March 19, 2055, Broadway: the Belasco Theater in New York and it is opening night for the previews of “I Will Always Love You,” the story of the last days in the life of Whitney Houston which takes place, almost in its entirety in the Hilton Hotel suite where she was found dead just hours before her anticipated performance at a pre-Grammy party…
Whoops, it is March 19, 2012 and the Belasco Theater in New York is debuting the preview of End of the Rainbow, the story of last brilliant weeks in the life of Judy Garland. It takes place almost in its entirety in a hotel suite in London where, with fits and starts, she delivers what will tragically be her final comeback tour.
If you are still the slightest bit curious how our fragile artists finally break, you don’t have to wait another 44 years. You will find many of the answers in the gut-wrenching performance of Tracie Bennett who stars as Judy Garland. (As I overheard between my own muffled sobs, “Leading actresses across New York are going to be killing themselves after seeing this.”) Read the rest of this entry »
When I heard the first reports of Whitney Houston’s death at age 48, just hours before she was set to perform at the legendary Clive Davis Grammy Eve party, I was neither shocked, nor stunned nor saddened in contrast to the mounting numbers of television reporters and fans gathering at the Hilton Hotel where her lifeless body was found in her fourth-floor bathtub. I had already grieved the loss of Whitney Houston for more than a decade.
I have now spent what remains of “Grammy weekend” wondering if all the people around Whitney Houston throughout the second half of her life were enablers, unwitting or not. Or did they help extend her life throughout these final turbulent years.
First, full disclosure of my role as a keen observer. Almost 30 years ago, the man I would later marry, was managing director of Arista Records in the U.K.,, at the very time Clive Davis was signing the 19-year-old former back-up singer for Chaka Khan and daughter of the legendary gospel queen, Cissy Houston. My husband recalls the recording ingenue as so sweet and funny, she went along with the marketing team’s practical joke of switching her newly recorded demo tape for one she specially made about his favorite English soccer team.
Back then, that young ingenue blossomed into the Whitney with the perfect poise, the face and body of a Vogue model, and the voice of an angel. Always credited: Clive Davis, first and foremost, and Whitney’s first manager, Gene Harvey and Jerry Griffith, Arista’s A&R executive.
As we all would see, Whitney soared, breaking every conceivable record.
Then came her 1992, marriage to pop sensation Bobby Brown. The people around her changed.
In 1999, I became executive producer of ABC’s Good Morning America and soon produced a five-part series on the legendary Clive Davis. He even took a hand-held video camera to his famous pre-grammy party, giving us a bird’s eye view. At the time he was working on a “comeback” album for Whitney Houston and some of us “in the know,” shall we say, understood she was struggling. Perhaps because my own brother-in-law had been an addict for six years, we worried about her, and never repeated what we knew were attempts at interventions and more.
Still, with the power and magic of Clive Davis, she finished her comeback album, and sat down with Diane Sawyer for that tricky interview which, I was reminded today, was taped the day Bobby Brown was arrested, one of many such run-ins with the law he would have.
Sawyer’s interview was a challenge for even an experienced news anchor such as she.. As we know in broadcast news, the journalist only gets to ask the questions; Whitney Houston got to answer them. She certainly shocked a lot of us then with her sassy street talk, most notably, “Crack is whack” which hardly put to rest the rumors she regularly smoked cocaine.
Four years ago, I was saddened by eye-witness reports from reliable friends who told me they watched her snorting cocaine during a taping for another network. By then that voice of an angel was gone, replaced by a shallow and croaky sound of vocal cords.ravaged by drugs. All the auto-tuning in the world couldn’t hide it.
Then, at his 2009 pre-grammy party, after live performances of Alicia Keyes and Rod Stewart, Clive Davis introduced his special diva, the one he discovered, nurtured, groomed and truly loved. It was another comeback for Whitney Houston and everyone in the room was rooting for her. After a long standing ovation and a tearful embrace of the audience, she began to sing. Well, not really. She skillfully used every vocal trick in the book to “talk” the high notes, let the audience sing along to where I suppose she could not.
Yet, what followed was another album, a two-part Oprah Winfrey interview and performance. her demeanor in the two separate hours was markedly different. In one part, I thought she appeared high.
Then came another concert performance for Good Morning America, one, I’m told, had to be re-recorded and altered in the sound truck before air. She then embarked on a world tour where she was booed off the stage in some places, hospitalized for “exhaustion” in another.
So, I ask, must the show go on? Did these last years give her something to live for, or did it utimately destroy her?
In the end, full responsibility lies with Whitney Houston, who made some bad, even tragic choices in her life. Those at Arista, J Records, Harpo, and ABC News wanted to believe her vocal gifts could be restored. Clive Davis, I know, believed to the very end, he could help her rediscover the angel within.
With a better heart and purer intent, did it turn out any differently than those who tried to prop up a bloated drug-addled Elvis Presley who was wearing a diaper to bed… or Michael Jackson who clearly was not fit for the European tour on which he was embarking.
