Scheduled to appear at the pre-Grammy Awards party given annually by her mentor, the music impresario Clive Davis, on February 11, Whitney Houston arrived in Los Angeles a week early, without fanfare, and checked into the Beverly Hilton with her small entourage under the pseudonym Elizabeth Collins. She was put in Room 434, which the hotel calls a “presidential junior,” consisting of a small sitting room, bedroom, and bath.

On the day of the party, Whitney’s assistant, Mary Jones, left the hotel to pick up a package at Neiman Marcus. Before going, Jones laid out a gown for Whitney to wear that night. About 3:35 P.M., Jones returned to the room, where Whitney’s bodyguard and brother-in-law, Ray Watson, was on watch in the hall. Jones entered the suite, and when she walked into the bathroom she found Whitney facedown in a foot of water in the tub. As they frantically administered CPR, Jones told the switchboard to call 911.

Fans were already gathering at the Hilton for Clive Davis’s party when Ed Winter, the coroner, took the elevator to the fourth floor. The hallway there had become a crime scene, with police tape blocking the area, and a dozen family members and friends were demanding, “What happened? Why did she drown?” There were no immediate answers and no real evidence. Though the surrounding rooms were occupied by people who loved and depended upon the singer, if she called for help she had gone unheard. The police found plates of food, a bottle of beer, and an opened bottle of champagne. On the bathroom counter were a spoon and what the coroner’s report called a “white crystal like substance.” When the initial autopsy results were released, six weeks later, they attributed Houston’s death at 48 to accidental drowning, with contributing factors of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use. She had used cocaine “just probably immediately prior” to drowning, and her condition indicated an “acute use” of the substance. There were also traces of marijuana, the muscle relaxant Flexeril, the allergy medication Benadryl, and Xanax.

After Whitney’s death, the singer Chaka Khan, a friend and fellow recovering addict, spoke out about the “vampires” of the “ugly ass” music business, lambasting all those who had allowed Houston, only nine months out of rehab, to arrive in the city of temptation a week before Davis’s party: “Whoever flew her out to perform at that party should’ve provided someone to be there, to somehow keep the riffraff from out of the situation, to keep some of the dangerous people away.” In the weeks that followed, a portrait of Whitney’s sudden relapse began to emerge. She had been spotted drinking vodka in Hollywood nightclubs to celebrate the 31st birthday of her alleged boyfriend, the singer-actor Willie “Ray J” Norwood, who was famous for being Kim Kardashian’s partner on an explicit 2007 sex tape. She had made a spectacle of herself in the hotel, complaining about watered-down drinks in the lobby bar. She had done handstands by the pool and erupted in the gift shop over a headline in the National Enquirer: WHITNEY COLLAPSES! STRUNG OUT & BROKE, IT’S WORSE THAN ANYONE THOUGHT.

Her friends and family chose to concentrate on the positive. Whitney was a multifaceted woman, they said, who always loved the Lord. In her final days, she prayed and partied, confident that she was on the brink of another comeback. The handstands by the pool, they said, were not the antics of an addict but proof of her newfound stamina, her dedication to daily exercise, and a vow to quit smoking. She had a new movie, new music, and a new man. Also, she had reportedly worked again with Warren Boyd, her drug counselor over the years. According to the producer Harvey Mason Jr., she was on time at the studio the Tuesday night before her death to record one side of a duet called “Celebrate” with the American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, and she played a CD of the song for Clive Davis at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “She was way more energetic than the young people, more excited to be in the studio, more passionate to make something outstanding,” said Mason. Everyone agreed that she was also clean and sober on the set of her upcoming movie, a remake of a 1976 film called Sparkle.

In the Beverly Hilton on February 11, a Houston aide told a VH1 crew waiting for an interview, “Whitney can’t make it . . . . She’s dead.” On the fourth floor, meanwhile, the R&B singer Brandy—Ray J’s older sister—who had starred with Houston in the 1997 TV movie Cinderella, was out in the hall, crying. Bobbi Kristina, Whitney’s 18-year-old daughter with the singer Bobby Brown, was attempting to gain access to her mother’s room. Dionne Warwick, Whitney’s cousin, remained calm. She shook Winter’s hand and said, “I know Mr. Winter will take good care of Whitney,” adding, “and thank you for taking such good care of Michael Jackson.” By the time Winter went downstairs, the lobby was crawling with stars—Tom Hanks, Tony Bennett, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Neil Young—arriving for the party. Winter waited until 1:35 A.M. to remove the body from the hotel. “The family wanted to maybe spend a few minutes with her before we loaded her off,” he told me. But it didn’t happen, “because Bobbi Kristina wound up going to the hospital,” he said, after reportedly becoming “hysterical, exhausted, and inconsolable.” He added, “And Pat Houston [Whitney’s manager and sister-in-law] had kind of an anxiety attack.”

While Houston’s family would insist that they had seen no evidence of her recent drug use, members of Bobby Brown’s family went on television to tell a different story. Brown’s sister Leolah Brown, Whitney’s former assistant, said on the Dr. Drew TV program, “When I first heard she passed away, I said, My God, somebody gave her a bad bag.”

If Whitney had arrived in L.A. a diminished diva, she left it a fully restored icon, seizing headlines, mourned on talk shows, and memorialized at a three-and-a-half-hour, star-studded, nationally televised funeral. Pat Houston would later blame Whitney’s death not on drugs but on “lifestyle.” She told Oprah Winfrey, “The handwriting was kind of on the wall.” The cause of death clearly went deeper than toxicology. The last days of Whitney Houston began long before her arrival in Los Angeles.

