When you look at that picture of him, he’s got it. It’s who he is. It’s him. There’s no doubt about it.” That said, she’s not completely at ease, either. For the first time, she’s willing to say her husband was a victim of his time, of a system that, at best, allowed him to be a one-dimensional artist; at worst, saw him as an easy target to exploit. “I just have this feeling that he had a great musical side, but they didn’t promote that side of him. They promoted the image, the side that you see in that picture.” “Well, of course he’s an artist! He couldn’t be anything else. You can see it.” Foto: In this undated photo, singer Whitney Houston poses for a portrait in Beverly Hills, Calif. Both were icons of the '80s pop culture. Photo: Courtesy of the Houston family/Courtesy Everett Collection/Handout via REUTERS It wasn’t always a hard life for him. His parents split when he was just a baby. Houston became a latchkey kid, but his grandmother kept him out of trouble, insisting that he go to church and school. He sang in the choir and did well in school. He had a sense of who he was. “He was somebody that grew up in a community where music was always played, always in the house, and he was able to express himself in that way. But once he got that record deal, it was just money, money, money, and the way he would describe it, they were trying to get him to be what they wanted him to be, so he wouldn’t be who he was.” Houston didn’t realize that money is the root of all evil, at least that’s what he said he told one of his drug suppliers. “They asked him, ‘What do you want to do?’ He said, ‘I don’t want to do a movie, I just want to sing.’ ‘You don’t make those kind of movies anymore, son,’” she says. Houston and Clive Davis were just starting to work together when a woman friend introduced him to cocaine. “She took me to this famous drug dealer, who would do drugs with me and give me this drug. When I did the first cocaine in my life, he told me he’d done them with people who had very dark skin, who had very blonde hair. And that he didn’t want it to look like I did. So he gave me a very white powder. It was white powder on a piece of foil, and the foil had a light blue substance in it.” “ ‘You just cut it and put it on your tongue. Make sure you get a good amount, because it’s not going to stick. Just lick it and then your tongue is going to start to get numb, but don’t stop licking, and it will eventually go away.’ “I was really young. I was not thinking at all. I thought it was like gum. I was just laughing. I didn’t even like it, because it was really thick and I thought it was so hard. I remember that the first time that I did it, I looked at the mirror and I had these red eyeballs. They were just staring right at me. And I thought, ‘This is really weird.’ “The first time I did that, I did it very well. And the next time I did it, I thought it was so bad. I was like, ‘I’m so stupid.’ Because you only use cocaine for a period of time until you reach your maximum high and you go back to cocaine again and you get a new high. I kept doing it. I didn’t care about the whole coke sickness, and looking stupid, the red eyes. You were high.” “ ‘I don’t care about the cocaine. I don’t care about the sickness. I’m using so much money on this record company that I don’t care. You have no idea what I’m going to make later on.’ ” Houston didn’t really care about the cocaine either, but it made him feel more confident, like he could walk into any room, get on stage and have the whole room come to him. “It was like this was a drug that I had to have to be able to perform,” she says. “It gave him self-confidence. It gave him hope.” “She had this habit of always keeping her makeup, her hair done. She didn’t wear jeans all the time. This was before she got addicted to crack. And I went to her house to get ready for some event and she had three black trash bags full of clothes with clothes, shoes, everything, and she’s got this whole room with makeup and hair. That’s what kept her happy and feeling good.” Once the drug was in Houston’s life, there was no turning back. “When you have a crack habit, you can get that same sense of elation that you have when you’re on cocaine. And so what does that mean? It means that you want more and more. Once it’s in you, it’s in you. You don’t want to get rid of it, because then you’ll feel bad. ‘Who’s going to want to deal with me now that I’ve messed up again?’ That would be your first thought.” He couldn’t hide it any longer, though. “You start breaking down in front of people, and it becomes a very big issue,” she says. “And you can’t get rid of it. They don’t get rid of it. They can only manage it, but it’s still there. And he’s not going to stop until he’s dead, or until he’s in jail.” “ ‘I think the worst thing you can say about Whitney’s situation is that she was addicted to cocaine. I think you would have to qualify everything that Whitney was doing or didn’t do with cocaine. People would always want to believe it. People’s thoughts were always that he was using crack cocaine or he was using heroin. It didn’t matter what he was using. And so people would say, ‘It sounds like he’s using drugs.’ And they won’t even be able to tell you what exactly he was using, because they don’t know. And they say, ‘Maybe you can keep him away from the drug, but we can’t keep him away from drugs.’ ‘People get jealous that you have money. So when people tell you that they think that you’re doing drugs, they don’t know. If I had any inkling that he was doing drugs, I wouldn’t be working on him. I’d be working on myself, or whoever.’ ” There was never any real support from Houston’s inner circle. She and her sisters and mother did all that they could to keep him on the right path, but there was no guidance. Houston just did what he wanted to do. “When I met him, I was working at the record company. He was doing the ‘One Moment in Time’ video. And he came to watch him, and I saw him take a hit off of the pipe. And the guy was talking to me, ‘We should not give him any more cocaine.’ And I was like, ‘This guy is doing cocaine.’ This was the thing that Whitney loved so much. He was doing cocaine. How could you say no to that? Because I know how cocaine makes you feel. It makes you feel so good, it just makes you want more and more. That’s how cocaine is. It’s almost like one big drug that just keeps you craving more. “He was the only person, or one of the only people, to give us any help. That’s what made him feel loved. And when Whitney wasn’t loved like that, it was like, ‘Well, fuck you. If you can’t love me, then I’ll love myself. That’s what I’ll do. You don’t have to love me.’ “This is what was happening in Whitney’s life. He became more and more addicted to drugs, until finally, it got to a point where Whitney Houston got tired of trying to be loved, because he was never really loved the way he wanted to be loved. Whitney Houston never felt good. He felt so empty inside, and that’s what’s hurt. That’s what I want to let people know that he was not the way he seemed to be.” “I remember I used to talk to him and say, ‘God, I wish I could have some of this. I wish I could have a piece of you.’ He’d say, ‘Get the fuck out of here. You want a piece of me? Just buy my stuff and you’re gonna see a piece of me. You know you got the most beautiful eyes in the world. I used to get up every morning and wake up, and look in the mirror and say, ‘You want me. I’m the man, aren’t I? You want me.’ And then he used to smile and go back to sleep. That’s how he made his money, because he knew it all.