It must be a slow news week.
A British former cop named Dave Roberts is getting a lot of attention today for a book he’s about to self-publish called “Protecting Whitney.” He claims, among other things, that he was the inspiration for the Kevin Costner character Frank Farmer in the movie “The Bodyguard” which co-starred Houston.
It’s a bunch of malarkey. “The Bodyguard,” as is well documented, was written by “The Big Chill” and Indiana Jones writer Lawrence Kasdan in the 1970s for Diana Ross and the late Steve McQueen. Roberts, now 73, would have been in his early 20s, making this claim preposterous.
Roberts did eventually do some security for Houston, freelance and full time. But he was not her bodyguard during the making of that movie. That job fell to Peter Weireter, says Alan Jacobs, who was Whitney’s personal bodyguard in the later 1990s and early 2000s.
Jacobs tells me Roberts “is an odd fellow and is obviously still obsessed with Whitney. It is beyond my imagination to think how narcissistic he is to think that anybody cares about his personal infatuation with Whitney. Nobody knows who he is, no one cares, there’s nothing he can say that hasn’t been said by numerous other people.He just wants to do this for his ego. There’s nothing new here. He always had a huge ego. That was his main problem.”
Roberts thought he was so important to Whitney that at one point he wrote a letter to her father, John Houston, and others in management about her drug use. He was immediately fired, which he owns up to. He never saw Whitney again. That was roughly 20 years ago.
In one anecdote, Roberts says Houston wrote Post-It notes and slipped them under his door. Jacobs — whom I’ve known since 1999 at least — laughed. He asked me, “You knew Whitney. Would she do something like that?” The answer is a resounding ‘no.’
Jacobs, meantime, went on to do personal security for Penny Marshall, Rodney Jerkins, Jessica Alba, and for Meg Ryan on the film “In the Cut.”
Chicago Review Press is a self-publisher that obviously doesn’t do much research into their authors. They just accept manuscripts and publish them for a fee. It might have helped them to a little vetting in this case. I’m told Whitney’s still loyal employees — through her estate — are having a good laugh on this one.
As for the Daily Mail, and People, et al.: what do they care if it’s true? It sounds true and they need stories this week.