A Born Pop Diva

It was all about the voice, “the voice of our time,” as the songwriter Diane Warren once called it. The gospel singer BeBe Winans first heard it when Whitney was opening for the singer Jeffrey Osborne. “I went backstage, and we met, and I said, ‘I want to know what church you come from, because, singing the way you sing, you come from somebody’s church,’ ” recalled Winans. “She looked up and she said, ‘New Hope Baptist!’ ”

New Hope Baptist Church sits at 106 Sussex Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. There, where her mother, whose name is Cissy, led the choir, Whitney was saved, infused with the Holy Spirit. She could see her artistic future as she studied her godmother, Aretha Franklin: “She closed her eyes, and that riveting thing just came out. . . . That’s what I wanted.” Across the street from the church was the now defunct James M. Baxter Terrace public-housing project, and near that, on Wainwright Street, the house where Houston was born and lived until she was four. From the start, the battle lines of her future were drawn: God on one side, the ghetto on the other.

But Whitney didn’t grow up in the ghetto. After Newark’s week of race riots in 1967, the family moved to East Orange, New Jersey. When she was 13, she spent every Saturday for months in the local movie theater, from the matinee to the last show, transfixed by a film called Sparkle, about three young female singers falling prey to hustlers, addicts, and thieves. “As a young girl back in the 70s there was the black-exploitation movie thing,” she later said. “This was a positive reinforcement for young African-American women. For anyone who wanted to pursue their dream and present their gifts. It just appealed to me.”

Houston helped spearhead the new Sparkle, which is being released this summer, and co-produced it with Debra Martin Chase. “It was actually kind of eerie seeing it, because it’s a great movie, but just knowing that she’s saying good-bye through it brought a deeper depth,” says another of the film’s producers, Bishop T. D. Jakes.

Like the mother in Sparkle, Cissy, who started as a gospel singer, tried to protect her daughter. Cissy sang with the Sweet Inspirations, who became a regular act in New York City nightclubs and went on the road as backup for Elvis Presley, Dionne Warwick, and Aretha Franklin. When talent scouts began to circle the teenage Whitney, Cissy told them it was too soon. By 18, however, after graduating from an all-girls Catholic high school, Whitney was ready.

She was discovered by Gerry Griffith, director of A&R for Arista Records, who was stunned when he heard the girl blow the roof off the Seventh Avenue South nightclub, in Manhattan, with her one solo, “Home,” while she was backing up her mother. Griffith led her to the master, Clive Davis, who had guided the careers of Janis Joplin and Bruce Springsteen, and he embarked on a feat of creation that Billboard called “a De Mille extravaganza—epic and expensive.”

Whitney was already a successful model, signed to the Click agency (and, later, Wilhelmina) in New York, and she had appeared on the cover of Seventeen and in several ad campaigns. Her father, John Houston, a part-Native American “gospel groupie” who drove a cab, then a truck, and helped manage Dionne Warwick’s early singing group before working in a Newark-government office, handled the business end. His daughter’s enterprise was called Nippy, Inc., after Whitney’s nickname, which came from a comic-strip character who was always getting into trouble.

“Whitney was a product of Clive,” Kenneth Reynolds, who worked with Davis as director of Arista’s R&B product management, tells me. “Clive had been trying to create the pop diva, an artist that transcended all genres. He tried with Aretha, but she was too defined as the Queen of Soul. He tried with Dionne, but she was in a niche already by the time she came to Arista. Finally, along came Whitney, who was beautiful, talented, a little rough around the edges, but that could be fixed. Clive made it clear in meetings: this Houston project better be huge. He’d gone on The Merv Griffin Show with her. He picked every song on her albums.”

The result was Whitney Houston, released in 1985, when Whitney was 21. It sold 25 million copies. Her second album, Whitney, released in 1987, was equally successful. Forbes magazine said she was one of the 10 highest-earning American entertainers, worth $44 million. By 1988 she had surpassed the Beatles’ record with seven consecutive No. 1 hits.

“She became a huge star,” says Reynolds, “but, like so many creations, they fall apart.”

“During her early hit years, Houston did few interviews,” Out magazine reported in a 2000 interview with her. “Music-industry insiders suggest that Davis limits the media’s access to Houston because of the disparity between her white-friendly image and her proudly black manner. It wasn’t long before the apparent vacuum of her personal life filled with a persistent rumor—that the diva was a dyke.” (Individuals close to Clive Davis have disagreed with the statement about him.)

Robyn Crawford, an all-state basketball star two years older than Whitney, had been her best friend since Whitney was 16, when they both had summer jobs at a community center in East Orange. They were almost like sisters, and from the beginning Robyn always had Whitney’s back. Early in Whitney’s career, they lived together in a small apartment in New Jersey, Houston’s then manager, Seymour Flics, tells me, until Flics and his business partner, Eugene Harvey, insisted that they move into a more secure building.

“Robyn was very much a protector, Whitney’s guardian,” according to Kenneth Reynolds. “Whitney had gone on a promotional tour without Robyn in 1985. When she came back, we were going to the National Association of Black-Owned Broadcasters Convention, in Washington, D.C.” Eugene Harvey went to Arista and said the company should buy Crawford an airline ticket to the convention. “Because Whitney missed her,” Reynolds says Harvey told him.

Reynolds tells me, “I got up and closed my door and I said, ‘Gene, the airline ticket costs $79 for Robyn to fly to D.C. and stay in the room with Whitney. Don’t make a big fuss about it at the company. All you need is a bunch of straight, macho radio jocks finding out that Whitney wants Robyn on the trip.’