Over the next days we will learn of how Whitney Houston spun out of control and to her death. TMZ has reported she was found in the bathtub by her body guard and that prescription drugs were found in the room.
I reported earlier that an eye-witness told me that Friday night he experienced a massive water leak in his hotel room at the Hilton where he was one floor below Whitney Houston He told me hotel representatives said it was Whitney Houston’s room where she had also destroyed three stereo units.
Just an hour ago, I met another eyewitness who occupied room 248 and wonders if he may be the last person to see or hear her alive. He told me it was 4:00 a.m. Saturday morning and he went out on his balcony where Houston, he says, was on her knees holding onto the balcony bars above, screaming, “I can’t take this anymore. I can’t take this anymore.”
He also felt awful, knowing what he now knows, to assume she had lots of people around her help her in her distress.
His “timeline” doesn’t fit current reports; he believes he heard commotion –like medics arriving — at about 10:00 a.m. on Saturday. (He clearly wasn’t tailoring what he heard and saw to published reports.)
I hope police get around to interviewing him.
The next few days will get ugly as authorities and journalists get to the bottom of what went so wrong in the last days in life of Whitney Houston. . Fans, family, friends and some entertainment journalists will be appalled as every last bit of her privacy will be violated.
Sadly, it’s a necessary exercise as is the pursuit of my one big burning question: must the show always go on?
Only once we explore her death for any and all teachable moments, can her real legacy be restored, and, like Presley and Jackson before her, shine even brighter. When all is said and done, I suspect many will join me in mourning the Whitney Houston who sadly died over a decade ago.
Michelle Obama: "I really like this job." Gayle King thought bubble: "So do I."
If an interview with the First Lady is, indeed, a litmus test for the strength of a new morning show anchor, Gayle King has lit up the internet. Based on the first two inaugural days of the new CBS The Morning, void of any real news, who knew the woman previously known as the BFF of O would nail the first real news-making interview of the week.
Wow.
To start, there was something smart and intimate about conducting the interview in the First Lady’s office, away from the West Wing and the grandure of the White House public rooms.
Michelle Obama’s office , which I don’t remember seeing on television before, felt a bit more cramped than expected, sending a subliminal message of the humility she was trying to express as she and King addressed some of the more sensational content of the new Jody Kantor book about the Obamas.
It wasn’t just the interview questions that made this interview particularly engaging. King’s unique poise, warmth and, yes, star power ensured this viewer was glued to the set for part two.
Okay, there was one silly question I might have edited out, or around… we don’t need to ever ask if a first term First Lady has been on a learning curve. It might be more interesting to ask questions about the journey of a First Lady’s learning curve. Perhaps closer to the election, King can return to explore in more detail, for instance, how a First Lady learns to best use her new power.
Soon after leaving office and before he traveled the world on behalf of his foundation, Bill Clinton spoke to a class at the University of Arkansas, a tiny event that was covered by C-SPAN. With all its trademark bad camera work and bad lighting, the broadcast was one for the history books as Clinton answered questions about his learning curve as President.
The seminal moment: when the Joint Chiefs asked to speak with him about his proposed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. It was a terrible meeting for the new president who suddenly realized he was the person in charge and from then on he would call the meetings and set the agenda when he chose.
My final note about this interview is trickier: what to do with the First Lady’s surprising and controversial comment that some people are always looking to portray her as an angry black woman, a comment I predicted would be viral by noon.
I wish there had been a simple and polite follow-up from King, “Do you want to elaborate on that?” I also wish that comment was explored more at the new roundtable. Trust me, it will chewed on be everywhere else The echo chamber may even rise to the level of First Lady Hillary Clinton’s 1994 charge of “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband.
Michelle Obama is right that too many writers and political observers are more interested in finding nuggets that fit into their own pre-conceived narrative. Sadly, today everyone gets labeled and stereotyped.
Michelle Obama may not be wrong. She unfortunately looked a bit fed up this morning when discussing the new book about her.
In a world of 140-character tweets, the burden falls to the interviewer. Without a follow-up q and a, the words now hang out there with an open invitation for global interpretation. It will be interesting to see Michelle Obama can stay in front of #angryblackwoman and prevent a potentially explosive comment from backfiring in such a politically charged, particularly nasty year.
As for Gayle King: she’s got us talking… and thinking again.
Words: the new Snakes -- on a Plane?
My name is Shelley and I have been clean, sober and without a word game for 12 hours, the longest I have gone since downloading Scrabble a couple of years ago, and more recently Words With Friends. I know Alec Baldwin’s pain.
I am not here to criticize him, but to express my compassion and solidarity after he was tossed off an American Airlines flight earlier this week while playing Words after the flight attendant told him to “power down” his iPhone.
First, a confession: this column was delayed while I first played a quick round of Words with about 12 friends. Then I began a search to find the provable effects of word games on the brain. Having written three editions of a neurology book with a new cutting edge medical book on the way, I usually navigate data bases of information with ease. This, however, provided a different challenge.
How many points for O-V-E-R-R-E-A-C-T-I-O-N?
