‘A Song For You: My Life With Whitney Houston’ by Robyn Crawford
A Song For You: My Life With Whitney Houston (2019)
Robyn Crawford
(Dutton Books)
Prior to 1985, when Whitney Houston busted out of Newark in her meteoric rise to the top of the charts, she palled around with Robyn Crawford, her best friend. Twenty-seven years later, after the international tours, the movies, the TV shows, and the millions of records sold, Whitney was dead, at 48, a victim of her own excess.
In 2022, a feature film biography, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody, starring Naomi Ackie as Whitney and Nafessa Williams as Robyn Crawfrord, was well-received. (Stanley Tucci as Clive Davis stole the show.) It was based partially on Crawford’s very personal memoir recounting her life before Bobby Brown muddied the waters. Obviously, he could hold his drugs better than she. The movie made him the bad guy. This book, in its searing honesty, shows that Whitney loved cocaine years before marrying Brown.
Crawford was on her way to a promising basketball career. She gave it up to work for Whitney, travel, deal with press, attend meetings with Arista suits, and, basically, keep her friend grounded. They were also lovers. Had Whitney and Robyn lived in today’s acceptance of marriage equality, they might have had a chance. But in the ‘80s, they had to hide it. And Whitney’s greatest love of all (prior to daughter Bobbi Kristina) never had a chance. (Sadly, Bobbi Kristina died from cocaine the same way her mother did, drowning in a bathtub. She was 22.)
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Crawford’s book is a love letter of sorts to her best friend, her lover, her everything. She concentrates on the highs of success and experiences moments mere mortals will never ascend to. She was right there in the thick of it all. Singer Cissy Houston, the mother, is a bitch in this book. John Houston, the father, is a crook in the movie. Her family swallowed the millions of dollars almost as fast as Whitney could make it. Her team kept throwing her out on that stage Amy Winehouse-style when she was in no condition to tour.
A Song For You, though, makes the young, vibrant, positive, filled-with-life Whitney come alive again.