Most readers will go straight to the Whitney Houston section of record mogul Clive Davis’s autobiography, “The Soundtrack of My Life,” published today by Simon & Schuster. It’s heartbreaking when you realize how much Davis did to try and help Houston. Davis includes letters he sent Whitney from the beginning of her career to the morning after her shockingly thin appearance – a result of her drug addiction– in September 2001 at Michael Jackson’s 30th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden.
He wrote: “Dearest Whitney: When I saw you last night at the Michael Jackson concert, I gasped. When I got home I cried. My dear, dear Whitney. The time has come.” He implored her to get help quickly. She didn’t listen.
Read the full letter here: http://www.showbiz411.com/2013/02/19/clive-daviss-pleading-letter-to-whitney-houston-september-2011
Clive brought Whitney and her entourage to his home in Westchester County, New York, as a kind of intervention. It wasn’t to make money. It was to save her life. But she wouldn’t listen when he spoke to her with urgency about her problems. “She was in complete denial,” Davis writer. “I knew that if an addict does not want to get help, there ultimately is very little that anyone else can do.”
There were at least two other interventions and rehab stints that Davis supported but didn’t engineer. But there is just so much you can do: when Whitney got into a fight with a flight attendant on her way to Detroit to shoot “Sparkle,” it made headlines. This reporter was the one who mentioned it to Clive, and suggested trouble was brewing. The disappointment on his face was palpable. It hurt him to hear she might be suffering again.
Davis got the call that Whitney died as he was dressing for his annual pre-Grammy dinner. She had just been in his hotel suite that week. He writes: “There are moments when time stands still, and you feel as if you can’t even begin to comprehend the words that are being spoken to you. That’s how I felt right then.”