“Anyway,” he continues, “pretty soon the whole building was buzzing about it.” When Whitney arrived at the convention, he says, disc jockeys and program directors from across America were all buzzing about it, too. “And that was the big weekend when rumors about Whitney’s sexuality started,” he explains. (Aside from posting a short Internet remembrance of her longtime friend, Crawford, who continued to be Houston’s creative director until 2000, has remained silent in the aftermath of her death. “Refused by R. Crawford; does not want,” someone wrote on the FedEx package I’d sent her in hopes of an interview.)

Although Houston and Crawford would vehemently deny that they were anything more than friends and business associates, it has long been reported that Whitney’s management and family feared that the relationship could tarnish her all-American-princess image. “Whitney’s parents also resented Robyn’s powerful influence over their girl’s professional and personal life, which left them stranded in secondary positions,” wrote James Robert Parish in Whitney Houston: Return of the Diva. “All of a sudden she is dating Eddie Murphy,” says Reynolds. (Murphy would say they were just friends.) In spite of a reported year-long affair with the married Jermaine Jackson in the early 1980s, Whitney remained without a mate, at least publicly. “Any man would be a little bit threatened, because whoever stepped into those shoes was going to become Mr. Houston,” says BeBe Winans.

Houston was hugging Winans and his sister CeCe in their seats at the Soul Train Music Awards in April 1989 when she accidentally bumped up against a 20-year-old entertainer in their row who was also an R&B star. As a child of the projects, Bobby Brown had been shot at and stabbed in the shoulder. When he was 11, he saw a friend stabbed to death. By the time he was 14, after founding the band New Edition, he had become accustomed to being showered onstage with girls’ panties. He became a father at 17 and eventually would have three more children out of wedlock. The night they met, Whitney, whose image had become a little too sticky-sweet for some, was booed and called an Oreo when she was announced as a nominee. “For some reason, she became the target,” says her friend the singer Cherrelle. “People ridiculed her and talked about her and forgot about her songs. She was human, and that hurt.”

Bobby Brown, on the other hand, was already bad and on his way to becoming notorious: beating up a man at Walt Disney World, overdosing on heroin, doing time in prison and rehab centers, and eventually venting his rage on the pop diva, who was five years older than he and who, he would insist, made him look like an innocent. “She is the crazy one,” Brown once said.

Brown was just what some say Whitney felt she needed for her image. Though a renowned abuser of drugs and booze, Bobby, his friends say, had a nice streak. The moment she saw him that night in 1989, according to Cherrelle, she said, “That is going to be my husband.”

A Toxic Marriage

A week after Houston’s death, Narada Michael Walden, who produced many of her hits, including “How Will I Know” and “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” is channeling Whitney over the telephone, conjuring up what he calls her “skyrocketing energy.” He tells me, “She was a ball of fire, a Leo, born in August! She believed in herself!” He recalls her barreling into his studio with Robyn Crawford, determined to achieve their common goal: to produce music that would last 100 years. She was 115 pounds of raw talent; all she had to do was unleash the thunder from her chest. “She wailed!” he says. “We were used to hearing that kind of voice from ladies 200 pounds! But here was this skinny woman with that kind of power.”

The voice was infectious, intoxicating. Walden remembers that Mick Jagger, “a big Whitney fan,” came to his studio to meet the princess of pop. Natalie Cole, he adds, was in awe of the Jersey girl with the voice that breathed fire. “It was like riding a rocket ship,” Walden says of his time with Houston. “It was a superhuman feat! We talk about her addiction, but when you look at Whitney Houston, you have to realize how much work she did, how much love she put out into the universe.”

The glory of her voice was evidence of the power of God, “because she was completely spiritual,” says Walden. She would give prayers of gratitude in the recording studio. Soon, though, the voice was tempered by pain and heartache. In 1992, before 800 guests at her New Jersey mansion, she married Bobby Brown. “John, her father, told me how upset he was that she was marrying Bobby,” says Gerry Griffith. “Most people were. We knew Bobby and the type of guy he was—a street guy. But Whitney was smart enough to handle somebody like Bobby.”

Having conquered music, Whitney wanted a movie career. She was pregnant when she made The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner, who was riding the success of his Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves, and she had a miscarriage on the set. Some thought the rough cut of the film was a miss, because there was not enough of Whitney singing. More was added, and at the last minute Costner, who was a producer, replaced the song “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted” with one by Dolly Parton: “I Will Always Love You.” Whitney had such a strong presence that “she sucked the air out of the room,” according to David Foster, who did the landmark arrangement of the Parton song for her. The Bodyguard turned out not only to be a box-office hit but also to have the best-selling soundtrack of all time. For the next six years, Whitney would concentrate on acting as she starred in Waiting to Exhale (1995) and The Preacher’s Wife (1996).

She’d never been one to take serious care of her voice, unlike Celine Dion, who “wouldn’t speak for 24 hours before we were going to record,” says Foster, who produced many of both singers’ hits. “Whitney, even when she’d been filming all day, would come into the studio and—bang,” he says, “she’d rip her jacket off, and she’d be starting to sing. She was focused, and she was at the top of her vocal game.”

By the late 90s, however, her voice would begin to betray her, and she would have to lower the keys in live performances. The reason wasn’t just cigarettes and her age. Whitney’s drug use escalated after the 1993 birth of her only child, Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown. She started lacing her joints with cocaine, as she later told Oprah Winfrey. She confessed that she would spend her days and nights getting high with Bobby, watching TV, not getting out of her pajamas for seven months, while Brown lost control—“he would smash things, break things … cutting my head off a picture.” In short, she began the degrading process of what Oprah would call “making herself smaller … so the man could be bigger.”

