From what I’ve read/cobbled together, you are probably right on #1. I’ll take issue with point #2.
From all I’ve read and heard, Whitney was pretty wild even during her heyday in the 1980s. Clive Davis and the Arista execs worked very carefully to preserve a “girl next door persona” but I remember reading Right On! and other magazines suggesting that she was a little grittier than the handlers let on.
Remember, there were persistent rumors about her being a lesbian, peaking at the time she started dating Bobby Brown. She had dated Eddie Murphy and Randall Cunningham, both rich, eligible men, and the word on the street was that these were simply PR arrangements. She married BB around the time the rumors were most rampant. And they went away, for the most part.
BB is a lot of things, but I don’t think he is a liar. If anything, I figure he’s the type to exaggerate his bad choices. He maintained in his biography that he was a pothead and had dabbled in other drugs when they met, but in fact, Whitney introduced him to harder drugs like cocaine. I find this totally believable; it seems like cocaine was in the water if you were in the music biz in the 1980s. He also wrote that he suspected that he was Whitney’s man du jour because of his image and to put to rest the lesbian rumors (which seems totally true; it was about Whitney’s drug use from that point on).
You don’t need longterm addiction to die from alcohol and benzos. All you need is tolerance: something that is a goal for drinking (i.e. holding your liquor) and quite quick in benzos. So then you use more of one or both to try to get the same effect as before, and, bingo, pulmonary arrest.
It’s yet another reason for my campaign to make benzos harder to get and to drill into people’s heads how dangerous they can be if used improperly. (Even doctors don’t get it).
Here’s the latest theory someone shared with me. She’s broke, and books her last, disastrous tour, knowing her voice ain’t great. The pressure of having to perform without ‘the voice’, (think about the songs she’s expected to perform!), send her back to drugs, hence the melt downs on tour, and the complaints about her voice. She was supposed to sing at the Clive Davis celebration that night, before an audience of A list celebrity musicians. That’s a tight spot if you ain’t got ‘the voice’. Apparently she’d been consulting several doctors about the damage to her voice, and that very day, received the shattering news, that nothing could be done, things would never improve.
Of course I don’t know if one whit of this is true, it’s just a theory I heard. If it’s true, it’s heartbreaking, to be sure.
