When David Roberts first met Whitney Houston, he had never heard her sing. In fact, he had no idea who she was. “Seems strange now,” he says, with a gentle laugh. It was February 1988 and Houston was one of the most famous pop stars on the planet. But Roberts wasn’t part of that world. For years, he had been a police officer and then a sergeant in the royalty and diplomatic protection departments of Scotland Yard, serving in Northern Ireland before setting up his own private security business. He did regular work for the American embassy in London, whose staff, out of the blue, asked him to look after Houston while she was on a visit to the city.
Houston had just released her second album, Whitney, which had seen her achieve seven consecutive No 1 hits in America, eclipsing the record set by the Beatles and the Bee Gees. She was 23, and seen as a breakthrough artist who would pave the way for future African American acts with crossover appeal.
But Roberts wasn’t sure he wanted the job. He didn’t have a particularly high opinion of music stars, with their penchant for wild parties and trashing hotel rooms. Still, he agreed to meet her. It was a decision that was to change both of their lives.
“I was singularly impressed by her,” he recalls, speaking over the phone from his home in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he still runs a security and investigations business. “The stereotypical attitudes I had of that industry were completely dissipated by this sophisticated young lady.”
Houston was warm, natural and funny. She spoke softly. He was struck by both her intelligence and her child-like innocence. “She could have been my daughter,” he says. “When she was away from the spotlight, she was like a normal kid.”
After the meeting, Roberts went out and bought her albums on CD. When he listened to her voice, it was “a blow-away situation… I realised: this woman can sing”. He decided to take the job.
For the next seven years, Roberts, now 64, would be Houston’s personal bodyguard. He went on tour with her, shielded her from scuffles with photographers and fans, and would stand outside her hotel room to guard her through the night.
He also witnessed Houston’s tragic disintegration: her increasing reliance on drugs and alcohol, her spiral into addiction, and her troubled marriage to rap star Bobby Brown. He stopped working for her in 1995. When, 17 years later, Houston was found dead in a hotel room bathtub at the age of 48, Roberts was devastated but, he says “not surprised… I was so disappointed, because it could have been stopped”.
Five years on from her death, Houston’s story is being retold in a documentary by award-winning director Nick Broomfield, and co-directed by Rudi Dolezal. Whitney: Can I Be Me premiered at the Tribeca film festival in New York and is released in the UK on 16 June. It features previously unseen footage from Houston’s 1999 world tour, as well as contributions from friends and colleagues, including Roberts, and is a moving portrait of a woman defeated by the pressures of fame.
In some ways, Houston’s life is a modern parable: she was the girl who grew up singing in a gospel choir, before being plucked out of New Jersey by white, male, middle-aged record label bosses, who packaged and primped her to be as saccharine and unthreatening as possible, until she became the quintessential American pop star.
Her voice was extraordinary. But, behind the scenes, she struggled to reconcile who she really was with who everyone else seemed to want her to be. At the 1988 Soul Train music awards, she was booed by the crowd, ostensibly for being “too white” – a moment her former saxophonist, Kirk Whalum, describes as “emotionally devastating. She, I don’t think, ever recovered from it.”
Roberts, a plain-spoken, mustachioed Welshman, is not much given to overarching theories. He speaks in a clipped, straightforward tone, as if compiling an official report, and doesn’t like to dwell on what might have happened to Houston had the circumstances been different. You could say that about anything, he reasons, and ruin your life with conjecture. Ultimately, he wasn’t able to protect her. And for him, that’s the worst kind of failure.
Roberts describes his job as “a vocation” and one in which he was willing to give his own life. He was so dedicated to the woman he still calls “Miss Houston” that he was the real-life inspiration for The Bodyguard, the 1992 movie that made her into a global superstar. The soundtrack featured Houston’s version of I Will Always Love You and sold more than 17m copies. The bodyguard in the film was played by Kevin Costner – “a good two inches taller than me, and with two or three women hanging from his neck at all times,” says Roberts. “Was he like me? Oh heck, no!” He laughs. “I was never romantically involved with Miss Houston. And I was never shot at either.”
Still, there were some notable similarities. Some time before the film’s release, Roberts remembers Houston slipping a note under his hotel room door while on tour in Japan “and it said something like ‘We will always love you.’” In The Bodyguard, Houston played a character called Rachel Marron – the fake name Roberts used to check her into hotels.
“After that,” he says, “we had to think of a new name.”
In the early days of their working relationship, all went smoothly. Roberts would go on tour for two to three months at a time, and was impressed by Houston’s professionalism. He once witnessed her walk into a recording studio, perform a single take of One Moment in Time for the 1988 Olympic Games, and leave 20 minutes later having delivered a note-perfect rendition.
“She was known as ‘One-take Houston’,” he says. “She was back before the hamburgers got cold.”
Back then, Houston was primarily looked after by her childhood friend-turned-assistant, Robyn Crawford, with whom Roberts got on well. There were persistent rumours that Crawford and Houston were lovers – a narrative the documentary hints at more than once.
“I don’t think they were,” Roberts says now. He saw it more as a close female friendship – the kind of bond forged by a shared childhood in East Orange, New Jersey. Crawford went to the same high school as Houston and, being a couple of years older, used to defend her from bullies. “When I came on the scene, they were just together all the time as friends,” says Roberts, “quite happy to watch the telly.”