The pop diva was reverting to the New Jersey street kid. “People think I’m Miss Prissy Pooh-Pooh,” she told Time magazine. “But I’m not . . . I can get down, really freakin’ dirty, with you.” She told Rolling Stone, “I can get raunchy. . . . I’ve learned to be freer from Bobby.” She said in a later interview, “I started in the hood.” And she admitted, “Yeah, man, I’m what you call a functioning junkie.”

In his 1996 book, Good Girl, Bad Girl: An Insider’s Biography of Whitney Houston, Kevin Ammons, a former boyfriend of Houston’s publicist Regina Brown, portrays Bobby Brown as the brazen interloper who steals the princess from her selfish court. The book’s 221 scathing, expletive-laden pages are packed with acts of greed and betrayal by “the Royal Family,” which, Ammons says, was Whitney’s term for the people who worked for her. Everyone wants a piece of the action of the increasingly stressed and distant diva. When their golden goose is abducted by Bobby, the Royal Family resorts to manipulation, fistfights, and threats of violence to protect their interests and remain on the gravy train. “As soon as Whitney heard I was writing the book, someone sent me a package,” says Ammons’s co-writer, Nancy Bacon. “I opened it up, and it was a snake. It didn’t smell—it had obviously been sent to me alive. She told Kevin I was like a snake in the grass because I was writing bad things about her.”

In 1994, Whitney showed up two hours late to a White House state dinner, where she was to perform for Nelson Mandela. By the 1996 release of The Preacher’s Wife with Denzel Washington, she was doing drugs every day, she later admitted to Oprah. “I was losing myself,” she said. In 1999 she canceled five concerts, and in 2000 she was caught with half an ounce of marijuana in the Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, airport. In March 2000 she was supposed to sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” at the Oscars, but at rehearsals she appeared disoriented and couldn’t remember the words. A reporter told Dateline, “Bobby Brown … was sitting in the front row, drunk, with a coat over his head.” Houston was replaced on the program.

In 2000 she showed up four hours late for a photo shoot for Jane magazine. In the interview that accompanied the photos, she was asked to compare hanging out with a president (she had met Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush at the White House) and with a junkie. She responded, “Just the same. The president gets off on the country. The junkie gets off on a couple of hits.” Asked where she had gotten the diamond-and-gold bracelet she was wearing—she had bought it for herself upon signing with Arista when she was 19—she said, “I asked this Jew guy on Diamond Row in New York [to make it].”

At the celebration of Michael Jackson’s 30th anniversary as a solo artist, in September 2001, Houston arrived stick-thin, with the bones in her clavicle showing, a walking advertisement for the evils of drug abuse. Her publicist attributed the weight loss to stress over family matters. However, her hairdresser, Ellin LaVar, tells me, “I went into the bathroom with her that night and I said, ‘Look at you! You keep this up and you are going to die.’ I didn’t know what ‘this’ was, but she cried and said, ‘I know.’ ” The show went on, as always. Once again, Whitney was propped up by those who depended upon her to perform, no matter what. “That same night a stylist said, ‘Whitney, you look fabulous,’ ” says LaVar. “I said, ‘Why did you say that? Whitney doesn’t look good!’ ”

On September 10, 2001, after she canceled an appearance at another Michael Jackson event, reports surfaced that she was dead of a drug overdose. In the wake of the World Trade Center disaster, the following day, Arista vice president Lionel Ridenour announced, “We should be concentrating on the things that are really important right now, like the victims and the families with the tragedies here in New York and Washington.”

“If you had to name the devil … the biggest devil?,” Diane Sawyer asked Whitney in a 2002 interview. “That would be me,” she replied.

Other problems arose. In September 2002, a $100 million lawsuit was filed on behalf of her father by a man named Kevin Skinner. They claimed Whitney had failed to pay John Houston Entertainment for representing her from the fall of 2000 on and for engineering her $100 million, six-album deal with Arista Records in 2001, at that time one of the biggest deals in the history of the music business. After John Houston’s death, five months later, Skinner, a convicted Newark drug dealer who had been John’s driver, pressed on with the lawsuit. According to Dateline, Skinner even claimed to have supplied Whitney with drugs. “I was a cocaine distributor years ago … and that’s how I knew Whitney,” he said, adding that she and Bobby had gone to Clifton Avenue—a Newark neighborhood—to pick up the drugs themselves. Whitney’s longtime attorney, Bryan Blaney, says the suit was instigated by Skinner from the start: “[John] was aware of it. This was something that he’d been asked to pursue by Kevin. John was largely disabled by his illnesses, and he deferred to Kevin. Later he told his daughter and me that it was a mistake. The suit was baseless.” (It was dismissed in 2004.)

Skinner also claimed to be writing a Whitney Houston tell-all, The Rise and Fall of Daddy’s Little Girl. An ad for the book read, “Not only are the family’s most darkest activities revealed but also disclosed are situations involving Bobby Brown, Dionne Warwick, Pastor Rev. Thomas (New Hope Church), Robin Crawford (Whitney’s road manager) and many others.” It suggested that Houston was “truly knocking on death’s door” and called an overdose “almost inevitable.” Skinner’s hope, according to his Web site, was that the book would get Houston the help she needed and honor “John Houston’s last wish,” which was “for everyone to ‘please, pray for Whitney.’ ” (The book was never published.)

Fighting Off the Devil

Every time Whitney was down, she would turn to the Lord. Even during her final days, in Los Angeles, she spoke about God frequently, praying in a nightclub with recording artist El DeBarge, with whom she shared a struggle with addiction, and asking Reginald Dowdley, a makeup artist hired for only one day, “Sweetie, are you saved?”

