Seven years after the death of Whitney Houston (at the age of 48), her best friend and executive assistant Robyn Crawford addresses the rumors about their relationship. "We were friends. We were lovers. We were everything to each other," she writes in her loving, candid and eye-opening memoir. The two met in 1980, when Crawford was 19 and Houston was turning 17. "We never talked labels, like lesbian or gay," she writes. "We just lived our lives, and I hoped it could go on that way forever." Their sexual relationship ended in 1985 when Houston signed with a major recording label. However, they continued living together until Houston married singer Bobby Brown in 1992. Although Houston started cocaine at age 14, Crawford noticed Houston's drug consumption increase when Brown entered her life.
Crawford resigned from her creative director position on Whitney's team in 2000, frustrated by extra layers of interlopers and enablers (mostly family members) who isolated Houston from friends and fed her drug habits. Crawford is no fan of Brown ("Everything he put his hands on ended up in ruins") or Houston's homophobic mother, Cissy, who ignored her daughter's drug use. Once Crawford left, Houston was surrounded by greedy relatives mismanaging her money. This forced her into exhausting world tours, which encouraged her addictions and started wrecking her body and voice.
Likely no one was closer to Houston for three decades than Crawford. It's hard to imagine a more heartbreaking, compassionate or definitive biography of Whitney Houston than A Song for You. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant