “He was gorgeous,” she recalled. It dawned on her that she had seen him once before, when she was fourteen and he was an army MP searching for an AWOL soldier in the tenement next to hers. At the time, she and her friends thought he was the most handsome man they had ever seen. Now here he was, asking her out on a date.

  Having attended a Catholic prep school on a scholarship, John Houston was well read, sophisticated, and “drop dead funny.” Separated from his first wife, he was thirteen years older than Cissy, and her sisters most decidedly did not approve, calling him a “cradle robber.” But Cissy was hooked, and before long, the two were inseparable. Still a devout Christian and leader of the New Hope Choir, she knew she was “doing wrong” when she moved into an apartment on Eighth Street with John. But life was hard as a single mother, and John loved kids.

  His divorce wasn’t final, so marriage was out of the question for some time, but John drove taxis when he wasn’t driving the big rigs, and he was a good provider to Cissy and Gary. He loved gospel music and fancied himself something of an impresario. Lee didn’t want anything to do with him. There was no way he was going to mess with the Drinkard Singers. But attending New Hope on Sundays, he couldn’t help but notice Cissy’s two talented nieces—Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick—who sang with the choir she still directed. The two girls had gotten together a little quartet they called the Gospelaires. Acting as their informal manager, John got the group some gigs at local gospel shows. They would frequently travel to the Apollo Theater, across the river in Harlem, for amateur night. One night backstage, he offered his group’s services to a musician seeking background singers for a recording session featuring Sam “The Man” Taylor.

  Before long, Dionne and Dee Dee were working with some of the biggest names in music, including Elvis’s songwriters Leiber and Stoller, the Coasters, Dinah Washington, and the Drifters. John Houston had become a full-fledged player at the center of the action, but he had set his sights firmly on another act a little closer to home. As he saw the Warwicks soar as background singers, he knew that the real money was to be made with solo acts. And he had just the one in mind. Convinced that Cissy could be a star if she went out on her own with him opening doors, he worked on her day and night. But she firmly resisted. Recalling her father’s disdain for popular music, she wouldn’t betray his memory, or her calling, just to make money. In between the Drinkard gigs, she had a steady job at the RCA plant and was content. Besides, she later recalled, she was stubborn. She wasn’t going to do something just because a man wanted her to do it. She was also about to be a mother again. Michael Houston was born in 1961 and now she had young two boys at home.

  Yet John had not given up. Dionne was booked for a session with Scepter Records, but John had double-booked her for another session with a rockabilly star named Ronnie Hawkins, who was being touted as the next Elvis. Finding himself in a jam, John begged his girlfriend to step in just this once. Reluctantly, Cissy agreed. Immediately she was hooked. She knew her sisters would disapprove, but she managed to rationalize her decision. She decided she could be in the world of secular music without being of that world. Before long, she was singing backup with her nieces on a Drifters album that was destined to be a classic. At one of these sessions, Dionne was discovered by Burt Bacharach, who was instrumental in signing her to Scepter—the first stepping-stone to her hugely successful solo career. By December, she had her first top-ten single. And that same month, Cissy discovered that she was pregnant once again. She prayed it would be a girl.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Within hours of the news that Bobbi Kristina had been discovered, barely breathing, in the bathtub, the disparate branches of Bobbi’s family began to descend on Atlanta. And it seemed appropriate that the city had once been known as the epicenter of an epic civil war. Since Whitney’s passing, it seemed a civil war had been simmering within the family. Now it was about to erupt.

  The first indications that all was not well came when an Atlanta spokeswoman announced to the press that Bobbi Kristina had been found by her “husband,” Nick Gordon, and a fr
iend at around 10:20 AM. Indeed, Bobbi had Instagrammed a photo of her and Nick wearing “wedding bands” in January 2014 under the hashtag #HappilyMarried.

  Following the news that Bobbi had been hospitalized, her father, Bobby Brown, immediately flew from Los Angeles to be by her side—on a private plane lent to him by his close friend, the Hollywood personality Tyler Perry. The producer and star of the popular Madea franchise had also supplied a plane to fly the body of Bobbi’s mother, Whitney, from Los Angeles to a funeral home in New Jersey in 2012.

  Arriving in Atlanta on Saturday, Bobby issued a media statement before ducking into the Roswell hospital through a back entrance to be by his daughter’s side. “Privacy is requested in this matter,” he said. “Please allow for my family to deal with this matter and give my daughter the love and support she needs at this time.”

  Inside, a distraught Brown kept a nearly twenty-four-hour vigil in the room where other members of the family had also gathered. Although there was no love lost between Bobby and Whitney’s tight-knit family, they managed to put aside their differences to consult with medical staff on Bobbi’s condition. Cissy, closely following developments back in New Jersey, would not arrive for another six days, though her daughter-in-law Pat Houston kept her apprised by phone.

  Brown continued his vigil, standing over Bobbi in the intensive care unit, stroking her hair and murmuring “baby girl.” According to a member of the staff, he could frequently be seen singing gospel hymns near her bedside, often joined by members of Whitney’s family. He even joined in a rendition of Whitney’s signature tune, “Greatest Love of All.”

  The medical prognosis was not good. Tests showed that Bobbi—who had likely been unconscious for minutes underwater—had little brain function and was unlikely to recover. Tight-lipped about her condition, medical staff let it be known to the press that she was “fighting for her life” but refused to provide any more details.