Didn't she almost have it all?

Once a megastar, Whitney Houston is now a tabloid "crackhead." But when I looked for someone to blame, I kept finding the diva herself.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Music, Crack, African-Americans, Race, Drug Abuse, Celebrities, Whitney Houston, Rebecca Traister, Life

April 12, 2006 | Two weeks ago, a story by Los Angeles celebrity journalist Nick Papps began, "It's hard to believe that the drugged, dazed woman staring out from [an accompanying] picture was once one of the most popular singers in the world ... But today that woman, Whitney Houston, 42, is just another crack head."

The dim assessment came in response to tabloids that on March 29 printed photos of what is supposedly Houston's Atlanta bathroom, littered with crack pipes, cocaine-coated spoons, cigarette butts, Budweiser cans and garbage. The photos were taken, and sold to the magazines, by Houston's sister-in-law, who provided an accompanying tale of the singer's cracked-out habits, from hallucinating violent demons, to biting and hitting herself, putting her hand through walls, and locking herself away to smoke rock cocaine and pleasure herself with an apparently prodigious collection of vibrators. Speaking about the mess on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor," Billboard executive editor Tamara Conniff said, "I think that she was a really well-manicured diva star and she just turned a little ghetto."

Whitney Houston has sold more than 120 million records. Her first album, "Whitney Houston," sold 24 million copies in 1985, becoming the highest-selling debut for a female solo artist. She was the first American singer to have seven consecutive No. 1 hits. She won six Grammys and 21 American Music Awards; her 1992 cover of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" was the highest-selling single by a woman in pop music history. But her impact went deeper than that: Houston's was one of the only black faces that white girls like me who grew up in the 1980s ever saw in magazines in our dentist's office or in video rotation on early Af-Am-light MTV. For many black girls, she was the only young female role model presented in lily-white teen bibles or mainstream entertainment who looked anything like them.

But 20 years after her record-breaking debut, and a decade-long dominance of the pop charts, Whitney Houston has been reduced to this: "just another crack head," "a really well-manicured diva" who "just turned a little ghetto."

Hearing someone who mattered to me as a child, who was famous in a daily, first-name-only kind of way, whose voice and face were so very beautiful, get tossed away so unceremoniously was jarring to me. Yes, jarring, even after a decade spent watching her career circle the drain. Listening to the ugly overtones of her dismissal -- "crackhead" just half an epithet away from "crack whore" -- I found myself wanting to blame everything that's wrong with American culture. I wanted to point out that successful black women get punished, that women's entertainment careers get manipulated to conform to standards they can't maintain, that Houston's thunderous slide was surely precipitated by racism and sexism and a celebrity machine that chews people up and leaves them for dead. Literally. In 2001, the New York Post reported that MTV has collected B-roll for a Houston obit, an honor normally reserved for geriatrics.

So I called the kinds of people who could shed light on these possibilities. And they did. But in talking and thinking about Houston's story, walking past newsstands where her shiny, bloated face stared up from the tabloid covers, I realized that part of what's so sad about this particular pop culture tragedy is that racism and sexism and celebrity culture only went so far in destroying this woman; the rest she seems to have done herself.

"She couldn't have been a bigger or more beloved star, and she was really the first black America's sweetheart," said Janice Min, editor of Us Weekly, about Houston's mid-'80s profile. "Now she's not even worthy of 'The Surreal Life.' She's fallen below the entertainment C-list level. It's almost too tragic to deal with." Perhaps the surest sign that Houston has essentially ceased to matter is that Min's magazine, whose pages burble and hiss with every plodding plot point in every celebrity soap opera, did not run a story on the Enquirer's "Inside Whitney's Crackden!" scoop.

"We kind of ignored it," Min explained, adding that she decided against covering it only at the last minute. First of all, the story was one hell of a celebrity bummer. "It's a little tawdry for an Us audience, where celebrities have a nice shiny veneer on them. This is a little hardcore," said Min. "You turn to celebrities for escape and voyeurism. When their problems are worse than yours, then you don't want to read about them." And there's no worse buzz kill than a predictable one. "The interesting thing was that when you saw the pictures, you almost wanted to be more surprised than you were," Min continued. "There are a few celebrity stories that filter into the white noise category: Paris Hilton breaking up with a boyfriend, Nicole Richie looking stick thin, and on a much more tragic level, Whitney Houston using drugs. This has been an ongoing plotline for a long time."

It certainly has. Houston has been missing concerts for years. She was booted from the Oscars in 2000 for blowing off rehearsal. When she does perform, she often sings badly and looks consumptive. She's been in and out of rehab, was arrested for marijuana possession in 2002, and admitted to Diane Sawyer that same year that she "partied." Her husband of 14 years, Bobby Brown, has spent time in jail for drunk driving, failure to pay child support, and breaking parole by assaulting his wife in 2003. Houston hasn't released an album since 2003; the most exposure she's had in recent years has been "Being Bobby Brown," the train wreck of a reality show she and her husband headlined last year.

But all that doesn't change who she used to be. It doesn't change the fact that many women in their 30s and late 20s can still remember the 17-year-old fashion model as one of the first women of color to grace the cover of Seventeen in 1980. It wasn't hard to suss out the ways that America's historical anxiety about black femininity and sexuality was manifesting itself during the '80s: These were the years when Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America, was dethroned for having been photographed naked, and when Lisa Bonet, aka Denise Huxtable, was savaged for costarring in the kinky movie "Angel Heart" with Mickey Rourke. If young black women were going to be in the public (white) eye, they had to be pure and unthreatening, especially sexually.

For a long time, Houston fit the bill. And while there's lots to be said about the lengths she, or her P.R. people, may have gone to to make her a palatable crossover sensation, there was no question that her roots were deep in African-American musical tradition. Slick and overproduced though they may have been, Houston's songs were soul and R&B ballads; her voice was huge, and straight out of her Newark, N.J., church choir. She was the product of music royalty, daughter of gospel star Cissy Houston, who sang backup for Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley. Franklin is Whitney's godmother; Dionne Warwick is her cousin.

Houston's run is often described in shorthand now: She sang "the 'Bodyguard' song" ("I Will Always Love You") and "The Greatest Love of All," a tune popular at sixth-grade graduations everywhere. But those are the tip of the iceberg; between 1985 and 1997, she slammed out hit after hit after hit, from peppy dance tunes to ocean-liner-size ballads: "All at Once," "How Will I Know," "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," "You Give Good Love," "Saving All My Love," "So Emotional," "Where Do Broken Hearts Go," "Didn't We Almost Have It All," "One Moment in Time," "Run to You," "I'm Every Woman." Houston's pipes could shake the stereo, make you shiver even when you knew the song was schmaltzy.

Next page: Houston and Brown didn't look right. They didn't appear to be well, or particularly sane