In 2000, Clive Davis left Arista to launch his own label, and Whitney remained behind. “I was shut down,” she told Essence magazine later, “literally shut down because I was in transition from Clive, making all these changes, and I felt like I was dangling from a string and going, ‘Hey, somebody save me.’ Clive was my man for all those years. Where was I going? It frightened me.”

During this period, while Bobby was serving one of several jail sentences for violating his probation—he had been convicted in 1996 of drunk driving—friends urged Whitney to go to rehab, if only for the sake of her daughter. If she did, they said, perhaps Bobby would, too, when he got out. She didn’t deny her drug use. She would merely listen and say, “It’s not as serious as you’re making it out to be. And I’m just not ready.”

“Then,” she later said in an interview, “God woke me up.”

The call came from Perri Reid, an evangelical minister, who had been reborn after a singing career as the R&B artist Pebbles. During her marriage to producer L. A. Reid, she had managed the Grammy Award-winning group TLC. When Whitney recorded with L. A. Reid in his Atlanta mansion, Pebbles met her, and they became as close as sisters. Pebbles was a bridesmaid at Whitney’s wedding. After TLC declared bankruptcy and dismissed Reid in 1995, her career seemed to collapse.

Whitney invited her to stay with her in New Jersey. “Whitney was filming The Preacher’s Wife with Denzel Washington at the time,” Reid tells me. “She knew all of us women loved him, and she said, ‘You want to come to the set today and meet Denzel?’ I said no, so she knew something was wrong for real. She came home one day, burst into the guest room where I was lying in my pajamas, eating my Hot Tamales candies, not wanting to talk to anybody. She snatched the covers off of me and said, ‘Come into the kitchen.’ ”

Whitney had staged an “ambush” to confront Reid with a group of women, including Cissy. “You’re going to have to fight!,” Whitney admonished her. “Don’t let all the lies and what people are trying to create about you for their own selfish gains destroy you.”

“She was in a rage about it,” says Reid. “She went to war for me.”

About seven years later Whitney called Reid, known by then as Sister Perri, whose Tuesday-night healing services in an Atlanta warehouse brought salvation and many reported miracles to her followers. “We had this bond as sisters that was so strong we could sense when something was wrong,” says Reid. Whitney called her in 2002, she tells me, to say she sensed Reid was in trouble, but it was actually Whitney who was distressed, though she didn’t say so. “Hey, you came up in my heart” was all she said.

“This was a good soul, misunderstood,” Reid says. “This girl got on a plane and brought everybody—Bobby and Bobbi Kris, and Doogie, her dog. I thought they were going to be there a couple of days. She got to Atlanta and stayed.”

“She took me under her wing,” Houston later said. “I stayed in one room, and she took me through a transition of deliverance and prayer You need somebody to give you tough love, people to remind you that you are a child of God and you don’t belong to the devil.”

Testimony posted by a fellow congregant chronicled Whitney’s presence at one service, where she “couldn’t sit still … and paced.” Reid, “recognizing Whitney’s anxiety, asked her friend if she would bless the congregation with a song For the life of me, I can’t recall the song she sang that night, but what I so vividly remember are my tears that wouldn’t stop flowing,” wrote the congregant. “At that moment, in this intimate space, I was able to clearly see Whitney Houston’s gift. No music, no background singers, just Whitney effortlessly having a conversation with God.”

The Lord had led her to Atlanta, but the Devil rode beside her, and that’s where her real problems began.

“We took eight years off to raise our children and get to know each other better,” Whitney told Sister 2 Sister magazine in 2004. During that period, she would occasionally perform onstage, as she did in a Las Vegas tribute to Clive Davis when he received a World Music Award for lifetime achievement. She looked and sounded so great that the audience went wild.

Then she would retreat to the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, where she hoped to live a normal and anonymous life. In addition to Bobbi Kristina, the family sometimes included three children of Bobby’s from previous relationships, as well as Nick Gordon, an orphaned boy Whitney had taken in two years earlier, when he was 12. It seemed impossible, however, for the couple to stay under the radar. In 2003, they took Bobbi Kristina and 30 suitcases on a well-publicized pilgrimage to Dimona, Israel, where they were baptized in the River Jordan by the Black Hebrews, a sect of vegans led by a former Chicago bus driver, who believe they are the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel.

As Whitney and Bobby dazzled and disgusted their neighbors with their princess-and-the-frog marriage, they caught the attention of two African-American women, the filmmakers Tracey Baker-Simmons and Wanda Shelley. “We were curious about the frog,” Baker-Simmons tells me of the reality show that would be called Being Bobby Brown. They wanted to take the idea directly to Brown, but he was serving time for violating his probation, so they met with his brother, Tommy, who told them, “Bobby’s misunderstood.” He agreed to put in a call to his brother in jail, and when Bobby heard the idea—and the mention of a licensing fee—he said yes.

As soon as the two women began filming in Atlanta, in early 2004, they encountered Whitney. “I’m his wife, and I, of course, will be in the show,” she said, according to Baker-Simmons.

Once Bravo aired the series, starting in June 2005, the curtain was drawn back on Whitney and Bobby’s life. In the first episode, the couple is joyously reunited after Bobby is released from a 30-day jail stay. In the next episode, Whitney accompanies her husband to court, where he is charged with striking her. As the series goes on, Whitney gradually descends into a chain-smoking, apple-martini-drinking, foulmouthed, wild-haired shrew. “Kiss my ass!” she snaps at one point, and she says repeatedly, “Hell to the no.”

The 10-part series opened with an audience of one million, to blistering reviews. “Being Bobby Brown, the reality show spotlighting the R&B singer whose rap sheet may be longer than his catalog, is undoubtedly the most disgusting and execrable series ever to ooze its way onto television,” said The Hollywood Reporter. It described the show as “the lionizing of a lowlife. . . . Not only does it reveal Brown to be even more vulgar than the tabloids suggest, but it manages at the same time to rob Houston of any last shreds of dignity.”