After two days of searching for the truth, I have come to the conclusion that there is no current scientific basis to support the premise that online word games are addicting. Hey, call me just another word junkie, but I don’t believe the available science. Someone needs to give me, and Alec Baldwin an MRI and we’ll show you. Come on, the man took his treasured iPhone into a gross airplane lavatory where most of us contort our bodies to make sure we don’t have to touch anything in there. Yes, a junkie will take a fix anywhere he can get it.
What’s more, there is no science to support the so-called online “brain-training” games that now make up a billion-dollar industry make you smarter, mentally clearer or more creative. Hey, I was certain it must have. Read the rest of this entry »
In NBC
Oh, the joy to watch a brilliant news interview, the work of a master such as Bob Costas who, like a knight out of our journalism story books, charged onto NBC’s new high-tech set Monday night and delivered a low tech tour de force…. phoner!
As happens in all high art forms, Costas made this incredibly challenging interview seem effortless.
Getting a newsmaker in the chair (or on the phone as it turned out) is only half the battle. Getting a person in the middle of a media frenzy to really talk is the other, especially when that frenzy is over a pedophile sex scandal and football.
Eric Wemple, the Washington Post’s news media op-ed editor, said it best:
“The tone put this interview into a special category. Over nearly ten minutes Costas managed to be: prepared without being formulaic or rigid, polite without being nice, and skeptical without being prosecutorial.”
The transcript of the Sandusky interview cannot possibly reveal the mine field through which Costas was walking. One wrong step, I kept thinking, and Sandusky can just cut off the questions, put down the phone as in, “Uh, thanks for your interest, Bob, but gotta go now, it’s been a long day.”
Instead, Costa was getting Jerry Sandusky to open up and say (with a disturbingly flat affect), “I shouldn’t have showered with those kids.”
It reminded me of Michael Jackson admitting he slept in the same bed with a 13-year-old for 30 consecutive days in the boy’s mother’s house, but that he and the child (his first accuser) only watched scary movies together.
Pedophiles are very crafty, but if you can keep them talking you can learn a lot. Masters of manipulation, they often believe the “winning ways” which work on 10 year olds will also fool grown-ups. It rarely does. Read the rest of this entry »
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has launched one of the most fascinating CYA campaigns in memory, in public everywhere serving as a moral compass on everything from the firing of Joe Paterno (“It was the right thing to do”) to the question of whether or not to fire the graduate assistant coach who reported seeing Jerry Sandusky rape a 10-year-old, but did nothing to intervene.
On Sunday’s Meet The Press, Gov. Corbett explained to David Gregory how Pennsylvania’s current Attorney General made the decision that Coach Mike McCreary, currently on administrative leave, was more important to the case as an eyewitness, despite he failing to meet the higher moral obligation to intervene on the child’s behalf.
Sadly, Gov. Tom Corbett, who was Pennsylvania’s attorney general until last January , failed to meet that higher moral obligation as well. For at least six of the 15 years Jerry Sandusky is alleged to have molested children, Corbett was the top law enforcer in his state. The case began, then stalled on his watch. Read the rest of this entry »
Gloria Cain Breaks Her Silence to Greta Van Susteren tonight at 10 on Fox News
Poor Gloria Cain. I’m afraid Herman Cain’s wife of 43 years is about to suffer some of the indignities experienced by the women who have accused him of egregious groping and abuse of power.
There will be many who won’t believe Gloria Cain’s words, many who think she’s only speaking out for her big payday in the end.
With his poll numbers dropping ever since multiple women have accused him of sexual harassment, candidate Cain has now brought his wife to Greta.
And so, the political wife who has stayed in the background now breaks her silence.
“You hear the graphic allegations and we know that would have been something that’s totally disrespectful of her as a woman,” she says. “And I know the type of person he is. He totally respects women.”
“I’m thinking he would have to have a split personality to do the things that were said,” she says.
Is Gloria Cain a shrewd political wife? Or is she like so many others who never see any wrongdoing either because a) they’re too trusting or b) they are married to a charmer who wears a “mask” at home or c) all of the above. Read the rest of this entry »
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CBS: Putting the (S)Neeews Back in the Morning
January 10, 2012 in broadcast news | Tags: "Where's the Flu?, CBS News, CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose, Erica Hill, Facebook fan page, Gayle King, Health Watch, Julianna Margulies Dr. Holly Phillips, Matt Lauer, Melissa Etheridge, Michelle Obama interview, Mitt Romney, morning television, Newt Gingrich, The View, Today Show, viewers comments | by Shelley Ross dailyXpress | 5 comments
As a former Senior Executive Producer of a past CBS News morning show incarnation, I write this headline with a more generous heart than may appear; I always root for news shows to thrive and headlines like this just might help trigger a surge of competitive juice that pumps ferociously to prove the observer wrong.
The new morning team at CBS News.
While television critics have been kind about the launch of CBS This Morning — at least respectful of anchors Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Erica Hill — the morning show’s new Facebook Fan Page is overwhelmed by vitriol from viewers, real viewers who put their name and photos to their comments, some with whom I actually agree. Read the rest of this entry »