The atmosphere changed when Bobby Brown came on the scene. Brown was the “bad boy” of rap, a man raised in Orchard Park, a notorious estate in Boston, and who, as part of the R&B five-piece New Edition, became renowned for his short temper, his womanising and his drug taking. For Houston, the daughter of gospel singer Cissy Houston and the cousin of Dionne Warwick, he seemed to represent a side of herself she had long suppressed.
It was “infatuation” says Roberts, “probably inspired by the fact her mother said no.”
The first time he met Brown was at Houston’s 26th birthday. The rapper, recalls Roberts, was wearing “a blue turquoise floral suit, white socks, black loafers and with his hair out at a rakish angle.” Roberts’s first impressions were not favourable. “I don’t think I’ve ever been impressed by Mr Brown… He was just not good at looking after her. He was always either in conflict or creating conflict.”
When the couple married in 1992, Brown “lost his own identity, which I suspect he resented deeply, especially as his own talents were inferior to Miss Houston’s”. He became verbally and physically abusive, says Roberts, publicly demeaning her at every opportunity: “It was a pervasive atmosphere. In the days prior to the advent of Mr Brown, we’d go shopping to a mall, we could buy some clothes, get a cup of coffee. However, when we tried the same in the presence of ‘Mr Whitney Houston’, then it became a complete battle as to who could attract the most attention; and the more he tried it, the more she tried to meet it.
“That was her problem all the way along – whatever he did, she tried to do the same to make him feel comfortable in an environment where he was otherwise totally out of his depth.”
She wanted to please him so much that she forgot to look after herself?
“Yes,” he says, simply. “That was the story of her life.” He compares it to “battered wife syndrome” which he witnessed as a policeman: “[Brown] 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.”
After Brown came on the scene, Houston’s drug use increased dramatically. The documentary suggests she had nurtured a recreational habit since her teens, but Brown had an alcohol problem and mixed the two. Roberts knew it was going on, but “never in my seven-and-a-half years in her presence did I ever personally witness her imbibing any drug other than a Newport cigarette or a bottle of Heineken… She respected me too much to do it in front of me.”
Behind closed doors, however, Houston was developing a ravaging dependency on cocaine-laced joints and crack. Brown had got rid of Robyn Crawford in a fit of jealousy and, to Roberts’s disgust, no one in Houston’s entourage did anything to halt the obvious deterioration in the singer’s health. Instead, they turned a blind eye to her habit so that she, in turn, would “continue to earn them money”. She became “a commodity, a possession, a tool for making money”, says Roberts. In 1995, Houston overdosed while on the set of the movie Waiting to Exhale. By that stage, she had a three-year-old daughter, Bobbi Kristina, and Roberts felt he had to intervene.
“I was almost given the task by her doctor,” he says now. “He said that something had to be done. His concerns were quite specific: that she had to have an operation to remove nodules that were growing on her voice-box, otherwise, within eight months, she wouldn’t ever be able to sing in the same manner she used to again.” He pauses. “And it came to pass.”
Roberts wrote a letter to Houston’s lawyers outlining his concerns, citing specific examples of members of her entourage smuggling drugs on tour by hiding them in their genitalia. A week later, he was informed his services were no longer required. He never spoke to Whitney Houston again.
Roberts is not a man to oversentimentalise, or vent his anger, but his contempt for Bobby Brown is clear. When I ask whether he thinks Houston would be alive today if she had never met Brown, he says: “The short answer is yes… Unfortunately Mr Brown has a lot of inadequacies he has to come to terms with, and I’m not sure he has, even to this day.”
After they parted company, Roberts looked on from the sidelines as Houston’s career unravelled. She was dropped from a live performance at the 2000 Oscars because producers claimed she was unable to hold a tune. She subsequently went to rehab, twice.
In 2006, the National Enquirer printed a shocking photograph of Houston’s bathroom, the surfaces scattered with a crack pipe, coated spoons and cigarette butts. Her marriage to Brown ended in 2007. Five years later, police were called to her suite in the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, and found her face-down in the bath.
When news of her death came, Roberts was sitting on the balcony of his West Palm Beach apartment, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Someone called him – he can’t remember who – and his first instinct was to turn on the television, “and there it was”.
He felt depleted. Above all, he was upset by the pointless waste of it all.
“So many people could have done so much to avoid that,” he says. “They didn’t. They abdicated responsibility in favour of greed.”
Houston’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina, died three years later at 22, in eerily similar circumstances – she had also drowned in the bath after a cardiac arrest possibly induced by “drug intoxication”.
Roberts sometimes listens to Houston’s version of I Will Always Love You. Or he’ll catch snippets of it as he walks down the street, played by some unknown radio, the sound of her voice drifting on the humid Florida breeze.
It’s a different song to him now, one that leaves him feeling profound regret. He tried his best. But in the end no one could save Whitney Houston, least of all herself.
Whitney: “Can I Be Me” is released in cinemas on 16 June; the premiere and a live performance from Michelle John at Sheffield Doc/Fest on 11 June will be broadcast into cinemas nationwide. Tickets available via whitneyhoustonfilm.com
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This article was amended on 5 June. Whitney Houston smoked Newport not Marlboro cigarettes, and the “one take” song for the Olympics was One Moment in Time, not The Greatest Love of All