Behind the scenes, Whitney had been using again. In March 2005, Cissy showed up at the Browns’ Atlanta house with deputies and a court order granting her the power to have her daughter involuntarily committed. “If you move, Bobby, they’re going to take you down,” she threatened. Then she turned to her daughter and said, “I’m not losing you to Satan.”

Whitney reportedly went to rehab at Crossroads, the Caribbean treatment center created by guitarist Eric Clapton. In 2006, the whole sordid story was told—and sold “for big money,” according to Derrick Handspike, the author of a Bobby Brown biography—to the National Enquirer by Tina Brown, Bobby’s onetime crack-addicted sister. She relayed a shocking account of her sister-in-law’s drug use, which carried the headline inside WHITNEY’S DRUG DEN!

While Bobby was serving his 30 days in jail in 2004, Tina said, she had moved into their house, where Whitney, in a stupor, imagined cameras spying on her and worse. “She saw demons when she got high,” said Tina. “On one occasion she told me she was staring at the face of the devil himself. . . . But it was her reflection.” Tina said that Whitney told her the demons were beating her black-and-blue, but Tina believed that Whitney had actually inflicted the bruises on herself.

I called Bobby Brown’s former attorney Phaedra Parks, who is now a star of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. She said the Enquirer article had been a turning point. “Whitney felt very betrayed,” she said. “She obviously considered Tina to be family, and for her to release a story like that with such derogatory comments and allegations—it broke her heart.” Whitney asked Parks to meet her at the Palm restaurant in Atlanta, where they held hands and prayed.

Whitney would once again survive the seemingly unsurvivable. But her famous voice was gone.

The Road to Recovery

Stevie Wonder eventually suggested that Whitney enlist the help of the famous voice coach Gary Catona, whose clientele has included Andrea Bocelli, Sade, Seal, Liza Minnelli, and Muhammad Ali.

“I was told, ‘Whitney is beginning her so-called comeback, and without her voice there is no comeback,’ ” Catona tells me over coffee in Los Angeles.

He met her in her home in Alpharetta, in the final days of her marriage. Her image was shot, her career was in the toilet, and Gary and Pat Houston, her brother and sister-in-law, were hovering around like nurses in an emergency ward. “My voice is stuck in my throat,” Whitney told Catona. “I try to sing, and nothing comes out.”

“She looked thin. Her hair was a little messy,” he says. “She looked like someone who had gone through some kind of emotional trauma.”

Yet, there was a spark. Singing was in her bloodline. The great Aretha had told her, “I’m passing the baton on to you.” Catona continues: “Everyone was relying on her to make a comeback, not just for financial reasons but for her well-being.”

Catona demanded her full commitment, and she agreed. “She wasn’t a crooner,” he explains. “She had to sing at the very top of the capacity of the human voice. She was also an alpha female, domineering, commanding, and people were scared of her.”

After a few months of Catona’s daily exercises, Whitney rented a house in Orange County, California, determined to live with her daughter and without her husband. “She blossomed,” says Catona. “She was the most devoted student I ever had.”

She focused on her health and tried her best to quit smoking. “Once, I forgot my keyboard, and she thought I had left,” says Catona. “I went back in, and she started coming to the door with a cigarette in her hand. She hugged me, and I saw her flick the cigarette over her shoulder.”

In September 2006 she had Bobby served with divorce papers. He was in Los Angeles, occasionally staying with Karrine Steffans, a video dancer turned author whose sexual encounters with celebrities fueled her series of erotic Vixen books. When Whitney and Bobby fought, and they frequently did, Brown would sometimes head for L.A. and Steffans. “Bob’s big thing was everyone blamed him for her downfall, but when he met her she was already using drugs,” Steffans tells me. “He always felt very angry about that. He told me, ‘What everybody saw wasn’t the real Whitney.’ He always said her private persona—which you saw on Being Bobby Brown—was who she really was.”

All of Brown’s credit cards were in the name of Nippy, Inc., according to Steffans, and each time Whitney ordered him out, she would cancel them. During one separation, Brown, Steffans, and Brown’s brother checked into the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, using Houston’s credit card. “They kicked us out of the hotel,” says Steffans, and Bobby had to wait in Los Angeles until Whitney was ready to allow him to return to Atlanta.

Steffans was also friends with Ray J. In an interview with Oprah in March of this year, Pat Houston obliquely referred to Whitney’s relationship with Ray J: “I saw her chasing a dream. Looking for love in all the wrong places. The dream she was chasing was younger. . . . She was chasing something that would ultimately hurt her.” Ray J is as famous for his sexual escapades as for his five albums and short-lived reality show, For the Love of Ray J, on which he chooses partners from among a bevy of women. When he was seen out with Whitney during Grammy week, he was promoting his book, Death of the Cheating Man: What Every Woman Must Know About Men Who Stray. Described in the book’s promotional material as “a celebrity addicted to infidelity,” Ray J had first encountered Whitney when he was a teenager, about the time she co-starred with his sister Brandy in Cinderella.

