Whitney and Bobby Babble Tonight With Diane

I like Whitney Houston – she’s about the only current diva I can stand. She has a great voice, good (but not great) musical sense, charisma, beauty, and a sense of humor well-displayed on her 1996 SNL appearance. I even used to like Bobby Brown when he was the King of New Jack Swing, or at least the Prince. But as a couple they seem to bring out the worst in each, and when they appear together, they babble like crackheads.

Tonight they appear with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s PrimeTime Special Edition:

In a rare interview, Houston told Primetime’s Diane Sawyer that she has used alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and prescription drugs at different points during her career.
“I partied a lot. Trust me: I partied my tail off,” she said, adding, “You get to a point where you know the party’s over.”

….But the days of her self-destructive behavior are over now, she says. “That was a moment in time that happened to me, that I was going through, that I’m over. I’m beyond it. It’s past. It’s done,” she told Sawyer. Houston said the rumors about her health were wrong. “I am not sick,” she said. “Let’s get that straight. I am not sick, OK? I’ve always been a thin girl. I am not going to be fat, ever.”

She denied having anorexia or bulimia, but admitted that she sometimes has difficulty eating. “If my nerves are bad, and if I have an emotional stress going on in my life, it’s very hard for me to eat and stomach things,” she said.

Houston faced a drug possession charge in January 2000 after an airport guard in Hawaii allegedly found marijuana in her handbag, but the charge was later dismissed. In the Primetime interview, she firmly denied tabloid reports that she had used crack cocaine.

“Crack is cheap. I make too much for me to ever smoke crack,” she said. “Let’s get that straight, OK? I don’t do crack. I don’t do that. Crack is whack.”

Got that Diane? Crack is whack. Hit the rock, don’t smoke it. A mind is a terrible thing to taste, er, waste. Whitney doth protest too much, and her assertions of all that being in the past seems to be an effort to convince herself.

And when asked whether she will completely stay off drugs, she said, “Well, I’m not going to tell you that,” but added that she is not self-destructive and does not want to die.

“I’m a person who has life, and wants to live,” she said. She said she prays every day that she will have the strength to keep off drugs. “I won’t break.”

I hope not Whitney, truly.

Not too long ago, many wondered if Houston’s career and her personal health were in jeopardy. The second Jackson concert was the latest in a string of last-minute no-shows by Houston. In the spring of 2000, organizers canceled her appearance at the Academy Awards, and a few weeks later she failed to show up at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to help induct her mentor and longtime producer, Clive Davis of Arista Records.

At the time, her publicist attributed the Oscar cancellation to a sore throat, but Houston told Primetime she was “fired” because she was “not getting along with” the director, Burt Bacharach, during the rehearsals. “I had an attitude about it,” she said.

She said the no-shows have been blown out of proportion compared with her record during her 17-year career. “If you look at the stats of how many concerts I did, and how many concerts I missed, there’s no comparison,” she said. “I’ve done more shows in my lifetime than I’ve missed in my lifetime.”

I wasn’t aware that 50/50 is a good performance ratio. I think of it more like school or work than, say, field goal percentage from outside the 45 yard line.

But Bobby makes Whitney look like Cal Ripken in the reliability department:

Brown has had his own problems with drugs and alcohol. After crashing Houston’s Porsche into a Hollywood signpost in 1996 while driving drunk, he repeatedly violated his probation conditions, and spent two months in jail in 2000 after his probation officer said he tested positive for cocaine. (Prosecutors dropped the drug-test charge after he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.)

He was even arrested in Atlanta on the morning of the Primetime interview, Nov. 7, for allegedly speeding, driving without a license and having marijuana in the car.

He told Sawyer he smokes marijuana “maybe every other day” to help regulate a bipolar disorder. He said he has never used other drugs, and denied there was cocaine in his system when he took the drug test in 2000. “I tested for a substance like cocaine, which can be anything. It can be an aspirin. It can be a Valium,” he said.

It could be water.