It’s a balmy evening in late summer and just for tonight the sprawling back lot at Universal Studios has been transformed into Bobbyland. There are posters of Bobby’s new album cover blown up billboard size; walls of TV monitors playing Bobby’s newest video, “Humpin’ Around”; and partygoers mingling in baseball caps that read, simply, “Bobby.” It’s been four years since Bobby Brown’s last album, Don’t Be Cruel, sold eight million copies, and MCA didn’t want to release his long-anticipated follow-up (titled, simply, Bobby) without a great deal of fanfare. “So we decided to throw a party,” says MCA Records president Richard Palmese, a man not known for understatement. “And this is the greatest party in years.”
The mob is penned in by scaffolding and booths marked in big red letters: cajun popcorn, fried chicken, vegetable pantry, and fruit. There are two different levels to this bash, and in the V.I.P. tier, record execs are chatting each other up; members of Bell Biv DeVoe are munching on shrimp; and Sinbad is trying to conduct a radio interview with Mr. Brown himself. Despite the crowd screaming over the sound of “Humpin’ Around,” playing over and over and over again, the main point of curiosity at this party is Whitney Houston, a.k.a. Mrs. Bobby Brown.
Dressed in a pale-pink, loose-fitting silk suit, she is sitting at a table in between Robyn Crawford, her executive assistant, who bears a striking resemblance to Detroit Piston ace Isiah Thomas, and her new mother-in-law, Carol Brown, who is visibly ecstatic about the party. As Bobby emerges from the V.I.P. tent, looking characteristically dapper in a pale-green suit, a matching polka-dot shirt, and his trademark diamonds (watch, ring, pendant), he makes a beeline for the table, and his wife and mother beam in harmony. He kisses Houston, and she whispers something in his ear. He smiles and kisses her again. “I had my doubts about this relationship,” says a member of Brown’s camp. “But when you see them together, you know it’s love.”
There was certainly reason to wonder. On the surface, this couple seems remarkably mismatched. She’s the squeaky-clean pop diva in sequins; he’s the B-boy from the projects who was once arrested and fined for simulating sex onstage. She’s a morning person; he gets up at two in the afternoon. She is so devoted to her two Akitas, Lucy and Ethel, that she reportedly built a $75,000 house for them, a miniature version of her New Jersey mansion; he is afraid of dogs. She’ll wear the same thing two days running, while he travels everywhere with two extra pairs of shoes in case he gets tired of the ones he’s got on. (“Even as a kid I could never wear dirty sneakers,” he says. “I’d just keep going and steal me a new pair.”)
More significantly, there are the persistent rumors that Houston is gay (which she has repeatedly denied) and that Brown is a crackhead (which he has repeatedly denied). He was, however, definitely a ladies’ man (“Getting girls is how I live,” he once sang); he has three children, by two different women. “I think women are God’s gift to this earth,” explains Brown. “I love women.” Houston, who previously dated Eddie Murphy, is now expecting Bobby’s fourth child. “It feels different this time,” he says. “It’s different being married.”
Despite all the disparities, this seems to be a real relationship. Whitney and Bobby are the inverse of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Like Ginger, Bobby gives a sexual charge to the pure image of Whitney (Fred), while she graces him with a veneer of class.
They rub off on each other professionally as well. In recent years, Houston has not sold to the black audience the way, say, Bobby Brown has. “Whitney’s gone through a real rough spot with her black base,” explains Ernie Singleton, president of the Black Music Division at MCA Records. “She wants to ‘cross-black.’ Being married to Bobby Brown might help her with that.”
But marketing considerations aside, the couple seems to understand each other, and their separate worlds. Right now, it’s getting late and Mrs. Brown is ready to leave Mr. Brown’s party and go back to the hotel. He walks her to her limo, kisses her good-bye, and returns to Bobbyland, where he parties with his pals until early in the morning.
“Nicollette married Harry Hamlin so she could get a green card?!?” It’s a week later and Whitney Houston is reading aloud from the National Enquirer and other tabloids as she gets her makeup done for a photo shoot. She is competing with her own voice: in the background, one of her cuts from the sound track for The Bodyguard her upcoming feature-film debut, is playing loud. “Fergie’s pregnant?” Houston says now to Ellin Lavar, who is curling the hair on Whitney’s wiglet. “My oh my,” she continues, leafing through the pages, stopping at an article on Roseanne Arnold.
Houston is wearing skinny black jeans, black sneakers, and a white T-shirt. She has a lovely face, with an almost doe-ish quality, like a Disney character. Her manner is considerably more playful and girlish than her image: she is relaxed, but professional. “Madonna says k. d. lang looks so much like Sean Penn she could fall in love with her,” Houston recites. She folds the paper in half. “I like to read them,” she says. “It’s either me or Oprah they’re writing about. They take turns.”
Ellin laughs, and Houston concentrates on what Kevyn Aucoin, the makeup impresario, is doing to her eyes. She’s surprisingly nonchalant about being in the tabloid spotlight, but then again, she’s been around show business and its attendant vagaries all of her life. Her mother, Cissy Houston, is the great gospel singer who sang backup for, among others, Aretha Franklin, and Whitney’s cousin is Dionne Warwick. “Even before Dionne became famous,” Houston recalls, “my mother and her sister were singers—the Drinkard Singers—and they traveled widely and were famous in their own right.”
Houston, who is 29, grew up in East Orange, New Jersey, and first sang in the New Hope Baptist Church. “Church was the family function,” she has said. “Every Sunday that came I went to church. I was in church Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, skipped Wednesday because that was adult choir rehearsal, I was back Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then again on Sunday.”