Steffans was having lunch with Bobby in Encino the day he was served with divorce papers. She says the process server told him that he was giving him a residual check from Bravo for his work on Being Bobby Brown. One evening soon after that, while Brown was licking his wounds in Steffans’s home, the phone rang. It was Ray J. “He said, ‘Is Bob still staying with you?,’ ” Steffans tells me. “I said, ‘Yeah, he’s right here.’ And Ray said, ‘Tell him I fucked both of his chicks, you and now his wife.’ ”

“Around about July of 2006, Whitney took Bobbi Kris without my prior knowledge or consent, and moved to Orange County, California, where Whitney received treatment for her drug addiction,” Brown says in court documents. “Although I was having severe financial problems, I did all I could to see my daughter. I came to California to be near Bobbi Kris. I also paid approximately $10,000 for Whitney and Bobbi Kris to live in a nice hotel. . . . while Whitney was going through rehab I love Bobbi Kris dearly. . . . However, since Whitney has been awarded sole legal and physical custody of Bobbi Kris, she has attempted to eliminate me from Bobbi Kris’ life.”

In 2007, Clive Davis came back into Whitney’s life. He was now head of Sony/BMG, which included Arista. “Clive called me one day and said, ‘O.K., are you ready now?,’ ” Whitney said in an interview. “He said, ‘I’m tired of listening to what I’m listening to I want you back.’ ” He asked if she was fit, ready, and able to return to work. She told him yes.

He enlisted Diane Warren to create songs for a new album. Warren tells me that she put herself in Houston’s mind when she wrote a song about struggle and rebirth, entitled “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.” As soon as Whitney heard the lyrics—“I thought I’d never make it through, I had no hope to hold on to I was not meant to break”—she told Warren that she’d written her life.

But Warren and David Foster weren’t sure that Whitney had the vocal strength to sing it. In the end, she not only sang it, says Warren, “she sang the shit out of it.” According to Gary Catona, 75 percent of Whitney’s vocal strength had returned by the time of her appearance at the American Music Awards in November 2009. When she came onstage in a white gown, singing the Warren song, the crowd leapt to its feet. “The buzz was: Holy shit!” says Warren. “It was one of the best performances I’d ever seen. It was: Whitney is back!”

Catona says, “Every time her voice would improve, I would stop working with her, and she would go off and do something—a concert or a tour. [Her handlers’] intentions were not malicious; I just think they made some fundamental miscalculations. I told them, ‘She needs to build her voice.’ I spoke to her brother Gary quite a bit about this.”

Instead, in 2010 the machinery revved up, and Whitney embarked with a troupe of 100 on her “Nothing but Love” tour, to promote her new album, I Look to You. At each stop, crowds of up to 20,000 were waiting in anticipation. The love came, but with it the carping of critics and the baying of the tabloids. In Australia the knives were out. “The Australian media is the toughest in the world,” says Andrew McManus, who promoted the dates there. “Whitney had hired a group of eight dancers from Michael Jackson’s troupe and tried to keep up with them. By the third song, she was out of breath. We sat down the next day and told her, ‘This is not a Britney Spears show. People want to hear The Voice.’ ”

She soldiered on, even though the reviews were brutal. McManus recalls, “I told her, ‘I’m really sorry how this Australian media has attacked you,’ and she said, ‘If that’s what God’s got for me, that’s what God’s got for me. That’s my whack.’ ”

Then she hit Sydney, which, McManus says, “is probably the second-biggest gay market in the world, so it was a pro-Whitney crowd. You could feel the will and love in the room for her to hit that high note in ‘I Will Always Love You.’ ” He’s referring to the point David Foster calls “the Boom and I moment,” when the music explodes with a boom, then pauses, and Whitney belts out a cappella, “ . . . and I will always love you.” The Sydney audience grew silent in anticipation, and Whitney nailed it. “It wasn’t perfect pitch, but it was real close,” says McManus. “She had not even finished the song when the audience stood as one. It was spine-tingling stuff. She was nearly in tears. She was so proud.”

On the Town with Ray J and Raffles

Tiffanie Dixon, Whitney’s hairdresser for seven years, remembers how excited the singer was about her renewed career. This past winter, she was doing her best to quit smoking, not just cut back again. Intent on looking her best, she also decided to have a face-lift, but Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Marc Mani reportedly refused to do it after she failed the routine physical, which indicates the condition of a patient’s heart, liver, and lungs.

During her final week, in Los Angeles, she went out on the town with Ray J. Two nights before her death, after singing “Jesus Loves Me” with Grammy nominee Kelly Price at an event celebrating young R&B singers at the Tru nightclub, in Hollywood, she spent several hours with a crowd that “erupted with applause, and we all were in awe,” says the event’s co-host Kenny Lattimore. There, she reportedly had a confrontation with X Factor contestant Stacy Francis, whom she accused of trailing Ray J around the club. Whitney allegedly told her, “This is my man! I’m a cougar! Bitch, get away from my man!” (After Houston’s death, Francis said she had tried to defuse the situation, which she described as a misunderstanding.)

As she left Tru, the night exploded with “a million paparazzi flashes,” says Lattimore. The photographers captured Whitney with scratches on her arm and blood on her legs as a crowd of people screamed her name and tried to get her attention. She returned to her hotel, where she asked Tiffanie Dixon to read the Bible with her. Dixon recalls, “Her glasses were broken, but she read by holding the little single lens. She had marked pages—Exodus, Mark, and Matthew. The last thing I remember her saying was ‘I just want to love and be loved. I want to love like Jesus did. Unconditionally.’ ”

The man who escorted her and Ray J to Tru and practically everywhere else they went that week was Raffles van Exel, an admitted con artist with several aliases, whose specialty is crashing celebrity circles. Although he claims to be connected to the owners of the Raffles hotel chain, he’s actually an illegal immigrant, a native of the Republic of Suriname, in South America. His family moved to a suburb of Amsterdam when he was young.

