“This wasn’t someone who was pushed into show business.
“It was about being partners on a journey that she knew she was going on,” she says. And she loved Houston, to whom she still refers by her nickname, Nippy. Care-taking came naturally she’d grown up in a family where her father had violently abused her mother and where, from a young age, Crawford had taken on the role of protector. At that time, Houston had a single manager, Crawford recalls, “and he couldn’t get her clothing out, get it pressed, get up early and send it downstairs like I could. The singer’s management team was small in those days – even in the mid-1980s, when Houston’s first two albums became two of the biggest-selling debuts of all time, with some 40m copies sold worldwide (the eponymous Whitney Houston, with its huge hits How Will I Know and Saving All My Love For You and its follow-up, Whitney, featuring I Wanna Dance With Somebody, So Emotional and Didn’t We Almost Have It All). As soon as Houston could afford to, she hired Crawford as her assistant and the women moved into an apartment together in Woodbridge, New Jersey. Crawford went along with Houston’s wishes, and continued to in the years that followed. This is all said in a tone of quiet reflection, but in the book the pain is acute. ‘We were young, and fearless, and free.’ Photograph: courtesy of Robyn Crawford She also told Crawford that, “if they found out – because her career was taking off – they’d use it against us”. In an extraordinary scene in the book, she then went to Crawford’s house, handed her a Bible and told her they had to quit having sex, “because it would make our journey even more difficult”. At the age of 19, Houston signed her first contract with Arista Records president Clive Davis. It was also clear that her relationship with Crawford was going to be a problem. In 1980, when they met, it was already clear Houston was heading for stardom: her cousin, Dionne Warwick, was a veteran star her mother, Cissy, a successful backing singer and Whitney had caught the eye of record executives in New York. The friendship would, in fact, last two decades, but the sexual relationship was short-lived. “We just lived our lives, and I hoped it could go on that way for ever.” “We never talked labels, like lesbian and gay,” Crawford writes. Officially, they were just friends, but even privately they resisted acknowledging what was really going on. Both Houston and Crawford had been raised in God-fearing households, at a time when, she says, “you were either this, or you were that”. The warping effect of denial isn’t easily shrugged off and there is an overwhelming sense, both in the book and in person, of someone running a gamut of internal barriers. If she is coy about this, it’s with good reason. It was something that happened in the flow of a friendship.”īy “something that happened”, Crawford is referring to the years immediately after meeting when the two women were sexually involved. We were two friends – it wasn’t like we met at a club. “She told me she was a singer and that she went to Mount St Dominic Academy, and I told her I was playing basketball and in college.
She was a basketball star, home from college Houston was still in high school. “There was an instant connection,” Crawford says. In her publisher’s New York office, the 55-year-old is softly spoken and elegant, choosing her words with the care of someone still half stuck in the mindset of shielding her friend.Ĭrawford and Houston were teenagers when they met at a community centre in East Orange, New Jersey, the singer the younger by three years. Even seven years after the singer’s death, Crawford clearly continues to struggle. To break any silence is difficult – never mind one enforced over decades, at the risk of huge commercial damage to a brand as valuable as Houston’s. Reading her book, one gets the chilling sense not only of how alien things were in the very recent past, but of a story that shouldn’t be repeated in the future.
“I found comfort in my silence,” says Crawford, whose decision to write the book was in part a rebuke to the tabloidisation of her friend’s legacy. Meanwhile, Crawford was harangued, marginalised, and allegedly threatened with violence by the singer’s family. More acutely, it is the story of two women who, for the entirety of Houston’s life, concealed the sexual origins of that relationship, amid intense and often prurient speculation. T he story told by Robyn Crawford in the pages of A Song For You, an account of her decades-long relationship with Whitney Houston is tender, moving and painful to read, the history of a friendship that is also a love story.