In Chicago in the late 80s, Raffles Dawson (his real name) met Earl Calloway, a cousin of the jazz great Cab Calloway and the arts editor of the newspaper the Chicago Defender. Now 85, Calloway lists for me prominent entertainers he has interviewed, adding, “And I would always take Raffles with me. He’s a fine young man.” Soon Raffles had a key to Calloway’s house and a room of his own in it. One night, Calloway took Raffles to the Chicago debut of Whitney Houston, and afterward Raffles met the rising star, with whom he would become friends.

In 2002 he gained notoriety in the Netherlands by promising the wife of a billionaire—“who was married Pia Zadora-style to the Dutch Richard Branson,” says Marc van der Linden, a Dutch journalist—that he would include her in a 9/11 memorial concert he was organizing with Jermaine Jackson. It would feature, he said, Whitney Houston, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. “She had to invest big-time in Raffles’s flying between the Netherlands and America,” says van der Linden of the Dutch singer. “Until a reporter called the Kennedy Center and asked if she was going to sing, and they had never heard of her or Raffles van Exel. That was the end of Raffles’s career in the Netherlands.”

He moved to Beverly Hills, where, in a very frank “sizzle reel”—a selling tool for a proposed reality show—he reveals how he breaks into society through what is described as “the Art of the Con.” In the video, he crashes Michael Jackson’s father’s entourage by posing as Joe Jackson’s publicist, and the unwitting Jackson lets Raffles arrange interviews for him. In another scene, he tells Stevie Wonder that he’s the son of the jazz great George Benson. In yet another scene, he cons his way onto a bandstand in Phoenix, telling the bandleader that he’s the guest singer, and belts out “La Bamba” before a cheering crowd. “Everybody has a law and a rule, but they are made to be broken,” he says on-camera. “As long as you do it elegant, it’s all yours.”

Not so elegant were Raffles’s scams, including his shoplifting a $750 Ralph Lauren sweater from Neiman Marcus in Chicago in 2002, which brought him a third-degree-felony conviction under the name Raffles Evert. He got into Michael Jackson’s Neverland estate by showing up uninvited at a party hosted by Jermaine Jackson, then greeting guests at the gates “until people thought he was hosting the party,” says the organizer of the event. “Next thing you know, he’s part of Michael Jackson’s circle.” Or at least he seemed to be. “He was kicked out of Neverland when he made it into MJ’s bedroom,” Karen Faye, Jackson’s hair-and-makeup artist, tweeted. “He even made it to MJ’s funeral and got up & spoke. He is a scam artist. Celebs beware.”

Raffles Dawson was deported three times by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, in 2007 and 2008. As soon as I mentioned him to sources, my phone began ringing nonstop. One caller, a former friend of his who asked to remain anonymous, remembered that he had met Raffles at the Hotel Bel-Air. He said Raffles claimed to have stayed there frequently with Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown when he worked as Whitney’s assistant.

Ray J also knew Raffles. In one of many videos available on YouTube, Raffles conducts interviews about Michael Jackson’s death with everyone from Jesse Jackson to Louis Farrakhan. On one video, Ray J greets Raffles with a man hug and says to the camera, “This is the guy who always brought me around Michael. . . . Whenever you saw Michael Jackson, Raffles was around.”

It seemed to be the same with Whitney Houston. “I stayed in their guesthouse for months,” Raffles was quoted saying about Whitney and Bobby Brown. “I helped Bobby in the studio and was present at all of their concerts. We went to the Oscars and Grammys together—every award show. I was treated as family and played with their kids Whitney asked me many times, ‘Please take care of my daughter, Bobbi Kristina.’ ”

The night Houston died, Clive Davis’s pre-Grammy Awards party went on as scheduled, but it turned out to be largely a tribute to his fallen star. Among the guests was Raffles van Exel. Roger Friedman, who wrote about Whitney’s death on the Forbes Web site, tells me, “He said he had her tickets to the dinner and planned to sit in her seats. Whoever was at Whitney’s table rejected him, and he found some other table. He was sobbing and telling anyone who would listen that he had found Whitney.”

“I am sorting out her clothes right now,” Raffles told a Dutch newspaper reporter. He flew to Newark with Houston’s family on Tyler Perry’s private plane for Whitney’s funeral, according to Friedman’s column. The night before the funeral, at a private wake in the mortuary, someone took a photograph of Whitney in the open casket, which was sold to the National Enquirer for a rumored $400,000. After the picture appeared on the front page of the tabloid, Friedman reported that an employee of the funeral home claimed to have seen Raffles van Exel take it.

Whitney Houston was alone much of the day she died. She had breakfast with strangers, three men she had encountered the day before and deliberately dismissed. “That Saturday, we were all at a big table in the Beverly Hilton’s restaurant downstairs,” says one of the men. “Whitney came walking by, either coming from or into the spa, in black sweats, gray sweater, and a cap and sunglasses. She smelled of alcohol. She noticed my friend and said, ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were a crazy fan yesterday.’ She sat with us for 10 minutes, had a bowl of fruit, gave us a hug, and left.”

With her death she regained her audience. I met with Salim Akil, the director of the new Sparkle, at Soho House, the private club in West Hollywood. He said that he is convinced that Whitney’s performance in the film will wash away the problems associated with her. “People aren’t going to think about that shit, man,” he said. “Nobody is going to be able to say anything more profound than what Whitney says herself on that screen. There’s a line in the movie where she says, ‘Hasn’t my life been enough of a cautionary tale?’ All the questions that you ask people as you do this story, I feel she answers in this movie.”

“And what is the answer?,” I asked.

He imitated Whitney’s voice. “The answer is: ‘All the good things, all the beautiful things, that you ever thought about me are true.’ Her performance is consistent with the gifts that she gave us consistently. Isn’t that enough?”